Batavia Public School District 101 Board of Education Meeting for August 23, 2022.

001i'm sorry don't we normally do roll call on them first yeah first call the roll yeah okay cindy could you please call the roll i was super confused and then i thought maybe i'm doing it backwards kathy gravel here aaron kilburg here here chris lowe present rj mathis here craig meadows present aaron meisler here all right and sue would you please lead us in the pledge yes i pledge allegiance to the flag 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 all right dr houston's are there any items removed from or added to the agenda for tonight there are not all right then the first item we have on our agenda is public comments and we did have someone

002here with public comments and i know ms deisman had already spoken to that person but i will let her go through for the record we do have a new one okay um our process here is that the speakers will be called up in order of form submission we only have one so the first one we see the first person invited to speak when your name is called please come to the podium so you can be heard comments will be limited to three minutes ladies we have pat hendricks and rosie mcvay yes thank you we're from the aauw the american association of university women and we would like to express our appreciation to the board members and the school district that are doing such a good job to educate our children and we we just wanted

003to to thank you and say that we support you 100 percent i just want to uh second my vote to rosie's comments i understand that this is basically an unpaid volunteer position and you put in tremendous hours and hard work and all for the the good of the district and and the community's children thank you very much we do appreciate you thank you so much thank you that's very kind all right next item on our agenda is our bps partners um todd swanson unfortunately could not be here with us tonight but he did check in and he said he didn't have any um comments for us so um he had an emergency and please no todd they were thinking about you all right committee updates everyone's got new committees i'm not sure if anybody's met

004with their committees yet does anyone have a committee update no no those are common fast and furious though so next month we should have new uh new board member committees and new board member committee updates so the next item on our agenda is the consent agenda which is our opportunity to approve a number of routine business items with one vote all of the details for each item in the consent agenda is in the um board book so um i will have mr pierce please go through the consent agenda yeah we're moving right along here tonight uh 4.1 and 4.2 is the approval of the july 19 2022 special and regular meeting minutes 4.3 is the approval of our august 8 2022 special meeting minutes 4.4 is the destruction of our closed session recordings from february

00523rd 2021 4.5 is the review of our closed session minutes 4.6 is our monthly personnel report we did add something on there this year where we on our personal report we added our tenured staff on there and so congratulations to all of them 4.7 is our payroll and bills 4.8 is the approval of our donations to the district uh thank you to the dunham fund and the batave united way for their donations they are appreciated 4.9 is the approval of our chromebook service contract renewal 4.10 is the approval of the athletic trainer contract renewal 4.11 is policy for approval and 4.12 is the approval of the consent agenda all right are there any items to be removed from or clarified on the consent agenda all right then i would entertain a motion to approve the

006consent agenda so moved second move by meadow second by my sir all in favor any opposed all right i would like to say that we have a staff member in the audience whose name is on our retirement track now and that makes me very sad calling her out she'll love me for that she's not sad i might be talking about you though that's not enough time uh next item on our agenda is our report so i will hand it over to dr hitchens for the first two standard reports yes and as always i would put out there for any questions or comments the foyer request is something that we put out there monthly these are the five that we have replied to since the last board meeting and then the treasurer reports are something you

007see every month any questions on those all right then steve was going to take us through his hiring report yeah first of all thanks to the board i had several folks reach out to me and ask questions and with different inquiries and i appreciate that it was an interesting hiring season i would say for us um you can see that i listed um kind of our numbers for 2022 and then below that in the graphic i uh listed some comparatives uh from the last couple of years a couple of things to note that i didn't write on here was that uh 2022 we actually had 14 staff members who res we call it a reassignment position or they they took a different position um within the district we actually had 14 of those in 2022

008and in the comparative years of 2019 and 2021 i think we had three or four each year so that's a big shift for us should also be noted that um these new staff that were hired some of those are staff that are covering like full year leave of absences or maybe one-year positions things like that so they may not be position staff members that are with us for the rest of their careers although a lot of times people who work for us for a leave of absence or for a year position uh they're kind of that's like the farm system if you will and they show us they do a great job and are committed to our mission and vision values we often rehire them the following year so it's a great opportunity you know

009a couple of interesting trends um that you can probably observe yourself is that in our comparisons we certainly continue to see that special education and student services positions are our highest turnover i would tell you that if you talk to folks in hr across the entire state and in king county they would probably tell you the same things every year the isbe asks for they do a survey for hr offices about hard to fill positions and they tend to be the same across all of our districts special ed student services english language learners and then a lot of times math and science we often times have had challenges with high school spanish believe it or not so if anyone is watching or listening and you're attending college and wondering what major you should have i

010definitely have some recommendations for you in those areas um what what what is what has really been most challenging for us i would say this year is that a couple of things um you know we want to improve our candidate pool of our diverse of a more diverse staff and and getting people into that candidate pool has continued to be really challenging secondly um you know in the past it was an outlier if we had staff who were hired and ready to work for the new school year like in mid-august um and it was an outlier somebody would resign in late july or early august and i would say this year we have seen more of that than we ever have we actually had a staff member in a hard to fill position resign on

011august 11th the day before our licensed staff members were coming back to work and even this past weekend we had a staff member in a hard to fill position who decided they were going to leave education and didn't come back worked for a week and a half and didn't come back to work on monday and these are those are very unique circumstances for us and um as you can guess they're hard to fill positions and now we have these hard to fill positions once the school year has started and those are the two positions um from a from a licensed staff member viewpoint that are not currently filled um adding to that we're still missing parapros at batavia high school at rotolo middle school and at our elementary levels um we are still looking for

012a uh and by the way the the positions that are currently open that we would love to fill are at the middle school we have a speech and language pathologist position and at hoover wood school we have a special education position beyond the parapro positions we have some lunch campus monitors that only work a couple hours a day needed at rotolo and at the elementary schools and lastly at the middle school we would love to have a a a a cna lpn like a nurse's assistant position that is open so those are those are open positions and when you look at it and compare ourselves to others in king county and statewide i would actually contend we've done really really well in filling those positions you probably have all read articles about various districts across

013our area and the state that are have you know tens if not hundreds of still missing positions in their classrooms um and so you know again so to kind of circle back again i would say our biggest challenges lack of diverse applicants in our hiring pool which then translates to a lack of diversity amongst our our current staff members secondly a lack of applicants in our hard to fill hiring pools um overall and then thirdly um we're short with parapros right that's and and i i would like to say that um with with the parapro challenge um you know again i i sent an email out to uh my counterparts in king county in late july early august and everyone replied within probably 24 hours just to i needed maybe a little bit of uh

014emotional support to be like are we the only ones like this and everybody um stated that they had challenges and actually when everyone shared their numbers with me we actually stacked up maybe the best in king county in terms of uh where we were at with parapros and i'm exceptionally proud of our staff and our special ed staff members in leadership positions for despite having a lack of paraprofessionals still having our kids properly supported in all of our buildings um i'm also happy to say just in the last couple of days we have been able to hire a couple of para pros but obviously there is still a need there so those are really our big challenges and and i think a legitimate question is is so how are we going to um approach these

015challenges right and so i'd like to share a little bit a little bit about that um with our our our lack of diverse candidate pool i would like to acknowledge that statewide that's a challenge the illinois state board of education has a ton of initiatives that are happening to try to get more people of color and diverse populations actually into collegiate programs um to uh to to get into that pipeline i actually have a relationship with a local college and they have me come out and kind of talk hr with their student teaching students and i do that usually first semester and second semester and it's been amazing since i started doing that probably in 2015 there was massive amounts of uh teacher prep students and i did it last spring and i think there

016was like 16 students so like the numbers have gone down and so i would like to acknowledge that that's a challenge um for a lot of us in the state uh the second acknowledgement i'd like to to make about that is it's going to take time to get there um and i think we're doing some things that will help but i also think that there's things that we can do to improve upon that and so you know we're working on our local pipeline um we've added some additional courses at batavia high school um to support our own students uh considering uh to become teachers and i appreciate the work that austin savitsky and mike theriault have done i think that they've already they sent invites like in july or august to a lot of us

017to come and support on those programs and speak to our our own high school students uh to do that um i had the opportunity to be a part of a lot of several job fairs this this past spring and i to be honest with you um we for the first time ever the organization um that i'm a part of in the state of illinois it's the um all the school personnel hr people like myself across the whole state they actually did a a virtual job hiring fair and i'll be honest i was a little cynical about it at first and it actually was phenomenal it was one of the best things i've attended and i will tell you that i had the opportunity to interact in a matter of like 90 minutes with probably over

01875 prospective students what i learned was i need to have another person there online besides me because i couldn't do it all myself i was having like three conversations with people simultaneously and um so beyond that one i went to a couple of other job fairs and all of those i will tell you i had plenty of conversations with uh diverse candidates and um you know like you do in any job fair the people that you interact with they're like oh yeah i'm going to apply i'm going to apply i'm going to apply and what what i learned is is i don't know that many of the diverse candidates did apply and what i need to do a better job of is coming up with a system to follow up with all those people and

019make sure and at least prod them and get on them to say we still want you here please apply and so that was a learning experience for me um and i'll talk a little bit more about this um in a little bit but we also need to do you know traditionally in batavia i i've had people the last i don't know five to seven years say hey steve is the job shortage really impacting batavia and my honest answer has always been no it's not really affecting us that much we have tons of applicants well i can officially say that those days for the most part are over and instead of us having just people come to us which was has been a very nice thing to have we have to shift how we do this

020and and we have to actually market bps 101 to our diverse populations and also to all populations because again our candidate pool was really much smaller this year than i've ever seen it um and we have to change the game a little bit with a marketing plan where we have to talk about what bps 101 is all about and why uh different stat prospective employees should come here and really just market it and so we're gonna i've already talked with holly a little bit about that and we may need some professional help to to to set things up um we're already taking like baby steps if you you don't need to do this right now but if you look at our human resources webpage um we've already made it a little bit more user-friendly um

021and we will continue that and we have some ideas to improve that and so um definitely some lessons learned to to increase that diverse candidate pool and i think there's a few strategies that that i can do and we can do as a school system and i'm going to rely on some others because i i believe that one of our marketing approaches we need to have stat real staff members of all different uh uh evolved in all different positions do testimonials about like what is it like to work here and so like we'll we'll be uh needing definitely some help from uh our current employees um with our hard to fill positions um again hard to fill you know i said a little bit about this especially the special ed student services and parapros you

022know our our state has recognized this this is not a batavia problem this is a statewide problem the isbe has made it easier to get your teaching license with all sorts of short-term um applications and even the parapro license just in the last month it's become far easier for people to get that license they've pulled back some of the restrictions and so again i believe we need to market that better to the to the to the people in our community in order to get a better better support there our local pipeline i think will help another approach that we're going to take is we have a handful of student teachers that are working this fall in all of our buildings and we have plenty we have again some staff that are our special ed and

023some of our other hard to fill positions and what we really need to do is get those people um engaged at bps101 and then actually get them working here potentially in the second semester because undoubtedly every year we have openings that we can't foresee right now but we have places for them and so that's something we're going to work on too and then again as i spoke uh earlier uh when i was addressing talking about uh increasing our diverse candidate pool and our our our the diversity of our staff we have to market better so you know we will say a lot of this is um you try things see if it works improve it stop doing the things maybe that didn't work do more of the things that may have worked all of these

024challenges are questions that i have a very close relationship with my colleagues in king county and i don't care if you work in eligen burlington west aurora east aurora you know geneva caneland saint charles batavia these challenges are very real for all of us um and we just need to continue to uh do our best to take on these challenges so kind of in conclusion um i'm very proud of the work that our staff did specifically in the area of special ed and student services at the end of the summer when we um had several resignations that were very shocking at the end you know end of july early august and i'm really really proud of the time that our special ed team put in to not only get candidates i always meet with every

025single new staff member who's a full-time staff member and the quality of these candidates were exceptional despite the late hour and so i think that you know we've heard some negative feedback at times about our hiring practices and of course we can get better and we can do things to improve but i'm very proud of the work our principals and our special ed staff specifically did to get our people again not only getting people to be teachers but really qualified solid candidates to uh work with these special populations with very late notice we definitely need to shift our strategy as i have spoken about and really market how great it is to work here in bps101 um and have our own people tell some of that story in order to get uh the right people

026applying here um you know i've todd swanson was mentioned earlier and and i've had conversations with our association leadership um we're going to be entering our bargaining season here in january february as the current contracts contract expires um on june 30th 2023 and they know that we have we have we probably have a shared interest um to use some of our our interest-based bargaining terminology uh to to uh figure out ways to uh make it um to improve ways to get our new staff in and because we've had we've struggled getting our new hires in and nurses uh specifically this summer because our um pay scale for new people hasn't been as competitive as it should be and so we have some work to do there and then again diversifying our candidate pool which ultimately

027leads to diversifying um our staff and our workforce is an important priority so that's kind of my report i'm certainly available here if people have questions or want to continue the conversation i first want to say welcome to all the new hires at bps101 we're excited to have you as part of the team and i also want to say thank you steve for your candor and acknowledging that it's a different world there's different challenges and if we want to attract the best the brightest diverse candidates and just feel positions almost we have to change things up we have to examine how we're doing things and how we can better position ourselves to be competitive so i think that's the first step to making a correction to be competitive in the future so thank you for

028that and then just for the audience if you could just talk a little bit you talked a lot about how to work short with paraprofessionals if you could just talk about who they are what they do and how we're that was your question sorry but um and how we're managing that shortage within our building yeah paraprofessionals are are a vital i mean every staff member that works in the school district has an important responsibility to support our students in their learning right paraprofessionals are are a vital component because oftentimes they're paired or working with some of our most high need students who need those supports whether it's written into their iep or whether it's just something that is a need in order to have uh provide proper educational equity for these students and so um

029paraprofessionals in in our school a system that they they can be as close as like a one-on-one support where you're spending a significant amount of time just with one child or they can have responsibilities for several students out in a general ed classroom or they can have responsibilities in a self-contained classroom to support the kids and oftentimes if you have spoken with a parent of a of a student who has paraprofessional supports written into their iep there's a very very close bond that is built between that child the paraprofessional and that family and so i would never want to uh underestimate the uh importance of people who fulfill those roles um and how vital they are uh for for um our students and and what is also interesting to me and you you see this

030all the time is that um you'll see paraprofessionals that definitely have um certain students that they may be responsible for but if you go into a classroom you'll see that these pair of pros are there to support all kids and so um it's a it's a hugely uh vital um position and and you know there's a lot of uh debate um and rightfully so about parapro compensation and things like that as my little commercial for the thousands of people who are watching this live i would just like to share that bps101 is a good place to work our pay for parapros is competitive and something that again i think we have to get the word out about is that um and and members who have been on our board for for a while will know

031this um several years ago and several contact contract bargainings ago with our paraprofessionals and our whole bespa staff we were struggling to maintain staff members because um the board only paid um i believe 35 percent i have that right tony of the family health insurance and we bargained it where um now our board pays 80 of family life insurance and uh the individual is only responsible for 20 and if you actually take the hsa it's 85 percent board paid and 15 paid by by uh by the individual uh or for the family and um i can't speak for all school districts i can't speak for target i can't speak for supermarkets or other places where people are seeking out jobs um but we have great insurance and family insurance is very affordable for all of

032our staff members and i appreciate the work that tony and his insurance committee team has done that to make that possible the paraprofessional job is nice for some people because it's a school year job you get summers you get spring break you get winter break you get paid holidays and you work a school schedule which it can be very nice for people who have school-aged children so there's a lot of positives to being a parapro here i know that the bond between parent excuse me parapro and the teaching staff that work closely with them is incredible again they're like family um and so i you know we would we would love to have you and uh reach out to us if you're interested um it's funny you asked that question about that because see i

033can talk forever about this stuff be careful if you ask clearly go ahead could you explain the requirements to be a parapro maybe because i don't think people understand like do you need an advanced degree i know you do not need an advantage i know you mentioned something about licensure so there's people out there that might be looking for a job but do you need it yes or i'm going to say if they were interested i wanted to know would you be able to walk them through we can walk them through it yeah i'll tell you that becca and michelle who are hr coordinators they i hear them all the time on the telephones walking people step by step to get through and and the state has uh made it a lot easier from um

034the standpoint of requirements and things like that in order to be a parapro so please reach out to us and we'll help you we'd love to and i would say the same for substitute teachers i was gonna that was my next question we'll talk about that a little bit is there uh is there a concern about retaining your current pair of professionals if we're short staffed right now i imagine the stress is raised for them yeah and you know it's interesting it's a pair of pro positions again and this isn't just a batavia thing this is across a lot of school districts is a pretty high turnover position um i looked back at the 2019 staffing uh report for our comparisons and i didn't go further than that but that was the last time we

035had a pre-pandemic like normal summer and that's why i chose that and in that august we hired and i i could have this off by a couple of people but we hired probably 17 or 18 pair pros um in that august this year we haven't hired that many um but that is a typical uh it's a it's a higher turnover position than some um and it's very typical for us pre this how the game has changed a little bit and things have changed that we would hire a lot of people in in august um and i don't know if i mentioned this along with that we also had in 2019 and i don't know if it plays out real well in that in that compare comparison chart but um we pretty much had the majority

036of our licensed staff positions uh filled by june maybe into early july and again that's really shifted and so it was more of a typical fact um uh back in those days rj that we would hire more of our paraprofessionals in late july early august and it's interesting too something has changed in those days there were oftentimes parapros who were being hired because they didn't get a teaching job and they wanted to build a relationship and work in a school system we don't see nearly as much of that because of the teacher shortage and so there are incredible number of factors um that impact all of this and i i you know i do a lot of reading about retention and things like that and pretty much whether it's business education in all kinds of

037different um jobs really the number one thing that keeps people at work is if they feel like they're making impact they're engaged they feel like what the work they put in is making a difference and so perhaps um you could make the argument um or at least this should be an area of focus of you know there is an onus on all of us to make sure that people are happy are engaged and feel like they're making a difference in their day-to-day jobs and i would say specifically i think it's been really hard you talk to any educator or any staff member who's worked in the school system in the last few years that's been really challenging for all of us for for a variety of reasons and so um this is just a very

038general statement but i've been in several several of our schools in the last couple you know week and a half since we've opened i've had informal conversations with a number of staff and everybody i've talked to is telling me like the vibe is different they're feeling different they're feeling like it's better and i'm excited about that and i'm hopeful from like a workforce standpoint that we can capitalize on some of that because that's a really important thing in in keeping people and retaining people those are the difference makers it's that culture the engagement the relationships and making a difference that really makes a difference any other questions for steve yeah i have a question for steve and then i have a question for the board um question for steve are we doing anything to track

039our success or failure as far as attracting applicants attracting diverse applicants figuring out whether or not we're making progress is making our staff more diverse are we actually tracking data figuring out whether or not we're making progress and adjusting if we aren't or increasing yeah it's a good question it's it's kind of challenging at times because um people self-report their diversity um and so when when people uh so it's it and that's when we hire them but in the application process no one we're not allowed to legally to do all those things and so um you know i would say that in in tracking it so tracking it becomes very challenging um i don't think we're making great strides what i would like to do to your point and i i spoke briefly about this

040is and and this i can take responsibility for this um because of my my role in my position is i need to do a better job again when i interact because i interact with them plenty of of diverse staff uh potential staff members i need to do a better job of tracking um and following up with them um meaning did they really apply right because if you talk to our principals they all want to they all want to hire um they want to have the diversity that their students represent represented in the buildings they they all want to do that and the constant problem that i hear from them is that they just have trouble finding any diverse candidates at least at first look from paper to even be a part of the interview process

041and so my guest chris what i can tell you is that next year i will have at least some data on how many diverse candidates that i've had the opportunity to interact with or my team has had the opportunity to interact with and if that made a difference in did they actually apply and be a part of our candidate pool because that is our biggest problem i that i can see um with that challenge that you're bringing up okay so i hope that answers or at least makes a little bit of sense and then another part of that if i could just interject as he said the um candidates self identify their diversity and we actually the candidates don't even do that it's when we hire them they do that right but even at that

042point they don't have the option to identify all of the different types of diversity it's also true and all of those different types of diversity are representative of our students so i just want to put that out there as well that is an excellent point because diversity is not always visible that's right exactly it's challenging i know that some people were getting concerned because they saw a picture and the picture doesn't necessarily represent what the diversity is um so that's why we need to ask these questions and the question that i have for the board is it has come to my attention that this isn't a goal of ours to increase the diversity of our staff however we have mentioned in the equity page that it is we are committed to change and i know

043that we ident when the strategic planning team um did their work they mentioned that that was something that was of concern to them do we want to as a board make it a higher priority provide more resources whatever it is that we want to do to enable steve to do a better job of being able to attract candidates in general but also specifically diverse candidates to make our staff more representative of our student body so i'm going to ask the question and this is more of a dialogue than anything else steve is seemingly already committed to trying to meet that goal meet a goal of his own because he recognized the importance with the staff and students and everything else so what is the benefit of the board saying that that is a goal that

044we want to pro like state i'm just asking that's everybody right well i mean i personally think that if the board specifies specific goals that we're trying to attain it makes it easier to track and figure out whether or not we're actually accomplishing them or going further away from them okay i think with any goal it's important that they beat smart goals and given the dialogue that we just had with steve about how we're facing challenges with staffing it at all just due to a shortage i don't know that it would fit the achievable um category at this point and although it is good and steve recognizes it i don't know that it should be a formal goal because i don't know how achievable it is and i get you to define smart goal yeah

045and i'm sure people understand what that means okay so smart goal timely achievable measurable and you're close enough that's specific specific thank you thank you very much i can't remember so it could be a smart goal but it just depends on what it is because you can't say hire this many people by this time but you can say attend this many job fairs um you know right the other aspects towards it that would lend you to believe that you're moving towards that diverse do we have a question chris would you be comfortable if steve came to us with some goals that would allow him to do the job that he also needs to do but also like specifically in response to this like i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this

046and then again like he said he can report back because he's going to start collecting that data like would you be comfortable with steve's sort of thing this is what i can do yeah i think the important thing yeah and this is what i need yeah i think the important thing is that we actually have something that is trackable so that we can actually hold them accountable to say whether or not we're making progress so that we have shared expectations and we all know where we're going or where we're trying to go so question just of clarity procedure what what's the difference do we have to have a goal to have a charge i don't think could the board have a charge as a request to go do that thing without establishing it as its

047own subset of a goal of the goal we kind of already have i kind of love that yeah i like the charge right yeah so one of the what chris mentioned was when we did the strategic plan check-in report we collected all that data including the equity journey continuum which does show you know the statistics that you're looking for and we gave all of the data to stakeholders staff students and community members and they identified a lot of areas for improvement they um they lumped them ming facilitated this one two three four five six seven eight they lumped them into eight different categories and those are all important things that we need to address it was just the timing of it and i know the equity team is addressing the first two and then the

048um they actually went through an activity where they ranked the priorities to try to figure out let's do ones that are within our control right now so they have listed that as the it's not that it's not a priority but it's number five out of the different things that they selected um so it is identified as something to get to and i guess the speed of that is on you but there are two priorities that they identified before that one that we should make sure that we consider as well related to the um diversity equity and inclusion so i guess the question is is that something that the equity team has to take on themselves or is it something else that i think they can be two parallel things me personally i think there could

049be a charge or a request or however we want to put it to give steve the agency to do what he needs to do and maybe to ask for more resources that agree because it puts us accountable to being able to support him on that and then second of all and then if there's a way because i even made a note of it that steve could coordinate with the equity team to find out if there's things that maybe they know reasons why people aren't coming to work here that he may not be aware of or they could facilitate that conversation with the person that applied but didn't not didn't apply like he talked to but he they could potentially help follow up because they might someone might be more comfortable talking to a fellow teacher

050or staff member as opposed to administrator you know so um i i don't know if i'm ready to like craft it all today but i think it's something we need to do right and i didn't expect to actually come up with a solution today it was more of hey yeah i would agree yeah what's the process yeah okay so regardless of what you come up with you're still doing it i'm still going to continue the the journey that we're on and we'll work to um get more candidates in that pool first and i guess probably steve i kind of feel i can correct me if i'm wrong board members but there's just a desire for it to be sort of concrete so we have a way to measure what you've done and compare that to

051okay what do we need to do next and that's why i don't know if you guys are comfortable with steve crafting sort of the initial like here are the things i'm going to do and we could assess whether or not we think those are the things we wanted to do and whether we think it's enough or whether we think i'd also like a little education steve because you hinted at it on like what you can ask and do and what you can't ask and do because that's going to craft some of the data that we can't or can't get so our expectations are realistic realistic i was going to say managed but real estate all right so see when do you think you'd be able to just share out with the board sort of a

052plan i mean i know we won't be hitting super high ringing until until the spring i got nothing going on so well yeah that's why i asked i mean like are you thinking like this is a winter like by winter you'd have a plan since spring is when we start really hiring yeah yeah i think that's fair i it it shouldn't take that long i mean it but sure if you'd like some help with the numbers tony's really good at crunching well you talked about some of those things the recruiting and that is needs to be in place by the next hiring season which starts in april really yeah so if you had information for us board members you'd be comfortable if like january february steve sort of lays out his plan and then he'll

053have a chance to work his plan and then he can report back to us again i guess is that okay makes sense to me are you comfortable with that sounds great yep all right can i ask one more question you have two other comments oh my gosh aaron yes um you mentioned way back in your comments about the pera pay is on par do you mean with neymaring districts i no i i would i don't know if it's not it's it's like it's in the mid like all of all of our pain i'll talk about this in a little bit um you know our our strong desire is to be competitive right and it depends on the school district and things like that but generally speaking we're not way off by any stretch of the

054imagination and it's a total compensation package well and that's why that's what people need to remember too is that everyone goes straight to hourly rate um but hourly rate looks a lot different if you're responsible for 40 to 50 percent of your insurance premium for a family so like it's and there's a story for us that i don't think we've told very well that we've worked on um with uh with vespa thank you for clarifying yeah two quick comments one um i had heard from other people that i work with in school districts i'm talking about people kind of late resignations and like the july august and one of the things that and i'm not suggesting a solution or anything i just want you to think about it is one thing i had heard from

055people is the challenge related to continuity of health healthcare from one job to the next and that they wait so that they can get on the new one without falling into cobra in the middle or anything else like that so that's one of the challenges i have heard so i don't know if that's fixable or not but that's what i had heard and then um secondly the um i think that's it it just lost it literally just lost i have another thought so we can yeah go ahead maybe i'll get there you can stay on the top i just might give you some time right there you can stay on the topic yeah let me think about what i was gonna say it just caught my attention when you said we want to be um

056what's the word you said competitive competitive when you say we who's we our school district okay is that us as well i would think so i'm just i'm just gonna i don't want to be competitive i want to be the forerunner i want to be who everyone's trying to get to i don't want to be competitive i'm just putting that out there well then you better talk with this guy right here about what that looks like well i know and that's what i was gonna say i know we're looking at the treasure reports and i know we're looking at things like that obviously we can't just say here you go here you go here you go but i like what you have to say it's on my mind but one of the questions that i

057have to steve is do we know like why a paraprofessional works here instead of saint charles versus geneva versus westeros do we know that like do we have good information on that why they work here and maybe like how to attract people it would only be anecdotal okay um typically uh people work like in their region for for positions like this um there's not a ton of people that are going to like live in batavia and drive to elgin to be a parapro as an example right um so it's typically regional um that's i mean i i hear what are you saying but i guess one of my questions is is throwing money at it going to solve our problem like do like i'd love to dig in if we can in any way like

058you are you have close ties with your with your people aren't going to like what i say but i would say not necessarily um elgin has a much maybe not much they have a higher pay rate for their starting teachers the last article i saw they were missing 100 teachers well and we've we've seen that with sub rates that we've had lower sub rates than many of our surrounding districts but we've had much higher sub fill rates again right now we have probably 14 parapro positions open when i last checked with my my other colleagues in king county they all had more than us um granted some of the school districts are larger than us um and and i think one of the major issues and challenges that we all have and it's not just

059education it's a lot of other places there's not the people we had just as a data point since may 1st we've had a ton of parapro positions posted right we've had 14 applications for elementary parapro's this is since may 1st that's a long time ago we had four rotolo applications filled out and we had one for batavia high school and i think rj made a good point that we'd like to at least pay competitively so people would rather come and work for us than at target and that might be something to examine you know but but i don't know if we can find trends or information or something to find out why do people work and what is it they really want right if it's pay we can talk about pay if it's work environment

060i mean at one time it was benefits and i think you might have made a really good point that we're not selling our story very well it's kind of a question that if you talk to anybody in just about any industry right now i know it's the question everyone's asking ever yeah somebody who had to close their restaurant one day a week because they couldn't get staff do we do exit interviews for people who leave i typically do not um and i i will tell you this um typically people communicate with me why they're leaving um so i usually know the story uh but i don't take the time to talk through every single why um generally speaking in batavia and this is a generalization but typically people leave here because they have an opportunity

061elsewhere that might be closer to home or is a little bit closer to the city where they may pay a little bit more or they a spouse or a family member has a change and they go elsewhere so that's been the typical um that's not but that's not the law i mean but that's typically what happens did you think of your question i did yes so uh two things one one of the things my company started doing to help people remind them you know remind staff about it's not just about the salary is they put together a total comprehensive compensation report that goes out with everything i mean it's like you're because we went through a little while ago and updated for now you get dental where for the longest time my office didn't pay

062for dental you know because we were looking at our competitors and we're realizing we're paying right but why aren't people still coming it was because we were lacking in other elements so they kind of put that together and it goes out at the last paycheck of the year um the second thing is i just want to appreciate and state that you you are recognizing probably a little earlier than most have run into that you got to move from a reactive stance of just fishing in a barrel to a proactive of figuring out why people are leaving you know and and then also why people aren't you know how do you market yourself as a district in an organization so i appreciate that thanks all right everyone have their questions no one has one thing remember

063we can keep going i could ask one more all right she says thank you steve you could talk all night uh yeah he could talk all night we've seen it happen haven't we uh next time on our agenda is building our future together i think doctor i will get us started but we'll all have a chance to chat and the purpose of this agenda item is to make sure that everyone in the community knows that the board has voted to put a referendum question on the ballot on november 8th and we had shared with you previously the do's and don'ts we cannot tell people how to vote and that's not our job our job is to say hey we're asking you your opinion you go out and vote but in order to do your due

064diligence you do need to learn about our referendum so your job as a board our job as a district is to say we have information how can we get that information to our public so that they can make an informed decision on november 8th so you can um i know at least one board member has been invited to a pto meeting because every board member is a liaison and they might think oh the board will come and speak um and you can always you should invite tony or myself or mark to come as well to talk about um building our future together but in general you should really know this very well you should know the highlights because even though there might not be a a very large number of people talking about this right

065now it will snowball between now and november so just be prepared and know that we'll have some new information coming out and when it does we'll update the website but in general you should know the high level well you do because you voted you can probably talk about the referendum question for an hour but can you talk about it for 30 seconds because most people want a 30 second version and so and no what we've been um doing as we've started this holly and tony and i have been actively working mostly highly on what that information campaign looks like she does have a six page document ready to show you of all of the it is everything is timed she has all of her communications planned between now and november but we can't just lay

066them all out today so she does have a plan in case you're wondering why you haven't seen something but we have there have been banners that um we put up at the corn boil tony and mark and i are will do our rounds for all the staff because we know that the community loves their teachers and a lot of time they'll say hey just tell me like i didn't read everything give me the 30 second version so we want the teachers to be able to give the 30-second version we want you to be able to give the 30-second version even though you know the hour-long version of what went behind this referendum question um so we've already done a couple of those um meetings we've met with the heads of the ptos at the elementary

067we do have a bic meeting coming up in september that we'll talk about it again as well where we sit on the chamber we've been to the park district we together i think we all talked about it at the city council we have rotary members so we're we're just we have a comprehensive list of all the ways that we can get this message out and it's not to sell anything it's to sell the idea of learn about this and go vote and please tell us what you think um the referendum on the right hand column there if you are going to be talking about it these are some of our the big reasons why you decided to put this on the ballot and that on the left side then right in the middle in blue

068is this is the sticking point here we do have a we're in a really unique opportunity we have a unique opportunity right now to make some really quality improvements to our schools without raising the bond and interest levy so we can't say we're not raising taxes because every year our operating funds do go up a little bit and it also depends on the value of your home we can't predict people's tax bills but we can tell you we will not be raising the bond and interest tax levy which is an important part of your tax bill when you look at the school district and we the bond market is changing construction costs are changing so we don't have the exact um detailed design of every project we would do that will come at a later

069time but we do know that the ballot question includes replacing hc storm and louise white elementary schools we would replace those buildings and tear down the other ones and we wouldn't move locations they would still be somewhere at that site so those are some of the highlights there are projects in every building that you don't have to memorize but you can direct people back to the website which we will update you know as things come more into focus with that and i that's what i wanted to share for this report and i would open it up to you guys for questions or comments or holly and i'd invite halle and tony to chime in as well for anything that i missed the only thing i'm going to say and i've seen it more lately because

070for those that don't know i'm in the architecture business and i put things out to bid and one of the challenges everybody's seen as a blade is you know pinning down like what the exact cost of construction is because of fuel costs supply chain issues um like even like one of the example like if you want to generate or switch gear you're going to wait 56 weeks to get it period or you can pay 25 000 more and shave about 20 weeks off of it but those are the challenges but on the other side from what i understand and tony you can confirm it is is that's construction prices squishing you on this side but then you're also looking at bond rates that are potentially going up so i i kind of personally want people

071to understand that that's why it's not like a here's the precise list of things we're doing we're only asking for a certain amount of money not the things to be done you know because if we go with things to be done we can we might not be able to afford it so what we're trying to do is say we're going to evaluate it and it won't even be you know us it'll be the staff members and the teachers and others and administrators that'll make the decision as to what needs to go out as well as our architects as a part of that process you're very cheery it's like hearing from tony hey i'm just i've been on this committee for a while so it kind of rubbed off you're welcome anything else i know we've

072been talking about this for a long time so this i love the one pager yeah yeah i think it's great any other questions thoughts concerns all right we are excited my lab super exciting we're excited to hear from the community all right next item on our agenda is the uh the preliminary proposal building improvement i'm assuming that's tony yep yeah that is and so now excuse me now that we have a master facilities plan for our schools and we know how we have a general approach to fund them uh we'd like to start tackling some of the higher priority items as you know well we've built our elementary schools the six of them in sister pairs over the years the oldest being alice gustafson and jb nelson schools which were built in 1955 and 1957

073respectively or actually not irrespectively the opposite order hc storm and louise white are newer and they were built in 1978 but they need more work fortunately we don't have the money that we need to accomplish replacing jb nelson and alice customs and it's just it's not in the cards for us so it's some kind of decision that we're going to have to make probably through referendum 10 or 15 years from now is that will be in these in this same scenario when it comes to these schools but they are in need of important safety and security work and it should start sooner rather than later and we don't necessarily need to pass a referendum to make that work happen and so as we mentioned in july you'd probably incorporate some of that work into the

074upcoming budget that you'll adopt here in september in fiscal 23. it would also bleed over into fiscal 24 as well certainly but we're looking at something at the on the magnitude of about five or six million dollars total or about two to three million dollars per school to basically make it so that those the entrances on those schools are secure ironically what we're looking at is moving the main office of those schools exactly to the same spot as where they were when they were built in 1955 in 1990. so the irony isn't lost on us but that is the best location in terms of particularly of cost and disruption to other aspects of the school the work there would not be complete with this you know there's a lot more work to do in these

075schools and this is just the preliminary phases and if the referendum passes there would be more work that needs to be done but this is the stuff that is important that we've identified as urgent and we want to get started with as soon as realistically possible so the proposal is preliminary and it's just conceptual as to what will happen in those schools we're just identifying the areas as to where things would be located here we're looking at alice gustafson school and its parking lot and so the area highlighted in red is where we would propose to move the office to it takes the strain off of the early childhood center which is on the north side of the building right now which is where the main office is at el augustus and it happens to

076be secure but that space was never designed to handle the car traffic and the pedestrian traffic that goes through that area of the building worse is the pedestrian car and bus traffic that goes through that neighborhood is very congested and convoluted and so we would make some adjustments to the site plan particularly how traffic flows and put changed how the the u-shaped kind of car drop-off area moves through the site and make traffic come only from the east toward the west so that we wouldn't have traffic crisscrossing each other so um these are like i said conceptual we're working with the city of batavia we're working with our architects we're working with our civil engineers and then working with our teachers and our and our neighbors to talk about the impacts of these changes moving

077forward but this is the concept and if so long as the board approves of the idea we'll incorporate it into the fiscal 23 budget and it will require a commitment in the fiscal 24 budget and then we would move forward with these plans in earnest ideally bidding them in november because anything later than that would cause us to probably not be able to order all the things that we need and get all the plans in place to get this stuff done next summer i'd be happy to entertain any questions that you might have yes sue the fence that it references at gustafson in particular that's the first one i looked at um is that the red line or the black line that is it's very hard to see here but it is the red line

078and the rationale behind that fence is just to prevent pedestrian traffic from crossing in that area it's not intended to actually keep people out but we don't want but because of the traffic yes we don't want pedestrian pedestrians crisscrossing traffic and and basically at any point that they choose we want to control where that happens because the cars will park because people park on the side of the street where four is where number four is people would still be able to park they parked there so you don't want to walk across the okay the bus line and that main sidewalk that's that sidewalk that runs east west on carlisle we don't want people to choose to walk across that lawn and then cross the the car lane and then walk into another entrance we want

079them to follow the sidewalks so is one the primary drop off is that going to be car and bus or is bus still going to be on the other side there a bus would be on the other side of the building but this may change so like i said it's conceptual and it really depends on what the city of batavia tells us in terms of what obviously buses and cars are going through here and how that works and how that fits together is going to be contingent on cars going through there now yes what do you need from us tonight tony just a general commitment that we this is something that you the board wants to accomplish in the current fiscal year and the next fiscal year and this will actually bleed over to the

080next conversation that we have about the budget and i was going to say and you're the one that we would actually have the money do we have that's actually voting on it at a later point but you don't want to move ahead until we've all said yes this is what we're technically you'll have two opportunities to vote on it one when you adopt the budget in september and two when you approve the bids in november but today is effectively to give you some level of comfort to engage the architects and tell them to go do their job exactly which is spending money just so everybody's aware there's no work for free no architecture really came up with this are architects and civilians okay so oh it was dlr yeah it's on the corner that's right

081there yeah it's too tiny i know you gotta like six times all right so i guess my question is we know that this could change but in um in theory do we support this plan if it's for safety yes okay because you do or you do i do i just i know what's involved in these and just knowing that the current environment situation is an environment and where the main office is and how to even get to screening anyone at both of these schools you got to basically walk into the middle of the building which is like the worst way to handle anybody from a visitor coming into the building right so to provide more detail on that and i mentioned in the report but essentially what needs to happen is it's not just a

082door that's a secure vestibule it does include that uh it includes moving where the main office where the where mostly the school secretary sits giving them visibility to the rest of the site so that they have situational awareness as to what's happening around the school moving the principal's office to be adjacent to that location and then moving the nurse's office because that must be adjacent to the main office as well of course that creates other dominoes and dynamics that began to fall throughout the rest of the building but that's what we're concentrated on in phase one and there will be other adjustments that will need to be made throughout the rest of the building and moving things around because we're not increasing the building's footprint we're just moving around what's inside it and so it's

083rather complex is this going to take up all of our capital improvement money or and then some and then some so what is the impact if the referendum passes versus if it doesn't pass so this is the work that we've identified that must happen well right i mean i'm just saying it's going to have a domino effect because we're taking up all of our money that we normally use for maintenance and there's still much more that needs to be done in these schools too to make them usable for the next 10 or 15 years until we make a decision as to what maybe come of these buildings as their age yeah that's why i'm bringing it up because yes we need this for the other two students yes we have to do this regardless but

084it's going to put us in a situation i'm saying we need it for four schools if the referendum doesn't pass right is there security issues at uh ac storm and louise white yes there are yeah we'll have to figure that out okay but we're gonna work on that right for the time being we'll work on the optimistic assumption that the referendum because we wouldn't pay for that or we wouldn't approve the payment until after that referendum is voted on right are you no this would this is not associated with this i'm saying but we wouldn't be voting for final approval until after we probably would because the referendum wouldn't be till april or the date you gave no reference in november november but bids would be awarded in the meeting ideally in the meeting in

085november yeah so we would know you probably would know but i'm afraid to pass because voting would occur oh because we've been meeting but we're doing the second week in november you're right we wouldn't know but at that point they're not related they're not on the same no but i think argus is saying that would inform us yeah before we went to the vote with the results of the referendum which may change one's perspective of right i think that it was that your point rj that we may need to look at aaron's point is is what we the assumption that we're operating on is this is the minimum amount of work that needs to be done irrespective of whether or not the referendum passes or not if the referendum doesn't pass we're going to have

086to come up with a plan b for hc storm and louise white yeah and we're going to need some time to come up with a plan b but right now we're hoping for plan a i mean tony i had a conversation with you and the way i understand it is this is of like the highest priority because for me personally as a board member the one thing that really keeps me up at night is the safety security of our student staff and everyone that we're in charge of during that day and so um yes you know this is going to maybe put a strain on the budget slightly but i feel that we're being fiscally responsible with taxpayer money to do this because this is work that needs to be done we're doing a good

087job of what we have we have an opportunity to do much better right and i really can't think of anything more important than the security of our community i may follow on to that comment thank you um two things one the reason why we ended up hiring dlr to do that master facilities plan is we realized that we could relatively easily build a secure vestibule on storm and louise however there was so much more work that we knew that needed to be done and so many interdependencies and intricacies that if we went and did that we would probably tear down a two million dollar vestibule within five to seven years and having wasted that kind of money and we just don't have that kind of money to waste frankly right and so we needed to

088have the plan to see how all the pieces fit together before we move forward we now have that plan and that's why we're here talking about this for ags and jbn unfortunately cost effective wise those schools really should be torn down but the amount of work that needs to be done there and rebuilt but that's just not in the cards for us right now but i would say too it isn't as though these schools are unsafe it's not that they're they're not unsafe places we would never bring kids to an unsafe place but the security and um especially perimeter security is not ideal in any way sensor form and we have to make adjustments to keep it secure and this is just not best practice and so it's not unsafe but we can do a

089lot better and that's why we're making these improvements agreed you know tony safety has always been a major concern of mine and so i think anything we can do to secure the buildings is a priority so we're good you want to talk about how this impacts our budget next i'm ready when you are you ready to hear about how it's going to impact our budget guy yeah so this is our opportunity for a public hearing so we do have to declare that we're opening the hearing i'll give some um background on the budget but then we'll give the public an opportunity to comment or ask questions if if they choose so i have the verbiage are we ready yup all right tonight we'll conduct a hearing on the bps101 budget we'll begin the hearing with

090a brief presentation from cfo tony and glacey after excuse me presentation the public can comment there will be no action at tonight's meeting for any of our agenda items just that one yeah all right tony tell us about the budget right so in terms of our process we the board placed a tentative budget on display at its meeting in july this evening we're conducting the public hearing to hear from members of the community in terms of their concerns or thoughts or questions about the budget we will adopt the final budget in september at the meeting on the 20th and the last day to adopt a budget for our for a public school district in illinois is september 31st if you wouldn't mind holly if you would open up the tentative budget summary i have updated

091this tentative budget summary as of today so if you looked at it in the prior few days that this agenda item was available it has changed i apologize for that there are a lot of moving pieces with this particular budget um and i want to give you the best information that i have but it continues to move page number five i believe it's is a summary i keep going holly i'll tell you when to stop might be more than five keep going we're gonna go right to the numbers which intimidates many folks keep going one more page i believe right here of those numbers okay so take a little different approach here in explaining the budget if you'd scroll up and just blow that up as best you could i'd appreciate it this is a

092total summary of the fiscal 23 budget both in terms of operating funds and non-operating funds what are operating funds operating funds include the education fund the operations and maintenance fund the transportation fund the imrf retirement fund and the working cash fund and those that group together is what our district needs to operate on a daily basis there are non-operating funds which includes our debt service fund which pays kind of our mortgage if you will kind of our in our debt and then our capital projects fund we move money every year our practice is to move money from some of our operating funds to our capital a lot of our capital projects span multiple fiscal years or they are in the occur in the summer time which depending on when a contractor bills us may fall

093in one fiscal year or the next and make can make our budget look like we're spending more or into deficit in a given year or excessive surplus and so that's why we make these distinctions and move that money over to them now in the operating fund at present this current version of the budget we're showing a surplus of 170 which out of 120 million dollars is not much is a razor thin margin for a surplus and so i do anticipate that we will have a surplus at the end of this fiscal year but a lot has to go right for that to happen we are showing at present an almost one million dollar surplus in the non-operating funds and the primary reason for that is all the not all the money that we're transferring over

094to capital projects or spending out of capital projects in the in this fiscal year will be spent because i don't know exactly if we do this work at jb nelson and alex gustafson i don't know exactly when we'll get the bills for that work but we have to have the money there to pay them so that we can pay it when the time comes so it's really close we're moving about four million dollars out of our operating funds and into our non-operating funds so that we can pay for this project if this is what the board chooses to do there's a lot going on in this budget um salaries are going up not as much as you would otherwise expect um uh we are hiring a lot of newer staff that make less so it's

095pulling down some of those averages it's a kind of a hold over from the pandemic a lot of positions went unfilled during the pandemic and now that we're actually filling them we still have vacancies but now that we are filling them it's pulling down some of the the salary increases in terms of its averages benefits are doing well our new benefits plan is being is contained and is is much less than inflation so we're seeing we're reaping those benefits however we rely very heavily on purchase services contractual services we outsource custodial we outsource transportation we outsource source food service and those are seeing massive increases as you would expect in this economy everything is increasing in excess of our revenue new revenue is coming in at five percent i anticipate to come in at five

096percent this year expenses are going up eight point seven percent as of today so we're spending more this year than we're taking in and that is a dangerous position to be in over time and so we must be careful i'm saying that this guy's falling here but we just need to be prudent with our finances and we always do and we've got some additional pressures that we're not accustomed to um i think that's about it when it comes to the budget unless there are any specific questions that you would like me to answer oh a couple of other things sorry i'm running off the top right and wrong about this all night yeah enrollment we have more students at present enroll in our schools than we would otherwise anticipated so our enrollment trends have been

097going down for the last probably eight years expected to have about 5150 students here this year in fact we have about and so more than than we would otherwise expect which is good um as you well know birth rates continue to decline not just in illinois in the king in the collar counties but nationwide it's an issue declining enrollments are an issue in schools nationwide and will continue to be an issue um so we have more folks moving into town than we have than that are moving out at present which is good news but the birth rates can will continue to decline we graduated last spring of 550 seniors and in this incoming kindergarten class is about 325 so there's a big difference between seniors who are graduating kindergartners coming in and our staffing is

098staying roughly nor the same as it was in the prior year down about 1.9 fte and so that's good news for class sizes in general although there are class size issues around the district and there always will be depending on where how old kids are and what neighborhood they live in but class sizes have on average have never been smaller in batavia so that's good news and that is now i'm done all right keep board members have any questions for tony with that enrollment decline is it just it declined less than expected or was it actually a bump up it declined less than expected and it's close to okay obama close which kind of just highlights that the enrollment is really kind of like reading tea leaves yes the good news is my projections have

099never been more wrong on enrollment in in the positive direction [Laughter] tony uh one of the numbers that stood out to me as you said revenues um are increasing five percent expenditure is 8.1 but you said we're not saying the sky is falling so why do you say that because uh to a you know common person well you're not taking in as much as your expenses going that's not the right trend but there could be some factors that could change in the future that right so as with the board was talking earlier about hiring and then making sure that we remain competitive and have salaries that are attractive to employees or potential employees when we do that we need to make sure that we can sustain those salaries over time and the challenge there is

100it might work in a given year and it could work this year but being able to sustain that or with the expected revenue that we're going to get in two three four five years it has to remain within that ban otherwise we'll be forced due to money reasons to lay people off because we just won't have the staff here to do so now the question that we're assuming in our financial projections is that with our declining enrollment we can theoretically reduce the amount of staff that are available because we if we don't have as many kids we shouldn't need as many teachers the challenge is that's never really worked for us we should have eight fewer fte in this fiscal year than we did last year based on enrollment although it's higher than we otherwise

101anticipated but we only have negative 1.9 so tony reminds brad and i have this all the time this is we talk about this constantly we do yes uh and so if we're not careful we could put ourselves in a more precarious position especially with the pressure that we see to increase wages so we just need to be mindful of that and i'm saying that we can't do things or that we should do things but it's going to take active management and prudent action so that we live within our means and we need to take care of our schools too as as chris has been saying for years and years serving on the capital projects committee we need more money to actually take care of our buildings yet we need more money to hire the right

102staff we need more money to make sure that kids are getting the best instruction that we can possible but all this stuff comes to roost at once we want to have small class sizes too but you're juggling 17 different priorities that all compete with each other simultaneously it's just like your house you're making the same amount of money but cost of living is going up all right any other questions comments from board members is there anybody from the public who'd like to comment or on the presentation the budget presentation thanks to him you got a thumbs up from me thanks ming thanks next item on our agenda is um our action items uh the first action item is the approval of the transportation contract amendment again tony and so as i said we rely very

103heavily on purchase services and service contracts to provide um our support services to students to remain competitive for bus drivers uh first student who provides regular education transportation services for the school district has requested an increase in their contract essentially it's a three-year contract we are currently in the second year and they would like to implement the third year's rates so that they can increase the starting wages for bus drivers and attract more bus drivers last year was not a good year for bus drivers and having buses arrive to school on time luckily we have almost as many drivers as we need to have right now with our current routes and we want to keep it that way so that we remain competitive and so we're recommending that we increase these rates to the year

104three and that will cost the board of education about forty thousand dollars more than they would have otherwise expected questions for trial and transportation contract you you said that it wasn't a good year for buses how does the rates help that is it more bus drivers is it how does that help offset that concern more bus drivers okay essentially at the end of the day better planned routes because you have more options that sort of stuff potentially yeah if we don't have enough drivers or essentially excess drivers because you know there's somebody sick every day calls in sick and if there aren't is there isn't a bus driver to actually pick up that route then that route is often very late because they have to scramble to make coverage needs work any other questions all

105right i would entertain a motion to approve the contract amendment with first student for regular education people transportation and adjust the daily rates as presented we'll move second move by meinsler second by lock all in favor all right any opposed right next item on our action agenda is the approval to increase substitute teaching rates i'm going to hand that over to steve yeah i've said plenty tonight but again this the approval we're seeking is to help bps 101 um not pay the least in our area but to be competitive um and i will say that uh that i i i came up with a couple of different scenarios for uh these different rates um i met with tony to make sure that the budgeting is appropriate and the finances are there to do this and

106um we as we worked on that we went with the the best rates that we could i'm actually happy very happy with uh the recommendation we're uh bringing forth so any questions i have a question yeah it could be just that i'm getting old but when did we last do this i would swear that we just recently okay so it's not that last year we did it last uh you approved it last september for october 1st previous to that we did it in january of previous to that it was a long time ago okay because it seems like we're doing it more often yeah we're in the midst of what you could call it an arms race um i i have a meeting tomorrow with my king county hr colleagues and it won't shock me

107if one of them chimes in and says well we're raising our sub rates again and i'll be saying yes we are too okay hopefully okay no i i just but yeah i don't want to say we go higher even this is another they're based on comparatives with uh mike again i'm really lucky i have a great team in king county that do the job i do we're transparent we're honest we share ideas we share spreadsheets with numbers and this these numbers all came from comparisons to our cane uh because we were unfortunately substantially lower substantially than our other districts right we raised and then everyone else in some of the categories yeah yeah it's like that okay and some are still higher right yeah some are still lower and and you know this is just

108anecdotal but for somebody who spends her day in a high school building and talks to subs that are there most of the time what some say is they pick a school district or a school that they like they just don't want to leave ridiculous money on the table right so if they can go to school districts over and make a substantially larger amount of money they'll consider making the change most of them don't want to they just want to make the going rate yes i don't think five ten dollars yeah is going to make it yeah yeah so uh if no one has any other questions i would entertain a motion to increase the pay rates as presented so moved second who's by lock second by meadows all in favor aye any opposed all right

109tell us about nurses steve i'm surprised similarly we were turned down many times um in many times and i'm not exaggerating that at all we were very concerned we weren't going to find nurses um we we scrambled and again the uh brad v brad two worked tirelessly over the months of july and august to find folks and we we've gotten there but we are uh significantly lower than where we should be in the current market uh for these positions this impacts not a ton of people um but it's the right thing to do to keep us competitive and i think that the world has seen how important the registered nurse position is in our school buildings i got to see our one of our new hot new nurses in action on the very first day

110of school and she was absolutely fantastic um and so this is a good faith effort to pay them the right the correct wage again staying competitive questions we heard time all right steve talked a lot tonight so he pre-sold us i would entertain a motion to approve the rate increase as presented so moved second move my lock second by meadows all in favor any post all right i do have a quick question on that that has nothing to do sure do we know why we had such a strong turnover with the nursing staff uh we have not had a ton of turnover in that department um some people moved some people retired um it was kind of like the perfect storm school nursing looks different than it did or at least the last two and

111a half years has looked a lot different than it did preceding that um so okay last item on our agenda is approval of the equity team consultant i'm going to hand that over to dr hitchens and i'm going to hand it over to ming shelby this is a really exciting part of the night um so there's three updates from the equity committee and the first one is that we met several times over the summer and one of the tasks that the committee um wanted to focus on was the welcome and inclusive environment and crafting that safe space messaging to not only staff but also to students so i have some cute props here that are displayed in our elementary schools and these were designed by our student intern but the message and the vision behind

112it was with equity team and then here's one of our secondary schools and you'll notice there's a qr code that goes straight straight to student resources so that's one thing that the team worked on um the second is that implicit bias training is something that the team felt that they really wanted to focus on and so on september 2nd sherry jones from the iea will be leading two breakout sessions with our with our staff and what's really great is that it's not just our certified staff but all staff are invited our campus monitors paraprofessionals everybody are welcome to be a part of this event and then the equity team also met with sherry jones over the summer to discuss what are some pre-activities some post activities that we need to complete to make sure that

113we're ready to go and prepared for sherry and then our final one is that we interviewed four consultants to help us with our equity action plan and it was unanimously decided that dr rikita leaks would be the person that would help us with this charge and the team overall felt really really excited for to meet with her and help us continue this really great work and one of our members is in the audience today kara shuster and she was a really big part of the summer as well so that's the quick update talk way less than stephen tony you did thank you um any questions for me no all right thanks for coming kara um i would entertain a motion to um i'm sorry i lost track of to approve dr rakita leaks of unlimited

114opportunities llc to consult with the equity team in the amount of thirteen thousand five hundred dollars seven move my mindset second by was that you rd yeah uh all in favor any opposed all right that passes thank you guys so much lots of good stuff on this agenda tonight um and lots of really good discussion so that's really awesome uh we'll go next to administration comments great i have several first back in august we had a special meeting to discuss board communications and i know that meeting was definitely needed there's many people the community staff board that sometimes get frustrated with communications a lot can go wrong um including like you want transparency and you want to be able to connect with the community so we decided to sit together and meet and try to

115problem solve and from your perspective what i heard at the meeting is you guys really want transparency you need to follow the open meetings act which brings some challenges to communications you need to follow your policy which is very specific about how you communicate with each other and the public um and you definitely also want people's problems to be solved and you want people to be heard um and there is that desire to follow the chain of command so that people could get their problem solved in the place that they should be solved at our workshop we identified issues related to communications we talked about concerns that people have shared and some of the emails that you've gotten we shared our frustrations as well i know something positive will definitely come out of that meeting

116for example we decided that we would like somebody to facilitate future sessions so i'm going to pass these out not now because as a former teacher i know that if i pass this out you'll read it but i'm even sending you giving you a pen because what we heard what we decided after this meeting is this is a hot topic and we need somebody here who has the expertise so the illinois association of school boards could help you your attorney can help you or luda as a statewide organization could also come in and facilitate it but i started with iesb so i have um laura martinez is your representative and she's a parent in the district so how great is that so i there's four dates here that you're going to tell me whether or

117not you can make them and what time you can start and then i'll see if magic happens and we're all able to pick the same night also in the packet that i'm going to hand out is we talked through like what happens when an individual contacts you what happens when somebody emails you what happens when somebody comes and speaks it public comment how do you respond to that because it's in your policy and it is the you know that you don't engage with people during public comment and that's not because we don't care about them but that is policy um and so we need to all be on the same page with that um and so what happens if um somebody sends an email to the entire board who's going to reply that kind of

118thing so we wrote this with the help of the attorney he looked at it he he advised us on it we wrote it he looked at it again so you're going to see a couple three comments in pink that he added but other than that attorney approved here um and so those are some of the positive things that have come out of that not um you know knowing that we're we're all on the same page as far as wanting to be heard and wanting to really hear what people are saying and and make sure that they know that their opinion matters and then all right my next comments are about the see i talked too long my computer shut down that's the theme of the night gotta log back in um no offense steve [Laughter]

119you just put those there so who's going to help me pass up so i wanted to talk about the back to school this year it has been an amazing year i had my caps lock on ah that's the thing it has been an amazing year so far and i'm not just saying that in 10 years i have not felt the energy steve talked about other people are talking about other superintendents are talking about it but let's talk about hearing batavia i get the the best part about being a superintendent and i know it's really hard to be a board member because you don't get to get out i get to go to all the schools so for sure on the first day and last day i put my schedule together and i wear comfortable shoes

120and i go visit every school on the first and last day just to just make sure everybody's where they need to be and it was great and then i obviously visit in between and so i have been asking teachers i've been asking students how's everything going i've met tony and i met with the pto um officers we're asking them asking and it has been amazing we had a meeting with all the district administrators zoom meeting today and we asked them how can we do better and all of these things that i'm hearing buses are mostly on time buses are never 100 on time but almost like there were there were almost as little issues as you can related to buses i'm hearing the words calm everything's so calm that's what i'm hearing so i've been

121writing down some words that i'm hearing smooth i heard sunshine and rainbows everything is sunshine and rainbows and then a lot another theme is that students i don't know if you know this but they take a little while to get back into the groove of learning when they've been home for the summer and everybody's commenting on how it's happening quicker this year than it has obviously the last two years but even in prior years so people are talking about kids being in the groove and students being in the groove a lot sooner than usual and as a matter of fact i was in a first grade room just um yesterday and they were all first grade they were all counting and it was like music to my ears i just went in they were so

122happy they were counting to 185 yesterday but then they were bragging that they had counted out loud together and in a chorus to 120 and this is on like day five of school they're counting to 12 120 they were so happy i know that's their target i know but it was just they were so proud so thank you to the teachers and the student services staff nurses paraprofessionals campus monitors administrators everybody who's there with the kids every day it makes a difference and then for the 12-month staff buildings and grounds the buildings look great business office they continue to get people paid despite the new people josh is here we're still getting our bills paid and people paid that's amazing technology thank you so much the kids have what they need teachers have what they

123need and then let's talk about sending the rjac staff who have registered 146 new students that's not even kindergarten and preschool so kindergarten preschool we had to register all of them and on top of that 146 new families so thank you [Applause] um summer she was never alone she always had many friends many friends many in the lobby and then we all take turns covering cindy's lunch every day so all of us um have a special we each get a week everybody in this building to be cindy for an hour and wow when she comes back i'm like where's cindy is it is it time yet like the phone's ringing and pretty stressful i don't know how to answer this question and she just she does a great job so does everyone here helping out

124to get those families registered like tony said 5 250 students which is actually pretty close to last year and a lot more than we were expecting so thank you to everybody that helped make that happen and now that we are students supposedly are in the groove staff are in the groove so now it's time to recommit to our roles and this year we're going to talk with all the staff when they come back together for our district-wide institute day on september 2nd about just hoping everybody reflects on what their role is and how are you supporting student learning including the board what do you do that's supporting student learning because they're already so what is it that we're doing um and there is that popular nasa legend that story that we've heard before about when

125john f kennedy was touring the headquarters in um 1961 the story goes that he encountered a custodian mopping the floors late at night when he was getting his behind the scenes tours and he said why are you working so late and the the employee responded mr president i'm helping put a man on the moon so um i know that we're not putting kids on the moon this year even though how fun would that be but we are helping them to prepare for whatever comes their way and everybody has a role and i can't wait to continue those conversations with the staff about what is it that you're doing that's helping put our students on the moon so that is my pep talk for the start of the year and thank you everybody to make who

126made this a great start lisa you're welcome wow that was very positive i know because that's that's what's happening in the building just reflecting that all right board member comments erin i'm going to start down there i am wanting to welcome everyone back to a great school year lisa and i had a conversation this morning about how this school year just feels different and it's delightful and i'm glad everyone's back this is a very busy time of year it's an exciting time of year and everyone feels just invigorated and fresh and i'm glad to hear the students are ramping up faster and i can't help but think that you know that might have been one of those hitting coveted blessings they're just a little bit more agile so that's it for me rj um i'm

127really happy that you're enjoying this lisa your last start of the school year so i'm really happy to hear it yeah so uh as we know elise is leaving so um i was talking with lisa and she said she's not counting down the days i thought that she would be so yeah i like that you're you know you're really busy so congratulations on such a good start um the other thing uh i'm really happy to be back in school if i could say anything to any parents out especially new parents uh in their schools please consider volunteering for events i know you've already seen emails from your ptos and you're and they're not going to stop they they need volunteers as much as they can and even if it's just three hours on one day

128of the entire school year it'll go a long way to help them so that's it thanks good um i i just want to say i struck me the other day and more as of being on a board member i'm starting to see like all it takes to like get the beginning of the year to work i mean teachers and communications and everything else and previous to being a board member i just tried to make sure my kid's alarm went off at the right time so that he got out the door and he missed the bus and then i had to drive him to school right that was about the biggest worry i kind of had you know as a first start of school i can see what everybody has to do from like custodial staff

129i mean it's you make the kind of allegory of the i'm putting a man on the moon but it is everybody you know there's massive amounts of efforts of waxing the floors and getting the furniture moved and even a little story i had with um mark anderson talking about we're marching band stuff so i'm gonna apologize for that and eventually but um you know we were talking about how we could get that process started and he was like oh do you need this thing the trailer and i said no not yet oh good because it's perfect for us to move desks all over the school district because we can just load it right up and get them quickly where they need to be i'm like great perfect no i don't need it you know so

130i'm just excited to have everybody kind of you know back in the groove faster feeling positive about things as i appreciate you bringing that to us um on the marching band front i am going to apologize because it's starting to be marching band season and we're in the thick of it um but i want to echo and i appreciate your comment about volunteers it's you know i don't know and i know other groups need a lot of volunteers from sports and otherwise and and please get out even if it's a couple hours it helps immensely and and you know we it just we on the march marching band with what we're doing this year we need about 40 volunteers for every competition this year wow and just getting people out there for and that's an

131eight-hour stint on average so now you're losing it yeah but we have fun and everything's good so there we go some days something else yeah no we don't do that but it's a lot of fun you get to hang out with kids you get to you know see your kids grow and and and become you know better versions of themselves and that's one of the things that i got from being a volunteer so i want everybody to encourage them to get out there to do that too awesome i'm good thanks craig sue have a great year everybody thank you i echo what my colleagues have said i will maybe take the volunteering a different spin so despite my gray hair i do have a child that's in grade school i was at a barbecue talking

132to some parents that had a second grader and i was asking about their experience you know they've been their kids have been in the covet area and they have even if they wanted to really couldn't engage and they were saying how it can be a little bit intimidating because uh you know something's never changed and you're the new kid at the table and so i would encourage parents that have been involved and have relationships to reach out to those new faces to make them feel welcome we need them they're the future leaders of our community and they're kind of thirsting for it right now so i would ask you to do that and um yeah i'm just happy to hear that everything's off to a good start so i'm looking forward to a student-focused year

133where we can do our important work that needs to be done together with everyone in the room what do you want me to talk about yeah okay you said you were this was your idea all right this is my idea this is i didn't know lisa talked about the the moon landing and uh this was my idea because uh i love the space program and i'm a little corny but uh she's got pins here that have little astronauts in it and you know i've heard that story before about how everyone had a common goal and for me really what tied it together was uh i had an opportunity this year to participate in commencement as a school board member up close and personal and i get emotionally thinking about this is that our students i

134mean that we had a challenging year we were talking about a lot of things and students weren't always at the top of the list in my opinion and you know to be there and listen to these kids speak with eloquence and poise you've never been to commencement it's like a rock concert they fill up the niu i i've never spoken to a crowd and these kids got up there and killed it amazing the way they talked about their experience i remember the last speaker the gentleman said you know we're bulldogs i'm getting choked up thinking about that but uh but what that means to me is that unity of purpose that's what we're here for that's what everybody in this room in the audience is for those kids those families and so i wrote this

135down but you know we do you know we're not going to the moon but we do have a mission and it's on our website and it says to help students learn and grow in all aspects of their development we have dedicated ourselves to ensuring that our learning environments are productive safe and supportive and what's encouraging to me is we had a pretty full agenda i think we touched on every one of those with our agenda which is encouraging and then we actually have five strategic goals and so i know lisa's talked about this but you know when kennedy said we're going to go to the moon that was an impossibility we all have more technology in our cell phones and our watches probably than there was in the collective world at that time and yet

136they made it happen and so when you have a goal you know they had 400 000 people at one time with the mission to get three men on the moon we have 350 teachers 735 staff approximately working with 500 5 250 students so our goal is a little bit more manageable but these are our goals and i feel like for me with these people helping represent us every day getting up and working on these goals which i'll just read them out loud strategic gold one is student learning ensuring maximum development growth and achievement for all students strategic gold tools a learning environment provide a productive safe and supportive learning environment strategic goal three is quality staff cultivate a positive and productive working environment that attracts develops retains a high quality staff we spend a lot

137of time talking about that strategic goal for partners and achievement engage families in the community as vital partners in the education practice we're working on our communication every day strategic goal 5 resource responsibility demonstrate effective and efficient business operations ensure excellent stewardship of our public resources we talked about the budget so i'm encouraged that we are focused on these goals and we're doing the work that we should be doing that's all i have thank you aaron i love it kathy can i just say one thing yeah i would just i love this kennedy thing so much but i would challenge us to look at it a little bit different and you know what we might be educating a student that is the next president that is the next person on the moon and if we

138look at each one of our students in that way i mean that just blows my mind the possibilities so this is a reality we could have that next person in one of our classrooms and that's just so exciting to me thanks yarn i am going to be long-winded tonight i have a prepared statement um it's kind of shows the struggles of what we go through as a board and we're always learning always growing so i've said from the very beginning that this is a marathon not a spread we knew this work wouldn't be easy or quick we acknowledge we would make mistakes at our last meeting we had a discussion on how the board communicates with staff in the community we as a board allowed that discussion to get away from being strategic instead we

139got very specific we allowed the discussion to be focused on how the district communicates in regard to equity issues we were emotional and frustrations were elevated how we communicate should be consistent regard regardless of topic communicating regarding equity should be no different than any other topic while we have acknowledged that we were off topic and apologies were made to those present at the meeting we have not had a conversation about the potential harm that was caused or why this specific topic generates such frustration i believe it is our responsibility to acknowledge our mistakes and make amends to those we harm as individuals i personally have struggled with what uh what is my responsibility when such mistakes are made to navigate this problem i have tried reviewing what experts have told us on the subject this

140spring the board engaged in a training session titled equity and educational imperative in reviewing my notes one portion stood out as especially relevant the urgency and the urgency of moving from unconscious exclusion to conscious inclusive behaviors this was illustrated with a diagram that indicated exclusive and inclusive behaviors i'm afraid we've fallen victim to some of the exclusive behaviors and must make an effort to focus on our inclusive on their inclusive counterparts according to our training exclusive behaviors are colluding avoiding contact denying differences blaming others and becoming defensive on the other hand their counterparts are taking a stand on her hurtful behaviors making mutual contact valuing individual differences accepting responsibility and giving seeking and receiving feedback it is our responsibility to identify when we are being exclusive and intentionally make efforts to be more inclusive i

141believe we have avoided contact with those who have raised equity concerns we have implied we can represent those who are not present we have blamed those who raised concerns and who have raised concerns and have been divisive um according to our training we should be reaching out to those who have concerns we should value their uh diverse perspectives and encourage their feedback we should accept responsibility for our decisions and stand up when we see hurtful behaviors this past week lost my spot ming shelby who's president sent out two readings one an implicit bias and another on multicultural competence in preparation for implicit bias training which he mentioned earlier for training and staff i don't believe it could be more timely in the first reading i was reminded everyone has implicit or unconscious bias and we

142must make a conscious effort to mitigate it the second reading really dove into what our approach should be let me share a few portions with you multiple multicultural competence is having respect respect for the ways others live in and organize the world in an openness to learn from them our goal should be to be an ally for all students according to the material an ally is an advocate a person who supports other people's rights to speak for themselves who resist the temptations to speak as an expert on their behalf if we do not defer to the leadership of people of color and defend their ability to speak for themselves we will end up using our expertise to promote ourselves part of being multiculturally competent is realizing the limits of your understanding the goals of multicultural

143multicultural competency are increased understanding respectful communication and full inclusion of all people to participate effectively we need at least a minimal understanding of cultural competency and an openness to learning from other people's cultures the easy part is attending the trainings listening to lectures or doing the readings the difficult portion is implementing what we learned into our everyday actions it is difficult to tell someone you know well and respect that they made a mistake it is difficult to prioritize the feelings of people you don't know or have a difficulty relating to over those we over those we do that is how we grow i know and understand the frustration of making an effort to correct a wrong while feeling those you're trying to help don't appreciate it i understand the process takes time and we need

144to be patient before we'll see significant changes we can measure that said we need to recognize recognize there are folks living with problems we are likely never to understand or appreciate we need to understand that while we ask folks to be patient we're asking them to continue to continue suffering while we rectify the system while we may tire of being overwhelmed by one topic it is much more tiring living with the oppression on a daily basis any frustration we feel trying to solve the problem pills in comparison with those living with it i can only speak for myself but let me tell you i'm exhausted i'm stressed i feel alone way too often i have self-doubt and i'm afraid of being labeled as the angry back black guy that only wants to talk about equity

145i've read many books listen to podcasts and attend trainings i understand that race racism and bigotry are intertwined in everything we do whether we recognize it or not i know it is our obligation to stand up for those who can't defend themselves and call out our friends co-workers and acquaintances when they contribute to oppressive systems but like i said doing the right thing is often difficult because our systems were designed to prevent such changes from happening however i'm committed to doing this work i will continue doing this work when it's difficult and i will continue doing it when it causes me stress sadness and pain i recognize i have a position of both power and privilege and it is my responsibility to do what i can to make batavia a welcoming place so while sometimes

146i may feel like i'm doing this work alone i know there are many out there who will stand beside me and behind me as we continue on this journey i hope there are board members and administrators who agree thanks thanks chris all right that's all on our agenda tonight so i would entertain a motion to adjourn so moved by my sir taken by lock all in favor all right any opposed nobody wants to stay later all right please tell me before you fill out the workshop when you're available it'll just take you like 30 seconds i even gave you a pen full service you