001okay to get board backs up are we ready yeah we just don't have internet but does everybody have do you have the internet steve please give us another minute yes [Music] oh [Music] i printed everything else awesome good for you did we is this mine patient we're still working on some internet issues thank you for your patience [Music] here angela wilcox barry alt-schuler leah callister lazari here erin chanding here katie karam steve wang here all right would you please all stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance sure i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all good evening and i welcome us all back to bhs auditorium as everyone noticed as they
002came in universal masking is required at this the meeting tonight um hopefully we won't have any issues but if we need to take a recess and come back to a virtual meeting we'll do so if we don't have people complying with the mask policy if we do end up having to go to a virtual meeting and public comment is incomplete we will shift to an all email format and if you wish to participate in the public comment we'll be able to send an email to public comment at barrington220.org with the email subject line of public comment let's hope we don't have to go there so the next thing i really wanted to report is we are 10 days away from our schools being fully open this is exciting fall sports started yesterday we have not
003been fully open for a very long time so let us celebrate and appreciate all the hard work that the staff and the administration did to get us here as you'll hear throughout this meeting keeping our schools safely open with in-person learning are our top priorities let us also understand that many are grieving they are grieving the loss of a loved one the loss of a lifetime milestone maybe a graduation or an activity that was missed or sport or not seeing their friends at school every day please be kind to one another as we enter into this new school year i have seen this community pull together in times of change and together we can get through this um also i wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow speaking of change is our new teacher luncheon so
004if you haven't gotten to janine to let her know you're able to attend please do so it's one of my favorite events of the year is to welcome our new teachers um also the global leaders global leadership summit was last week i know some administrators and board members and former board members had the opportunity to attend i heard really great things and i am hopeful for our community leadership and collaboration going forward the board is going to have a follow-up workshop workshop with our isb on september 8th prior to our board meeting where we will be we will be reviewing our desired protocols we don't have on them on the agenda tonight so we'll be reviewing them in september dr hunt and i will meet in the coming weeks with lori wood to discuss what
005the agenda will be okay let's see um for public comment tonight as everybody noticed in the meeting we're limiting public comment for to two minutes tonight so we can hear everyone and get through public comment within hopefully within an hour and i think we're set with the number of people that we have to do just that um and the last thing that i wanted to report on is that we have a guest speaker with us tonight and that is darcy crea of our attorney so we're going to listen to her quick report on the status of the school's opening louie thank you sandra i'm really honored to be here tonight with all of you i've represented the board of education of barrington for about 28 years and so it is a particular honor to be
006here i know that many of you have questions about the governor's mass mandate that was entered it was issued on august 4th and so the board president and the board asked me to present tonight just really briefly give you a little background information about that and hopefully you'll find it useful and as we move along so the governor on about 2 30 in the afternoon on august 4th issued executive order 18 and this order mandated that all teachers staff students and visitors to pre-k through 12 schools in the state of illinois that they all wear masks at all times when in school buildings and so this has been we anticipated that something like this would happen on and off all summer and the day arrived finally on august 4th it's caused a great deal of
007controversy each of us probably has a different opinion about the validity of that i wanted to talk to you about the underpinnings of what gave the governor the authority to to make that executive order so he has powers that are vested in him through the illinois emergency management act and that act is the one that grants the governor of illinois a number of specific powers that he can exert whenever there is a disaster proclamation in illinois the governor has issued a disaster proclamation since march of 2020 when illinois schools closed due to covid first closed i should say and he has the right to do that about every 30 days and so the current one that he has entered was entered on july 23rd and it will be effective through about august 21st or 22nd
008we have every reason to think that he will reissue that disaster proclamation for the foreseeable future so during times when there's a disaster proclamation he has the right under the illinois emergency management act to exert some powers and the statute it's actually um it's in a large section of the statute it says that he the governor as a member the really the member of the executive branch in illinois going back to history class he has the right to enter executive orders that promote the health and safety of the citizens of illinois and it is by virtue of that law again the illinois emergency management act that gives the governor the right to mandate masks be worn in illinois schools now does the statute say anything about masks at all it does not it does not
009say the word masks but it gives the governor very broad authority to issue an order that protects the safety and health of the citizens of the state and so in doing so i just found out about 24 hours ago a little over that the first lawsuit was filed and i believe clinton county illinois challenging the order and so we should [Music] we should know pretty soon what happened so when those court cases are filed they come in as temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions and the courts typically will make a decision on those very quickly within a matter of days and so now the lawsuit that's been filed is one of there's over 60 that have been filed against governor pritzker and governor pritzker and the state of illinois have prevailed on all of them
010to date so we'll i'm not a betting woman but we'll see what happens in this lawsuit that's been filed until then until a court that has jurisdiction over barrington says otherwise the mass mandate is valid it is enforceable the governor has the power to order it despite what you may read or see in the media and i have advised the board of education that they are required to follow that mass mandate so i wanted to at least give you a legal underpinning of why certainly i'm sure these are questions that you have tonight and i'm really like i said again i'm happy happy to be here with all of you it doesn't sound like there we go okay so um oops next we will move into public comment um we value your thoughts and opinions
011and in accordance with board policy 2 230 we ask you to state your name elementary attendance area or relationship address to the district before beginning your comments we also ask you to limit your comments to two minutes janine has the countdown timer again tonight as well as the bell we will not allow the board's business to be impacted and we will ensure all voices are respected and heard in accordance with our board equity statement that states that we recognize embrace and defend the identities abilities and voices in our diverse school community per board policy 830 visitors to in conduct on school property it states and i quote the school district expects mutual respect civility and orderly conduct among all people on school property it states that no person shall strike injure threaten harass or intimidate
012a staff member a board member sports official or coach or any other person it also states that no person shall impede delay disrupt or otherwise interfere with any school activity or function all in attendance must be respectful and of others and allow the board to dialogue appropriately we commit to addressing issues and not attacking people and we ask you to do likewise if we experience continued disruption the federal defense offenders will be asked to leave and will be escorted out as necessary i will also call for recess if the board is unable to conduct business in order to allow as many people to speak if someone else has spoken and represented your views please do not feel the need to repeat the comments instead consider standing to show your support we ask that actions do
013not delay or impede the public comment or the work of the board and as a reminder that public comment is not a conversation and if any comments require further attention we will ask dr hunt to follow up and report back to the board again please refrain from calling out harassing or threatening any staff board or community members thank you so let's um proceed with um i'll call up two again as i have done in the past so first up is tristan neduc and then second will be gina williams and we have mike here we have a mic here thank you to the members of the board of education for allowing me to speak briefly tonight my name is tristan adelku and i'm a former bhs alum and i work with the state representative mark mclaughlin
014your current representative in the 52nd district i'm here tonight as a civil servant on a political capacity providing information the specific services from the state available for parents and district residents resident representative mclaughlin regrets being unable to attend tonight's meeting as he has a prior commitment but he wanted you to be aware that he and his staff have been visiting local municipal and board meetings over the past few months and want to let you know that our office is open and available to serve you and the families in the district our address is 28662 west northwest highway in lake barrington just west of the kelsey roadhouse the office can provide assistance for constituents with various state of illinois departments also with the state of illinois budget having been approved we are asking your board to
015let us know of any issues of concern that you may have so that we may bring them forward for consideration and prepare any items for discussion in advance of and during the october veto session the veto sessions is the second third week of october lastly representative mclaughlin asked me to reinforce his full support of each individual school district and the voices of its parents decide what is best for their children when it comes to coven 19 regulations as the fall as he said quote with so much confusing contradictory information coming for the health care officials media outlets and now the governor's office this is our opportunity for local elected officials to make decisions in the best interests of their communities you will be waiting forever for perfect information and perfect data it's time for your
016board to support what is in the best interest of the children of this community that is why you are elected to make difficult decisions without perfect data please consider the psychological sociological and community impacts before making your decision regarding remote learning and mass mandates unquote thank you again for the opportunity to speak for you this evening if you or your residents have any questions please feel the free to send them to representatives office via email mcglocknetilhousegop.org or call representative mclaughlin or its legislative director after gina will be marcia mcclary please state your name and attendance area can you can you hear me okay uh good evening board of education members and dr hunt my name is gina williams and i have three children in d220 i'm speaking about the change.org petition begun august 6 a
017copy of which was emailed to you monday morning asking you to address several issues brought up on behalf of barrington families in barely four days we have over 753 signatures and support continues to climb i will restate a shortened version first quarantines of healthy children must end please remove the quarantine requirements for close contact other mitigation strategies of 2.8 million in federal funds for ventilation systems three feet social distancing and masking are enough second no required student testing shield testing is partly funded by the pritzker family the pcr test has been discredited by the fda as being phased out neither of these tasks detect different covet variants third no student segregation or discrimination of any kind due to vaccination status all children must be allowed to participate in whatever class sport or activity they wish
018to without sanction if they are not vaccinated other mitigations in place make segregation a moot point fourth return of schools to usual operations and serving students and staff this includes lockers sports food service resuming labs group projects and field trips and all dances social engagements and events fifth proactively decide now that mask will become optional the day illinois lifts the school masking order or when the order is found to be unlawful please help fight with us at the state level for this mandate to be removed without commitment around these issues we will not comply we will not pay student fees we will continue to pursue a charter school initiative our district mission is to inspire all learners to achieve excellence our children today are not being inspired they are being controlled and are forced to
019learn in an environment driven by fear partner with us and fight to keep schools open five full days a week returning all operations and services to normal without any quarantines testing and segregation we are asking for your statement of commitment to create the best possible environment for our children to succeed sincerely district 220 parents taxpayers stakeholders and students after marcia will be margot dalstrom i'm marcia mcclary parent of um five students ages seven to sixteen thank you very much for all your hard work and tireless efforts i know it's been a very tough time especially for dr hunt um so i'm going to talk about herd immunity and vaccines as i mentioned i spent nearly 20 years in the farm and vaccine industry before changing careers i'm no longer paid by the industry so i
020don't have a reason for bias herd immunity is made up of both those with natural antibodies and vaccinated cdc estimate over 40 percent of the united states actually has had covid hence a large portion of d220 has um active natural immunity we just don't know what it is there are antibody tests available and very cheap and sometimes fully paid by insurance to find out if you have natural antibodies understandably we do not know yet the full length of protection from either vaccines or natural immunity when it comes to covid however in my long career never had i seen any vaccine candidate presumed to be given to those who had a recent infection and carried natural antibodies not one time in analysis of 20 years in the industry not once the vaccines are not without risks
021neither is covid but i think we need to understand they both have risks over 500 000 reported vaccine adverse events are still to be investigated in the safety database and while many may be unrelated they often go unreported these vaccines are still in trial stage and will be for children for a long time i can't imagine d220 absorbing the potential liability or ethical problems of discriminating in any way based on this and pushing vaccines and to healthy children that are 99.9 of the time just fine from covet as well i've prepared a grid for you that you can take for later that shows shows about doing a risk benefit analysis for a child having a vaccine versus healthy antibodies versus being heavy neither and i would encourage you to look at it and i think
022you'll want the most green for your child on the grid and the least risk and i've done that for my children thank you marcia next up is margot and then rebecca tyler riley hi i'm margot dalstrom i'm in the huff district and my youngest child will be starting high school this fall and i just wanted to center my comments around liability it seems like the primary or only liability that's ever talked about is the risk of students getting covered instead of just looking at what happens to kids if they do get it thankfully that's really good news a recent john hopkins study found zero coveted deaths among healthy kids but i'm asking the board to also consider other sources of liability to which you're exposing yourself one of them has to do with pushing an
023experimental vaccine to add to what marsha stated dr roger hodkinson a medical specialist in pathology says all mrna vaccinations of kids and youngsters must stop immediately since they cause serious side effects dr michael yeden former vp and chief scientist of pfizer said you do not vaccinate people who aren't at risk from a disease you don't set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn't been tested extensively on human subjects the other areas of liability are medical discrimination of any kind since there are cases of vaccinated people still getting and spreading covid it seems discriminatory to treat vaccinated individuals any differently than non-vaccinated another area of liability is kids missing school for quarantine and denied access to education if there's a risk of false positives with the shield testing
024process it seems discriminatory to put any students in quarantine based on those results and the final area of liabilities with respect to mandating masks many people have spoken about how difficult this is for their children for a variety of reasons and anthony fauci is recently quoted as saying hopefully making kids wear face masks won't have any lasting impact on them this doesn't inspire any confidence that they won't thank you thank you margaret awesome rebecca and then after rebecca is margulzada roble and i'll ask that we keep our mask coverings on while you're talking i'm a matter of four three already in the district and a baby um i encourage district 220 to ask ourselves those two important questions if covet were to start from today with the latest data and science would you decide again
025today to newly start quarantining healthy kids have kids primarily just in the school environment start wearing masks distancing kids only in school why are not anywhere else or are some simply having a hard time making needed changes that are justified district 220 is a sought after district in illinois and we should be leaders on this if we were to continue any mitigations what are specific metrics to restore all of the freedoms if we can't now there will always be a low level of viruses around us so clearly that's not it not everyone will choose to participate in a pediatric vaccine trial so that's also not an answer this critical question must be answered with any vote to continue to restrict kids freedoms if this can't be answered it seems to me that we are not
026justified and restricting the kids anymore clearly we've learned during 220 that waiting for the state of illinois has shown to be very slow and not serving our community in timely manner and it's within your local authority to make local decisions ending disruptive quarantine process for healthy kids maintaining the freedom of a private choice for families and student of district 220 regarding any emergency use and approved covet vaccines given unknown safety profiles of and hundreds of thousands of unresolved u.s reported adverse events ensuring no medical discrimination consisted consistent with district 220's equity and non-discrimination platform making masking is a personal choice and wearing two masks and or protective shields for those that choose is completely acceptable masking has been proven ineffective even per mask manufacturers as far as virus transmission declined the extensive testing programs being
027proposed by idph and extensive contract tracing if there's a case let the whole class know um just like monopinekai or lice would be handled let parents decide if they need to keep a child home or at a mask for that week cdc and government data sets are clear that covet risk to young adults and children is lower than riding a car or swim thank you all right [Music] margo zada margozata's not here uh lily williams hello board members my name is lily williams and i will be a freshman at barrington high school i'm a cheerleader on the cheer team and i've been practicing this whole summer with them before i start speaking i would like to make it clear that this is not my coach's fault and this is only my opinion i love admire
028and respect my coaches dearly over this past summer it was made a rule that if you were vaccinated you wouldn't have to wear a mask indoors last week we were sent an email that said that this policy was invalid and that we would have to go back to wearing masks at practice just yesterday was our first practice back wearing masks when i tell you my mask was soaking at a different color than when i arrived i'm not kidding also we got so much less done than when we weren't wearing them due to the fact that we had to take mass breaks now moving on to school the fact that we can't sit next to each other without having three to six feet between us is crazy to me i don't remember if i even know
029how to work in a group anymore also do you really think that children are hanging out with each other while wearing masks when we are outside of school what good is a mask if it's only being worn in school i arrive to school sometimes with four other children and we are not related we don't wear masks and the second we get out of the car we are not allowed to be near or touch each other that's a little weird to me don't you think please board members take this into consideration and allow our children to breathe thank you for your time [Music] [Applause] next up is ainsley williams followed by josie kroll and i'll ask that we keep our masks on while you're speaking [Music] hi i'm ainsley williams and i'm going to prairie middle
030school i came to say that we need to make schools mask optional i know that a piece of cloth over my mouth is not stopping me from getting coveted i have had cobia and it's nothing more than a cult from the mass i don't like going to school i used to look forward to going to school but now all i can think about is someone yelling at me to put my mask above my nose when i go to school with a mask on i get overheated and feel sick when i'm in the classroom with and my teacher has a mask on i can't understand them so most of the time i'm not even learning the lesson correctly moving on at gym since we can't do anything besides walk the fitness platform play noodle tag one
031day i was walking with my friends but that she was also have my have she's also been my neighbor forever i've spent most of quarantine with her but still i get yelled at if i went closer than six feet between her and me it is absolutely insane that i live two different lives in and outside of school i spent all the summer without i've spent all summer without putting on a mask one day i've spent all summer without putting on a mask once until six today at six camp i've also been at competitive cheer without one for over a year to close things up i want you to know we don't want mass completely gone we want them optional and thank you for your time thank you okay josie and i'm gonna ask that we
032keep our masks on please keep them on please and after josie will be karen null thanks josie oh sure um hi i'm josie kroll i um i'm from the countryside district i have three kids and i want to talk to you tonight about quarantines for children but first i would just like to say dr hunt i thought your proposal last week for the masks was fabulous it was fair it showed leadership and i thank you for taking the stand and trying to compromise with the group so last year my daughter was home for 14 consecutive days symptom free and covid free because another student who she rode the bus with and never spoke to sat a few seats away tested positive she missed out on school the in-person learning she had to zoom which was
033very hard for her last year and she missed all her socialization her friends and her sports this was very hard all year long she couldn't wait to get back to school and there she was back home all day long for 14 days in fact the loss of education socialization was profound last year just from the quarantine alone district 220 statistics from october 12 2020 to july 9 2021 d220 students lost 13 447 days of school for just 175 cases the ratio of cases to quarantine days is 76.8 that means for every one positive case there was 77 days of quarantine for staff staff lost 3 370 working days for just 90 cases again for every positive case 37 days of quarantine please don't quarantine our students and our teachers it's unnecessary unless they actually have
034tested positive with a reliable test more than once thank you josie karen noel and then up after karen will be brian prigg hi okay um we lost you know we do have to wear the masks um but there is good news that some brave parents in mchenry county did file a temporary restraining order to pritzker which will be heard august 12th at 9 15 thursday morning so there's hope still but i just want to beg you guys to like help the teachers maybe since we do have to do this i brought my son to school today for his reading and his math testing at rose elementary and we couldn't see the teacher's face you know it was nice to meet her and everything i'm sure she's lovely i don't know really um but anyway um
035it's just sad that we've been free all summer he's playing football my daughter's on pom-poms starting at barrington high school and they have been free all summer that girl i just started to cry when i heard her talk how wet the masks are we're going to have to do something now and i wish you would have spoken before us because maybe you do have some mitigation in process that they get masked breaks on the hour until this nonsense goes away or maybe you know i don't really feel comfortable you guys are a school board you're not a medical facility so i do not want anybody testing my children without my knowledge or power that is completely unacceptable their vaccine status which my kids are completely vaccinated is our business you have the records the school
036nurse has that record i don't want anybody being segregated because of vaccine status so these are my biggest prayers um it's going to be what it's going to be i know this is uncomfortable for everybody and i know people love the masks we hate the masks we know they don't work we've shown you they don't work but we lost pritzker is the order he's no ron desantis that's for sure who is giving parents and the school boards the option so i hope this please pay attention thursday morning maybe it'll go through maybe we'll win we'll win and you can take back this math mandate because you do have some power here and we're relying on you to provide a fun healthy happy learning experience for our kids they want friends they want to see faces
037their first crush they'll never know if they have a cute boyfriend or girlfriend or who's going to ask them for a dance or something so stupid is that this is important socialization and they want to see their teachers it is hard to understand people talking without a microphone through a mask if she's up there thank you brian brian craig please state your name and your attendance area hi there my name is brian priggy i have a daughter at lines this evening you've heard about a petition making the rounds it's asking you to commit to five things for the upcoming school year what you may not know is that this petition started as a letter the last draft i saw was signed by 11 families the petition itself amounts to nothing more than an ultimatum it
038contains direct threats of non-compliance and failure to pay fees and vague threats of violence at the beginning of the school year the earlier drafts of the letter called for teachers to be reassigned or asked to change careers if they wanted to work in a safe environment this petition should be seen as exactly what it is an attempt to bully the board into doing something that's contradictory to sound logic the last time we were all together we were talking about the guidance provided by various agencies many on stage said it's just guidance or it says should tonight that ambiguity has been removed that distinct difference in the span of little more than two weeks highlights the dynamic nature of this pandemic this is not the covet of last year let alone the covid of last month
039to that end i'm not here to ask you for a commitment to specific actions i don't ask for commitment to specific ideals i ask for a commitment to our kids and to following the best guidance available from the most qualified institutions at any given time and my commitment is this regardless of your decisions my family will be peaceful and upbeat my kids will see nothing but respect for school staff in my actions i will not stage protests or walk-ins we will continue discussions as adults in venues like this but our children will not be subjected to that debate i ask that you soundly reject and rebuke the position petition lest we repeat the mistakes of arkansas's governor who recently took to youtube to express his regret for enacting a mass mandate ban our kids deserve
040it thank you brian next up is bina kamath ray and then following bina will be rachel roberts good evening my name is bina kameth rayne and i'm the mother of three boys our schools are north barrington and foundations at countryside i'm also a board certified pediatrician and neonatologist and i work at the american academy of pediatrics i remain worried about the increasing numbers of covid being seen in children and adolescents the recent data show that covid cases have tripled since i last spoke to you in july up to approximately 94 thousand cases i am grateful to our governor for showing the leadership to institute a universal mask mandate and at this time universal masking is one of the strongest tools that we have to keep our children safe whether or not you agree with the
041governor's decision what it has done is created a time for pause so that we can choose carefully intentionally thoughtfully how we proceed next i urge dr hunt and the board to use this time to properly implement the mitigation strategies that we know work to decrease covid vaccination masking distancing hand washing ventilation and testing i ask that you listen to the public health experts to help interpret the studies and data that can guide us in maximizing our success with these strategies we all want to put covid behind us and resume our normal lives i know that my colleagues at the front lines whose icus and hospital awards are filling up with pediatric admissions certainly do this may prompt us to ask about metrics that will allow us to phase out some of the mitigation strategies that
042keep us protected however many public health experts are still struggling with what those metrics should be given that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic and we're going in the wrong direction i urge dr hunt and the board to not get ahead of the experts in this regard and to let those experts guide you finally the children are watching us they are looking to us for protection and for leadership they are watching the manner in which we proceed with humility integrity and how we teach each other the children will take their cues from us the adults in the room thank you thank you bina rachel roberts followed by brian kim i remind you to state your name and your attendance area rachel good evening my name is rachel roberts i have a
043student at lines and one at station i am thankful the governor has changed the shape of this debate one of the points that stuck with me from the last meeting was when dr kim said last year's covid is not this year's covet this year's covid is even more dangerous to kids when making plans and mitigation measures for the upcoming school year we are best served with keeping that thought in mind when we look at our schools at how our schools were able to run effectively last year that was with last year's covet this year's covid is entirely different with regards to transmissibility and breakthrough cases post-vaccine the safety of our children is paramount and mitigation measures at least as stringent as last year need to be kept in place thank you brian kim followed by
044leonard munson good evening my name is brian kim and i'm a father to three young elementary school school children in district 220 i'm also a physician and an assistant professor at the university of illinois college of medicine i'd like to start out by pointing out the reality of our situation just this past week 94 000 children were diagnosed newly with covid this is more than double the number of cases just two weeks ago these numbers are already worse than trends that we saw last year underlying the reality that delta variant is worse even for children even beyond the almost 400 children who have died from covid we forget the others that survive but still have complications recent studies cite that about 10 to 15 percent of children develop long-term symptoms after covid things that we
045are still discovering this can happen weeks or months after recovery from even a mild or asymptomatic infection they include chronic fatigue headaches post-concussion like brain fog memory lapses difficulty concentrating in other areas of the country schools have started with optional masking and during the first week have already been hit with outbreaks schools in mississippi started with optional masking already had 47 cases 100 quarantine had to go to mandatory masking indiana started with optional 70 cases and a school district there had 70 cases in eight days 1100 and quarantined sporting events canceled the list goes on and on i urge you as a board to not cut corners when it comes to masking and layers of mitigation and follow the recommendations of local and state public authorities whose sole job purpose and training is to look
046at the data studies and make sound recommendations lifting mitigations too quickly leads to outbreaks makes school leadership look foolish and risk the safety of our children and community the goal of everyone is to keep children in school masks and mitigations are not the enemy outbreaks quarantines are the enemy please do not lose sight of this thank you brian leonard munson followed by rosanna klusmeier my name is leonard munson i have a freshman at barrington high school first of all i'm appalled that you took a minute of our time away two minutes three minutes was pretty ridiculous two minutes is even worse because you want to shorten your time listening to us this is our only opportunity other than an email that doesn't get answered to speak directly to you so i'm appalled by that let
047me start by saying why are we opposing the freedom of choice dr hunt provided a great plan of mass optional you want to wear a mask wear a mask all day long put your kid in a suit i don't really care what i care about is my kid being able to breathe when he's at school i wear a mask eight hours a day because i work with an at-risk community these kids are not at risk are they going to get sick yes are they getting a car accident yes are they going to wreck their bike yes are they going to get a concussion yes we can't mitigate all that risk it's a freedom of choice that we agreed to the board voted on it and because pritzker decided to make a mandate which will be
048overturned we have changed directions i don't know why we did that okay at some point in time your elected leaders you got to be a leader okay you can't everyone on this board has said i'm concerned i haven't seen enough data i want to see more data i'm not sure you can have an avalanche of data and you're not going to change your opinion that is just sad because although we know that there are potential long-term effects can someone tell me what the long-term effects are of putting a vaccine in a 14 year old kid that is healthy today you cannot you cannot this vaccine was designed for people over the age of 80 that died from covet not for 14 year old children or 15 or 16 or 18. it is not even in
049the top five for death for um anyone under the age of 25 it is not a mitigating risk we've got to have options we've got to have choice and you can't quarantine our children you have to educate our children and you're harming our children more than you're doing them good and i think you've missed your your mark when you're a board that is going to stand by governor pritzker thank you please be thank you rosanna klusmeier followed by monica casey hi good evening dr han i'm going to address you first this evening um i'm here tonight for my children like we all are i first want to thank you for your last plan i thought it was spot on it was perfect it was the best compromise for all of us but unfortunately there are
050power hungry people here it wasn't good enough um dr han in your interview in the quintessential barrington you cited your favorite quote i want to read that out loud to everyone here tonight because i feel it's so relevant to where we are today the man in the arena the credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena who strive valiantly who know the great enthusiasm the great devotions and spend themselves in a worthy cause who at the best know the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst if they fail fail while daring greatly so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat so please don't take offense to our actions but do take note because we will not stop until we achieve
051victory parents i now want to turn to you because all this ends when we say it ends we put these people in these positions to represent us it's time they start listening to what we what our needs are and our children my biggest plea to you all is to do your research question everything i tell my kids this all the time question everything regardless of who tells you unfortunately this isn't just about the virus this goes beyond there are many many resources available to us all we just know your rights on masks and quarantine because we do have rights these mandates are unlawful and they they know it but they will continue to push whatever they can until we say enough a great resource you should all look into is awake il.com there are lots
052of thank you rosanna that was i believe that was rosanna klusmeier i did not hear her state her name so monica casey then followed by catherine deese please state your name in your attendance area hi it's monica casey um you you know me from the last four meetings i have three children through the district the last 18 months have been a struggle and detrimental in so many areas of our lives and i believe everybody here would agree that most significant impact has been on our children we are now embarking on the third consecutive school year that has been disrupted compromised or lost altogether due to coveted restrictions and mandates without a doubt every child was negatively impacted but it's beyond sad to think that those youngest children that have had no prior knowledge of an
053education and atmosphere different from this in the past 18 months as the high percentage of population-based covet immunity continues to improve we see the number of serious cases and deaths continue to decline and despite the more contagious delta variant it continues to be virtually zero risk zero for zero risk for the death among children under 12. viruses will continue to evolve and will always be a part of our lives with the reality that 100 eradication is unlikely unfortunately recent state mandates have once again disrupted and jeopardized the ability to provide our children an adequate education they deserve and have already lost as parents we cannot and will not sit idly watching our children be the result of what clearly appears not to be about the health of our children but overreach of control today is
054a stark contrast to 18 months ago it's time to focus and place priority on our children's education in person and teaching have them learning in the most positive atmosphere it is not time to police excessively discriminate segregate and divide so many parents have spoken at the past four board meetings citing facts resources personal stories and pleas for choice acceptance and freedom voicing our concerns in defense of our children and advocating for the best possible education and learning experience for them thank you monica catherine dees followed by david din if i'm reading that correctly excuse me [Music] just just one second i just uh want to let everyone know we've got multiple uh power outages around us and some of our school buildings um if if we do have a power audit here i'd just ask
055that you you stay seated we'll have people that will provide us direction on where to go so just be calm if that happens we'll step forward and provide you the appropriate direction sorry my name is katherine dear and i live in the north barrington school district for 40 years i am a former educator in political science and social studies with history and i have written curriculum for 31 years the united states is at a critical point right now and i think there's some issues that need to be addressed i have five questions which i would like the board to address at the next board meeting one exactly what type of programs is mr nate rouse creating two will the programs be for students as well as teachers three will people from our community have access
056to these new programs and their content if not is there something to hide from the public four is this a backdoor setup to put critical race theory which is in itself racist into our schools number five if systematic racism exists in every facet of american societies mr rouse would not have the position he has today thank you [Applause] [Music] david din followed by heather ewald [Music] no oh [Music] heather you're after him please sir oh dear okay i live in the north barrington school district i'm a retired teacher i didn't realize that this was a one purpose meeting but it but it seems to be um i'm addressing the critical race theory that appears this is the trojan horse to bring it into our district this was in the barrington 220 by samantha pushkin article
057just out in the barrington magazine i have just a few simple questions is there a problem of equality and diversity in the barrington schools if so why hasn't it been addressed before now if there is no problem why are we hiring experts and changing our curriculum and i'd appreciate if we could get a response to that but this i am very concerned about the way our whole country is going and if you don't believe it just turn on your tv thank you heather ebon will finish with rachel turk good evening i'm heather ewell mother of four north barrington and countryside my family and i got sick with coven i've lost people i love to covet i cared horn was at the deathbed of my grandmother who died of covid so i know firsthand the suffering
058of covid i have also comforted a friend who lost her son to suicide which she felt was due to the coveted lockdowns i've seen my special needs nephew lose verbal skills due to coveted lockdowns and mass mandates there are many sides to this coveted suffering but i am afraid we are losing our humanity with vaccine and mass mandates i'm here to ask you to be courageous and fight against these mandates make mask optional for our children one of the largest studies on covet mortality done by a professor at johns hopkins school of medicine and their team analyzed forty eight thousand children sick with covet and reportedly found zero coveted deaths among healthy children clearly the science supports the decision that our children do not need to wear masks to protect them from something that cannot
059harm them i hear many of you saying it's just a mask your children have no issues with them and children should just suck it up and wear them but i'm here to say that my children suffer from wearing a mask many children suffer from wearing a mask i hope we can all agree to this that some children suffer from wearing a mask and i ask you what to think about what makes us human would you be willing to let your covet positive mother die alone in a nursing home rather than bring her into your own home because you're afraid of govind have you not gathered with your family because you're afraid of covid have you canceled your children's play dates because you're afraid of covid maybe you're afraid that that family's not vaccinated where is
060your humanity perhaps you're not listening to the science that your children are not in danger of dying of covet but i challenge you to think about your your humanity we are now at a critical moment of truth this is not word salad i pray that you can find your courage stand up for our children who suffer from wearing mass give them a choice don't let power-hungry governors rule of the world put fear in your heart thank you heather rachel turkey [Music] good evening my name is rachel turk i have a senior at the high school and i have an eighth grader at station i agree with the mass mandate but felt and felt compelled to come here tonight to say in person because i know several people just do not feel comfortable coming here knowing
061that there's a big contingency of people who don't believe in vaccines or wearing masks and they just don't feel safe coming here tonight so i just want to let you know that there are a lot of people who are just middle of the road don't want to be too political but want to feel safe and just aren't here that there is a voice there for that uh the other thing i just i as i've managed to mention before i moved here six years ago from boston i'm a fifth generation tough no-nonsense boston irish and i we my family has believed in hard work they have had to do lots of hard difficult jobs three of my grandparents had to quit after eighth grade to take care of their parents take care of their families they
062worked in tanneries they worked on farms and it's really hard for me to hear that some people's kids cannot sit in a comfy air-conditioned room wearing a mask that to me is just beyond that whining is just not acceptable in my family so it's just it's very shocking to me to hear that from people especially from children i i don't think i think people love their children but teaching them that they could be derailed by little physical discomfort is not going to serve them and lastly when it comes to the curriculum issue recently that's coming up i think there's a great quote that goes it's the mark of an educated mind to contemplate an idea without necessarily accepting it and if people focus on critical thinking and teaching your kids how to be critical thinkers
063the rest will take care of itself thank you thank you rachel okay that concludes the portion of our meeting for public comment we will move on to our report from dr hunt in one second [Music] so good evening uh thank you very much uh very happy this evening that later on the agenda we will be making a recommendation uh for a new assistant principal at barrington high school lori herman joins us from district u-46 we had over 76 applicants for this position multiple interviews with multi-disciplinary interview committees and we're very very excited about what she brings to the table uh from a professional background she's worked the last 17 years as a social worker at different levels within school districts masters from concordia university educational leadership masters from aurora university and social work and a
064bachelor's from the university of iowa and psychology and communication so i'd like to congratulate laurie i guess not officially welcome her until the board votes but i think she'll be a critical part as we look at our social emotional learning standards and development within in the in the uh at barrington high school so i'd like to welcome her to barrington schools also like are we good sorry about that each month we we do look at enrollment this is the time of year obviously we're staffing uh for the uh upcoming school year uh i want to give uh teresa uh a huge um thank you for the work that she's done with the human resource department this year in preparation for additional staffing with code restrictions with social emotional development and enrollment continues to grow in
065a few of our elementaries there's a few areas that were watching in rosalind and lines and a couple grade levels that rose at well rose as well so no recommendations for additional staffing right now but there are a few areas and i know the board was provided the report at your table to take a look at and you can track that as well and then lastly in my report i i'd like to just briefly discuss the revised public health guidance for schools i'm going to come back around when we get to a discussion item a little bit later on to review mitigation strategies and uh potential matrix and and kind of where we're at with that uh when we get to that point obviously um it was already governor covered governor pritzker's executive order number
06618 coveted executive order number 85 requires universal masking indoors for all students k through 12. and it really encourages that that universal masking piece be the kind of the central mitigation strategy uh in reviewing this prior to governor pritzker's order uh the implications of quarantine within this guidance uh made universal masking or a step away from universal masking very difficult with the implications for identification of students and corning teening of students some of the good news you know i know many have addressed or talked about quarantining some of the good news behind universal masking is it will significantly reduce the number of those that are quarantined i'll talk a little bit about that later as well but it really puts us in a position where vaccinated students obviously do not have to be quarantined at
067all with when when they're wearing a mask and then un vaccinated students when they're within three to six feet do not have to be quarantined as well and there is a kind of a test to stay provision that's within these guidelines as well and again i'm going to get through some of our mitigation strategies and what they look like a little later in the presentation i think the last thing i would like to address in my report you know i've addressed this in prior meetings and came up again tonight there is no initiative and work to bring critical race theory into the curriculum at barrington schools uh the the school district is responsible for teaching state standards uh recently social studies adopted new standards and the critical race there is not part of our curriculum
068nor part of any proposed uh curriculum change i obviously work in equity cultural responsive teaching uh is important to us and and and certainly if if who whomever spoke tonight if you'd like to follow up i can talk in in a little more depth about that work but i just wanted to make that clear as well it's been a very difficult time for not only barrington schools but all schools and local communities as these very divisive decisions are being made and i'll tell you probably the best thing that's happened to me in the last week or so is seeing principals back seeing our district leadership team back working hard really focused on welcoming students back and creating the culture that we need for our students and and really our focus needs to shift away from
069this to teaching and learning the important initiatives that we have in front of us as a school district to improve that student experience and that is where our work is and that is where our focus is uh going forward we will balance and and certainly um take very seriously our responsibilities and what has to be implemented and integrated within our schools um but we will also start to focus on solely that teacher teaching and learning of kids because that's the that is the most important uh priority for us that's our core business and and and what we'll focus on as we we balance the implications of covet 19. so again i will come back around with some additional information specific to mitigation um and kind of where some of the work we've done there in
070preparation for the board but i'm happy to answer any questions specific to this portion of the report are you planning on having tents at the individual schools like we had last year yes those those will be reinstalled someone someone mentioned you know access to outside mass breaks all of those things are being discussed and planned for as we prepare for the opening of school would you just repeat the question i'm not sure if everybody heard sorry for me i i was asking dr hunt about tents at the schools last year we had them they were taken down over the summer i think every opportunity we have to have the kids outside and certainly out of the sun and if it's drizzling out obviously if it's heavy rain they can't go out but having the tents
071out there gives them a place to eat a place to recreate even hopefully some teachers can teach outside where they can be mask-free and the response was yes all of those are being reinstalled and we certainly will encourage all of those um tents will be reinstalled and put up uh we'll certainly encourage outside activities much as possible and to be clear that has not changed when students are outside they can take their mass off and have those mass breaks so i'm sure um certain staff will take advantage of that as well that's good great we do have return to school as a discussion item as well so we can ask more questions at that time are there any questions on the information reports that we've received today it's quite a long list for us to
072go through this time okay how about board committee reports finance committee met today just grab my notes here and um there were a few updates that will be coming closer to the board in the future but um the audit that happens annually is going well it's on track it looks like we will come in in a timely way which shows some good planning in our finance area by our staff there was a discussion about student fees there was also um discussion about the budget i forgot to say about the audit typically what we do is um have the auditors come to one of the finance committee meetings probably the next one or the one after and we let the whole board know that the auditors are coming so you can come in and ask questions
073and meet the auditors if you want to and um and then it comes to the public board meeting and then you know there's there's timeliness about these things that will be coming your way in in the future and we'll be letting you know about that so um those were positive things um didn't miss anything steve i think okay all right so as we know that date let's make sure we tell doctor so you can remind us in his weekly update which which means that is it is a good opportunity for board members to talk to the auditors um and discuss any concerns that they have with the auditor's reports any other committee reports [Music] all right it's going to get active here next month as school starts and we have everyone back okay so next
074up is our consent agenda do we have a motion on the consent agenda okay on our consent agenda this evening we have finance report the following finance seven finance reports the 2021 exception bills for july the 2021 nslp exception bills for july the 2021 bill list for august activity accounts for bhs and k-8 for july the 2021 wage and payroll report for july the treasurer's report for july and last the revenues and expenditures report for july under minutes we have minutes open and close from july 13th or 2021 and we do have a revised personnel report so that was put up there today so make sure you take a quick look at that if you've got any concerns there and then last we have consideration to approve the 2021 2022 paper bid any questions or
075discussion [Music] okay we'll take a roll call vote [Music] sorry about that katie carram yeah barry altschuler yes angela wilcox yes okay motion passes um let's move to action items first up is consideration to approve the mou from the bea did you is anybody going to present this to us or and okay i i would say you know the boards receive um kind of multiple updates on this this was a really a collaboration between uh district administration and bea and i think really improves um opportunities for professional development collaboration uh for our staff at the high school so it's specific to the wednesday schedule minor modifications been made and certainly appreciate bea leadership and working through this with us yeah it'll be a great change for our freshman advisory program any other questions or comments
076parents aware that the day is going to change a little bit on wednesdays i'm sure that's going on with back-to-school communication all stuff i see mr williams nodding his head yes that is that is being communicated friday afternoon stay tuned thank you a slight change to the high school day at the high school okay any other questions or comments could we have a roll call well i didn't do motion oh my gosh all right roll call barry alt shuler yes leah collister lazari yes katie karam yeah aaron chanding yes sandra bradford yes steve wang yes angela wilcox yes all right motion passes i want to go back we um accepted our uh we approved our consent agenda do we want to allow lori to say a few words we usually do this [Music] my apologies
077i just want to say thank you for the opportunity i am excited to fill this role and looking forward to going back in person next this whole year so thank you [Applause] okay back to our action items do we have a motion for the consideration to approve the parking lot agreement with salem united methodist church second any questions this is uh an agreement that comes up every year to allow parking for our staff at huff street school i love safe parking close to the school any other questions or comments so i apologize i was not at closed session because i was traveling today but i think we asked this every year was there any um discussion as far as making this a multi-year agreement and is that something that we can discuss in the future
078i'll let dr bine answer he addressed that in his memo yes we do ask the church about that and they remain interested in a one-year agreement okay all right any other questions or discussion roll call steve wang yes leah callister lazari yes angela wilcox yes sandra bradford yes aaron chan ding yes barry alt-schuler yes katie karam yeah all right motion passes all right let's move on to our discussion items first discussion item is the tentative 2021-20 budget discussion i'm going to invite dr bind forward to lead us through that conversation [Music] so all right great thank you board members as usual this time of year we have the tentative budget so i've got a short presentation for you to provide some information on where we are the general idea is to give you a quick
079recap on this last year which will be a preliminary recap we'll briefly talk about the legal obligations to adopt a budget do an overview of what that budget looks like from a revenue and expenditure side provide a quick summary and what the next steps are so just starting with a little recap as you might recall this last year we had covet 19 during our school year that disrupted normal operations in a normal budget we actually did a budget amendment last year now the numbers i'm going to show you later in this presentation based on feedback from the finance committee i really compared to our original budget which is a normal school year budget not the covid adjusted budget just so that you've got an idea we did budget for revenues to be a little bit
080lower than normal on our local property tax receipts that turns out they actually came in stronger than we were budgeting so that was favorable for the budget our overall expenditures came in a little bit under budget that was more in the area of salaries and benefits as well as a little bit in transportation as a result we have a a larger than budgeted surplus now keep in mind uh this is pre-audit adjustments so these are preliminary numbers and there may be some as normal as we talk about this every year there may be some significant moves in the results between now and when the audit is final based on some of the audit adjustments that take place so we're looking at you know revenue coming in at about 157 five expenditures at 149 we had
081some transfers with a net surplus of about 8.6 million now we were not budgeting a uh such a large surplus again as with revenues a little stronger in expenditures a little lighter you may see some significant movement on that so you know just in fyi you know we're working on that as we always are at this point in time the finance committee will have some conversations around what surplus we will have next month at our finance committee meeting as well as what recommendation to make to the board around a transfer potentially to the capital projects funds that's what the board has historically done with the surplus all right so moving really to focus on this next year's budget as you might recall we are obligated to adopt a budget by the end of the first
082quarter of the fiscal year so that's by the end of september prior to adoption there has to be a tentative budget that's what we're talking about tonight that budget needs to be available and on public display for at least 30 days prior to the final budget adoption and the board needs to hold a public hearing so we will do all of those things and i'll talk about that at the end of the presentation looking at the budget and for the attentive budget that we're proposing our operating revenues as as usual are primarily made up of local property tax receipts that's a function of the structure in the state of illinois and the state of illinois does have the from a statutory perspective and a structure structure perspective the largest reliance on local property taxes as
083we look out across the country so that's not a making of our local school district that is actually a state state structure issue we do have larger than normal federal funds here typically the federal funds are about half of what's shown on here usually running about four percent but that is the numbers larger this year reflective of esser funding so you might recall we we've talked about esser funding we had the original cares act or really esser one and we had esther two and sr-3 that provided some federal funds into the school district those are not funds that will recur year after year after year so this percentage is larger than normal but when we take a look at next year's budget i expect it to again drop down to pretty much around where it
084normally would be so on an operating revenue perspective we are assuming a little higher collection rate for local property taxes now that's pursuant to the board guidelines we talked about the committee the whole meeting in january so we actually were at 97.75 last year we're at 98.38 i believe is the number for this year which i've rounded here to 98.4 with the expectation that will return to a 99 number for the fy 23 budget uh we are assuming four categorical payments uh this has sort of been the normal trend three are current one is past due but we're expecting four full categorical payments those are state payments for a variety of special programs primarily in the special education area as well as transportation this tentative budget does have a d sub issuance uh transfer to
085capital projects that was the normal approach that we have used in in the district there is the opportunity to consider that we talked about that finance committee today as well a little bit about that and we'll have some more conversation as we look forward to a final budget federal revenue i already talked about and then transportation revenue is really projected off of last year's actuals you might recall it's lagged by a year so our revenue for this year is based off of prior your actuals prior your actuals were down a little bit we're expecting revenue to be down a little bit but last year really wasn't dramatically lower from a transportation side because we did a lot of transportation of students even on the first two thirds of the school year when we didn't have
086everybody in session so all right that's on the revenue side we also on the operating revenue side there's also the non-operating revenue side and this really is going to this part of it i really want to just draw your attention to referendum funds so last year we issued 75 million dollars in bonds to support our referendum construction i'm not planning and don't expect that we will need to do any issuance of referendum bonds this year i think next year a year from now we would anticipate the remaining amount showing up in the budget and that would be talking about doing a bond issue when we did our last issuance though we did have the the conversation about the market conditions and if they were to change significantly if we're looking at a big increase in
087rates we might be opportunistic for the benefit of our community to issue those bonds a little bit earlier right now not seeing that although there's been some indication that maybe from from the fed there may be some changes they might be okay with interest rates going up a little bit but that's looking a little further out still as best i can tell so right now in the budget we've not included any new issuance and we're going to use funds already issued to pay down costs on our on our project the funds that we did issue were deposited directly into the capital projects fund the money from the bond issuance of course can only be used for the referendum purposes so we can't use those to support salaries for staff members for instruction we can't do
088other things that are outside of what the referendum question was which was focused around construction improvements in our facilities the so the expenditures that we'll have in the budget for this year which i'll talk about in a couple minutes are funded off of the bond issues that we've already done all right so let's take a look at the expenditure side i'm here again as is fairly normal we see the preponderance of our expense structure is focused around salaries and benefits now we do have a little larger than normal supplies and purchase services that's because of the esser funds so again the the other percentages look a little bit smaller because those couple pieces are a little larger are there inflated for this year due to esser funding a year from now again i expect those
089to shrink a little bit so i've talked about these include escrow funds our salary budget is up five and a half percent uh compared to the prior year but that's inclusive of esther funded positions so we have some positions that are a one-year position that we're funding through esther funds are going to go away we're looking ex when we exclude those we've got a 2.6 increase in salary budget overall our benefits are are up 3.3 percent uh supplies purchase services and capital those groups again they're artificially inflated for this year based on esser fund spending so 10.6 because we've got esther funds in there but if we take those out we're really looking at a 1.7 percent increase a lot of which is driven by a couple of our our external contracts for for services
090including bus transportation which uh at a two percent increase all right on the non-operating sites this is the the other the other side of that bond issue we've we're budgeting about 43 million dollars worth of of expenses this year not sure exactly where that number will fall might be a little bit lower might be a little higher depends on when some of the bills come in and how that construction progresses but that does not have an effect on our operating results but that that is paid directly out of the capital projects fund if we look at the budget as a whole both the operating and non-operating funds all together we're actually going to have deficit spending this year but that's because we had a really really large surplus last year because that 75 million dollars
091worth of bonds that was issued so this is why we really focus on the operating number so that this this other type of work around our facilities doesn't confuse or confound what's going on so again just as a reminder that the funds that we will be spending have to be pursuant to the referendum question which is what we'll be doing all right so here's what that summary looks like uh revenues of of about 1675 with expenditures of of 165 and then some operational transfers again those then those operational transfers are related to requirements from the state board of education the administrative code to pay for certain things out of certain funds net surplus of about 142 thousand so one of the things that we talked about with the finance committee is that as we look
092to future years you may be seeing a little larger budgeted surplus than this with the idea that we want to maintain what i'm going to promote is maintaining a stable fund balance so we've got a good policy in place with a 25 to 40 percent fund balance but each year as our budget increases in order to keep our fund balance percentage flat we need to keep some money in our operating funds so in our reserves so i'm going to be working administratively with dr hunt and my colleagues to make sure that in future years you'll actually be seeing a little larger number there so that we can ensure that we've got financial stability um and also we're able to achieve the educational goals of the district all right next steps well budget hearing this is
093what we normally do we we have an attentive presentation at this point in time first meeting in september we have a public hearing um on the budget then uh final budget uh is uh being is considered by the board at the second meeting in september for approval once that's approved it gets filed with the required agencies uh for example isb you know we're required to file our budget we'll provide it to others and we also then post it on the district website we will have the tentative budget available for public inspection this is required uh for which more than 30 days between now and when you would consider the final budget so that's what i have for you tonight on the attendant budget are there any questions i can answer for your board members so
094i remember at the beginning of the last school year we entered into an additional or supplemental agreement with barrington transportation i believe is that part of our reimbursed expenses as well yes okay just want to make sure that uh second with regard to your mentioning of perhaps going out to get to finance the bonds for the referendum spending if we if we do see that there's going to be some sort of increase and we decide to go out a little bit early on those how is that captured in the budget i know that it sits under capital projects but i also know we have other capital projects that are not part of the referendum so how do we distinguish those just out of curiosity right so what what we would do is i would actually
095need to bring to you a budget amendment similar to what we did last year same process as adopting the original budget because that's a material change in our budget and doing a bond issue i would be bringing that back to you from an internal perspective administrative perspective we do track our bond issues separately so all of our referendum bonds have separate series issuances that we track within our system both on the revenue side and then all of the expenses so that we can actually tie back every expenditure to a particular bond series that we issue so even with the bonds that we currently have that are that are earmarked for the referendum with regard to any sort of interest that we're getting on those that are sitting in the capital funds account does that continue
096to be newer back to the benefit of the the referendum dollars yes yeah the funds that are earned in the capital projects fund uh accrue to the benefit of the capital projects fund okay and then last question is can you remind me what is our percentage for the fund balance now are we below 30 i believe yes we've actually been running just below 30 like 28. it's probably 29 was 28 a couple years ago we had some conversation around that uh and actually i was shared with the finance committee today is next meeting i'm actually going to bring those calculations now that we'll have what we'll really have more reliable pre-audit pre-final audit numbers so that we can work at our what was our june 30th fund balance percentage and that will be part of
097our conversation as we start to think about what funds do we need to retain in the operating funds as opposed to transferring the capital projects fund so i'll be able to share really what that number is based off of unlikely to change um pre-audit numbers next month all right and when we're looking at the that fund balance percentage are we considering things like extra funds and things like that because it's kind of you know like when we're looking at our our budget as a whole that's all you know kind of falsely inflated for just one year you know that so the way the grants work is that we are given a grant allocation we have to incur the expense and then apply for reimbursement against that so we don't actually get those funds in where
098we count them and they look like they're part of our fund balance and artificially inflate that we're also budgeting for um this year so those revenues and expenditures should balance out on receipts there might be there's some items that that we did not get reimbursed for during the last fiscal year that will probably come in this fiscal year and so that may actually bump revenue a little bit this year as we look at that but they don't tend to come into play because uh in calculating fund balance because we haven't gotten money for which we haven't expended expenses yet so they really they mostly come very close together okay thanks dave dave thanks so much i have two questions for you um less i heard i remember i know our district policy calls for our
099fund balance to be i think between 25 to 40 percent that's correct last i remember in the spring i think it was about 31 percent is that it's still the case and how much does that translate to yeah so that that is that yeah that's the question angela's asking that i will be able to provide that information more specifically but less you know we've been running close to just below so on on the percentage so that that amounts to four months worth of of operating expenses so when you think about you know that's really what we have in the bank as of year end that's not reflective of our cash low point our cash flow point actually happens a little bit before the end of our fiscal year because the spring tax bills start to
100get paid you know toward the end of the fiscal year and just prior to that is when we really start to run low on cash so um but as of june 30th we normally are looking at about four months worth of uh worth of cash so with an operating budget uh of about 150 million and if you say well we've got about a third of of that that's available you know that would be about our europe about 50 million and which is fairly healthy right so well you know i guess i would say you know it depends on how you want to find fairly healthy i think the pursuant to our board policy what the board has determined is somewhere between 25 and 40 percent is an appropriate level of fund balance when but there
101are districts that we compare against that have 50 70 percent and more in terms of fund balance that's what i tend to think of as a healthy fund balance uh yeah look i'm your finance guy so i you know i wouldn't mind having a little more money laying around in case an emergency comes up or you know there's a problem with property tax receipts i mean that certainly since i've been in this profession i can remember when cook county bills didn't go out until the very end of the calendar year so uh receipts were were significantly delayed they've made a lot of improvements there but you know i do remember that that being said you know that's sort of my natural inclination as a conservative finance guy but i'm very supportive of a 25 to
10240 percent i don't feel that we need to go higher than that and i think the board i completely agree with the board's position that we don't need to bank community money we have a very low tax rate here and i'm not saying people don't pay a lot of money in property taxes those property taxes are based on the value of homes and but on a rate basis on a percentage basis we have a very low property tax rate i don't think that we need to raise that rate so that we can bank money now and but part of what that means is that the district does what it did last year with a referendum when we need to do facility improvements some really big unusual expenses we ask the community for permission to do
103that um sometimes and we had these questions during the referendum why why didn't you save up money you knew that you're gonna have to do groups you knew you're gonna have to do electrical work you have to do plenty more why didn't you save for it well if we were to save for it we would end up with much larger fund balances you know if you think about that we would have had to bank 147 million dollars and so we'd be sitting on 200 million dollar fund balances and personally i don't think that's appropriate and in the board historically he's not felt that was appropriate either so you know i'm i'm very comfortable with that um you know i hate to see us get close to 25 because then if things go sideways then per
104policy the board's having conversations about how we change our our you know what do we cut back to to get us back about that thank you for that explanation dr brian i'll just add that that is exactly why the policy was put in place that way it was put in place before i was on the board but in order to not be you know hoarding money or over over taxing we try to spend what we collect in a given year so therefore we don't want the fund balance to increase over 40 percent but on the other end we don't want to have to borrow money to pay our bills right which is which was the case prior to that policy um being put in place so that's those are the real reasons but why we
105have the um those two caps on our fund balance so thank you make sense to me and then i have one more question about esther funding for um the nine million or so from cares lesser oneness or two i i think cares has mostly been spent but can you remind us where we are there are we in terms of allocation do we need to have a public hearing with regard to allocation or does that shift depending on you know how the district decides to spend say oh well maybe we need you know more hand sanitizer or something we need to spend here could you just kind of remind us again where we are certainly yes we have spent uh the original care spending uh we did have our public hearing around sr-3 funds as as
106is required and we have budgeted uh for the vast majority of the remaining funds to be spent during the course of this year uh we did go through uh and and prepare the different areas which we shared with the board uh here's what we're looking at spending these things on honestly if we need a little bit more hand sanitizer i'm sure that you know that we'll be able to figure out one of the other places that we can buy a little bit of extra hand sanitizer from or conversely if we need a little less that we'll have money to make available for some of the other programming that that we're covering with esser funds so we have some flexibility there say oh we want to invest a little bit more in sel or you know
107or some other mitigation tool we can we can do that as long as it's not millions or something like that right so so with with our uh with the plans that we have in place we've already done that identification of what do we think are the most valuable things for us to be able to invest in which was a significant amount of money in sel and instruction curricular supports for students so that is where a lot of that those funds are spent so i think that if we were going to have any major changes we would be sharing that information you know dr hunt will be sharing that information with the board to talk about any major changes that we're having in that programming and i think it's important a reminder you know last spring
108that the want or the desire was much more than we had in asset phones we had to whittle that number down to what you brought for the hearing you know a month or so ago so we don't need another here at public hearing or anything we basically allocated yes okay any other comments or questions i do have one anybody else so my recollection is that we've added a couple staff at the elementary level and that used up all of our contingency funding i know that a lot of us are focused on making sure we have great learning this year and we don't miss any miss any students so if we have other areas where you feel that that we have a need to add i'd ask that you you know don't hesitate to bring it
109back to us and let us decide if that's if that's something that we need to do and dave kirk if i'm wrong we'd have to amend the budget at that point if we do that um they're not necessarily it would depend on the magnitude of the expense in the area in which it was being spent okay i know this is going to be an unusual year and i want to make sure that that we have those discussions so please don't hesitate to bring those back any other questions or comments for dr bine hey thank you board members thank you excellent so now dr hunt i'd like to turn it over to you to talk about our return to school 10 days for most students okay thank you very much uh yeah it's it's very exciting
110to be 10 days away from welcoming our students back and i think you know so much has changed since the last time you know we sat down and had conversation i think my takeaway was to try to create a matrix to bring back to this board to kind of evaluate covet in a more local basis within buildings and we certainly were headed down that road and then august 2nd as was discussed earlier i think august 2nd august 4th governor uh came out with the universal mass order which obviously changed things so i need to be very clear that this isn't a proposal that would be in place usurping what the governor's order currently is this is something that we would look at refining over the next couple of you know months uh to look at
111post the order so after the order's over what are the data points that we're going to look at and and evaluate mitigation strategies so just just to be perfectly clear with that i i think just from an overview i think it's important to note these are kind of general guidance as of right now we're presenting this tonight to get some feedback from the board where we've been we've worked in internally with the executive council gotten feedback certainly with uh our health professionals actually had a meeting with about six of our medical professionals in the community to provide me some feedback as well and and we'll continue those conversations and tapping into those resources i i you know as i already stated this evening uh when you look back a year ago you know every school
112district was in a different place in illinois probably certainly in ohio but if you look at where we're at you know august 20th it's there's some something to celebrate there bringing all students back into buildings being able to educate them in person is is a huge step forward and that that is going to remain our priority keeping students in person learning and for instruction uh as long as you know we possibly can and hopefully you know through covet 19 when we're back to quote unquote normal we we looked at you know various um we looked at other districts what were they doing what what data what information is out there and and and kind of brought those things um together uh our i guess our plan really starts with a look at the county level
113and uses that kind of as a gate as i'll show you here in a minute and then it goes to that building level data and what are we seeing at the building level and and again please know this is just kind of a work in progress so before i dive into that i i want to really cover the mitigation strategies that will be in place so everyone is clear um as we come back to school on uh next week we look at the you know ability and we talked about this earlier if you're ever going to consider removal of a mitigation strategy there really has to be a balance there so i want to lay out for you the various mitigation strategies we will have in place um as students return as was in place
114last year there's a covid 19 symptom screening web app it's a kind of daily reminder for our parents please check symptoms uh take a moment reflect you know or any of the symptoms present that would indicate potential covet 19 and then take appropriate action so that will continue to be in place um building principles are still working through and are planning for um you know designated entrances and that will follow the school procedures to limit interaction as much as much as possible much of that was in place last spring and will continue to be in in place as well mention hand sanitizer earlier necessary ppe obviously will be in place students will be asked as they enter the building before lunch and recess to utilize hand sanitizer the one of the biggest changes from a
115year ago to where we're at right now is the difference between six feet and three feet and the ability to provide three feet of physical distancing really opens up the ability to bring all students back to clarify within the document they stress three feet but they also prioritize everyone in person learning as the the you know the really driving factor in this so we will retain minimum three feet social distancing uh wherever we possibly can and i think that is in most places um we are recommending the incorporating shield by next now and pcr testing and parents having the ability to kind of make those decisions as as we move forward we have done some improvement of ventilation and filtration a lot of that has been kind of on the filtration side um some airflow
116work and i i did uh i shared the last board meeting we had a significant improvement uh coming up business offices work through kind of in inputting needlepoint bipolar ionization in every building to be clear because i've had some questions on that that's work that's ongoing we've got the you know the money came this summer that will go without forbid and that work will be done throughout the course of the fall so uh that that will certainly uh continue as we move forward visitors will be permitted to enter the buildings uh really focused on educational purposes uh only so trying to limit as many uh individuals in buildings as possible without cutting back on the things that make you know make education special bringing you know parents into read or educational experts to come in
117and work with kids those are things we want to continue to provide and and certainly we'll do that seating charts will be maintained in cohorts in lunchrooms for pre-k 8 in case we do have a positive case we kind of know where students are and we can access them cleaning will continue high touch surfaces is recommended and we'll continue to do that and then the vaccination status for eligible students and staff uh kind of on that note just to give you you know a kind of a a rough idea of numbers i believe with it with our staff we were about 96 percent of those had reported so i think about of 1100 of our staff reported back of 1700 we're about 96 percent and we had about 64 percent of our students 12 or
118older uh reply and they're about 85 in terms of vaccination right now so we'll continue to gather that data we're working on what happens as students turn 12 how do we how do we gather that information uh but that gives you at least an idea of the information that we have currently so when looking at you know okay after the governor's order's over you know what would we look to and and and evaluate in terms of phase mitigation we said tonight there isn't uh a magic matrix you can go and just pull somewhere you know this is this is something that we've we've had to look at and we thought really looking at it from two phases one look at it from the county level the data sources available there let that be kind of
119the first gate in this and then secondly if that was positive and look to what's going on actually in the schools and school buildings uh going forward so in terms of data sources uh that's community transmission uh all of you have probably been on the northwestern website searching you know different per hundred thousand numbers and zip codes so we we we decided to utilize the northwestern site takes take into consideration vaccination rates look at person to person transmit rate transmission rates per building through contact tracing and information that's shared with us and then staff and students quarantined per building if there's a large number of staff and i'll i'll back up and say universal masking should dramatically impact improve uh the quarantining situation for for our schools and then obviously positive cases per building using
120the the testing that we are recommending moving forward with so you probably have all seen this as well this is the cdc kind of thresholds that they determine transmission within communities low all the way to high it's simply kind of a math problem of how many cases per hundred thousand dollars or per hundred thousand uh over seven days and you plug in a number and and and and uh you come up with a category that you're in so when we did this kind of last week as we were preparing um we were in the in in a better place as a community uh right now we're at about it looks like about 108 or 106 down there uh i can't put my glasses on but 106. thank you uh so we actually are in a
121high transmission if you use that data right now so the the thinking here is utilize this information as the first gate and if we are low moderate that's you know that tells us we probably can go to that next level and start looking at the building data and tracking that information and kind of using that to drive some of our decisions the next level of this is we use the outbreak definition that was available through idph and that is what what is the definition of an outbreak and so an outbreak is defined as five or more cases um that are linked to a common location during 14-day period so we we kind of made the determination if if that's an outbreak we don't want to be there and we should develop thresholds within buildings you
122know that that would indicate moving forward holding with masking or holding with a certain mitigation strategy based on that data and that information so we we've kind of built our plan around this and i guess as of right now you know what we've done is we've looked at different scenarios in which different types of masking and we use masking specifically as a mitigation strategies we're preparing for this as that was part of the conversation um to kind of drive uh our plan so you know just an example of what it could look like and again we're working through this if you're five or more cases defined as an outbreak you wouldn't want to move away from universal masking if you're three or more cases you're heading towards that out break and they're tied to the
123school so in other words this spread happened in the school you wouldn't want to move away from universal masking if you're less than that potentially going to situational masking and if there's no person to person over a four week period as defined you make the decision and and recommend not requiring masks or recall recommend but not require so these are different scenarios that we're playing with right now to drive some of the conversations and again i think from a from a high level we've used the definition of what an outbreak is in the school as as the tier to kind of drive some of these conversations so we've kind of just played that scenario out for each you know building okay k through five it's pretty easy you got pretty much self-contained classrooms you can
124operate within those middle school high school gets a little more difficult as students are moving around the building more so we use the concept of teams here so if you had a large breakout within a team that's a portion either half or a third depending on the middle school of the group you could you you might have to have students masking in universal while another team could be situational but it's essentially using that figure to kind of plug in and tell us and drive us where we would go towards you know potentially uh moving away from the mitigation strategy completely from a 712 percent perspective same same type of logic uh in in terms of uh utilizing uh the uh uh definition of an outbreak probably the biggest uh difference here is we looked at
125where in the 7-12 or 6-12 eventually as students become more eligible to access the vaccine what's the appropriate percentage in which okay we've got x number of students vaccinated we can safely say okay it's just time to step back based on that figure alone and you know i had had some really healthy dialogues and i know you were on that call as well with some of the doctors uh we we you know the outbreak and the definition we found or i'm sorry the herd immunity statistic that we found from the mayo clinic was at 70 now we found others that were at 90 percent so i kind of left this as an x and some of the takeaway from some of the physicians was to give some feedback here and what might be the right
126percentage and so that's something kind of that we need to continue to look at have conversations with and land on a figure but i think at this point if you look at vaccination status in terms of numbers and percentage is there a number in which we say okay we've reached that point we know that we are we're okay and comfortable moving away from masking and kind of moves away from all of these other metrics in terms of cases so it's really conceptually that's what this thing is built around and you know i i know i moved through it fairly quickly tonight i think with the governor's order we have a little bit more time to make sure we're really thoughtful about this and and i wanted to at least share kind of from a high
127level where our thinking is going and certainly open it up to feedback and thoughts that you might have and i would end with this you know obviously vaccinated vaccinated students are different in terms of how we approach things however with universal masking i i think to a lot of people's concerns tonight quarantine will be dramatically decreased because of the universal masking so that's a lot of information very quick and and again i don't present this as this is the recommended i present this is here's where our thinking is today and we want to get feedback from the board certainly continue to talk to our medical professionals and get additional input and then potentially bring something back around to you as we as we move forward and i'll end where i started saying we're talking post
128governor's order here so when that is lifted these are these are the mechanisms that we would use to gauge whether it's appropriate to pull back on some mitigation strategies or not and again it might not just it might not be basking it might be social distancing it might be it might be other mitigation strategies that we kind of plug into this and and and use as well any questions that i can answer or any feedback [Music] i do can we stay on this side for a second here um okay but can we clarify right now that my new understanding is that asymptomatic unvaccinated students do not have to quarantine if they were less than three if they were more than three feet apart from if they are universally massed which is happening yes okay and
129the tests to stay provision is there as well where they'd have to test on one three five and seven and why is the quarantine for a vaccinated student quarantine until symptoms have diminished but symptom but it's different uh not unvaccinated student it's 14 days period why is that different i think one's because of the one of the students are vaccinated and the other ones are not right but if a student if a person is covered correct vaccinated or not why would why would the dates be why it would be different i i think that's just the maturation period of the disease and and that's why they chose that i mean that's that's the that's the quarantine period when we i mean from ohio perspective that's where we started with quarantine was 14 days so these
130are not are correct this is from the health department this is from the idph document okay so last thing so let's say my 10 year old gets coveted goes home for 14 days comes back it's contact raced again we are not because she can't get vaccinated but she just had co-hood but we're not counting antibodies so that's we start over so you your 10 year old universally masked in a setting and asymptomatic does not quarantine okay we're we're tested right yeah i feel like so we wouldn't have to use either and she's not positive test to stay but we wouldn't have to do that i don't believe so say that again asymptomatic unvaccinated universally in order and you have you have to be masked and you have to do the test to stay if you're
131going to determine whether or not you're you're positive is that what you're asking i guess i'm struggling with the fact that a child who just recovers from covid but is not having the ability to be vaccinated comes back and is treated just it seems to me a little uh well okay so but but the theory is now that if they're universally masked and more than three feet apart doesn't matter anyway correct okay so just to clarify for the community and the board whereas last year if a student had a positive covet exposure and was masked but was within six feet of the positive covalent exposure that student would have to go in quarantine for 14 days regardless of negative pcr tests and whatnot this year i believe the difference is that if we are universally
132masked and we're at least three foot distance if there is a coveted positive exposure those students can stay in school as long as they are testing to stay and that test comes back negative is that correct they do not have the quarantine that is correct and the only thing i want to i guess put the caveat on an idph um the the the county the local county makes some of the decisions on tests to say so we've got to work through that as well i have not heard from lake county on where they're at with this sorry not to be the dead horse but the test to say only applies if a child is within less than three feet if they're masked and and at least three feet distance correct and they don't even have
133to test to stay they just get to stay they have to test to stay right so we test to stay if we're doing the universal masking we're gonna do the test to stay if they're if they make contact with somebody who tests positive yes so we're the universal masking allows us to do the test to stay we have to go through the lake county health department to make that determination we let them know about what the contact racing has told us and then we determine whether we're going to do the test to stay but if we're universally masking we should be able to do that the other thing where you said that a student who was tested positive they get what's considered like a 90-day pass so if they come back to school they're going
134to test positive again for the next few times even if they you know if they're exposed again they get a 90-day pass so we don't have to quarantine them again okay and then if a student has a positive covet exposure and is masked but the student or the parents refuse to test to stay would they then have to quarantine for 14 days yes then they would quarantine if they don't test if they do not test okay correct i guess i'm confused i'm sorry i did not think that we just discussed that we would only be testing to stay if the exposure was closer than three feet that that is not my understanding i thought that that's what okay okay so if you're if that's correct if you are we tr if you're masked and you're
135within three feet of somebody then we we are going to do tests to stay if you because you're a close contact to them okay so if you're maintaining the three feet then no i'm sorry am i i guess i'm oh so you're saying if there's so the question is between three and six feet i think darcy may have mentioned this earlier yeah that that that's where that we do not have to test to stay in that scenario and that three feet then we're testing to sleep right so less than correct so less than three feet less than three feet and mass and three and exposed you would test to stay okay okay thank you also can we double check with the health department if you're a vaccinated student and you're symptomatic it seems like maybe
136you should take a covet test right now that we know that vaccinated people can carry the the delta variant yeah and then please know that this is general um i'm i'm assuming there's going to be a much larger decision tree put out with all of these scenarios as we kind of move through this but i i can check on that my other question is i'm a little uncomfortable going to situational masking without vaccine availability this may be a moot point because the governor may not lift the mandate we don't know unless there's vaccine availability but that's my one other piece that i'm not uh comfortable with if we have if we do go to situational masking and this is mostly because of the quarantine situation if we go to situational masking and there is no
137vaccine availability we have we risk the you know we run the risk of having to quarantine whole classrooms of students right if we go to mask recommended and so i think there's no question um that the quarantine implications changed significantly from when we had the first conversation regarding the plan to to where they ended up with it and i don't know if it'll be a mute issue or not and i also don't know if idpx could very easily change those guidance along so there's a lot of hypotheticals in that but i understand your perspective [Music] that's just my feedback on that piece like that you know and it all depends on when the mandate is lifted sorry can you walk us through a little bit more of how the shield and the bio net how
138that's all gonna work sure um so we are continually working with them right so this is we we joined in and you know i give the team a lot of credit we got right in front of the large wave of school districts um so we you know essentially it's an it's an opt out provision for parents we'll communicate this all you know hopefully by the end of the week on on kind of the process and procedures each building is i believe handling a little different on how they're going to kind of implement this whether you know areas and locations it's a saliva based test i mean they have a video i can share with the board of education that shows you kind of how they walk through this um essentially they walk through you know
139deposit the saliva put it down it's done based basically on a code uh all the labor all the management of that is handled by shield it's not internal employees handling all of that so with it then within 24 hours we get the results back from those tests so does this seem as necessary now that we are going to be universally masking all the kids i think it's good data to have especially if we get to a point where we have local control and we're considering what we're going to do so starting to track that i think is beneficial i also think there's an element of asymptomatic that we potentially can catch along the way that maybe prevents spread that is beneficial as well so yeah i think it it's good is a good process and
140certainly good information for how especially if we get to a point where we can make some of those local decisions on that subject can you speak about the reliability of testing if people can opt out of the testing how we can really judge what the percentage is in a school or in a classroom yeah i wish i could and we just haven't had been able to talk to the people at that level at shield yet so it is on the list of questions um to you know get through with them um i know is craig here where is craig back there um craig i know you were able to get some of that information in terms of reliability and i don't know if that's something you you can address [Music] but um [Music] you can
141come up here to that um so we are working on schedules we actually have representatives from medcall which is our partner that are going to go out to all of our buildings on friday and meet with our school teams to go over the testing procedures make sure the testing sites are set up we're kind of working more on just the logistical piece to make sure we have all the materials the locations and a schedule in place we kind of started there that was their recommendation any additional details as dr hunt was saying we hope to get on a call with them actually later this week to address some of those additional questions are we doing random shield testing in addition to test to stay or is it are we only deploying shield testing if there's
142a covet positive no we're we're deploying it across the board for for all students that are opted into the program so is it is it randomized testing then or no so only if there's a coveted positive exposure no we will run all of the students through one time per week in our school oh one time per week for everybody who says okay correct correct okay so every single student who opts in will be tested correct got it okay will they be vaccinated or undefeated or just unvaccinated anybody anybody signs up right did we delineate unvaccinated we do not it would be either group of students it would be only those that choose to opt out that would not participate in the testing that all be described as dr han said later this week we're putting
143together the communication to the community so it'll be deployed for every student who opts in plus if there's a covet exposure that's part of the test to stay as well correct okay we're either going to have you know again i think some of the logistic pieces if shield is here can we use that for a tested stay date or do we have to use our nursing staff of binax we'll have that ability to go back and forth if a parent does have to test if a child is within less than three feet and has just to say can a parent take their own test or does it have to be done through the school i i think we've we've um we've discussed that a little bit um i i believe the conversations i've had if
144we have a verified outside test we can utilize that so will we be using this for classes like band orchestra um contact sports those kinds of things because i remember reading that that would be really beneficial in those situations and helpful yeah it will certainly encourage that but it's it's for all students all students okay all students once a week to start and they i mean we went back and forth one or two times a week we just felt operationally to get it you know get this going really look at the impact on the operation of the building instructional time all of those pieces it made more sense to start with one time per week so do we expect to start when school starts or like the second week of school we're targeting early september
145yeah probably the first week of september is their recommendation for us to be able to have everything firmly in place and be able to start testing by that point it also gives us a start you know to it getting the school year just normal operations up and running and to put that in the mix right out of the gate i think would be also a little awkward so probably first week of september is our target date i'm sorry i really wish we had more details we're working honestly as quickly as we can on this and i promise once we get the schedule and some of these other pieces in place i think it'll make a lot more sense where we can just kind of walk through what it looks like at a school share a
146schedule with you because each building is going to have to have a separate schedule and a time frame that works for them in the manner of which the how they're going to test the students but we're laying all that out and we'll be able to share that with you soon doctor i knew you based the five transmissions in a school on the definition of an outbreak what did we base the three transmissions in a classroom on we essentially were we don't want to be in an outbreak we that's not a benchmark we're okay right and we simply just backed it off from there okay one is against the school and one is against the classroom correct two was in the classroom three were in the school so that classroom data we just kind of backed
147it are we we're checking it with health professionals though or yeah we i we presented this to a group of health professionals this week and we'll circle back with them as well okay okay and can we also talk i'm also wondering are we looking at um you know for classes like uh language immersion or speech therapy um or some of the younger grades where phonetics and facial expressions are really important are we taking a look at maybe the option of using clear masks that don't fog up microphones so that teachers maybe are not as muffled behind the masks do we have some of those tools at our disposal that could we use esser funding yeah i believe we had some of those masks in place for for staff last year and i know we've got
148some of those sound units in classrooms throughout the building we've discussed that as well so some of you know i don't think that's pervasive in every classroom but i know that those resources are available do you think we can maybe pilot it or look at testing it out especially in like language immersion so that we can see if it makes a difference for kids in terms of hearing the teachers or for seeing mouths move and things like that i think it's something we'd have to work with our staff on for sure i mean there's a comfort level also with these mass and and doing that i mean we also have the ability to go outside now and open up and we'll certainly encourage that as much as possible as well so there's a plan like
149to say can we maybe have specials outside for elementary like outside inappropriately distance or maybe one class you know one subject in the morning one subject in the afternoon we're we're looking at their strategy i haven't gotten to the minutia of those details i'm quite confident our building principals will plan and leverage the outside as much as possible with the freedom of being able to pull mass off okay i also hear a hack for people who want to use clear masks is to put a little bit of dish detergent on the mask so that they won't fog up i hear that that's a tip so other questions i hit a couple i just like to comment if these numbers hold true 96 percent of staff if again we haven't heard from all the staff but
150that makes me feel so much better about lightening the mitigations when we're able to do that i encourage parents whose kids haven't been vaccinated yet if we can up those numbers again it'll make me feel so much better about lightening the mitigations but you know vaccination is still going to be the best way to mitigate and if we're going to get rid of mass the more vaccinated kids that are eligible to be vaccinated the better it's going to be for everybody even the people who are not vaccinated so i just want to throw that out there there's a follow-up to that we have heard back i think you said 60 some percent of the students on the questionnaire um if they've been vaccinated or not are we planning to follow up then to get the
151other thirty something percent to find out we'll continue to do that okay so i think again it'd be great to know especially if we're going to use that as a metric you know once the mandate is lifted to reduce the universal masking i think that would be really good to know so we'll be following up throughout the fall and we're also looking away to capture those sixth graders whether you know it's not happy birthday please submit your vaccination you know some time frame between there but to kind of benchmark and track sixth grade as well last year we had one of our metrics was the volume of ppe that was available do we have any concerns on running low on any of those supplies this year i don't you know dave and i've spoken about
152that before i don't i don't have any concern on the ppe side and you're certainly not seeing the press you know at the market level that you saw a year ago so i think we're in good shape okay and once we understand the dates for the ventilation system and changes you'll be reporting that back to us as well so we can understand where we are with each of the schools and sure improving that that would be great um [Music] um let's see um i don't think we have to go through it right now but you you mentioned different situational masking if we could have some examples as we move forward of what those might be um i think that would also be helpful to explain to the board and the community and understand what some
153of those might be okay i think it would also be very helpful there's been a lot of questions and a lot of things if we had like an faq that was out there for the parents to look at that might be helpful as well yeah we are working on putting some information we want to get through tonight with this meeting talk about mitigations and we'll release some of that information as you know as we get closer to school um we've also um i know there's plans for large groups of students to to come to school in the first day of school and not want to wear a mask do we have plans in place to address yeah we're going through that now i know that uh [Music] the principles come together on thursday on that
154specifically uh and you know we will there will be a plan in place we want to work with families to get them to a place where they understand the limitations that we have and we're masked and they'll just be a kind of a progression of how we have to address it with with individual students okay you had said you're coming out with expectations or some kind of a document yeah well we will address masking as one of the mitigation strategies and some of the doctors sent me some guidance on on some of the masking so we'll put some guidance out regarding types of masks as well and you'll release that some time before yeah for sure for sure as long as it doesn't change before school right i did have one more i know a
155lot of parents and myself included are concerned that we kind of try to return to as normal as possible meaning you know field trips assemblies um all the stuff that kind of group projects things that stopped last year also i've heard so many parents who tell me that the locker situation at the high school for kids in sports was very difficult last year they had nowhere to put their equipment um and luckily i guess some teachers would let them put their tennis racquets or their things in their classrooms um and something as simple as yeah as just all i mean you know group project labs are we just are we incur or is it business as usual yeah i mean so specific to your questions field trips we've discussed and you know i've asked that
156those go forward obviously that fit within the requirements that that we or the confines of the requirements we have so field trips you know will move forward talk to steve about lockers at the high school those will be issued uh so we are returning as much as we can to normal for sure oh okay great will middle school have lockers i didn't ask that question specifically sorry oh it did come out saying that they won't so i know that that was that was already yeah put out there at least that i saw okay so in terms of sports lockers at the end of last year because we were participating in sports athletes were allowed to enter the locker room when they entered into the school building and placed their equipment in the locker room if
157they chose not to do that that was their choice on it that was an issue that was the resolution to that so that they weren't storing it with their teachers in terms of the classrooms [Music] setting up the lockers is more than just a just a quick turnaround we're working on that so our policy or our our procedure here has been we wanted to keep mitigations the same as last year and ease them back in we will begin easing lockers back in at the high school and the middle school if it's not in the first two weeks we're going to look at it first right as september as is kind of a target area for that so the lockers are available for coats and such when the school year begins or not when it begins
158but as it starts to get a little cooler in the afternoon but the sports piece at the high school and the at the middle school if that's an issue as well i will we will make sure that there's a place for them to drop their stuff so they're not having to carry bags around and football equipment is a big one and tennis equipment and soccer and such great thank you you know there were mitigations for like passing period last year because it that's a crowded time at the middle school and at the high school and there were routes and different plans and things is there still some kind of plan for that for this year i'm assuming my understanding is that we're opening as as we closed last year okay so one some one-way hallways
159and things like that to help mitigate the number of students in a given hallway i just want to be absolutely clear on this so the middle schools will have one-way hallways the high school hallways are quite a bit longer or wider there's no need we can still maintain six foot of distance in there and if you've traversed the high school if you get caught and you miss your turn off it's not easy to get back on it takes you know another minute or two to get around like the east wing or the west wing but our hallways are much wider than they are at the middle schools the middle schools will be following exactly and frankly we'll be doing exactly the way we were but i don't want you to think that the upper third
160floor east wing will be one way the way we started we found that that wasn't necessary because of the the the number of students we could handle in those areas fair enough thanks [Music] other questions or comments so thank you for you know a dr hunt and dr winkleman thank you for being proactive and you know looking forward i mean i know where we sit today and i know that you can't you know you don't have a crystal ball you can't accurately predict where we're going to sit tomorrow even but um i'm always so reassured by the fact that you are thinking about other options and and different um avenues to proceed um you know not just tomorrow but you know in the weeks to come the the contact tracing slide for some reason is
161sitting with me in a weird spot and i'll tell you what my my knee-jerk reaction is is that um you know i think that we have a community that listens to us and and you know barry i agree with what you're saying i mean the more we can get people vaccinated the better you know chance we stand as far as you know losing masks and things like that yet you know today we we sit with um you know a universal masking requirement vaccinated or back unvaccinated we sit with um you know this this new fear that whether vaccinated or unvaccinated you can still contract a variant of covin and that you could also transmit a variant of covin and with that as an underlying statement and and what is our reality at least in our
162state today i guess when i look at the the different tiers and different treatment of vaccinated versus unvaccinated and i'm not saying that i want vaccinated people to be quarantined or things like that i'm not asking for any sort of punitive or um more proactive quarantining of any group but when i see the distinctions between them something doesn't sit right in my gut and i i understand it logically especially when we come at it from the basis of the more vaccinated people we have the better chance we have of you know proceeding with life as normal but when we get these bounce backs that are the opposite of that that say actually vaccination is not going to change things you're still going to come to school with masks when i then see distinctions between the
163way those students are treated it strikes me in kind of a bad place and i know that you didn't create this slide and our district didn't create this slide and i know that we've asked for additional information about this slide but i think that you know when trying to um provide assurances of um you know equitable treatment and and and you know what we've been explaining this entire process this slide bothers me um i guess that's just the only thing and this isn't a criticism it's just a comment yeah and contact racing will be hand in hand with lake county right that's not something we handle exclusively by ourselves and i think you're right in that it kind of is what it is at that level and i understand but if i understand it if
164you're unvaccinated and you're masked and you test to stay you don't you do not have to miss school right for 10 days so as long as you're testing negative and you're asymptomatic and even if you're unvaccinated you do not have to miss school so i think that we can actually if you test to stay you can kind of cross out right missing school or missing sports you can stay in school and you can play sports [Music] there's no question for an unvaccinated student that this situation is better in terms of quarantine right so so i think i just so i don't think that i think we have to read the slide correctly so if you do test the say angela you don't have to and you're negative you don't have to undergo the bottom two
165right you don't have to undergo yeah you don't have to undergo the bottom two in terms of going staying home for 10 days or not participating in sports as long as you're testing negative and as long as you're asymptomatic so angel cooking i'm wrong but what you're saying is that why is there a different treatment between asymptomatic vaccinated asymptomatic unvaccinated right because if you're vaccinated you don't have to test to stay even because you're asymptomatic but the fact is if i heard you correctly you can still transmit the disease or i'm sorry the virus and you can still contract the virus correct i think we should question that i think if you're vaccinated and you're asymptomatic and you have been exposed within three feet i don't think it's a bad idea to test i mean
166you could be asymptomatic and you could still i think the cdc recommendation is that it's not required but that is the cdc recommendation right but you i mean you can test to just make sure if you know that you have an exposure that's been a close one that's correct yeah so my other comment is pragmatic so i think um and i understand where we currently stand but i i wonder if there is the potential for any sort of um situational understanding and response to masking during sports and i i'll give you a specific example actually i'll go back to a specific example where i think that we kind of as a board at least in my opinion i think we kind of miss the mark and then something that i think will happen in the
167next week or so so i think with field day last year i think as a board we kind of missed the mark as far as saying you must wear a mask and the temperatures were over 90 degrees so i believe camps are starting and we have in the high school we have a gym that is not air conditioned and it gets hot and you know there will be kids that are exerting themselves in a variety of different sports some of those sports just can't be played outside um so you know my question is is there any sort of ability that we have as as educators as coaches as you know people who have children that are entrusted in our care and that are exerting themselves to have a little leeway as far as requiring a
168mask during these camps when temperatures can get close to 100 degrees in our gym and you know there's fans and things like that but it's difficult and you know i just worry about the safety of kids just from a physical exertion standpoint um you know in these situational types of situations that wasn't a very well said statement but i hope you understand what i mean yeah i understand what you mean i i don't know that we have that opportunity to make to take to have that level of discretion other than acknowledging with our coaches this is an issue it's hot you know when you can be outside can you do drills outside what can we do to provide enough you know brakes mass brake and and i'm sure they're gonna you know be thinking in
169those directions as well but to to make an exemption within the school building i don't think there's an area we can go a road we can go down i see i see not in your head as well that was it thank you other thoughts and comments i think in the same line of conversation that that we talked about this earlier i think but that if students aren't able to wear a mask or have a an issue or concern or a health problem that the families need to bring that to the school's attention and that we definitely don't want to be masking kids who can't wear a mask who are going to be ill because they're wearing a mask who are having mental health issues because they're wearing a mask we need to have the families
170talk to the school and they'll make a plan an accommodation or whatever make what makes sense and that that that's that's available and there's yeah there's a process for that and you know form they would take to your physician and fill out and that'd be brought back and evaluated there's certainly you know that that process is in place and and ready to go in fact it was it was there last year right because we you know we're weighing these things right global pandemic wearing a mask being being unhappy being stressed being depressed we you know we've hired extra extra social workers extra psychiatrists psychologists staff to to pay attention to kids and make sure their their mental health is okay right and so we're working on that and we care about that and as a
171board we care about that i know we get caught up in rules and regulations and cdc and are you know the governing organizations and health experts but we very much care about that as a board yes well we'll be doing check-ins right with some of the extra staff that we have we'll be checking in with the students as they come back this because it's going to be a big transition to be coming back um to fool in person with everyone here for sure as well we're going to kind of there'll be some students that might need to learn relearn to learn in school right and you'll be updating us on that yeah the board and this is before my arrival the ministry of team the board supported very appropriate resources to ensure that those layers
172were there for students and very confident that that will take place right because i want to keep students in school we want them to come back and then stay in school for all these reasons yeah i know nobody really thinks masks are comfortable or particularly loves them and i'm encouraged by the new quarantine guidelines paired with universal masking that will help us keep the most number of kids in school for as long as possible because they will not have to quarantine if they test negative so i think that that's really encouraging for our overarching goal of keeping kids in school in person five days a week so glad about that all right well thank you again dr hunt um for this work and uh for this time for us to ask questions and and deliberate
173on that any anything else we need to cover thank you all our next discussion item is board priorities i know some people were able to get back to dr hunt what if we can pull up the draft of our board priorities that we started oh my gosh back in july was that july or june actually june did everybody have a chance to look them over oh my gosh i was wondering if um since we're going to have kind of a follow-up to our board retreat um before the next meeting would you want to wait and see if there any anything comes out of that that we'd want to add to our priorities or um we certainly could but i was thinking that we'd probably be adjusting the protocols or our guidelines more than these priorities
174okay because these are these are district-wide you know priorities so i didn't think that we would probably change these too much because this is an open session topic as well got it okay but i think it's always in our purview if we find something that need we need to change priority on that we could come back and and you know bring that forward for discussion even if we decide tonight that we like a through x and we really want to add y in you know in october then let's discuss that let's discuss what that might be got it yeah i didn't see any changes that i wanted to recommend for tonight i just didn't know if maybe we wanted to look at it again but it'll be a short time frame that we're allotted for
175the next board retreat so maybe this is very short so focused on protocols were there others that had comments i know leah you had sent some in i guess what's the best way to do this to make it straightforward [Music] maybe just give some background um as as the board you know went through this work there was an activity in which we started to identify areas um there was an activity that then helped us prioritize things that you know board felt there was consensus around which led us to this document and i know that the board has operated under themes in the past that align with the strategic plan from i think 2010. so what we did was essentially you know sat down with exec council looked at work that was happening last year what
176was continuing into this year the board's feedback as well and tried to put these into categories that made kind of sense with aligned with kind of the direction of some of the initiatives within the district already and then put them into and and put in quotations kind of a connection if you will to the prior terminology so there wasn't a disconnect there so if you look at the what's in parentheses for example under student experience it's formerly tech sel optimal time for learning kind of fell into there and school safety and security you know referendum so just trying to kind of align with the the feedback of the board the work within the district and and and kind of synthesize that so the executive council and and school district can really succinctly see what the
177priorities are and really focus on that as our work for the year so i think in years past we've also tried to make it something that was measurable and like actionable so that it would be it would help dr hunt and the team to know you know what it something that's not super vague like like in budgeting like financial stability is a little more vague than maintain a balanced budget is what we had before so those kind of action words and measurability of it was what we've tried to do in the past so i think it's a good practice for us and to just make things really clear i think would be helpful for dr hunt and the team as well if that makes sense um so i kind of went through what was there
178before and some of the things that are there now and kind of tried to make the language more clear i mean i don't want to nitpick completely but you know we're all kind of word smithers up here which kind of gets in our way but also is good thing so um do you want to circulate it can you share it um yeah yeah i hadn't i sent an email i could could i i sent it to dr haunt and sandra um and i resent it to sanders today we could send it to all of you that had all the bullet points is that is that would that be helpful or if it's a matter of adding action words um it was kind of a laundry list of things quite honestly yeah of you know adding
179a few things back in that kind of weren't in there and changing a couple of the headers you know one thing and that would be good for us if we could kind of get to closure on this tonight or close to closure on this tonight so that that the staff can move forward right um with their plans for the year so if it's not too difficult if we could just kind of run through and try to um address some of them i think it would be good i know we like to try to get out of here by 10 but maybe we can give ourselves a time limit does that make sense guys like maybe 20 minutes to see what we can do in 20 minutes yeah if we're not done then i i i
180mean i i love that we did have action words here i'm looking at last year's versus this year's i do like that um so can we just kind of go down them and see see how we do i i've heard leah in terms of you know making it a little more specific a little less general and i i think we can be a little more robust i mean this came from our board retreat but we haven't really played with it yet and i think we can do a little more than what we have here i mean just for example on the first one where it says formerly tech there's nothing here really about tech i mean i do think going back to last year we should monitor enhance instructional value of technology or talk about
181cyber security or i mean there's really nothing up here about tech per se and i do think tech should have something as a priority yeah and i think um you know and some of this is conversations you know internally you know the the thinking is the district for a long time talked about tech in one bucket and teaching and learning over here where we really feel that technology and teaching and learning need to integrate they need to be one they need to work together and they shouldn't be in isolation so certainly if there's certain things we're concerned about that are tech related but i i really believe technology supporting teaching and learning and that's that's where innovation and all of that comes together and that's kind of the conversations behind some of that yeah and
182so last year we had monitor and structural value devices i feel like we're kind of beyond that now we've we've been doing our monitoring we've talked about technology devices what was that three meetings ago um and i so i took that as the first bullet innovation in teaching and learning kind of encompassed you know um you know continuing best practices and innovation and learning or maybe we change that to innovate and you know make that an action we're innovate in teaching and learning i think we're beyond monitoring i guess so innovate in teaching and learning um including [Music] review of um use of technology in because we're doing a device study that's happening yeah i think it's an education thing though if we're using technology correctly in education right well if we say innovate and
183teaching and learning including technology does that not cover it are we including tech safety and and you know teaching kids the younger kids especially you know how appropriate use of their computers and you know internet and i mean i i'm not suggesting that we we have to list all these things i want to make sure that's all included in that yeah and i think that's that's the conversation is to try to bring these two worlds together i understand i just yeah yeah i don't i don't think we want to lose the cyber security best practice bullet because cyber security is still important things are getting hijacked all the time yeah that's right so we can see that's under student experience either no because that's like a not i would almost say that's more school safety
184school safety and security yeah i like it i'm fine with that okay so pursue best practice in cyber security under school safety and security i'm all for starting each bullet point with a verb too that's what leo was saying yeah you concur you can make them all match yes right and then i mean i think with the with the technology issue i think from my thought you know the device study is one and then second is just um continuing to to see what we learned you can't put this in mind you can you can take all this and put it compact but you know we use technology in such different ways over the past year so taking what we learned from that usage and continuing it in the most you know whatever is most helpful
185for learners moving forward yeah we we've talked about this administratively like we missed a huge opportunity if we don't take time and reflect right what do we do well what do we not do well and what do we pull forward i think we felt like that's part of strategic planning like really taking an assessment of not only where you're at where you want to go and looking really hard at last year and say what are the pieces that need to pull forward yeah yeah there was a lot of training you didn't want to lose that right a lot of times spent training and i think that's all captured with that verb innovate so i feel pretty good about that that first bullet so innovate in teaching learning and technology i i wrote down innovate and
186teaching and learning including technology okay okay either one is that good yes so what about the next bullet um get a verb in front of social emotional learning um [Music] what about i wrote a big long sentence it's probably too long but proactive engagement of all students to ensure social emotional needs are being met post covet i'll shorten that into a phrase um meet needs of social emotional learning for all students yeah [Music] meat um we used foster last year like the word foster it's a little bit stronger than meat i think well i think yeah you want it to be because i know that we talked about a goal is that you know each student has some sort of hands-on you know is as part of the return to school that they are going
187to be speaking with some sort of social worker psychologist psychiatrists whatever it is that is available to you know do those one-on-one assessments as well as just you know kind of proactively having teachers you know with eyes on kids but i think it should be a little bit of a stronger since we are we are we are seeking that type of information proactively rather than just kind of being a resource when needed i think it's important to include every student right and seo yeah so let's go the verb what's the verb emotional learning for all students okay i like that that's great are they okay yep yep um schooling versus learning loss i'd say assess learning loss assess and address learning loss or self assess and address schooling versus weight loss is that important to
188schooling versus learning laws no i think that no i think it's just learning lessons yeah okay but i think the schooling piece kind of falls under social emotional if there was law you know lost there okay so assess and address learning laws yes yeah okay great anything else that we need in student experience [Music] okay school safety and security we could just turn continuation into continue referendum project timeline and then the next one into complete high school renovation and field of dreams design okay and i added cyber security yeah i wrote i added pursue best practice in cyber security got to keep our verb all right would it make sense to um put something in about the referendum and it might be under budget might be more clear but continue referendum work follow timelines spend
189money wisely communicate with community so we have under budget efficient use of render referendum on time and budget is that is that okay that's kind of the same thing okay so we could say efficiently use or because i don't know that we want to single out the high school bit on the referendum because we want everything in the referendum you know all the buildings but remember this is for this year right so this year we're going to complete the high school renovation and field of dreams design that's why it was called out specifically because that's the focus middle schools but that's continue the referendum project timeline i would say what what yeah so we're already executing that whereas we're designing right now we're completing the design for do you even need bullet two if if
190we have which we do if we have a referendum project timeline it's established it includes the high school renovation and field of dreams designed so you don't even need that it's essentially saying stay you know keep stick to the timeline right i think that's fine i kind of like it just because it's a a big thing that's happening this year in that design but i'll defer to others that's the that's the main thing on our list at least for the next six months should we retitle at school edition safety and security or something like that because why would it just be under safety and security the basis biggest basis of a referendum was was safety safety and security i think at one point i had its own heading referendum and then the old term of
191school safety and security somebody wanted it brought forward would it make sense to say continue to research and implement best practices and safety and security there continue to research and implement best practices in safety and security under this heading that was what we had last year for safety and security best practices well well i think we're doing that in our referendum yeah that's what i would say too i don't think we need it separate okay okay so did we we struck the second bullet and added cyber security is that what we correct okay yes everybody okay with that okay all right um so under budget um maintain balanced budget instead of financial stability is there something else that you guys are trying to get out with that financial stability beside your balanced budget i'll let
192dave dave jump in if he wants here but i think part of this terminology was you know being uh financially stable or fine maintaining financial stability is naturally a balanced budget i mean that's part of that but it's not exclusive to that financial stability is beyond just the budget i'm so seriously maintaining financial stability yeah that's that's okay we have a dollar surplus but financial stability might be also maintaining appropriate fund balances which might require a larger surplus so the idea as dr hunt said was to try and actually do a little bit more than just say all we're going to do is focus on a balanced budget but financial stability for programming thinking about longer term investments in in our curriculum and our programming making sure that we have the appropriate funds to be
193able to do the initiatives that we want to do for example it would include a one-to-one program how do we make sure that we can provide stability for that programming and for our district and plan for that on the longer term so the idea was to be a little more inclusive to support uh what we think the community and board values are around stability on our finances that was the idea i get that then i get that i like that maintain financial stability everybody okay watching our time too um how about for the next bullet efficiently use referendum dollars instead of just trying to and sandra what did you just say for financial stability content maintain financial stability maybe we could say maintain and because i mean dave's going to be presenting something that i
194think is increasing our financial stability i mean it sounds like you're suggesting improve improve yeah enhance well if that's the case we want to be even more specific and say improve fund balance well well we've got a we've got a policy though that we want to keep it within a certain percentage right but you think that percent higher is what i'm saying i don't i i think that's one aspect though but that's not the only thing yeah true right so what about projecting into the future for financial stability because that's what you're talking about is kind of doing budgeting in the future for the fund balance to see where we are to keep our aaa rating to like keep us all around healthy but we've been i mean we well i don't know that we
195have to add that because we're doing that we do that always we use we project always wow i would say it's more detailed we have had a financial stability in recent years in our district and certainly maintaining that is something that's important as i think about my role in in making sure we've got the right resources available for our programming at the right point in time i want to ensure long-term financial stability and i think that that's where when dr hunt and i talked about this i thought this is more than just a balanced budget to make sure that we can do that so you know if the board's comfortable with maintain or enhance or ensure any of those i think would be consistent at least from the conversation dr hunt and i had in
196trying to reflect what we think the board's interests are how about enhanced all right enhance financial stability efficiently use referendum dollars um then under equity race and cultural sensitivity how about train district leadership can we consider adding in staff as well because i think that before the pandemic i know that there was a cohort of teachers at the high school that were meeting and they really enjoyed i think um mr sherman shared i can share a whole plan with you around this it gives details and that's included i mean the high school's a little bit ahead of the rest of the district and we don't want to put the brakes on them and say wait we're going to let them continue right let them continue and then i think the hope was to start it
197at other schools correct well i think that they're part of the leadership team right because they're the first yeah they're a little bit ahead so they're part of this leadership i don't know i didn't i think we had teachers right that we're not necessarily like administrators right on the district leadership team there are teachers yeah oh okay i also want to train the board right i mean yeah i don't know that we have to have the leadership the schools i'm okay with train district leadership team but i'm not going to argue too much if we say leadership team and staff okay trained district leadership team um how about collaborate with community groups i would say even collaborate with community because got it i don't think the community understands or at least something okay yeah no
198i like that i i really think that we need yeah i agree collaborate with community i like that yeah it's that's great okay i'm trying to keep it i'm wondering are we i still kind of want to add in staff because i just want to make it more expansive because like what if we have folks who aren't on the district leadership team and they're like i want to get involved and they're yeah i think there will be some staff okay i think the thinking was or i know the thinking is we need to bring the leadership team ahead with consistent understanding of terminology and message and all of those things before we bring everyone else along and i think when you think leadership you think maybe just the people that are sitting out here it's
199much broader than that and is the collaborate with community i i think kind of tim what angel i think we it's imperative that we address explain to the community what this entails is that is that what you're getting to there yeah we've already talked about a a meeting in which we come forward to the board and share kind of this plan do you want to sometime in the fall do we want to say collaborate and communicate with community does that help katie do you like that but if we just a district leadership and left-off team i'm getting like tripped up on team because like people are gonna think it's you know just a small that's fine it's that small cohort of people i'm fine with that is everybody okay with train leaders district leadership yes
200okay so train district leadership and collaborate and communicate with community the other thing that i remember we had a lot of circles on under this was around goal setting with regard to hiring and accountability and representation is there is there something that we could add around that i remember they had like four or five circles when we were sticking i i get to dig back in yeah i think it's part of that collab collaborating you know if they go back to last year's and look at those bullets they're they say assess evaluate and recommend improvements and so i think we're still in that phase and then to promote racial and cultural sensitivity and equitable behavior that encompasses those things too i like those two goals if we could bring those back and then that me
201and that leaves a little biter open we're not giving yeah it's not like that is an accuracy i sure can or i can just i'm sorry what did you say they certainly apply to the work and what we're trying to inspire to do i would love to bring those two back you want me to read them again okay you want me to read them again yes assess evaluate and recommend possible improvements okay um and that leaves it open to keep evaluating and recommending improvements and then the second bullet is promote racial and cultural sensitivity and equitable behavior okay everybody okay with that yeah i think the first time you could strike possible right we could just say and recommend improvements yeah yep yeah yep definitely i think in addition to the other two that we
202already said yes yep [Music] um okay then last section community relations how about implement superintendent transition plan and then the next bullet established timeline and community engagement for strategic plan okay yes um and then the last one communicate plan postcoded [Music] i would just call that i would hold back what we had last year i would say strengthen community engagement with emphasis on transparency i would agree yeah right here right at the top you want to say expand or just strengthen yeah we could use expand strengthen or just strengthen okay yeah yeah strike the negligence it was under community relationships okay so strengthen community engagement with emphasis on transparency i like it see guys did we say with emphasis on transparency and communication so we leave the communication strengthen community engagement with emphasis on transparency
203and communication right it's kind of redundant yeah i feel like i think it is expectation is the same because can you choose one or the other you want to choose communication strengthening strengthen so strengthen communication with emphasis on transparency so okay that's fine strength and engagement with emphasis on transparency strength and community engagement with emphasis on transparency all right and then we're going to get rid of communication post code then we're i think that what we were trying to emphasize there was communication so but if it's part of engagement it's part of engagement i would think but if you're strengthening your engagement you're communicating more it's true more or more effectively okay because we do you know want to make sure that's strong and we are many times criticized that it's not that strong sandra
204can i suggest two additional ones from last year that serving back sure so one was the um i mean especially since we're engaged in that litigation um the the risk behaviors one i think it was under health and wellness educate and prevent adolescent risk behaviors and i'm thinking primarily with like the vaping lawsuit um you know since we're actively involved in that i know that we still have some staff time that's going towards that could we can that student experience i was going to say the same thing something like that added under student experience okay so i'm going to read it one more time under student experience we would add educate and prevent adolescent risk behaviors yeah is that okay yeah and then the other one was um you know i think with the digital
205citizenship i still think there's so much work to be done with that and i know that we kind of address it with um like the innovation or with the you know the very first bullet that we have innovate but i wonder if we could add something about digital citizenship because you know i think that it's just so important to innovate in teaching learning digital citizenship by digital citizenship are we talking about like online behavior are we talking about yeah screen use time or focus i guess i was yeah i was focusing more i mean i think screen use is such a pandora's box especially you know with where we are right now but i was thinking more about you know usage on social media and yeah i think that's important i i just i can't
206speak to what's in place or not in place here so well i mean we have um i mean we certainly have policies for you know staff for us now i think we have something growing so um and we do a lot of digital citizenship um teaching and instruction and you know even with like things that go on the bathroom flyers and things like that but i feel like you know it is i'm not going to put a timeline on how often we see but in the past the board has seen and the community has seen some things that students posted that really they were not thinking and they were very hurtful and harmful to others and and i think that as a district we really have um you know some of these have made the
207news media you know i mean i i think that at least from my time on the board it's been something that we've always really taken very seriously to to try to continue to educate children and their parents as well which we do a lot of parent universities um as far as you know getting parents to understand like how their devices work and if you want to put restraints on it and if you want to put time limits on it and this is what you can do to to monitor usage as well i think the librarians do some of this curriculum work if i remember correctly when they're you know they're telling the kids you know google your name and see what comes up make sure it's appropriate you know don't post your drinking party because
208you're not going to get a job you know these kinds of things like those kinds of pieces that kids don't think about when they're teenagers um and and those are some of the the same kind of things that i think angela's talking about yeah so i'm all for adding that um under there again just as we had last year foster digital citizenship if that's okay okay okay so i will i can take this and update it and um distribute it back out do we want to take action on these at our next meeting on september 8th [Music] okay great so um do we want to look i love it we're going to see what we did guys and so many people left so that was fun um too bad they didn't get to witness that
209um hopefully they're watching it online at home um anything else on priorities let's look at our agenda items for september 8th other agenda items we have adopted board priorities a hearing on the tentative budget which we talked about earlier discussion with an sel update yes discussion on referendum construction anything else um we want to add do we want to do a an update on return to school yeah we should have an update a discussion topic return on return to school yeah yeah like the report as well our numbers and yeah i would like to know if i know that some grades are being tested right now for learning loss and stuff but i i know not all schools are doing that so i kind of i would love an update on what maybe the district
210plan is to address okay and assess learning loss here's kind of an initial snapshot of data yes i think uh yes you know full right correct um we'll we can ask for that as an update again and i think it's the 21st we meet again i think i remember right and reminder that it is a wednesday september 8th it's wednesday it is a wednesday and we are starting at what time do you need we're starting at what time 4 30 or 4. 4 o'clock 4 o'clock we will start on the 8th everybody can make it that's our workshop time yep we can we'll start with the workshop then and then go into anything we have to in closed session should we i forgot to bring this up at finance i apologize do we want to
211talk offline about rescheduling finance because that's what rescheduling the finance committee because that was supposed to be at that time so either earlier i would prefer to do it a different day because it's just a big long long haul maybe we can yeah can you send out some dates for finance to thank you that would be great thank you okay so we will add an agenda item to on return to school which will include um some initial data anything else you want to add the sel update that's that's big extravaganza right we've been waiting for did you hear that yeah awesome okay anything else do we have a motion or a motion to consider and approve the confidentiality of closed session minutes second roll call sandra bradford yes leah callister lazari yes katie carram yeah
212angela wilcox yes barry altschuler yes aaron chan ding yes steve wang yes motion passes how about a motion to adjourn did we ever get to discussing those minutes um no um [Music] we did not yet and we didn't put it on here because we might be part of our discussion on september 8th oh for the workshop thank you for that reminder so do we have a motion to adjourn second who was first i'm so sorry angela and leah thank you beautiful roll call katie karen sandra bradford yes aaron chanding yeah steve wang yes leah callister lazari yes angela wilcox yes and barry ellis [Music] all right we are adjourned