Board of Education Meeting June 15th, 2021

001flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all awesome okay so good evening i have a couple things to report on um first i wanted just to mention that if you haven't driven by station or prairie recently you will notice that the mobiles are gone so uh please take take a watch for that and i'm sure we'll hear more about that um with dr harris's report um i also just wanted to remind the board that there is a ribbon cutting ceremony on june 26th um and a couple saturdays from now you can check out dr harris's report for the joe celch senior dreamway that will be able to walk in a couple of weeks also in your board

002packet from dr harris was the triple i conference so please let janine know if you're going to plan to attend it'll be downtown in chicago in november and i understand from our meeting this afternoon about 600 people have already signed up so make sure we get get in there so the board also met today as most people know we had our workshop we reviewed and accepted foundational principles for effective governance we also updated our board protocols which we'll see on our agenda on july 13th and we also did a first pass on our board priorities so we got a lot done this afternoon so i think it was a very productive session and i think i can speak for the whole board and say that we are agreeing to work together well and we are

003hopeful to show you and demonstrate to the community how well we're going to work together so thank you board members for for our great day today um all right so we have a couple retirements that i wanted to just point out um to the to the community um the first one i wanted to just recognize was anne bonsamino who is who has had more than 30 years of service in the district um and she will be retiring so she's most recently been the reception here at the administrative office so lots of communication with the board there and also ava detloff who has been our nursing coordinator most recently but served more than 20 years in the district so she's worked with us several times obviously a lot in this past year but i know angela

004and i talk with her a lot in policy and ava will be missed and you'll see some new folks coming in on the personnel report and then i also wanted to recognize janine vaughn who's also retiring here from the administrative center um janine maybe some of you know maybe some of you don't know was the board recording secretary for more than 10 years so we've known her and appreciated her work and she's spent more than 20 years in the district so i wanted to make sure that we recognized them and we may have another retirement that we just wanted to mention i will i will be brief but to paraphrase from carmen ayala you are truly dr harris a leader of leaders and barrington 220 is a better place because of your leadership and your

005service here and you will be remembered for leading us through the pandemic while also continuing to enhance the curriculum and education for all students in the district and for that we're appreciative but you also never be forgotten for your efforts and your contributions to our recent referendum in bill 220. and so we wanted to leave you with a little bit of a token of our appreciation that we that we acquired um from a recent ground breaking and at uh station so um maybe you can just read that for us seven years of excellence thank you for your leadership and dedication 2014 to 2021. wow dr brian harris so thank you on behalf of the board my wife's gonna love this so perhaps at the end of the evening guys that um we've got some things

006to sign maybe we can pose for uh that'd be fantastic that's even better as you know i spent five years there well we made sure there's lots of meaning in that shovel all right thank you thank you thank you um so that is all that i have so next up on our agenda is public comment and we have okay nine folks um so i will just call them in order that's listed here so monica casey is up first and while monica you're coming up i will just remind everyone we've now come to the portion of the meeting when we have set aside for time for public comment we value your thoughts and opinions and in accordance with the board policy 2 we ask that you state your name elementary attendance area and the relationship to

007the district before the beginning of your comments we also ask that you limit your time to three minutes and janine will have a timer for us and this is not while this is not a conversation if we have any comments that require further follow-up we'll ask dr harris to follow up and get back and report to the board please also refrain from directing any concerned comments to individual staff or community members and address the issue in that people in order to follow as many as possible to speak if anyone else has spoken and you represented your views please do not feel the need to repeat their comments but stand up and represent that you agree with them so thank you monica good evening i'm monica casey i am a parent of district 220 for the

008last 15 years and i'm reaching out to all of you regarding the topic of mask mandates that was briefly discussed at the last meeting but it was not resolved and i think side sideboarded at the last meeting it's a critical topic among several with respect to the negative and permanent impacts on our children for the upcoming school year and beyond i urge you to place priority and consider lifting the mask mandate for barrington students at today's meeting as dr harris had indicated we will follow he will follow the idph guidelines unless directed otherwise by the board the district 220 board of education can vote for this and definitely has the ability to unmask our students several school districts throughout illinois have done this already having parents responsible in deciding their children's health decisions and well-being

009any adult concerned about getting coveted 19 has had the ability to be vaccinated since really february of 2021 however it is not formally approved for children by the fda nor recommended by our family doctor based on recently identified serious long-term effects as well as many unknown factors we are no longer in an emergency state of affairs regarding covet 19. we have reached stage 5 in illinois which is great with lifted mask mandates and only generalized subjective guidance regarding masks the cdc is consistent in its data showing that there is virtually zero percent risk to children regarding cova death or complications as members of this community it's imperative to make this a priority masks dehumanize and desensitize our children requiring masks for students throughout the day is both physically and psychologically detrimental to their development over

010the past year our medical providers have indicated health issues directly as a result of wearing masks including staph infections on the face nasal infections sinusitis eye infections conjunctivitis along with a myriad of breathing and anxiety issues the long-term negative effects of masking are many and yet so avoidable and so unnecessary i implore you as representatives of barrington d220 to be leaders and advocate for what our community our parents which is the sole reason you are in your respective positions are actively asking of you i hope you will bring this forward with a sense of leadership positivity and hope for the entire school district going forward and i thank you for your time thank you allison rohrbrock good evening my name is allison rorbach and i teach general music at sunny hill i am also the

011communications chair for the barrington education association on behalf of the bea i would like to take this opportunity to thank dr harris for his seven years of service to district 220 and congratulate him on his retirement obviously the last year has not provided a smooth sail into retirement instead the seas were unpredictable and sometimes treacherous every superintendent and school district in the country were tested in so many ways in our bea meetings we often commented that while we were losing sleep with worry anxiety and fear we knew that you were too and that we didn't envy your position or that of the board of education for that matter through it all we appreciated that you used our local public health department to guide your decision making it was the right thing to do we all

012acknowledged often how ahead of the game we were due to the one to world technology investment that you oversaw as well as the state-approved e-learning plans that were already in place months prior to those faded days in march 2020. we look forward to teaching and learning in the new or updated spaces that the referendum funds will provide and we are grateful that you clearly communicated to the greater community what our students and aging buildings needed after a year such as this we hope that in the coming year the pace slows down a bit and the burden lightens we hope you enjoy not making any critical decisions on snowy winter days other than coffee or hot chocolate and maybe you'll even get hooked on a new tv show on tuesday nights after this year we hope

013that you can strike the word pivot from your vocabulary unless you're referring to an amazing play during an illini basketball game best wishes to you in your retirement dr harris on behalf of the bea thank you for your dedication and service to barrington 220. thank you [Applause] hi my name is kaia krauss i'm a lifelong resident of barrington and i have three children that are in or have been through the district as i've stated in an email to dr harris and the board masking is not a benign intervention and it is ineffective at preventing aerosol transmission and stopping covid19 we know this to be supported by the who the cdc and dr fauci of niaid if you know otherwise i respectfully ask the board to provide data and science that supports universal masking of our

014children or that you lift the mask requirement why are children still required to wear masks at the last board meeting the board voted 4-3 to keep elementary students in mass on a 90-degree day this decision should have been to make masking optional giving the control to the parents to manage their own risk assessment on one of the most loved days of school ostensibly the reasoning behind the mass of the decision was to keep kids in mass was to avoid quarantines and school closures this illustrated the board's inability to appropriately understand risk assessment one there was one week remaining in school two these events were conducted outdoors where risk of transmission of covid is practically zero three the population is not at risk of covet nor at risk of high transmission rates and four to make

015masking optional allows parents to determine risk and their level of comfort with potentially missed school days finally i'd heard at least three stories in the last few weeks of children visiting the nurse that day there are probably more this 4-3 decision showed a lack of courage to do what is right for the children and a lack of understanding of threat of covet outdoors and to this population during that same meeting uh discussion of removing mass was met with concern of funding i worry that the board is afraid to lose funding from isbi and will choose money over the well-being of its students i also wrote the board asking them to review data collected this year on contact tracing and quarantining of healthy students how many students were quarantined how many hours of in-person school and

016extracurricular activities were lost how many of these healthy kids in quarantine ultimately tested positive for secondary transmission while in quarantine my guess is very few but the data needs to be analyzed so the district can do what is right for our students the boe has authority to make its own decisions isolating healthy people makes no sense at all jama published secondary a symptomatic spread at point seven percent after analyzing the data present it to the community we want our children our healthy children we do not want our healthy children missing school and falling behind idph has removed emergency order there are no more mandates making make masking optional and revise or even better remove contact tracing procedures as appropriate for our district thank you for your time [Applause] [Music] hello um i'm heather ewell i

017have four kids in the district and first i'd just like to welcome all the new board members it's so exciting to see new faces and um it's my first meeting since you guys are all here again and congrats to the new board president and everyone and um uh thank you so much for i had a senior so i wanted to thank you deeply from bottom of my heart for making graduation happen and it was just amazing and i just like to say can we do it like that every year so uh it was just wonderful and um congrats to brian and you know on your retirement and i'm sure you're going to have a great time with that amazing pension all right second i'd like to rejoice with all of us here at the official

018end of our pandemic and illinois totally in phase 5 totally reopened i went to chicago and it was like good old days again so that was pretty cool that said i'm here to ask you as our board because you are the voice of us parents to please lift our mask mandates please let uh masking be optional for our children uh any adult who has faith in the vaccine uh has been able to get one and uh we all know covid only very rarely kills children and we all know now that children rarely spread coven the vaccine however is experimental and many families i know are not okay with subjecting their children to this experimental medical therapy my husband also is in pharma so i do have a little experience from that side so uh many

019of our students will not be vaccinated and um i just ask you to please not force the unvaccinated children to remain masked and segregate them into essentially being masked and unmasked and forcing them i feel forcing them to wear masks will cause them to feel singled out and feel unwelcome at school and um just not to mention it's often difficult for them to breathe and just uncomfortable um so i just like you to please consider the psychological impact this will have on our children who for whatever reason are not vaccinated to segregate them so um just once again just ask you to please remove the mask mandate for all our children and let's love and accept all of our children equitably thank you so much hi my name is laura irman i have a third

020grader at lines and i'm also an educator with a master's from depaul and a decade of experience as a teacher and school administrator i understand that you're all in a different difficult spot but i'm deeply concerned about the idph's plans for vaccinating children instituting weekly testing of unvaccinated students and penalizing students who do not submit to this violation of their rights i appreciate that you feel like your hands are tied you say your funding is being threatened but it sounds more like blackmail to me the measly nine percent of our budget that comes from state funding is determined by legal formulas that are based on attendance so you need to question the legality of such claims when state agencies are making them all adults who feel like they're at risk have access to a vaccine

021now i got one myself and i respect that some parents are going to choose to get their children vaccinated when that's made available i'm simply asking that you would respect my choice for my child because i've also made it by following the science this preventative cure has a worse outcome for children than the sickness itself my son contracted kovid in may and it's without a doubt the mildest sickness he has ever had and it's like that for most children children are three times more likely to die in car accidents or from drowning yet we're still putting our kids in cars we're still letting them swim so why have we decided that school is too high risk if we eagerly engage in far more dangerous activities 28 states have either removed or now prohibit mask mandates

022for schools so it's time to push back on the idph and their mandates remind them that cloth masks are not effective especially when improperly worn even dr fauci admitted this in writing i saw kids in the pickup line every day don't pretend like they're wearing these masks properly and for kids like my son who has tourette syndrome masks are harmful within days of returning to full-day instruction his tics became the worst that we have ever experienced within a week of no longer having to wear a mask for seven hours a day including recess his tics dropped off dramatically my son is not getting an experimental vaccine i'm not consenting to weekly testing and children who aren't vaccinated shouldn't be singled out or forced to wear masks or excluded from extracurricular activities we would never let

023kids be visually marked marginalized and mistreated for any other medical difference so please please remember you serve are the interests of our children not political agendas not pharmaceutical companies or medical testing companies like the one that our governor is heavily invested in in closing i want to remind you a few words that people often emphasize when vehemently protect protecting women's reproductive rights my body my choice so i'm going to echo that sentiment here tonight my child my choice thank you for your time thank you for having me my name is julie leblanc i have three children i've gone through bankton 220 schools and i've been here since 2013. and i wanted to raise my concern for state bill 818 which many of you may have heard about already and the title of the state bill

024which is now past the house and the senate is called keeping youth safe and healthy act what a wonderful title however let me please just share with you what this bill is about this is nothing other than an incremental sexualization of our children as you know the sex ed bill was that um states that beginning no later than july twenty first 2023 all public school districts including charter schools are required to provide comprehensive personal health and safety education in kindergarten through the fifth grade and comprehensive sexual health education in the sixth through twelfth grade in all public schools so when this build sponsor uh state senator ram villavalam was asked by state senator sue resin for the breakdown of what's to be taught for second grade uh fifth and eighth grade he responded and i

025quote in younger grades like kindergarten through second the focus is on personal safety what it means to be a good friend and being able to talk to parents and trusted adults when someone wants you to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable or unsafe however he did not mention the following let me please statements so in grades k through 12 now we're talking five to seven year olds education will be expected to align with the national sex education standards which is the 74-page document which if you have time go through it it's very interesting and i don't know who comes up with these standards but there's no such thing as a national sex education standard this is put together by a special interest group okay so in grades uh k through two education will be

026uh aligned according to this quote unquote standard these students will be able to define gender gender identity and gender role stereotypes and how those sex-based conventions may quote-unquote limit behavior they will also be expected to identify different kinds of families cohabiting in same gender et cetera et cetera in grades three through five this is five and seven year olds okay in grades three through five education will cover healthy relations and safety but also delves into what children at those ages are experiencing like social physical emotional changes related to puberty however again ron did not mention the following information which comes straight from this national sex education standard let me just share with you some of these things in grades three through five and i'm quoting directly from this document explain common human sexual sexual developing

027including masturbation two describe the potential role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender next distinguish between sex assigned birth and gender identity explain how they may or not differ on and on i'm just asking you as a parent to just please carefully and thoughtfully consider what this bill will do to the mental health of our students these are our children so i just i would ask you to contact pritzker it's already been passed in the house and the senate and it's gone to his uh desk now and he has 60 days to respond he could sign any day and he could also refuse so please carefully and consider this this bill that our school district will be facing thank you for your time hi my name is mary ellen johnson i live

028in the village i have three kids who are either in the district or have graduated from the district um and i also want to bring up sb 818 the sex ed bill and julie already explained uh what the bill actually says but i want to just tell you that there are many parents that do oppose this and i also want you to know that this material while julie was writing just reading off what was in there what what is also in this material is highly graphic unnecessarily so multiple images for elementary school children on how to insert a tampon for instance and even though they have there are other really vulgar things in there including in sixth grade sixth graders um how to um use prophylactics for um certain sex acts that aren't um don't

029produce reproduction but are very similar in nature and i think you might know what i'm talking about and these same standards that that they're trying to pass and that this board is going to decide whether our schools are going to be teaching this stuff they will they have the kids use such terms as blue balls but they're not allowed to use the term parents so you really need to think again about what it is that we're planning to teach the kids there are other ways to promote things like empathy empathy for you know one another all children are different and we understand that there are other ways to promote empathy and then the other thing is if there are children that have questions of the this nature you know such as how to do these

030certain things why not have um the the teacher then say if anybody has any further questions on enduring reproductive curriculum is what i'm talking about so during reproductive curriculum right after the first the teacher can simply say you know we have a counselor that you can come and speak to with any further questions you may have you don't have to go into graphic detail that really is you know stuff that i don't even want to you know have to read and look at this is ridiculous anyway thank you so much read read peterson hello my name is reed peterson and i'm in eighth grade and i'm going into eighth grade next year before i start my speech i would like for you to know that i wrote the speech all on my own without help

031from my parents or anyone else i would like to ask you the barrington districts 220 school board to make masks optional for the 2021-2022 school year for all teachers and students of the district if you take a look around for a moment you will notice that masks are optional in this room and school is no different from this room in school with a mask i have noticed myself feeling lightheaded my stomach hurts and not being able to concentrate with a mask along with not being able to breathe correctly i would like you to note that i have never felt like this before in school in my entire life i have a hard time hearing my teachers because the mask muffles their voice and i cannot see their facial expressions as clearly as i would if

032they did not have a mask on we have moved into phase 5 of reopening illinois which means we will be fully open schools and everything i'm speaking for all of the students that feel the same way but cannot gather the courage to come up here and speak to you guys the board the community has elected you to represent us in our opinions as you all have agreed to now it is time to see if you break that agreement or stay with what you have pledged to do vote to make mass optional in school now thank you and last stop marcia mccleary hello everyone i'm marcia mcclary i have five children ranges seven to 16 years old and we're in the countryside grade school district area um welcome to the new board members thanks for taking

033so much of your time on a nice summer evening and congratulations brian on your your well-deserved retirement and everything you've done for our district um we're very excited about the referendum my kids put out signs and we're happy to see it through now finally um so luckily half of my conversation was covered so now i'm the data person um so i spent almost 20 years in the vaccine and pharmaceutical development industry which makes me have a unique perspective they no longer pay me either i have my own business so i do not have any reason to really be biased in my opinion some of my roles in that included evaluating drug candidates from going into the next phase of development whether we are going to continue to fund them cancel them to based on outcomes

034part of that process included looking at risk assessments and standard probability of success or failure failure for drug and vaccine candidates involves efficacy as well as safety now in this case we have you know these authorized vaccines they are not approved though that means they've shown efficacy but they have not shown safety that is why they are called authorized only they are meant for life-saving treatments you can read all of this this is not in misinformation this is not it's right on the leaflets on the pamphlets they give you when you get it says it there so i'm not making this up and i'm not trying to scare anybody because the risk benefit of these decisions depend on your risk of covet and that's my opinion but i think that's what most physicians would say

035to you is what's your risk of covid the higher the risk the higher the benefit of the vaccine for you versus walking around exposing yourself to covet so i just say i've never seen an assessment of a vaccine or drug in my life in phase three where we're at today especially with pediatrics that has less than a ten percent chance of failure for safety okay it's not less than one percent ten or more okay so that's just purely statistics that the industry uses based upon historical data where we're at today in development because we are in a big phase three trial especially with kids so i'm not trying to scare anybody but you know it's like with these kids we don't have enough data that's why they're not approved so we cannot push this and

036medically discriminate on our kids i feel so strongly about this i could not even sleep at night i didn't want to say anything to you guys but i just it just makes me sick like to think about this because i know what i know and i've seen stuff i've seen failures i've seen adverse events and and we have um so i'm going to email you guys all this data you can look it up yourself cdc database stuff the va ers system it isn't perfect but it is the system the cdc and the fda uses to report adverse events and it's self-reported data by practitioners there are hundreds of thousands of unreconciled unfinished reports in that database even if half of them are wrong it's too much for me okay for our kids and so i

037just want us to be really careful all the momentum in the state is very scary to me about what they want with vaccines and it's just to me it's a choice everybody needs to get educated not by the media not by the government you're going to talk to your doctor and look at the data and that's what i feel very strongly about and then based on what everybody said same thing kids are much more likely to die or be injured in a car accident or swimming we do this every day they can go out they can be on mass and they can live their life all the adults at risk can get vaccinated so i asked for you to really consider that and not follow the guidelines if our state is behind or under resourced

038to get there that's i get that you know they're trying to catch up we are all compassionate we understand that you know it's hard to get back to reality but we ask that you guys consider our information our data look at it with wisdom look at it with your with your eyes and i will provide it to you i have a six page paper i'm going to send you with all the data so you can look at yourselves to make the decisions and not listen to the media please i beg you okay thank you so much for your thank you so much all right that concludes our public comments why don't we move into your report dr harris a minute here all right there we go it is okay um well first of all i

039just want to uh thank the board and and the community members and staff that for your kind comments thank you appreciate it um and i'll get to that in a minute i've got some thoughts here at the end but i do have some important stuff i want to update the board on as part of my report first of all as we had talked about over the last couple meetings i had said that i would continually update the board as we all know things continue to evolve and change at the state level local level when it comes to public health and and isbe actually the state board of education has a meeting tomorrow and i do know many of my colleagues around the area will be speaking during public comment based on our comments tonight i

040would encourage our parents if you feel that passion about it talk to our state board of education their meetings tomorrow it's online you can submit comments to them i would encourage you to do that i can tell you i have been and i will continue to i have been directly involved with advocacy um you know all along but on this topic most recently you know to try and uh make sense of where we're headed for the 21 22 school year okay but at this point we have not received any significant change from the state level as i had indicated to the board in my uh communications what i anticipate uh is that we will get guidance from the state uh revise your guidance for 21 22 school year once all of the school districts in

041the state have finished this current school year which has not happened yet we still have districts still in session and i do i just know that that's a key piece that they will wait on until those districts conclude the school year so once that happens which i anticipate in the next week to 10 days i do believe we will get some updated information but the advocacy piece to allowing local districts to make you know have more flexibility be able to make decisions for their given circumstances certainly is something not only i have been doing but also all of the superintendents in the suburban area uh that i internet work with periodically and in fact i was on a statewide call yesterday we were preparing a draft letter uh that's going to be read tomorrow morning

042at the state board of education meetings so um i think it's critically important to continue to do that and we'll see where that falls but i do anticipate that coming sometime in the next week or two okay once the school year ends across the state of illinois a couple things i did want to mention as well uh summer school's in full swing it's going very well uh at all levels so um you know uh i was actually in a couple of buildings over the last week and and summer school is is going really well i mean the kids are engaged and and uh we weren't sure how summer school was going to roll this summer after such a very difficult challenging year but it's it's going well and at all levels so i'm very happy

043to to hear that the construction at the middle school level sander reference has started so uh it's exciting uh the construction fences are up you're right the mobiles were the first to go there was uh craig dr winkelmann principal at station for many many years happily uh helped uh demo the one over at station right uh and so that was uh a momentous you know opportunity for sure so we're excited about that and that we're off and running and uh to get those uh additions and that renovation done at our middle schools hopefully on schedule as we move forward um i do want to take you know a brief opportunity to introduce a couple people here in the audience tonight on the personnel report for the board's consideration and the consent agenda we have two

044administrative hires and i want to welcome bridget harrah bridget is our recommendation to fill the vacancy of the nursing coordinator for the district what a critical role right now i can tell you eva and i uh have been best buddies uh for about 15 months every day trying to make sense of um understanding you know what's happening in and around us so bridget i know you've been involved in your current district and in that role and we're excited about having you join us as our new nursing coordinator for the district so a preliminary congratulations we'll wait till the board takes the action and then we'll go from there you can see her credentials as well we also had a recent vacancy in our director of special education role jordan anderson is here tonight as well

045and welcome to jordan pending the board's approval uh she also will be uh you know serving in this new role as the director of student services at the elementary level working with all of our elementary principals and our programs for special education so jordan welcome and uh preliminary congratulations to you as well until the board takes that action so both of these candidates come highly recommend and we're excited to recommend them tonight uh to the board so i obviously prepared some comments and uh you have to bear with me for a minute you know um i do you know i i do have to say that this job has been an amazing you know leadership opportunity uh as an educator you know as a kid who grew up in central illinois and started as a

046high school social studies teacher in 1987 and now to finish my career as a superintendent in my opinion is the best school district in the state and arguably the best in the country um you know it's just been incredible and uh you know one thing's for certain you know this community supports education the passion of parents is you know not matched anywhere else there's no doubt about it and that's what makes it good that's what makes it you know a place that educators want to work parents want to live kids want to come to school here so and i've been fortunate to be the leader i want to you know start off by a couple comments here in may of 2014 the board of education at that time brian battle penny kasmir sandra bradford joe

047ruffalo wendy farley chris and dick you know they they gave me an opportunity right chris guyer and and dick burckhardt they gave me an opportunity to you know be here and uh i i thank you for that and sandra's the only board member sitting here at the time that i was hired and uh each of those many of you probably know those community members as well former board members all great people and passionate about the schools in this community and and it was just a a wonderful opportunity at that time i also want to thank angela six years you've been sitting here right every tuesday night with me and i came on the board shortly after that that first year i also want to thank gavin newman and mike shackleton for their four years of

048time with me as well as superintendent and finally lee and barry the last two years we've been through some interesting times right in your two years of service on the board with the referendum and then obviously the the pandemic and navigating that so it hasn't been normal or typical i can tell you that for those of you have been here longer you know so um and for the new board members you know obviously we've just had a couple meetings together but you know it's it's an amazing community service opportunity and and you've got a you know a new opportunity with the new superintendent and i know you've already began that work and and looking forward to watching from the distance of great things that are going to happen i also want to take the opportunity

049to thank my administrative team they're all here tonight uh and you know you're only as good as the people around you and uh you know i've had the opportunity to hire each of you into the roles over the seven years and some of you were already in district roles but i and i've worked with some of you previously in other opportunities and um it is just incredible and uh you know i've been fortunate you know again as i said this is a destination district for employees as well and uh you know we we certainly are blessed in that fashion and i want to thank all of you for your support and um for doing the great work of this school district the teachers i thank you to allison and the ba uh allison was a

050spokesperson this evening um you know for their work we've worked together we've had a great partnership in my seven years we've worked through you know challenges most significantly over the last 15 months no doubt about it but on the other hand you know that that partnership is critical and the relationship with our employees uh and our support staff as well and the bseo um you know we have 800 staff members in the district of support staff and they're also incredible uh support to all of our schools and and the district level um you know and i think one highlight of that from my perspective is for two years in a row under the chicago tribune workplace award our staff said this is the best place to work you know for in the school district environment

051and it it's self-explanatory it's an independent organization that evaluates and surveys our staff we have nothing to do with it and they they recognize us as an exemplary place to work as an employee so thank you for the board for making it that way you know for our employees and staff i also a special thanks to john breese this is his last meeting as well tonight john is moving on to another district in another role and i wish him well and uh so this will be your final meeting here tonight also um i recently was asked what are you most proud of and i will tell you that's tough that was i i i didn't have i'm usually pretty quick with stuff i can usually respond rather quickly with you know a thought i'm never

052usually tongue-tied and um uh i had to think about that one though you know what one thing what are you the most proud of i i broke it into two categories so i cheated but i will share this um with myself one instructionally i think you're going to hear a little bit about this tonight with dr fuller and his thoughts about the wonder world i believe the wonder world program allison referenced it from the teaching perspective the wonder world program was just beginning when i got here seven years ago we were just rolling out the macbook airs at the high school at that time in the 14 fall of 14. and we took many steps over the next several years that has had the most incredible instructional impact in our classrooms and instruction and how

053kids learn and learn at a high level and how it's going to impact them down the road and our job is to prepare them for a college of a career of their choice and i believe that tool has been critical and a component of that is the blended learning right we we started that in 2015 and i talked about in my interview when you interviewed me i said you guys just did a huge investment in technology and i told the board at that time when before you even hired me i said now it's the instructional opportunity right you've got to leverage that tool and that network to make it happen and and i think it's it's a journey we haven't arrived it's it's not a destination it's a journey and with unforeseen circumstance like we

054just experienced over the last 15 months that wonder world scenario put us in an incredible position to continue the instruction for kids while it wasn't what any of us wanted one what i wanted but it's what we were able to do many districts couldn't do that flat out i know for a fact they just couldn't do it and we were able to to provide you know an incredible instructional experience and there were some lessons learned there's absolutely no doubt about it and i think that will only make us better you know in our classrooms as we return back to full in person and how staff are going to continue to leverage those devices for instructional purposes um the other one the other impact is the referendum i mean we spent five years at the table

055and with the community talking about a master facility plan um and and it eventually passed the 147 million dollar referendum that will definitely impact the next generation of students in this community it will be the next 20 years you know what's going to happen here over the next couple years and the decisions we've made and how we're going to build out this opportunity the community has provided us so i will be watching from a distance with smiles on my face i i've told all the principals i'd like i want to come back when it's done i want to see how it's happening with kids in the classrooms in those spaces that we're renovating and how the instructional components are playing out because that was the key it's an instructional master facility plan with with student

056learning at the forefront of that and and i know that's going to continue so those are the two things that came to the top of my mind we spent a huge amount of time here at this table talking about those and finally you know after 34 years i want to thank my wife i don't know if she's watching but she's incredible allowed me to do the work i want to do and you know it's been great and i'm looking to pay it forward and return some of that time so i know if you're watching thank you carol and um and my kids my kids also you know when you're a superintendent you know it's uh you put a lot of time into what's what's going on here in this role and i know my kids

057you know also along the journey you know i didn't always get to every single thing even though i did the most i could so thank you all you got an incredible district credible opportunities moving forward i encourage this board when you develop your master facility plan you know that's that's your opportunity i'm sorry your master of strategic plan thinking of facilities matt your strategic plan that's your opportunity as this board to move forward in this community and if i was continuing i know that's where you're gonna be heading with dr hunt and that's an incredible opportunity to set the next generation in this school district moving forward so put your time and effort that's my advice as i exit you know into that that strategic plan engage the community and and and do the work

058that i inherited when i got here we were in the middle of it and i was lucky all i had to do was to figure out how to make things happen right you've got the incredible opportunity to create a plan that will guide our schools for the next 15 years so thank you all unless there's any questions that concludes my report thank you for listening thank you wow you think i was going to get there please thank you thank you dr harris thank you and thank you carol very very important recognition there that is the meeting you mentioned it's 10 am tomorrow i think there's a link on the isb website in case any of you are interested and then you can sign up for public participation between 8 30 and 9 30. so or

059you could just google isb upcoming meetings and it'll pop up yeah it's all it's all very self-explanatory isbe yeah and then also even though you're not a cubs fan but i i do want to thank you as well and i'm glad that we overlapped in our six weeks and uh i think uh you i peppered you with questions and you uh answered all of them very graciously and thanks for being you know definitely one of the best tour guides um couldn't have a more knowledgeable person um show us around the district when katie and i went and i think steve went on a two or two and thank and also you seemed ubiquitous so thank you for being so involved and invested in our kids education my son will never forget when you walked into

060his huff music class and sat down right next to him and played the ukulele with himself much better than i was [Music] maybe you should have sang i don't know yeah not a question but more of a comment i guess the majority of our parents have left but uh i think because of their passion i think we owe to them to put this put them asking question on the agenda at the july meeting we'll talk about the agenda at the end yeah but i think it's worthwhile they can still hear us that you know we hear them and that we respect what they've said and you know we understand what's in front of us all right so we do have some business we need to get through so any questions on informational reports how about

061updates from committee members any committee meetings in the last couple weeks all right it's gonna all right so how about the consent agenda then do we have a motion uh sandra i have a question about the consent agenda can i can i move to remove the minutes the consent agenda you may we don't have emotion on the table yet sorry would you like to motion to approve the consented agenda without the minutes yes okay do we have a second true i'll say though okay i'd like to say that the reason being is similar to what we the what the question that i posed earlier in the week which is the minutes include a notation that there was a parent that spoke but it doesn't actually include the words that that parent provided and i think

062we owe to that parent to provide the words that they attempted to deliver to the public it was not it was provided to us in writing and i would like to have it added to the minutes in addition to them speaking those that provided a transcript correct to include that as well correct what's our policy on that i mean my understanding given to what i given my research on this is that the board president should have the authority to make this decision you're asking to do what i'm sorry steve can you repeat that what were you asking to add so mrs kroll last week yeah made a statement and was not able to complete it so she left us her to write her written statement to say that she provided a written statement correct well

063well no not just that just to actually post the written statement itself so that it can be all it could be there for all pub consumption and the reason this came up that is clearly after the board that is not what we have done many times we get a lot of written statements so that's up to the board you can direct us to prepare whatever the board wants to do but that is not what we've done in the past but i think given some of these topics it's that particular item as well as from the may 18th meeting i understand that a gentleman i won't mention names because we've agreed not to do so but he also left a written document pertaining to his thoughts and those were also not posted with minutes and i

064would like that to be amended as well so how about we um i want to make sure we get through the consented end tonight um we do have a board policy on public comment could we consider that as a topic in an upcoming board meeting so that everybody has a chance to review that absolutely and my goal is to just remove it from this from the minutes for the consensus at this point and as we agreed put it to a discussion item for agenda for july 13th does that sound the discussion item would be whether or not we would change the policy to include i just want to make sure everybody reads the policy and you know and has an opportunity to read it before we make a decision out of curiosity during the pandemic

065parents were allowed to call in and leave a voicemail as because obviously we weren't coming in were those included in the agenda if someone called and left a voicemail for photocomment the fact that they called in yes we had a short description right of everyone the agenda or the minutes the minutes i'm sorry were there words included in the minutes no um but we still had we retained the video from all of the so you could you could yeah oh i i would love to look at this going forward because i i agree i think they should be included in the minutes it should be heard yeah so let's consider that as a everybody could we can add that um make sure we everybody knows what the policy number is everybody take a review of

066it thank you colin 230. the policy yes policy let me make yourself a note so i don't forget um so we have a motion on the table to approve the consent agenda minus the minutes and it's been seconded uh any more discussion are we ready to vote okay roll call please don't you want to say what's on the consent agenda i can i was going to read it after we voted but oh after we wrote it i'm sorry you guys give me feedback if you want me to reach for i'm happy to read it before before okay does everybody want me to read it before i will do that okay so on the consent agenda this evening we have finance reports um we have gifts which i'll mention in a moment we have the 2021

067exception bills for may the 2021 nslp exception bills for may the 2021 bill is for june the 2021 nslp bill list from june activity accounts from barrington high school in k through 8 for may the 2021 wage and payroll report from may the treasurer's report from may revenues are in expenditures from may i want to just mention the gifts that we received this um that we are accepting are from mr mrs thomas hayward some bookshelves and chairs and and cabinets so thank you for that kind donation as well as from lynn messimer um a harp so thank you so much for your for your contributions um we also have a revised personnel report so hopefully everybody saw the revisions there and um we'll exclude the minutes for now so roll call sandra bradford yes steve

068wang yes aaron chan ding yes leah callister lazari yes katie carram yes barry alt-shuler yes angela wilcox yes okay motion passes so um we have uh passed the personnel report so we want to take a couple of minutes dr harris to yeah congratulate so jordan and i'll start with jordan if that's okay congratulations officially any comments you'd like to just share bridget any comments um at the history of barrington and the nurses it's incredible a lot of really amazing leaders we've had past presidents from the illinois association of school nurses and i am set to assume that role in october of 2022 so it will be great to represent barrington across the state thank you thank you so much [Applause] okay so before we leave the consent agenda though um do we want to vote

069on the minutes separately or does everyone prefer that we just move them to the next consent agenda after we've had the discussion i agree i just want to make sure we're all in agreement sure okay all right so we have an action item um on approval of the 2020 2021 amended budget does anyone want to make that motion second we do we anybody just yeah just a quick comment just reminder to all board members we do need several signatures tonight since this is the official budget we have to submit to the state uh dave any additional comments real quick yes thank you we provided some information for you sir actually looking a little better on this particular budget i also wanted to mention to you there may be some additional upside on top of that

070based on how property tax receipts actually come in this month and so obviously we had preparation that happened in advance of tonight so uh you know the last week or two and over the next week or two we may yet get some additional receipts that will come in uh that may provide a little bit of upside if we have a lot of upside that happens you may hear me as we talk about next year's budget when we get into next year talk about using maybe a similar strategy with as we did deployed for this last year with our decept funds in order to help offset transportation uh shortfalls next year uh because that's a lagging reimbursement although where it sits right now i'm really pleased that we've got a positive budget especially when the board

071understood we might not be in the positive situation based on what's going on with the pandemic so i think it's really great news and thank you for your support on the amended budget thank you thank you for the summary any questions aaron chanding yes sandra bradford yes steve wang angela wilcox yes all right motion passes okay so we have a couple discussion items as well the first one is the ones world device study proposal dr harris i'm assuming absolutely i'm going to invite matt up to the table board members you have received a lengthy document that dr fuller and his staff put together in regard to our current situation uh with our student devices we are way out in front of this this uh topic and um and but therefore it is the appropriate time

072to initiate this this level of conversation um and so we still have and dr flores is going to go through this i'm just kind of give a little preview while he's setting up i mentioned the wonder world program and it's been rolling now for many years but the key to maintaining this and is is to have these conversations in advance so when it comes time to make decisions that the board's prepared and and we understand where we're headed and staff has done it's worked uh to make sure that we you know keep that instructional integrity in place you know in the classroom so dr fuller turn over anything for consideration to improve confidentiality of closed session minutes at the end at the end i'm sorry that's thank you this is brian's last presentation his last

073board meeting ever no pressure at all make it good make it good couldn't be a better person sitting there make it good thanks so i want to start the presentation by saying the that currently the ipad our current our current wonder world primary device is meeting the educational needs of barrington 220 as our primary device for our wonder world program this is not just my opinion this is the opinion of the research that we've done every year since i've been in the district we have a a cyclic way of doing research where we do students one year parents one year and then staff and we keep doing that over and over again there are several reports on the on the website so we know at this time that the ipad is definitely meeting our needs

074and as dr harris alluded earlier in the board meeting it certainly was a great thing to have in place for the pandemic everything was put in place so with this information one might be asking the obvious question so why propose a device study if everything's going well well there are several reasons number one the original device decision was made nearly 10 years ago right after the cohesive plan was first adopted in the district and as you can imagine many devices have come and gone in that 10-year period so it's something that we're always looking at in the tech world what devices are available also as we're all very well aware barrington g20 teachers are very experienced now using devices not just because of the pandemic pandemic but because we've been doing this program for a

075little over seven years now in the district and the primary timing reason we're talking about this today is because our ipad lease does end at the end of next school year so now is the perfect time we have a full semester before i'll come before the board with the recommendation for the following three years now is the right timing to consider if we wanted to look at other device possibilities and the other thing that i wanted to just let the board know is that we also get questions every time we have a device adoption or a device we consider purchasing a device we have questions from community members from teachers from board members have you considered other devices so now now's a great time to attack this type of a question and do this in

076advance i do want to give you a very brief history of the one to world program it did it was uh it did come out of the cohesive planning that started back in the macbook air pilot at the high school started three years later in 2013 where about 20 percent of bhs piloted macbook air laptops the following year we did a full rollout at the high school with an ipad pilot at grade six the following year in 2015 we had a full middle school rollout in elementary ipad pre-launch followed by the following year full elementary ipad roll out and then in 2019 that was the the biggest change we've made to the wonder world program where we decided to switch all the devices to ipad throughout the entire district i also have have talked about

077the district tech committee many times in the board memo and they are in fact the group of teachers that meets monthly and checks in about how technology is going in the district in general so they're one of the ways we know what needs to be improved what's going on what do teachers need it was formed in 2014 there are about 40 members they're mostly teachers but we also have administrators and support staff on the dtc and this again is the group that advises recommends tests communicates back to their schools on basically anything instructional technology related so in on the topic of device studies there are three different considerations i wanted to talk about number one the learning considerations about what devices we're using the actual considerations of the device devices themselves and also the different

078systems we have in the district so these are the three areas i'll be talking about specifically as far as learning considerations when we first made our device selection in the district and went with the the apple products that included a couple of years and this is before i came to the district even a couple of years of research just many many board discussions many many board memos that were written by cindy j and i know sandra was here for some of those we did about i believe it the number the final number was 28 site visits to different districts um a little bit of device testing a lot of teacher training and professional learning on devices and at that time that's when we just that's when we decided that apple devices best realized the original

079program vision and i did include that in the board memo if you wanted to go back and look at that and also the current one-to-world vision and mission and i think you'll notice that the original vision and the current wonder world vision are very very similar and then the vision to the one to world program i included here we don't need to read all of these points but that first one is the one that we probably focus on more than than any of the others because it contains the four c's the create creativity collaboration communication and critical thinking and we believe that the device that we've chosen now best realizes the mission of the one to world state statement as far as considering the devices themselves right now we've always considered learning and teaching needs

080as the primary need but also but we've also never forgotten about fiscal responsibility each time we come before the board with a with any kind of lease proposal we always break out that lease proposal over a long number of years and we make sure that it fits in the budgeting constraints that we have for the program in general something the board has always been has been very very it's been very positively received and the board has been extremely supportive on this program the platforms that we originally considered for the the different devices were the two apple platforms mac os and ios it's now called ipad os they changed that over the years we also considered windows devices we considered chrome devices and we're probably the only school district in the united states that considered linux

081devices we in fact were using some of those at the time we switched over to one to world and finally one of the things we learned about our devices that we've been using is that our apple devices have a very a relatively high residual value at the end of our leasing cycles we do i'll talk about about the specific leasing cycles in a moment but at the end when we're finished using them the devices have almost 30 percent of their original value so we're able to sell those back to an asset company and actually put that back into our program as far as system considerations one of the first discussions i have with with people when they find out i i work with a school district in technology or or parents in the district is

082it's not the same as you're buying devices from your home you don't just buy a device and hand it out there are many many more systems in place that need to be considered for a school district first of all our infrastructure infrastructure would be the wi-fi system things like the firewall the the switches and the closets the the way that the district is networked together wired and wirelessly and these things are fairly non-device specific they're we're going to have these infrastructure systems no matter what technology we choose however there are some device specific systems that are really important here probably the number one being our mdm our mobile device management system we current currently use a system called jamf and that helps us manage both our ipads and our macbook air laptops also apps of

083course they're written for specific devices so just because we own we own about i think the number currently is about 1.2 million different apps if you consider all of the ones that are installed those are all specifically for our ipads right now so those would be something we'd have to consider if we change devices we'd have to replace all those and then of course professional development for teachers and support staff those are all these are all things that i would consider significant district investments that will go into any kind of discussion of changing devices as far as lease cycles we currently enter low interest leases with a one dollar buyout and when i say low interest i mean the current one we're on is i believe point eight percent apr and they've all been under

084two percent since i've been in the district our ipads are on a three-year lease cycle and our laptops are on a four-year lease cycle currently and that's how we we've always done it since i've been in the district with our wonder world program we did readjust the lease cycle in 2019 and got all of our primary devices our ipads on the exact same lease so we bought a little over 10 000 ipads all at once we got the best possible pricing the best possible apr and also we were able to get a lot of services because we had such a large lease all at once and as i alluded to at the beginning in january february of 2022 i'll bring forward i would i plan to bring forward some sort of a proposal for the

085devices for the next school year and usually that decision comes from the board sometime in march and then we're able to order the devices they come in around april or may we distribute them before the end of the school year and then that device is used for the next three school years so that brings us to the schedule in general we have all of first semester next year to do any kind of device study if we wanted to go down that path so at this time i'd like to talk about the the specifics of the device study proposal if we were going to if we were starting a one-to-one program for the first time in this district like some some districts are and we've never done this before we would likely consider one of these

086four devices obviously the apple ipad which we're already using also we could also consider an apple laptop if as we've used in the past i would consider the m1 macbook air it's the one we just we just distributed to staff and the board as our most likely apple laptop another option would be the a google chrome device which would be a laptop touch screen or combination device or some device running microsoft windows such as a surface just something running the windows operating system which again could be a laptop or and or touch screen the three main considerations for a device study would be number one research and all of the options i present today are all going to include a great deal of research and that research would include how the devices are used in

087the classroom but also things like the costs of the devices we'd probably we'd probably come out with some sort of a if we went with this device here's the cost over the next say five to maybe 10 years depending on what the board wanted there we'd also look at those other two areas we talked about earlier the systems what would it take to switch systems and go to with a different set of mobile device management system what would it take if we needed to to change all the apps and then what kind of professional development would be needed if we if we made that kind of a change the other two areas the the interval and the representation these are if we decided to go with a hands-on device testing as a part of the

088research and included purchasing devices to test so one of the variables would be how long do we test those devices for and the other one would be how many grade levels or which grade levels are included in the testing and you'll see with the device study options coming up next we've addressed all of those issues so for the provo the proposed device study options include number one not to make a change just we could decide potentially that we could just continue using ipad as our primary device and move forward that would be one option the three device study options however the first one would be the potential of only doing research and talking to other school districts about the specifics and then working with the vendors to bring to bring in the the different costs

089for all of the systems the devices themselves and all of the the background things that would be needed to make devices work in the district option two would be research but also with adding some limited hands-on device testing which would mean we'd buy a smaller number of devices and test them among school district groupings so rather than having having all of the the level grade levels represented we'd pick one grade level for instance between k and two we'd pick one grade level between three and five a middle school group of students in a high school group of students so that's what i mean by limited there and then option three will be research with a full with all grades represented and i'll go into those a little bit more this time so no change obviously

090the the pros there would be that we wouldn't spend any time or dollars on testing however the cons would be considerable in that we would not have any formal testing or research that had occurred and every all of our answers to those questions we might get would be pretty informal and there would be no potential costs for not making a change with option one the pros list grows a little bit a little bit longer the current data reports are already available there's a great study i've referenced here in the past that 214 did recently i'm sorry 211 did recently where they did a total cost of ownership a study that was very very similar to the ones that were that i'm proposing here and that would be a great place to start as far as

091research only if we were to consider just having a research option here the other pro would be that there would be no time costs for training implementing or troubleshooting hands-on device testing because option one is research only and of course we wouldn't have to spend money to purchase testing devices the cons of course would be that the hands-on part would be second hand and there would also be a a good deal of time for our site visits that would that would that would be a an issue with option one the potential cost would be very low for a research only scenario where monetary costs would we wouldn't have to be buying devices and the only real cost at that time would be staff time so that's those are the issues the pros and cons for

092option one option two adds limited hands-on device tests so of course the pros would be we would have all of the pros from the previous slide on the research part of it but we'd be adding first-hand information on how the devices worked on our own network with our own learning programs albeit for a shorter a short time period students teachers administrators and staff would have firsthand knowledge of all of that some of the cons of course would be a we'd only have a limited number of students and teachers and subject areas participating the device testing will almost certainly disrupt some aspects of learning for the the classes that are doing the testing and it is a relatively short time the the two time intervals are a 33-day test or a 71-day test the 71 day

093test is a full semester and then down to the potential costs if we were to just have grade level groupings represented the the lowest cost we're proposing which would be about 30 students or 30 participants for each of those grade level groupings we'd be able to bring it in at about a hundred and two thousand and then of course if we extended that length of that test it would go it would double and go up to two hundred and four thousand i'll show you some grids at the end that that explains all of these costs a little bit more in detail option three is essentially the same as option two but with more devices and a and all grade levels represented so that price jumps up to 357 000 for the device testing and just

094makes it just makes it so we'd have to purchase more devices and before i go on with the rest of it let's talk a little bit about those costs i am every time i come up here i feel like i'm saying i'm bringing you worst case scenario costs well that's what we've done here so even though we'd have to have an initial outlay of of these costs some of them we might get back since we're only using them for one semester it would be theoretically possible to find another district and sell the chrome the slightly used chromebooks back to them and recoup some of those costs because we have macbook air m1s in that in that testing sequence those are the computers that we use and we'll have another lease coming up next year we'd

095probably be able to keep those m1 macbook airs and just not purchase them when we needed to purchase them next so that would be another cost that we would essentially be able to recoup from this likewise with whatever windows device we decided to test so those numbers are definitely on the high side and we'd probably be able to recoup some of that those costs back i wanted to make that pretty clear with all of that information our recommendation at this time is option one the research only without hands-on device tests after having a law having a very long discussion with our district tech committee and looking at all of the the the different tcos that are already out there the total cost of ownership studies that are already out there i feel pretty confident we'd

096be able to get the information we need by doing a research only recommendation and of course the cost is can is the lowest possible cost in this situation but i did not want to make that decision obviously on my own i wanted to talk to the board about that before we move forward i just have a few more pieces of information these are in the board report this is the grid showing the the projected device costs and how i arrived at those numbers whether we're purchasing two class sets of devices or four or seven for option three this one i can explain it if anyone has questions about it but this is to show how we would do the interval testing and when that would occur and then i also included the two these are

097these are both calendars of first semester of next year and it would show what days the testing periods would fall in and how i got 33 testing periods for a two interval test or 71 for a one interval test so i know that was a lot of information but i am here to answer any questions at this time dr fuller as it relates to staff costs to clarify those are staff costs that are already embedded or those incremental staff costs meaning overtime and other expenses that we have to pay out whatever what whatever one-to-one program that the district has we will we'll have staff well do you mean you mean in the in the um you mean in the study or do you mean ongoing in the study is it saying that potential costs would

098be staff time no training et cetera oh is that is that is that costs that we're already incurring because they work for us or is it overtime hours for example no it would be things it would be they would be very very low it would be things like um if like travel for instance um maybe some subs sub costs if we had some sorry time of yeah the cost of training and implementing some sub costs yeah it would be it would be extremely low in the context of all the other costs that are so not so probably not worthwhile to quantify probably not fair enough but i could do that if that's where we wanted to go i can quantify some of that if you'd like it would not be significant we would be able

099to absorb it in our current budget okay absolutely and then the second question i have is with options two and three you know if i'm if i'm understanding you correctly these are costs based on our understanding what these items you know retail for and we would be buying them does it make sense for us to potentially contact the vendors and ask them if they'd be willing to partner with us in a in a pilot of this nature and therefore provide things because i would think that that's at least isn't her task i guess is what i would think that's exactly what we would do i'm waiting for the for whatever the board you're interested in i will the first ques the first calls i would make would be we'd start to design the study and

100then i would contact vendors and find out if they would be interested in in making deals with us or helping us or another way to do this would that i've talked about is partnering with another school district as well so right now we use jamf azar as our mobile device management system we could potentially contact another school district and ask them to manage our devices and make some sort of a partnership with them so when we were done with the devices they could either purchase them for us maybe at a reduced rate in exchange for them helping us with this program so there's lots of options here that we could use to show those costs so it's on the table then then what i'll do is i have a contact that i can connect you

101with um on the google side yeah i get to get your email thank you okay i wasn't sure if you did all right then yeah i will we can facilitate that conversation that would be great thank you of course you also did mention that if we did go along with option two or three there would be some disruption to the students having to do this they'd be working concurrently on two different devices is this right there we have a couple of options there we could if we wanted to just give them the device that they're testing i i would rather not do that because that kind of takes the net away if you know for the trapeze act i would rather i'd rather have them have their their ipads that they're already used to to

102using in the in the event that they started you testing something on a new a brand new device and they couldn't do it i would want them to have a fallback and be able to switch to ipad whenever they need it to anytime you do action research like this there's risk and it it could impact you know i know craig when we were talking about this you mentioned that at station when you were there was definitely some interruption okay so that yeah we'll try to minimize that but you never know because you may run in the teacher sign something the kids can't get access device isn't doable so those are the type of things that occur so it can be disruptive it's not saying it will but it can be i gotta be honest with

103you bankroll if this new device gets damaged that insurance built in i think okay when we've done tests like this before frankly we have not had that issue at all this is a larger scale we might i don't see that being a big deal in barrington it's just not something that we deal with a lot dr thanks so much for this breakdown it's really comprehensive we know that apple products are you know the most costly but also have the highest resale value right at about 30 percent are you also before we go on with that a lot of people like to make that assumption and it and it simply isn't true it's not it's it's not true if you look at the the different costs the and what we're paying sometimes people get turned turned

104off by sort of the what is called the initial cost the ipads that we're using now cost 294 dollars each which is which is usually very shocking to people when they hear that because if you're going to best buy or whatever and you're looking at all the options that are out there they make an ipad that costs twelve hundred dollars that's not the one we have we are we're buying the we are buying the what's considered the entry level um of of of what we would consider the ipad the the is the one that we're using however when you're looking at the other devices if you're going to try to match those the the specifications you're not generally going to be buying entry level chromebooks or entry level windows to be able to just do

105basics so the costs are not as high as as the sort of i don't know there's a reputation that's out there and they're not as high as i think people assume them to be the chances that we would get about ninety dollars back per three hundred dollar ipad is pretty high for apple absolutely right but what in that the same can't be said for a chromebook or a surface would you like we wouldn't be able to residual value on chromebooks and windows devices are either zero or they're negative meaning you have to negative yeah meaning you have to pay people to come and take them away when they're done and then and the thought was that if we were to go with option two and three we were not to go with a chromebook or

106surface we would try to somehow either get rid of them or keep them just in case we could use them for other purposes well for for the for the purpose of a test we'd only be keeping them for sick for for six months so they would have maybe so they would have some residual value but if we decided to switch to that device as our primary device i would come up with a five to ten year plan to show how that how that residual value affects the bottom line over time and that's a really really good point because i right now we know that our 300 ipads really only cost us 200 in the long run but the same will not be will not be able to be said for chromebooks or windows laptops i

107am aware of other districts to matt's point when they've gotten rid of chromebooks they have to pay a significant amount to just have somebody take them and recycle them so you don't get any money you're paying them to take them so i know that's the case i've heard that repeatedly my understanding too is that apple tends to be a little bit better for the creative and design applications would we without having that hands only would we be able to research deeply enough for a chromebook or surface and those kinds of similar design apps that is a great question and that that to me is my primary that's my biggest fear is that how are we going to be able to be certain because if we're going to another district and we look at how they're

108how they're using a device we'd have to find a district who valued creativity as much as we do here in barrington and we're very aware that we value that because we've talked about that with our staff and students the last for the last seven years of research so we would need to make sure that whatever research that we designed would definitely cover those topics and we'd be able to find out is there a threshold to how much you can do with say a chromebook as opposed to what we're used to doing with an ipad you think we could find that out with option one without having it in our hands testing it as long as we we do a good design i think we we can we'll be able to tell if there are specific

109limitations and we'll be able to tell just from the uses of other school districts we'll be able to at least ask the questions and hopefully be able to get good good answers to those questions it's a great question i look at this as like a basically 10-year decision right because you know we made a we made a decision 10 years ago to go with the apple product and i'd like to think that these other devices may have evolved like you've mentioned right so i'm in favor of looking at some kind of hands-on um pilot because because of the reasons that you stated um because as we did before was we just did the research and we didn't we didn't do any hands-on and um i just i i see these as worst case costs right

110um if we're able to partner with other districts if we're able to you know we're going to use these devices for a shortened period of time if there's any way we can you know get some of their value back then i would be in favor of considering at least some sort of hands-on pilot just because i want to make sure that we we're making a sound decision based on us touching and using the devices yeah sandra i totally agree um i think we but i do think we need more data points as it relates to actual cost so after dr fuller has a chance to speak with the vendors at apple google microsoft etc you know i think it would be worthwhile for us to maybe regroup and as a committee or as a board

111side you know you know risk but i'll say cost versus return one of the barriers or considerations that we looked at is what you know like infant and campus and the the applications we use like apple worked with them and some of the other ones didn't if i remember they didn't match i'm not it's not technical language but um have those things caught up in the time period the things that we use all the time to communicate between teachers and students between parents and teachers um between administration that you know i'm asking sure the primary the primary devices that we'd consider schoology ic yeah the things that we already use i'm fairly confident they would work on all of the devices that we would be considering because most of them are web-based and all of

112the platforms we would consider would have a a robust web browser to be able to handle that amongst our your peers and other districts who did the study are they way ahead of us or like a year ahead of us like in the other district like can you glean from them that you know wow they're like pretty much going to stick with what they had or they're really struggling to decide or is there any is it too soon to ask that is that fair question that that's exactly the question we would be asking and the reason the reason that i feel strongly that we need to do some sort of of a device test or at least even the research is because we need to do this in the context of barrington 220. we can

113ask any we can ask school districts questions but until we we compare them with with what our needs are i i think i think that's the whole point of doing a device study in the first place and the the one for instance the 211 did they they started with hands-on device it was a it was it was a smaller scale than i expected when i found out the actual numbers that they were testing but they did start out with surface devices and chromebooks and they they tested with students and with staff and they did that for about a year they worked on the whole their whole strategy and and structure for about a year the hands-on tests were for just a period of months and they ended up taking windows devices out completely and again

114this was based upon what their needs were to start with and they only did the hands-on the long-term testing and the comparisons between it turned out it went down to ipad and chromebook and their decision was to go with with ipad at that time so that would that's one that's one extensive study that was done in the area that's just this year last year that was before that was the year before the pandemic is when they published that study i wonder if there's a way to like do the preliminary research and then say you know what it's totally obvious we should go with x or to say wow we're doing the preliminary research and it looks like a and b are really good choices maybe we should do hands-on with those like how do you

115feel about that idea i kind of wrote this this proposal with that with all of that in mind and i think the numbers and what we're proposing here is about as small scale as i would feel comfortable going and still give all the devices that are i think are that i would consider viable a fair shot what's being a unit district you want to make sure you've got you know you got your youngest learners as well as our high school seniors and everybody in between make sure you've got a good sample if you're going to do that because we've got so many unique things going on in this district across the buildings um you know the thing that i'll give a concrete example for a little context you know when matt said when you look

116at other districts there's an assumption that every other district is doing the things instructionally that we're doing i'm going to tell you that's not the case okay i'm just that's the reality okay we've got teachers that we have coached up and trained up in professional development that are doing authentic assessment scenarios where kids are creating they're creating videos they're creating you know um assessments it's a test but it's a authentic assessment it's a performance-based assessment that other districts can't even touch because they don't have the device that can even do that what we're asking our kids to do does that make sense so therefore there's a you you can't assume that when you look at you know the certain devices can't even we'd be taking a step back in some circumstance we think right that's

117what we have to you have to figure out we don't want to go backwards we either want to stay where we're at or improve what we're doing right and so that's a very important thing especially it's different now when we're when we were launching it it was different now we're 10 years into this right and all the professional development and the lessons learned and all those things along the journey and i think it is something you gotta look extremely careful on and you know before you make that you know commitment because there is a lot to it when matt you're using a broad level term research it it's involving getting direct feedback from teachers we know that have you know really taken that device to its really intended purpose and so therefore that's the type

118of thing we need to vet out that makes sense well i just think in hindsight with this year and the decisions we've made that i super appreciate you being tight budget worst scenario let's not spend any money but i think this is a pretty important decision for the future and that if it's a little bit more money to vet it out better then i i think we should do it you know and make the right choice i'd like to ask can so with the hands-on option is the students that you choose to be part of your group are they going to test all four is one student going to test all four options or are you going to have four different students each with one of the options the question is how you can compare

119since every student is different if you have four different students trying four different devices how do you just decide which device is going to be best for do that no i everybody that i'm wondering it would be just data collection like you do with anything else i mean we we already do this type of data collection with our wonder world studies where it's it's we would come up with some sort of a scale we'd come up with some sort of a rubric we would have students do ideally we would have a teacher design something that they've already done on the ipad and then try it with the new with the new device and see what the differences are essentially so the teacher would have that perspective this this far along all of our students in

120the district at every grade level have a great deal of they know how they know how it is on an ipad already so it's not like we're doing comparisons to nothing we're doing comparisons to ipad so i feel really confident in the data that we get back from our students and teachers because they're already they already have the the experience of years of using ipad in most cases so and then are we committed to one device for all years or perhaps i i i know before we had two different devices and then your presentation was we should get everybody on the same thing but now are we prepared to go i wouldn't say backwards because we're moving forward but to say maybe elementary school we'll do chromebooks and we'll do ipads for middle school and

121high school just for example it would be very possible for that to be that is an option so we don't have to have one for everyone i mean you're not aiming for that necessarily that's not a goal of this we i think it's open it might it's open or right it's definitely a possibility by the same token we would compare that with what what we have now by having all the same device we can greatly streamline i would just put that in the costs and the professional development and we'd have to have those discussions when we first launched the program the high school kids had a macbook air right right and the and the k8 had the ipad but what we found was the i the the laptop was limiting kids at the high school

122like a damn camera they didn't have you know different ways to to do some of the work that was going on k-8 so then you had kids coming out of middle school that then now they were taking a step back instructionally right with the tool that they got you know what i mean yes so that didn't it was a disconnect it didn't make sense and that's when we came to the board at that time and said hey it's time to you know take that next step at the high school so that's that's a little revision but one of your other arguments was they wanted uniformity that it was so much easier for training and for contracts and you know so i just i think that's a second in my opinion that's a secondary thing i

123think we got to get the right instructional tool i suppose never a goal it just turned out i would call that another just something we learned along the way just like the residual value it was never a goal to pick the device that would pay us back at the end but that's what we've experienced it's a nice thing to have it though absolutely okay you have to consider that the cost right yeah right right in the budget i think my only hesitation with the device study is the timing of it too these some of these kids are just coming back to school for the first time and over a year and a half they've been on one device they're i think we just really would need to consider who were i mean we're also with

124a lot of these kids just trying to figure out where they are what they're missing what we're and then we're going to throw one more thing at them especially at the younger level that's my only i and i'm not saying i just because you want to do it in the first semester correct so i guess that's my only hesitation from that standpoint i feel like kids how many students would we be impacting um right yeah it would be it would it would be 90 at a well yeah it would be 180 at a time basically 360 students total for half the semester depending on which of the options we went with i said maybe the second half of the semester yeah true all right um what do you think has changed then between because i

125know that we talked about obviously looking at the comparison between the macbook and the ipad at the high school um and the majority of the board decided to go forward with moving to the ipad at the high school what different information do you think that you would get at this stage just doing the research two years later i mean do you think that it would be significant that's that's why we're proposing it there it probably would not be too significant from two years ago on just the the issue of the two devices that we already had experience with but if we're for the reason we're proposing a formal device study now is to be able to not just look at apple devices but to bring in the other two vendors as well the google and

126the and windows vendors and we just haven't done that in 10 years so that's that's the difference it's 10 years later and it's a different time with the chromebook and again i know we didn't do a full study but i feel like we talked at least you know amongst us when we were looking at potentially because i think there were a lot of board members who had some hesitation as far as continuing with the ipad from middle school into high school and so we talked about other things that look like this and um we talked about the chrome book and my memory while hazy is that that wasn't really even an option at the high school level for a number of the reasons that you've mentioned tonight as far as creativity and things like that

127i mean is it do you think that it would be advantageous to look at all of these devices in each grade level or maybe with for example the high school since we just you know had this topic two years ago maybe it's it's more of a i don't know an interview even of some kids who are seniors now who had both the option to have the macbook at one stage in their high school education versus the ipad and you know to perhaps be a little less disruptive at the high school but then to go forward and and you know do this kind of broad swath across k through 8. is that something that would be considered or everything you're saying is a possibility anything's a possibility if you wanted to do a comparison of what's

128available now with the devices that are available now and not comparing them to things that are four years old i think you need to do it all now with what we have now with what devices are available at this time last question would just be i'm sure that the staff and and the kids as well have really um well i mean to start with the staff in the district i'm sure that we have you know purchased a ton of different apps as you've mentioned you know this like you know million or so apps or whatever that we have um and there's been a lot of adjustment and a lot of professional development amongst our staff to become well-versed in that especially when providing instruction primarily over the devices so you know while i understand obviously

129we can't change the the end of our lease um you know is there any trepidation that you could see amongst our staff members as far as looking at oh my gosh i just spent the last 12 you know 12 months learning all of these new programs and apps and things like that to develop instruction in this new way and you know we're trying to take what we learned from covid and move it into the future but now we have the potential to have to just change the whole thing and come up with you know in case some of these apps don't integrate well with the new technology d is there like i mean i know it's hard to give a well that's a four issue and the other issue is a six but you know

130what i mean as far as like what the the staff that i'm sure you've discussed this with i mean are they feeling some trepidation as far as having to kind of go back to square one after really running up a hill pretty quickly over the past 12 months or past seven years for that matter because many of our staff members have been learning all this for the past seven years absolutely in fact that was the that was the most significant conversation we had in our in our district tech committee discussion they just to say that our district tech committee because remember that the tech committee some of our tech committee members have been on the tech committee the entire time since 2014 and they've been with us through this through everything and to say that

131they were not enthusiastic about this initially um would be an understatement for all of the reasons you just said but by the same token they also realize that things are different than they were 10 years ago and they they understand the they understand the possibility that there may be something else out there and that's why we're proposing a device a device study to begin with just because we realized that moving forward maybe there is something better that we haven't considered and this is the way to answer that question and we made we may discover that we made the right decision all along and we want to stick with it or we may decide that something better really is out there and we should want to take the steps to put together a plan to move

132forward with something else yeah well i mean when i first read everything i was just completely on board with option a or one or whatever it is um i still think my gut is that at the high school since we've discussed this before and you know especially it was with just related to the ipads and the macbooks i would be in favor of just kind of still looking at those two devices um at the high school it's just my own personal issue for middle school and elementary because i felt like and again i know it was two years ago but i felt like you were pretty convincing as far as saying you know i don't think that at least chromebook i think we talked about i don't remember if we discussed both of the other

133options but it just didn't seem like it was a what you would recommend for our high school students and i hate to revisit you know past research that isn't exactly incredibly dated i mean i know two years is two years but still um certainly that would be my my gut response anyway thank you for doing all this yes do you think then that it would be advantageous to do some hands-on for some grade levels and not others maybe i mean it like i just i feel like if we and i'm not trying to make assumptions based on on you know your behalf but i feel like we've discussed you know some of these options at least for high school relatively recently and so i don't know if i see incredible value in doing a full

134study in the high school maybe it's different at elementary or middle school um and i could be wrong obviously as we know technology is not my forte um but i you know i'm just trying to think of the best way to kind of make the best decisions but yet streamline it as much as we can i do think you're spot on we have spent more time recently with the high school conversation we have not spent time recently here with the board k-8 you're right you are correct so we've done you know you have we had the high school staff here they all went through all that right and we did but that was just the macbook air compared to the ipad it did not consider these other devices so i i'll just give you my

135opinion because i'm going to the chromebook the chromebook at that level is a big step down i mean i'm just that's my opinion i know it is now the surface i don't know you know i i the macbook i don't know right but i know the chromebook at the high school level it's it's an internet device it does not do much of anything else it just doesn't okay the option right that yeah erin was mentioning it would have a significant negative impact in instruction and you heard that two years ago and i think it's gonna i'm just giving my opinion because i can last opportunity and you know that's at the high school okay um you brought it up i'll share with you you know i i just believe that now i don't know about

136the other levels i don't know you know that's what matt was saying we're not sure don't assume anything we haven't done that much of that level at the other levels for a period of time it's been longer at the other levels can we get some more details i think katie brings up some good points on like what does it actually look like from the student level like a practical level like if we did do a surface a surface in ipad study for example and we did you know maybe from a research only you came to the same conclusion that dr harris said that oh chromebook even for k-8 it's not going to make sense but i would be interested in you know what is the day-to-day look like for a student like a fourth grader

137who's testing it like how many hours do you know what i mean in terms of like how i think that you brought up a good point is like how does that work well they're also having their normal device and like how many hours would each kid have it and would it be certain subjects is it the whole day is it is it possible to get a few more details in terms of i know you'd have to design up the study a little bit more what you're proposing is the device study and that's well throughout the day and what we would be doing is we'd be replacing the ipad with another device and we wouldn't so they just have it kind of turned off in case they needed it their usual device i've had to be

138the backup okay i see and then they would use their thank you teacher would use the device in the study as the instructional tool and would we be looking at maybe all you know if we did k8 would it be you know one through four in one school would we spread it out in different schools the way we've designed the proposal is that we would look at grades kindergarten through two and pick a representative class there for each of the different devices do the same thing for grades three through five same thing for middle school same thing for high school so there'd be a grouping of students that are with with those devices and they would be testing the additional device in addition to having their ipad with them at each school or would it

139be based in a couple of select schools we would need to find teachers who are interested in this we would never ever want to do a device study with the teacher who was unwilling okay so our district tech committee would be the first place we would start because those are teachers that we've worked with over time and then we would we would go from there basically and look for either teams or or or teachers who are willing to to help us with this study when we've done these things in the past we've not had a lot of difficulty finding teachers to do these things so i'm confident we can find some excellent teachers to do a very structured and they'll be on board i'm sure we can find teachers to be on board with this

140this would be the primary device throughout the day and for homework and all that i don't know during the testing period okay i wasn't understanding that initially i thought they were switching or something yeah okay during the during the testing period that's what they would be doing is they'd be doing everything that they normally would have done with ipad but doing it with a different device still having the ipad just in case so one first grade class would be assigned like surfaces and another chromebooks if we were to test it but yeah your recommendation was not to do hands-on just to do the research the the option one so i think why i think we could get the the information that we need for the long term with a research only if we want to

141go the extra step and involve teachers and students that's why i came up with with three additional options if we wanted to go that route you feel good about just option one and being able to come with a good solid recommendation you know for all grades and we would replace the hands-on with with site visits and working at other schools with other school districts to help answer those questions and not students no student involvement we could involve students if we wanted to there there would be no reason why we couldn't bring students along if we if we felt strongly about that our staff has done this this year hands-on really deeply in a lot of professional development so i you know i trust them to be able to figure this out with you with them

142i would think it's been a crazy year of learning devices and learning ways to do things and getting out of the box and you know to say hey could i do it with the other device could i do better would it be harder you know these are the things that they worked on last summer too beyond the call of duty so but we don't over overburden them back to you know that but you have enough time if you came back from the research phase and said okay we've narrowed it down to two and we we really love these two do we have time after that to do a shorter to do it i think i think it's going to be pretty obvious based upon following this i think it's going to be pretty obvious okay

143from the amount of time they're proposing our kids and our staff are pretty skilled and they've got a huge amount of skills i mean on the devices and our kids are usually bluntly honest right i mean they will just say it like it is we found that with the high school kids especially you know and and even the little even the younger kids they'll tell you this doesn't work this doesn't i mean they'll just say it like it is and and tell you what will work you know uh with what they were trying to do you know that matt you've i've heard them we do surveys and focus groups we talk to our kids face to face all the time and i go into classrooms as much as i can and have these discussions constantly

144all right so i guess that it feels like the two options on the table are too to do to follow the recommendation or to do some hands-on whether when not we do it with all devices or not the hands-on i guess is i guess is another variant but your recommendations if we're gonna do it we do it and we do it as you if you as you've described here go either way though i i love doing these things by the way so you guys tell me what you want and i am happy to do any of the options here part of the recommendation though i will tell you it came from the committee matt right your committee said this is what i mean matt's bringing form the recommendation from the committee okay but if the

145board really wants more hands-on information i know matt will do an outstanding job i'll cut right to it that's it the committee said we should be able to figure this out through the research steps with option one matt's bringing forth the recommendation from the staff committee correct yeah so let me throw this out there so i'm assuming we need to tell you at this summer um if we're going to proceed with a study hands-on study so you would like to know that i'm assuming by our next meeting that would be ideal yes uh on on july 13th so we're about to pile piling up for july 13th um so do you meet with the tech committee before then i don't but if i needed to pull members together i can always do that we've done

146that in the past in the summer for a specific purpose i can bring it wouldn't be the whole committee it would be some it would be only some members so let me ask this question this way would the board be interested in having dr fuller take the conversation we had here back to that tech committee hearing the the concerns and and the and the comments from the board about doing a hands-on study and have them come back and see if they change their recommendation or um can minimize or change the um what's what's been presented to us for hands-on study and then bring that back to us on july 13th and we make a decision whether we go hands-on on july them after all to do any kind of hands-on study so i i think

147i think the i think the result will be the same and it will be a very small group too that that's something that and can almost guarantee you to scatter you're gonna have to pick a time it would be a zoom meeting that we would do and just have a single discussion but i could do it it's just that i have a feeling i know what they would say in our discussion do board members still have concerns that if we did not do a hands-on only study we that we wouldn't be informed enough to make a choice yeah i'm going to go back to my comment that i feel like we haven't done this before and this is a 10-year decision and i want to make the most informed decision and um the minority and

148that's fine well i mean i can agree with you sandra i mean maybe maybe the point here though is and dr totally understand why you did what you did in regards to giving us you know worst case scenarios i mean there's four weeks adequate time to work with some vendors and get an idea of you know whether they would be able to would be willing actually to you know entertain helping us in these pilot studies and therefore maybe providing that or providing resources or even providing discounted resources so that we can have an adequate view because i think that might help with the decision making progress of the board too i mean i'll be at you know to katie's point maybe somewhat disruptive but i would hope that you know again with how resourceful our

149teachers are and how you know just as dr perez said how bright our students are you know would hopefully be minimal and i don't know i'm kind of thinking on cough right now off the cuff right now you know for some of these classes at least in the lower grades that i'm aware of there's mixtures of you know teachers and students in other words you might not have you might have 60 students in the class because the teacher's going to switch back and forth and maybe you can pick students to participate in this rather than forcing the entire class to maybe that would you know allow certain students who might not be able to test be you know free of that responsibility to at the middle and high school level i would i already know

150what groups i'd go to we have groups of students who are into technology already established and i would go to those groups first as ones who would be interested in at the middle and high school level elementary i would not be able to do that we'd need to use a full class with a teacher who's willing just wouldn't be it wouldn't be practical to try to intersperse a bunch of devices among an elementary school with a teacher not involved in it got it okay just to clarify are you are you hoping that if a vendor would partner with us to pilot we could take the cost down potentially yeah i don't know yeah i was going to ask there's i can almost guarantee there this will not be free it just won't that's fair so

151the question would be how much further down do you want because right now we can do this for a hundred and two thousand how much further down is the goal for me to get this because no matter what i'll get it as cheap as possible yeah and this doesn't have any like if we were able to redeem some costs back that's not going to hit there at all i didn't hear at all so i don't think we could at least probably get i'm in my head i'm thinking at least get 30 percent back but it might even be more on every device but we're not sure right so this is this is the way to present it you don't we just don't know what that market bears right i don't want it so i don't

152want to promise something i'm not asking only for the apple product but that's after years of use we're talking about a couple months here so i think it would be different for the other devices so so let me ask the board this are we interested in doing a hands-on or are we happy with the recommendation to um uh to do the research without a hands-on do we have four people that are that are fine with just doing the research and not just totally fine with either option i'm for just doing the research yeah i think it's less i agree with katie it's less research two for research only maybe three why would you i guess i can i'm trying i prefer to get more data on the hands-on options before i say either way but

153i'm in you know we should get more data on doing the hands-on yeah i don't want to say at this point it's research only but that's just me anybody else so i think i heard two for research only do we have we have at least a couple of devices that the staff would be testing or the district tech committee could test or or we're saying just not even a single one that you all could play around with we could absolutely do that if we wanted to get some representative devices i and just do and just have them to discuss like we could do that it's not part of the this proposal but we could absolutely do that for a very very low cost obviously like to have like preview devices or test devices just sitting

154sitting around to to do our own staff testing would that be helpful to the district tech committee or it sounds like you don't you wouldn't even need that according to your recommendation i mean it wouldn't hurt to have to have if we're only doing research it wouldn't hurt to have them we could probably gain more we could do more testing based upon what we learned from research that would still be option one right option one it would just modified option yeah yeah so i guess go ahead i'm comfortable with research only if unless it comes back and you say wow we're really not sure and then i think we we test them out you know and i think that we don't have to be on the tightest budget ever but i trust you guys that

155if you can look at it and like dr harris said chromebooks probably not an option for high school with more research or to know that with the expertise that we have i'm i'm comfortable but if if it's like wow we're really not you know we're a little torn then come back and say hey can we do some research with this device i think there's enough time at this point to do that i counted three for research so i think that the district tech committee sounds very confident that a research only option is enough information um even to distinguish between between different design applications right in creativity applications i do think i would still encourage the district tech committee to buy at least a couple of those preview devices just to kind of get your hands

156on it to make extra sure that way if what leah brought up if you're like oh wait this surface we really should try it with the students you can let us know uh so i think i you know i would say i'm fine with the research only option with the encouragement that you know we we acquire a few of the preview devices just to be sure it's very very reasonable yes i think that's four for research only with a asterisk that you can you have some leeway to get a few devices to test out is that is that what i'm hearing one two three four right okay that idea that's all right and i think angela said you'd be okay right i mean just either way yeah yeah absolutely yeah i think well thank you

157i think we've got that so move forward that's exciting just so the board knows i know dr fuller and the team if they get into it early on and you if you think there's a reason you can come back and say hey i think we need to maybe do a little bit please do that but and you've done that before but yeah yeah excellent great discussion [Laughter] [Music] item we have is our agenda for july 13th let's see welcoming dr bob welcoming dr hunt we have um it's not up on the screen but if you guys go to that on your on your laptops there um we have the um some list of authorized depositories on the consent agenda um public hearing on the esser funds our board priority discussion we could add to that

158board protocol sorry well this is covent protocols for a discussion item but we can also add an action for board protocols or communication whatever we end up calling it um superintendent and for communication what it's called you could put board in superintendent communication but have that as an action item um and also we're gonna look at the policy for public comment we could also give that to i'm just we got a lot going on here we could also give that to the policy committee too to look at first but we're not scheduled to meet until august right so and i think that it probably should be i mean i love to do things in committees but i do think that if we're going to kind of change um it almost seems like a like not

159just a policy but a practice like maybe it's more of a board decision i don't know i agree but got it so would we be discussing a policy change or voting on it well i think probably they would give us direction to go back and then look at reviewing it i would guess it could be you would discuss it first that's policy 2 colon 230 and then if you were going to make editor changes whatever how much discussion that takes then you'd have to take action and then if you wanted to add something you brought up earlier i think we owe it to our families to i mean i would like it to be behind it beyond a discussion item or mass policy i know we're waiting for um direction from sb and idph but

160at a certain point we have to make a decision as a board and not drag these parents along anymore and i think that time is here so we have that on here as a discussion item but i think i hear you saying is you want to change it to an action item i would like to i mean our meeting after that isn't until august and i i think that that's i think it's difficult to decide that when we don't know what is b is going to come out with in there at the end of all the district school years because i mean our academic years would they potentially change their guidance if we're calling an action item that means we're going to there's a motion that's going to be in the in the computer but

161we don't know what the motions would look like i mean i i guess and again i i don't want to get ahead of ourselves but i don't think it's just mask or no mask i mean i think there's there's there's nuance here on you know if we're not going to mask how we're going to manage things and so i'm just concerned i i agree i don't want to push kick it down the road but i'm concerned that if we're going to announce to the public that we're going to have an action item we need a specific action item and i don't know if we're ready to having a specific accident i guess that's my concern so we agreed a couple meetings ago i think it was that we were going to at least have a

162discussion on july 13th and then if if it wasn't clear that we would add another board meeting if we needed to so that we could have that have the decision made before august so i'm happy to go either way but if we if we put we can't have an action without putting an action item on the agenda so we have to have an action we can decide not to approve that or not to have an emotion but you can't do it if you don't have the action on the agenda can we can i'm sorry i'm trying to figure out how to say this are we able to have it as an action but not take action right it builds an expectation in the public that we are though and then everyone's going to be mad

163at us one way or the other if we say we're going to decide and then we say oh we didn't get any guidance we're not going to decide it puts us in a very uncomfortable situation as a board and it disappoints the community who says oh i'm going to know that day you know so i don't want to set us up so if we have it as a discussion item we could always we in and there is a clear action item that could emerge from that we could always schedule another board meeting to take action thank you that's what i'm stemming from the discussion item right how long does it take to schedule assume at a minimum 48 hours yes okay i just don't see what like two days is going to do i mean

164i would just put it on there as an action item because you know i personally think that you know parents are asking us like what do you what is the plan for next year and they're making their decisions on you know where they're going to send their kids to school based on our decision and you know that's already pushing it pretty far out i mean i don't know what entrance exams look like for private schools and things like that but middle of july they say hey decision has been made we do not need to do anything further we already know there is whatever there is no mask mandate there's whatever you know we have clear and concise instruction and that's it or we say wow we really nothing has changed they still have not come

165out with anything it's really on us to decide and and tell our families okay this is the direction that we're going to go um and i think mid-july is is kind of as far as you can push it so i would be all for just putting it on the agenda as an action item then and i think we can shore up exactly what the action item is like what the vote is um as it gets closer on the information that we have at the time right so i think that sorry i think parents are asking us to make a decision with whether or not we have the guidance by that point i agree board can make a decision on this without action if you or you can do action you can do it it's not

166required to do action i just want you to know that i mean you can provide direction of the superintendent in a discussion item and say do this if you want to make it formal in action you can you don't have to to direct the superintendent to move forward in an operational fashion does that make sense so i just want you to understand it's not required i think some districts might take action some districts probably won't you know i mean they may distract the superintendent to do a b and c type thing does that make sense so just because it's a discussion item doesn't mean we can't give clear guidance based on you could tell dr hunt at that time here's what we want you to do and then they can plan if you want to

167bring it back then as a formal action you could do it then at any point i mean i'm just telling you you've got options what i'm saying right however you want to so we can say let's just go through us we could say dr hunt we're directing you to do something different from the guidance we'll bring it forward for action on august 13th this is the direction we're giving you and we can take action and you can plan with your staff accordingly absolutely that's what i'd be looking for if i was here right whether it was formal action or not right gives us the ability to provide the answer mid-july and whichever way it goes parents can at least make the decisions after their july meeting it's online they're on wednesdays obviously i don't know

168the next one i have to be honest so yeah there's one tomorrow but it sounds like it there won't be a decision but then like the next one yeah are we going to be before or after it because that might be helpful in our decision to know if they don't need to take state board doesn't need to take action on that either many times the state superintendent just sends out the directives so that could be any time basically not they could not matching their calendar it could so it could just catch us when it catches us that's correct okay they don't necessarily function like we do at the local level i i don't know if this is fair first of all dr hunt's not here but if we're getting close to our next meeting and

169nothing has happened from isbee i would just like to have dr hunt get an opinion from the lawyers again just where we're at from their perspective just so we know what getting into with this kind of discussion i would absolutely agree and if i was here i'd be doing exactly the same thing i'd refresh it right and there he wrote it i think we need to do that and and i would refresh ask them to refresh where we're at are you talking just on the standpoint of going against bisbee or both sides like i think i think we need to look at both sides yes no no both sides absolutely i want to get the lawyers involved too though to help us to make the best decision we can poor lawyers lawyers you know but

170well i'm sure he's listening but i will make sure i take it back to him okay we would like to make sure that he comes with that advice sandra you could also work with dr hunt you know with the agenda depending on where things are at who knows right and then i think you've heard the interest here at least that's my take on it and you can work on get the agenda then the right way depending on what the circumstances are does that make sense and it is a discussion item that's why i think we're hearing it yes or the other maybe both i think as long as we can give direction to the superintendent and give a an answer to our community through a discussion that's all anyone's looking for i mean no one

171wants more formalities they just want to know it affects so many other things moving forward then too i'm sure what how the schools are going to run and everything so we've got to make some decisions yep all right and i think something to consider too based on that is if we you know either way i mean there could be there could be repercussions if we decide okay we're going to make things mask optional we could have families that say oh then i'm not going to send my kid i want to do this remote option you know so we could have that too and that would need preparation as well so so i think it is it is wise to say that it will be something on july 13th we could give guidance for okay anything

172else you want to add to july 13th i have one i have one little thing so we discussed that the best gift to you is to give you a short meeting and we kind of did not do a very good job it's all good i feel bad get the work of the board done it's all good i was trying to not say anything because and i'm not going to say much at all i am just going to say you are a lean on the shovel what was that [Music] you're a good man i've enjoyed working with you um i told you the best superintendent i've ever worked with yes still true and um i'm sorry that this last year was just awful it's easy to lead in good times just you know you got to

173be a good leader you got to lead during tough times too so that's what it is you mentioned carol i'm going to give her a shout out and i'm going to remind you that she married you for dinner but not for lunch [Laughter] she's probably it's probably going to play out at my house thank you excellent advice all right so um are we ready to um approve the confidentiality prove the concept confidentiality of closed session minutes leave a motion to do so so moved in roll call steve wang leah callister lazari yes angela wilcox sandra bradford yes aaron chan chanding yes barry altschuler yes katie carram yes all right motion passes do we have a motion to adjourn yes second third [Laughter] really i think oh we don't have to do real comments right all

174in favor all right