001hello there on tonight's agenda is a referendum for 140 million dollars I just want to make the comment that at this time when inflation is so high when it costs so much to fill up your your car with gas and to buy food and put food on your table I really don't think this is a good time to have a referendum because you're going to be asking a lot from people especially every year our taxes go up you tax the max every year and it's really hard for people to handle the economy as it is that this would be just too much of a burden and I want to want you to look at the library referendum that we had not that long ago it passed by something like 158 votes and nobody campaigned against
002it and so and that was for a much smaller amount it was much less significant and I will let you know that we will campaign against this referendum and I don't think that people would take too kindly right now in this economy thank you very much thank you we do have as Lisa mentioned one um written comments that will be added to these minutes as part of our official minutes of the meeting um and Todd Swanson is not here tonight but he did send me an email he is in Bloomington for iea training all week and I know he was really excited about that and I Cindy did he give you anything extra that he wanted you to he said if he had anything he would give it to you so he just said uh
003please tell everyone that um he hopes we're having a great summer that we're recharging for all the work we're going to do together as the new school year comes upon us so [Music] um no that's not in our policy we we attach them um you've had your time as do we have we actually don't allow people to take other people's time I think that she probably took about a minute sure and the dinwiddies a former Batavia Alderman once put out a complete analysis of Batavia School District finances he was always giving well-researched good solid and verifiable information to Batavia residents former Batavia Alderman John something titled the article will there ever be enough money for Batavia School District as a Batavia homeowners report to all residents everything he said then still applies today in the
00490s a group of citizens education within our means exposed a lack of Maintenance in Batavia schools and constant taxing to the max the maintenance issues have been ongoing and now Batavia schools want to further tax us out of our home with a whopping 140 million dollar referendum between gas taxes Municipal Taxes real estate taxes and Tif districts Batavia residents are being priced and taxed out of our homes senior citizens on a fixed income with a home valued at just under 300 thousand dollars are paying well over seven thousand dollars a year in real estate taxes of which two-thirds goes to the school district that's nearly 600 a month add up all the other increases in taxes and there's little money left if any to pay for food medical and other necessities additionally normal upkeep of
005our home increases the assessed value which in turn also raises our taxes education no longer in fact never did require huge brick and mortar buildings today work at home and learn at home is entirely feasible covid-19 proved that brick and mortar education is not absolutely necessary Citizen and inspections and review of documents disclosed there's nothing major wrong with any of our current buildings we do not need to tear down perfectly good Schools Enrollment is declining every year and a number of parents have chosen to to homeschool which further reduces the need for bricks and mortar I urge the school board to reconsider this 140 million dollar expense vote this plan down thank you thank you all right next item on our agenda is um committee updates which I believe no one had one but Lisa
006was going to give us one from the equity committee and Aaron has one from the captain practice yes I apologize want me to start yes because this is very exciting thank you yeah so this is an update on the bleachers I was talking to Mr Mark Anderson I'm just going to basically paraphrase but the community should know that the stadium project is on schedule the Press Box was installed on Friday and the bleachers should be completed by the end of July the old lights have been taken down and the process to install the new lights actually started today and it'll take about a week to get those installed and uh so that's the work on the bleachers and the lights in the month of August the work they'll be done will be on drainage fencing
007um Hardscape work and electric work and the community should know that we are on schedule to be have substantial completion of the project by the first week of September so everything is on schedule as planned nice thanks for following up with that iron exciting project I um there's not a board rep on the equity team yet you just redid All of the board assignments but I was at their last meeting and it happened after our last board meeting in which you gave the authorization to have them hire a consultant to help them to facilitate their team meetings determine their purpose and create an action plan so they're in the process of asking for proposals for a consultant to work with them and the on a similar note the elected bodies in Batavia a few of
008the representatives from each of the elected bodies were online with a consultant who talked about the possibility of like a community-wide equity audit but that was it was determined that we all have our own things that we were working on and that we actually the work that we did with the Strategic plan check-in committee was um considered like the Kickstart to our work and so she actually didn't recommend an audit at this time because we do have all the data that we gathered from the hundreds of stakeholders through focus groups and surveys Etc so in the school district she said that we're in a good spot to just go forward with that action plan which the team is working on or they will start working on once they select that consultant hopefully if things are
009on track we'll have that consultant by next month that's right Matthew is that something that has to come to the board sometimes I get confused but this one because you had authorized it we're going to have them make their recommendation but if it's under 25 000 they wouldn't necessarily have to they're going through a process to selections sounds good all right next item on our agenda is our consent agenda and since Mr Pierce is not here tonight Mr Anglesey is going to go through that with us thank you item 4.1 is approval of meeting minutes from June the regular and special meetings from that month item 4.2 is the Personnel report which includes reassignments resignations hires and requests for leave of absence item 4.3 is the regular payroll and bills payrolls for June 30th and
010July 15th and the bills from the prior month item 4.4 is the disposal of surplus property which includes retired student Chromebooks and staff laptops item 4.5 is donations a donation from the Batavia Historical Society for books valued more than five hundred dollars item 4.6 curriculum contracts for the upcoming school year which include nwea map IXL Naviance Newsela informative item 4.7 student handbooks for 22-23 item 4.8 a stat a student fundraising provider platform which is snap raise item 4.9 is to appoint Kathy enger as our new authorized agent for imrf item 4.10 is the approval of Frontline education software subscriptions which includes planning analytics software budget management student analytics and apps substitute management and item 4.11 is the approval of the consent agenda from or clarified in the gender then I would entertain a motion to
011pass the consent agenda as presented so moved so moved by locks I can buy Meadows all in favor all right any opposed consent agenda approved as consent as presented Dr Hitchens I'll hand it over to you for reports um that we had one foia request that was fulfilled in the last month and we also have our monthly Treasures reports um I would entertain any questions but if not we can ask Dr Smith from the high school to make her way to the podium because she has the next report ready for me okay so um this is it's always a pleasure to come present to you uh kind of the fruit of all of the labor for sometimes 13 plus years of of work to get students to graduate graduation day is always my favorite day
012of the year um this year we returned indoors the convocation center of course last year was beautiful outside but we hit the jackpot with weather last year and we know that can't happen every year so even though it's really nice to have it outside the pressure of having beautiful weather was not on us again this year so it was great we graduated 538 seniors that's I think our biggest class ever um and so that that big class matriculated through our system and so they are now off and so about 91 of the students stayed through the second semester of their senior year we had about nine percent that graduated in December the report in front of you has three major I guess subheadings one is the final transcript requests one is post-secondary experiences while in
013high school and then the last part is achievement results so in terms of the final transcript requests over the last couple of years we've changed our process to gather this information so it used to be only by student report so they told us where they were going after high school and we just took that information and provided you with that information and there it wasn't verified so many students change their minds or take a gap year and don't report that to us so this year we did a little bit of both because now we use a system called parchment to officially send transcripts so we know those transcripts went to those schools and then we also did ask students where they were going so if we didn't have an answer in parchment we did take
014their self reports this is kind of a mixture of of self-report and parchment reports but about 75 of our students report they would go to a college or university in the fall we know the numbers a lot probably a lot higher than that but that's again from that self-report and that parchment report um we had about 134 students that did not report where they were going um but also under that other category includes students who we have a student who's going to go play semi-professional hockey students who are going to take Gap years students are going who are undecided or potentially going into the workforce that didn't report that to us so that's that number's a little low as we know when we look at the Illinois state report card that you guys take a
015look at every year the number is is much higher than 75 percent of students who go to school at College during University in terms of post-secondary experiences one thing that we've taken the direction from the board over the last probably decade almost is to increase those post-secondary experiences for our students while they're in high school with the support of our staff and so that takes the four many different forms one that we're very proud of is our dual credit program and that is in partnership with waubonsee Community College I'm going to give them a little plug like I do every single year they are so wonderful to work for what you may not know as other high schools that don't work with the waubonsie don't have this great experience I won't name any names but
016there are some junior colleges out there that just do not community colleges that do not work well with high schools and give the kinds of Partnerships that we have so we're very thrilled to work with them if you take a look there that is a raw number of dual credit courses taken by our seniors so in high school those seniors took 1012 enrollments in a dual credit class and those are at the cost of about 25 to 48 dollars and you can compare that to what a college cost class costs for example if they take the college American history class while they're in high school that's six credits at most universities six credits at most universities is I know many of you are paying for college right now as am I um I wish I
017could say it was forty eight dollars it's not um so we're really proud of that obviously this class is much bigger than other classes and so that's a good reason for that bump but we do have a good number of students taking those dual credits and many of them are taking multiple so some students are walking out of high school with a semester or more of college under their belt um we also send students to our Fox Valley Career Center again a great partnership with a local um School we had 51 students who enrolled at Fox Valley last year there are different programs there and different levels of certification licensure and credit so for our students who are in the auto and Welding two classes those classes do receive waubonsie credit through dual credit but
018there are other courses such as our EMT program or cosmetology program where students are then eligible to take a licensure exam once they finish so students can walk out of that that those programs as seniors and walk right into the workforce if they take that licensure exam so that's huge that saves them so much time and money it really sets them up for Success if they're able to you know follow through and get that licensure and then go right into the workforce finally the last program I want to highlight for you is our is a new one so last year maybe two years ago you approved a manufacturing program and that's another dual credit program that we offer through waubonsee Community College this one's a little bit different because our students do go to wabanzi
019to take the classes there with their professors and instructors and so those students take go this they take 18 months of course work at waubonsie it's about a half a day so they're still at Batavia High School for half a day it's very similar to Fox Valley then they go to waubonsie and if you can take take a look there we had 10 students 10 seniors I should say who completed that program in the spring and earned a total of 105 college credits in the manufacturing world and so those students can complete that program at lavanzi and people are begging I know Brad can probably talk speak to this more because he's spoken with so many Business Leaders in the area but they're begging for our students to come work there they're in their local
020businesses so that's exciting and if you want to talk about yeah it's like the number of credits they were able to earn is like it just blows my mind that we were able to offer this to our students you can see the list of courses that they're enrolled in and those are basic courses that would take you in a number of different paths whether it's Automation and Robotics assembly line manufacturing HVAC so they can use those core classes and while these students probably could right now given the job market go straight into these industries having an associate's degree really gives them flexibility in their career long term and increases their long-term earnings in those fields so to me we're giving kids a great jump start on getting their associate's degree and a career that will
021earn them a great wage and Brad did we have or Joanne too like there were juniors in the second semester correct that were enrolled yes so that'll now be going into the senior year doing that okay correct yeah we have students we allow students to come in and out of the program but to get the full benefit of the program they start second semester their junior year and go through that year and their senior year to get all the credits uh that you see there and they have to provide their own transportation correct we provide transportation students can also drive themselves we're trying to give them a sense of what it's like to to be on a community college campus so we try and provide some flexibility but if students don't have their own transportation
022we do provide it now there was open to whomever like Joanne can speak to this but any new program takes wild to to get kind of going street cred right so students pick courses not with their parents not out of a course catalog by talking to other students so like this group of students I think has spoken as we've surveyed them and talked to them and Page puddles their career and and the career in college counselor has spoken to these kids and really works with their professors at waubonsie that they speak very highly of this so we believe this program will either maintain or grow in the future okay awesome Joanne do you have any information about on the students that took the EMT licensure for example what how many of the students took that
023what the pass rate we don't get that information because it's on their own after they finish at Fox Valley you know little autopsy after the fact yeah don't get that because they can go take that licensure any anytime okay thank you so one new um chart that we put on the report this year was because we are we talked so much about those post-secondary experiences and this class this particular graduation class was so big we want to be able to compare apples to apples moving forward so we're calling it post-secondary experiences summary there and so if you go up a little bit Holly thank you you're good thank you so what we did was we tried to identify how many seniors received some sort of post-secondary experience and then taking away duplicates overall how many
024students had at least one of these experiences many are doing more than one of these experiences and so about 80 percent of our graduating seniors had some sort of post-secondary experience while they were in high school so that includes AP classes the Dual credit classes we talked about the Fox Valley and the manufacturing okay amazing it's awesome okay and then finally we have the SAT results um every year we provide you with sat results in the fall we give you AP results the advanced placement exam results but that comes a little bit later but we have the SAT results there these particular students took the test in the fall of 2021 because of covid and all that fun over the last couple of years they did take the test at a different time than we
025would traditionally give the SAT Statewide and so that was given in the fall of 2021 you can see there this is broken down into math evidence-based reading and writing and then meeting college readiness benchmarks in both areas any questions on the SAT scores so they take it earlier or later than they normally do they took it a few months later than they normally would have and then the very last thing is our Sila by literacy which is the students who take that who choose to take that exam they do get that on their transcript and they get a little nice sticker on their diploma saying they are multiliterate sometimes sometimes students get more than one but at least two languages that they can fluently speak any questions for joy thanks thank you it's always exciting
026to see about the senior class and the next item on the agenda is the budget update that would be Tony so this is our second look at the budget of course we'll have more we'll hold a public Hearing in August with final adoption in September after revising some salary numbers in terms of Staffing and looking at vacancies and reconciling some of those identified a larger Surplus than we had in the last version last month we were projecting a surplus of 1.5 million at present we're predicting a surplus of 2.6 that does sound good however revenues are increasing by 0.7 percent relative to the prior year and expenditures are Rising by 2.2 percent or maybe 2.3 um 2.2 excuse me so our expenditure increases are outpacing our Revenue increases and so that gives us pause for
027the future and we must be careful however with this Surplus as we discussed last month gives us an opportunity to move forward educational facilities master plan and in particular the work at JB Nelson school and Alice Gustafson school and insurance that is something we are indeed working on with our Architects and our construction manager and we'll have more information for you about that in August but we have the opportunity to devote more money toward capital projects for that purpose than we otherwise would have planned to with this budget as it stands today the good news is those are one-time costs that not necessarily committed to for future years as it will likely need those funds in the future I'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have Tony could you discuss what the drivers
028are for why our expenses are out exceeding our Revenue the primary drivers right now in terms of cost is in our purchase services as you may recall the board relies very heavily on Outsourcing which generally is good but in the current economy is expensive given inflation so Food Services increasing at a rapid clip custodial services are going up quite dramatically so we've been that contract out last year and our transportation service costs are are also going up as well but those are per contract and meanwhile other non-bid contracts are going up everywhere so um our you know our auditor contracts are going up 10 our athletic services our Trainers for our athletes it's going up uh three almost 300 percent next year so uh there's it's just it's a lot to deal with all at
029once it's all happening simultaneously thank you any other questions for Tony all right next item is policy Dr Hitchens um for your policy report this is the first reading of those five policies that you see there they are all just um they would all uh they're all press recommended changes I would say so if you make those changes then you would be aligned with the Press which is the policy Subscription Service which is so important given the volume of changes that are legislated and come our way and it's hard to stay on top of so um these are all would if you pull open that press policy or anybody or press policy book or most any District policies look pretty much the same these days because of how legislated they are so those five recommendations
030would just put us in line with what the Press attorneys are saying to do and then as always those procedures we bring them here we we um the procedures are our way of implementing those policies or exhibits there's some exhibits in there as well and those don't require your approval but we do want to run them past you in case you have any suggestions so comments or questions about the policies or procedures could you explain what press means again yeah it stands for policy something something subscription service so the Illinois the Illinois Association the Illinois Association of school boards to which you'll you belong they have a board of um superintendents and attorneys like several like uh I bet there's probably 10 at least 10 people and they're they get together and they take all
031of the legislation and they say all right this is how you need to change your policy and it's it's quite hard to do and it's a it's quite a bargain actually we pay 700 for the year for them to do this for us and then they say here's all of the changes you should make but they also do a five-year review so every five years they take a chapter of your policy which if you printed would be about 1100 pages I think um and and I know that because it's in the Press update it says like presses 1100 Pages or whatnot and so they um they do all that for us and then we look at it and then I show it to you and we first we're your first filter and we you know
032go through sometimes they make changes so every five years they'll take a Chapter and review it and they might change the way they abbreviate something or they might change a capital letter to a small letter and we don't bring you all those changes um but we do bring the ones that are substantial and just so you know it's policy reference education Subscription Service reference education it's at the bottom of every these will come back to us next month for approval the policy as well yep any questions on those the only thing I just was going to point out on the one that talks about public participation of school boards it's actually pretty heavily edited and adjusted with comments so everybody should take the time to look through that to make sure that because there are
033a few substantive things there that are actually aligning into some things we've talked about in the past but it starts off right at the beginning that actually kind of provides an overall time limit to public comment right and that is the recommendation from press they said we can put in whatever amount we want and you guys have done the 45 minutes so just want to make sure that kind of getting memorialized here now yeah so yeah there's some school boards throughout the state they said school boards are actually asking for some more clarity about this and some other communities not Batavia that don't necessarily listen to the directives of the board and have have things haven't gone well so there have been there was some pressure to kind of change policies for public participation they're
034pretty minor it um and it matches what we've been doing it's pretty minor for us actually all right so that's all of our reports tonight we do have two items for action on the agendas tonight the first one I'm going to hand over to Dr Hitchens and I'm going to hand it over to Tony well I assumed everybody tell me your name is there oh yeah I don't know why I did that uh Nintendo's not to mention Ed right right I saw it I saw it questions yeah um so this is the culmination of many years of work that included many individuals and we talked about this you know at length last month and I certainly won't belabor it any longer here but this is kind of where the rubber meets the road where if
035the board chooses to do so it would adopt a resolution here specifically that would put the question on the ballot for the November 2022 election and the reason why that's important in terms of timing is because that would allow us to issue bonds and feather in the repayment of those bonds with the retirement of debt that we'll have here in 2025 and so uh the those debt bonding Authority carries forward for five years and it certainly wouldn't be debt that's issued all at once but we would structure the payment such that the tax the implications on the taxpayer wouldn't change so they would carry them forward of course taxes do go up every year but it wouldn't be driven by this part the answer if they answered yes to the part of this particular question
036so that as I said that bonding Authority carries forward for five years and we would do our very best to both time the construction and time the bonds with um inflation and then the market for selling bonds too so that you know but depending on how that works really determines how much money we'll be able to generate to actually do the construction so it isn't something that's done in one Fell Swoop or at once it'll be something that carries forward over a period of years but it's designed to not increase the bond interest tax levy I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have so we've talked about this quite extensively so I'm sort of running on the assumption that we don't have any more questions anyone I don't personally have any questions but
037I kind of feel like since we've had several people from the community reach out to us and there was an article in the paper kind of implying that you know we're doing this without actually any forethought but this is the culmination of a three plus year process which has involved the community extensively of which the community has recommended that we ask this of them um and so we are doing what the community has asked us to do um obviously whether or not that is passed that is up to our community to decide but um a significant number of community members who were involved in the process felt that this was the best option of the ones that we've reviewed after extensively reviewing um the condition of our buildings and what where possible needs are in
038the future so we aren't doing this in a vacuum this isn't a sudden decision this is something that we've been doing for a long time so because we're not asking questions now is not because we don't have any we've asked questions numerous numerous times and we are doing what the community wants to do and we specifically engage them to make sure that this was a Community Driven decision and one thing I was gonna thank you Chris for mentioning that because that's very important to note that this is way longer than just this moment right now um one thing I want to kind of highlight because I'm kind of dealing with it professionally is that you know this is why we're talking about it as dollars to obtain through the bonding process not actually what's going
039to be built and accomplished because dependent on the market and at the time you'll need to be evaluating what we can do with that money and what we need to prioritize based on the money that's available so I just want to make it clear that that's the challenge ahead but it's one that everybody's well prepared for and the background that has been done has helped establish what those priorities should be so all right so our next step is I would entertain a motion to adopt the attached resolution providing for and requiring the submission of the proposition of issuing School building bonds to the voters of the district at the November 8th 2022 general election second move by Mathis second buying was that lock second by lock all in favor oh don't use this one we
040need to do a Voice vote or roll call I would do a roll call go through all right so um Cindy could you please call do a roll call vote trouble yes Gilbert yes yes hello I yes all right sir hi all right um approved as presented like uh it seems very uh anticlimactic because we've been talking about this for such a very long time um next item on our agenda is a search firm consultant so uh the board met tonight and interviewed uh search firms and had an opportunity in Open Session to ask them questions and to talk about the search firm that we are interested in and I don't believe any board members after that first meeting had any questions or further comments so then I am going to um I lost the
041Verge so I would entertain a motion to approve a school exec connect to perform the superintendent's search as proposed and authorize the superintendent to execute a contract in an amount not to exceed nineteen thousand five hundred dollars a second move by lock second by Meadows all in favor aye uh any opposed all right um Dr Hitchens are you going to handle informing them yeah we talked about that notification all right so that was all of the items uh action items on our agenda so I'm going to move to administrative comments Dr Hitchens I do not have any of this evening all right board comments we'll start with Aaron meitzler all right RJ nothing for me Craig I know shocker I'm out here no comments for me yet I'm just going to thank everybody for coming
042thank you stay engaged appreciate it that's it nice job Chris all right uh quick meetings talking about all these items for a very very long time that's one of the things that I do love about the way we do our work is we talk about things um for a for at length before we actually take action on them uh so since nobody had any board comments I will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second move by Meadows second by mites are all in favor aye any opposed all right we are adjourned thank you folks oh okay