Big Hollow School Board Meeting 10/11/2022

001foreign all right we'll resume back into Open Session can everybody's play Stand For The Pledge of Allegiance 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 does anybody have anything to add to the agenda can I please have a motion to approve the agenda OSHA second going Lauren all in favor aye aye any opposed eyes have it I'll take item six whoops sorry I'll take item six uh board I just wanted to thank you again every year this time we celebrate our board members on November 15th which is tomorrow um I think I can speak mostly from the community how how hard I know you all work so thank you and I hope

002that uh I am going to put push this out to our community tomorrow I hope that you can get some comments because people should appreciate the work you guys do well we're going to skip over item seven for now item eight board member code of conduct review Joe I will model continuous learning and work to ensure good governance governance by taking advantage of board member development opportunities such as those sponsored by my state and National School Board associations and encourage my fellow board members to do the same thanks Joe anybody have any questions on the consent agenda can I please have a motion to prove the consent agenda motion Second Joe and Doug yes yes do we have any public comment all right do we have our people everyone here yeah I will uh I

003can hit a few superintendent report items and then uh that are the quick ones I'm gonna jump to B grading practices update um Mr Cuomo is sick tonight so he was going to share a little bit but um just in in your exhibits exhibit nine is a document that Dr hetovitz created and it has a q a for parents it has a series of two to three minute videos on questions around grading at the middle school this was created partially in response to some comments at our CAC meeting and I just wanted you to be aware of it so uh Dr is there anything else you would like to share on this I mean I think we've and if anyone has any questions who do they contact why are the summatives only allowed to be

004oh sure yeah okay so the question was why are summatives only allowed to be retaken within 10 days is that correct so generally the thought process is that if a student has gone through the learning progression in a unit and they get to the end and the summative is given if they don't retake it within 10 days then the thought processes that the learning usually they're on to another unit um I mean that's something that we can look at if there's an extended time that parents would like but that was what was in place actually for the last two years I I mean I guess I just wonder what so we have formatives receive grades one through three through five and then are there needs being addressed by the time they take the summative because

005looking from hearing what we hear from other parents is it's 333 and fail The Summit so how form it I get that formatives can't be take for grades change but are they retaking to the point where the kid then understands what they're supposed to be doing so the the teachers are expected to be reteaching content material that students did not um show Proficiency in or master so if they do poorly throughout the learning progression like they're doing the formatives and they're doing poorly obviously that's real-time information the teacher should be responding to but if there's an issue with the summative um two things so the teacher can re-teach and then the student can retake um but then also if they do poorly on the summative we're we're taking the the most recent learning with the

006formatives to into account so that it it kind of balances out the summative that's what should be happening but if that's not that might be a systemic thing that we need to address well I guess my just my concern is where as a parent where do you see the proof of your kid actually understanding it until you get to the summative because all right so say I get that I see a three on this and they need to get better X Y or Z and then the next formative there's we use two or three usually right yeah three to five is what we've told teachers okay three to five so how do you see as a parent how are you going to see that they understood what they screwed up in the first one I

007would highly recommend okay so checking Google Classroom I know that parents um we've talked about that before but I would highly recommend contacting the teacher and asking for their their actual proficiency scale that the teacher used so if it's not available in Google classroom the teacher should be able to articulate exactly where the student lost points or didn't perform um the standards on the proficiency scale are broken down by a learning Target so it's basically step by step they should be able to tell you which learning Target the student's struggling with okay and let us know if you want to see us on any of those emails we'll help support and provide answers as well but that's generally what should be happening is the summative retake retake um in our hand or in our little

008grading policy document that was created two years ago um it says that either can request it but it I think teachers are kind of encouraging students to come to them but that's a that's a whole other issue but teachers can actually talk to students about how they did and recommend a retake as well where let's say the formulas you're getting starting after like twos threes and by the time you get to the summative you get a four is the are we still going with the concept you now have you know exceeds expectation in the summit of those form of grades completely disappear so if they do poor not poorly but if they don't do as well on the format is what they do well on the summative that's that we take the most recent learning

009so they would get if they got a four on the summative that would be be their grade okay anything else thank you thanks Dr hedgevitz okay I'm gonna hit a couple other things now you can do the recognitions I see more people here for the recognition so that I'm gonna jump to uh we're gonna bounce around tonight so bear with it but sprinkler head project discussion the uh we all know that like at our Primary Elementary specifically we've had some issues the last few years uh sprinkler heads blowing uh I did call in the company uh that does our inspections and I said give me a solution in the packet you'll see his letter uh I wanted to know what are our options the first option is not very feasible it's a basically a complete

010redo of the system uh he did say that the issue we're having is related to the uh design of the system um he told me that it didn't make me feel very very much better but he did say that uh um there are a couple other schools that have the same design same Architects uh that are having a lot more issues I think one's over in Grays Lake they're on 120. um but I said it still doesn't help we're still having this happen periodically so what uh I think option two in the uh pack in the on his letter is probably our best option and that's where they would go through the system and and make sure everything is pitched right so that uh that water is supposed to hit certain areas we are doing

011draining every two weeks once it gets cold to prevent which is quite a task for our for our group our guys but our crew but um we're committed to do that just so we can make sure that uh um do our best to prevent the problem from happening but he told me no matter what we do it could happen again so I just I'm just telling you that I'm going to do everything we can to make it not happen because it's not fun when it does but uh so I'm gonna probably uh talk to them about re-pitching doing that work sometime but in the meantime we'll be doing we'll be draining the system every couple weeks throughout the winter to make sure there's no water in the lines so yeah why didn't you like option

012three actually uh yeah I'm glad you brought that up he says in option three that the that the fire marshal approved him cutting those off and they did they did yeah I was gonna say if the fire marshal approved it then yeah that would be the best option that's that's that would be the best option those are the ones yeah yeah and those those are the ones we have the most problems with um the uh but the fire marshal told me specifically that we can't do that so I don't know where I was gonna ask him where which Fire Marshal he talked to because they told me like can't do it because I because we they have cut a few of them off already or we had problems and they never I guess we can't

013officially if I can get the approval that would be the best option okay I think I think we're waiting on one more person so let me uh see if I can hit item item D is an immunization updates uh we were in very good compliance this year item e is a staffing plan timeline this is something similar that I do every year just sharing it with you I will start meeting with administrators in January we talk about Staffing for next year I just want to outline that timeline for you item F Master board member status congratulations to Joe and Lauren I said it wrong earlier join Lauren we're done the highest level established and Vivian and Doug were distinguished so good job congratulations to that right and then we will save the rest of my

014items I believe for after we get the recognitions done so we'll go ahead and start with switch back to our recognitions so Kevin if you'd want to join me are you gonna be our photographer awesome is Isabella here Isabella come on up [Applause] so Isabella submitted some artwork and you you drew this right first I thought it was something that was printed it was so good so um and this was submitted to the Illinois art education Student Art Show so congratulations we wanted to recognize you and we're proud of you and uh and how you while you represent a Big Hollow we'll give her a little round of applause congratulations congrats and Nathan Kemp come on up Nathan Nathan is an IESA State qualifier in Cross Country so we want to congratulate you for that

015I know that's a big accomplishment and you ran in of meet with how many kids were running you think 238 230 in One race that's a pretty uh pretty crowded event wasn't it yeah a lot of fun a lot of people uh-huh uh Mr Walters coach Walters do you want to share anything I saw you here nice job nice work good job great great congratulations [Applause] congrats Nancy okay all right I'm gonna call up Carrick Hubbard Perry could not be here in September but Kerry was nominated and selected by the whole staff for the September employee of the month and uh I'm gonna let past you mind talking about Carrie or no come on up come on up Lucas shirt first uh don Lucas shared Carrie amazes me on CE while she does the job

016of Behavioral investors specialist day in and day out she has stepped up to the task and you can see the change in some of our toughest behavioral students who really need that extra support in learning the coping skills and expectations of being in the classroom and interacting with other students socially to be successful she is asked to help train teachers and other paraprofessionals in these buildings to help these students probably one of the hardest and most frustrating jobs right now sometimes it is people like Carrie who go unnoticed and come to school each day ready to change ready to make a change in the world so I'll piggyback on that um I nominated Carrie um always willing for her role this year so she uh she created by bass and by Dawn and voted on

017by the entire staff so congratulations Carrie and we'll take a quick picture here okay all right very well deserved thank you all right can I have Bridget Schuler back come on up Bridget [Applause] okay now I'm gonna read is anybody else here to speak on Bridget yes come on come on see Mrs Byrd is going to speak on Bridget's behalf and I know you see Bridget Jacob all right good to see you Jacob yeah Jacob's my guy every day all right I'm gonna let you speak I'm nominated Bridget because well she's amazing with Jacob and with all the kids in my class she's amazing with me she's just like we met at that Kagan strategy thing back in August and I was like please let it be mine please let it read my room but

018um she is so good she's so committed she so sincere and she truly loves the kids she loves everything about her job she's so good with Jacob um just think that Big Hollow is so lucky to have her we're so blessed to have her and someone who cares as much as she does and puts in the effort that she does every day when she comes to work couldn't be said better right there stay right here [Applause] yeah I think you have something to give I think you have something new oh that's awesome not me that is does that make it worth it Jacob stay up here Jacob stay up here Jacob let's get a picture messy all right Jacob okay awesome good job there you go thank you and that was uh that was great

019thank you fabulous [Applause] okay all right Nicole come on up foreign I gave the wrong plaques away just so if you have one as student a month I'm gonna ask I'm going to ask Mrs Lancaster to come on up Nicole was nominated by Mrs Lancaster or her teacher and uh I think Mrs Lancaster is going to share a pretty special story with us this is Nicole and I nominated Nicole [Music] Nicole um well I knew from the beginning of the year she was going to be awesome but we have from Ukraine and this girl not only speaks English she speaks Ukrainian and Russian talk about a brain in here and she was a little bit nervous um Dr Bianca Lana reached out to Mom and Dad and they said no she can do that because

020she was a little shy and this girl has stepped it up she has been a friend a mentor she's helped me she helps the other students and she she's helped our student make friends I think that if every new student was welcome to Big Hollow and even the United States like Nicole has welcomed and helped our friend annalina that this would be a pretty darn good country so I'm really proud of her and she's her confidence everything about her is just blossomed I love having her in my class I might keep her forever there you go and this is why we this is why we do this for things like this this is make this is pretty special so thank you for how you're uh being such a great friend okay awesome thank you everybody

021that came for the recognitions you can stay for the board meeting if you want but you don't have to some pretty cool recognitions tonight for the board I am trying to get academic spotlights but I'm not having luck that's where our staff comes and presents I just can't not having a lot of luck with that right now all right going back to item 11 superintendents report um I'm gonna go into uh exhibit eight which is the school report card presentation so Dr hezovitz and I are going to team up on this one if you've looked at your packet ahead of time you notice this is a lot uh we're not going to go through this page by Page um but please let me know if you have any questions so I I didn't I wanted

022to make sure you had the information um but I also don't want to overwhelm you tonight and just read off slides so I'm going to summarize points that I think are really important for us to talk about and then but please just let me know if there's something you saw that you have questions about um and this is going to be a little harder since I can't refer to a screen so uh but I'm on exhibit eight and I will have the rest of this for you too in case you don't have it okay okay um start off the exhibit or the the packets or this exhibit with our district mission and vision just to point you to that uh and the goals of specifically goal one is ensuring high levels of growth for all

023Learners and uh we specifically have three targets there develop a standards-based reporting system strengthen systems of support for all Learners and enhancing our professional Learning Community practices those are three very important things that we are doing it's uh it's a part of um uh our strategic action plan and we've got a lot of good work going on throughout the district on that I'm going to skip now down to the Illinois school report card summary um there's a there's a header page that that has the link to the Illinois school report card on it um but then I'm gonna go to the next page you should see a green border on the page at the top it says Big Hollow sd38 um if you I tomorrow I am going to send a link out to our

024community uh with with a little more information on the school report card I want to review it with the board first so that's why I'm doing that tonight uh this this document here what I did was uh I didn't print off the entire report card because it's it's uh it's pretty massive so what I what you'll see on these pages that have the green uh I think all of them have green yeah I have a green header on them are you're going to see a snapshot of some items that I pulled out of there and then we are going to share some of our student assessment data in a different way um it is all on the school report card though uh so I'm gonna flip through this a little bit and highlight so the

025uh there is a school level finances page I think you might find some things there that are uh somewhat interesting but uh it's nothing there that we haven't talked about before I'm gonna the uh the on the second page that says School level finances there is a I want to point to you there is a an area that breaks down by school what our expenses are and what you'll see is that we have prioritized our expenses at the primary school that's that's expenses per child per pupil expenses uh so you'll see our highest zip primary second is it Elementary third is at middle per pupil expenses um we purposely have devoted more resources to that building to try to front load our services and support for kids uh District environments page starts with District finances

026expenditures by fund I'll be honest with you I I've included these in here for your for you to look at but they they're always running behind on their financial data so the data I give you is going to be up to date this is a year or two behind depending on what what data they're looking at but you'll see that some of this is 2021 uh student enrollment um I'm going to there's there's a page that says student enrollment at the top what is it and there's some data on that page so I'm going to skip to the next page that says a five-year race ethnicity Trend I don't know if you can see it looks like this uh I think that there's some there's some you'll see if you look at that our demographics

027are changing from 2016 which is the far right follow it to the left and you'll see our demographics are changing in the different uh uh ethnicities race and ethnicity the next page is something that I think is that we need to be aware of too it's the five-year ell Trend so uh in 2016 our English language Learners uh were made up of was made up of 6.7 percent of our population is now 11.1 we've seen a significant increase in our El population over the last five years chronic truancy is chronic absenteeism is in there these numbers in my opinion are high I mean well not my opinion they are high compared to Prior years uh but with uh this is going off last year's data where we were it had kids being quarantined and so

028the absenteeism numbers were high they were still lower than the state averages which did surprise I mean that I guess it doesn't surprise me but uh we were significantly lower in state averages on that but I still think it's it's higher than typical for us chronically truant is absence that's absence without uh excused cause uh our numbers pretty low compared to the state uh you see teachers information on the next page which next page is uh um The Chronic attendance yeah uh that that is uh absence you mean The Chronic absenteeism or the teacher information it says their attendance rate is 59 compared to the state which is 66. ah let me look here you know what Kevin I might have to do I can't remember I don't want to tell you wrong but I

029think that would be uh percent of teachers that missed less a certain number of days and I don't remember how many days that is though um yeah but it is it is uh the state had the same issue so it is lower uh it is we do have a worse attendance rate than the state somebody else was gonna think 10. okay fewer than 10. and how many sick days are they allowed in contract 13 is the minimum that's interesting they don't track it until after they wouldn't start the tracking after that point oh because it does seem like it looks like 59 seems like it's an outrageous number but if yeah so 59 have less than 10 days absence is what that means or being penalized because the teachers are taking their allowed absences yeah

030I mean honestly there's uh it's just uh they're not they're just putting a number there they're not holding us accountable to anything but yeah it doesn't look good yeah that's why it was yeah I didn't know if it was the lower number was that like golf or a little yeah yeah in this case a higher number yeah in this case higher number would be better I don't remember I have to look back I mean I can look at prior years Data before the covid uh to see too how we compared but um yeah some of this is does that mean does that mean we only have 40 of teachers that use less than 10 sick days a year no the 60 no the 59 percent represents the percent of teachers that use less than ten

031they use less than ten yeah so 40 use more than 10. yeah yep last year last year so and last year we were quarantining them so what I'd have to do is for you is check what it was prior to the pandemic I I hate to make a judgment on that with last year recording came two years ago if teachers got covered last year though oh it was still going around right yeah last year we did have to but then it would be reflected in our attendance data too for the general which it was but it was was in line with the state that's my question is that yeah we've got whatever that seven point difference between us and the state itself yeah it's really off compared to everything else it could be that all

032of them are taking their 13 . that could be two which is perfectly fine yeah right because that's why I'm asking I'm like yeah right yeah but remember you could only imagine you take off like two or three days right yeah because of like maternity leave yeah attorneys all of that but like you said Kevin said it is different than the state there's something there uh I'm on student-to-teacher ratios uh the average teacher salary that page there um data has been consistent with what uh has been in the past retention rates uh what this number represents is that uh three-year average percent of full-time teachers returning to the same school year to year so 80 88.1 percent if you look at is all of our teachers is what our retention rate has been State average

033is 87.8 so right in the ballpark um student staff ratios student to certified staff so all of our certified staff uh there's one student to every 10 certified staff which is pretty in line with the state there's administrative salary data similar to the Past and then the next slide says is the summative designation this is the I'm gonna then you go to the next slide you should see uh uh it says four at the top says four annual summative designations on the left hand side you see exemplary commendable targeted comprehensive those are the four ratings I I want to give you an explanation here of of how this works and I have gone through now and met with all of the buildings and at the middle school we went to and met with all the

034teams all the grade level teams so to kind of share this data with them so everybody's very aware how this works uh exemplary schools that follow the exemplary range are in the top 10 percent what they do is they give every school a a zero to 100 score every school gets a zero to 100 score so if there were a thousand schools there's more than that but if there were a thousand in Illinois they would they would rank they would all have a zero to 100 score and and I'll show you how they come up with a score and then when they get everybody gets their score they take a line they draw draw the top 10 percent they draw a line the top 10 percent are considered exemplary and then they take another line

035and they draw it at the bottom five percent and the bottom five percent are called comprehensive and they go through a very significant School improvement process everybody else between the five percent and the top the bottom five the top ten is considered commendable unless you have a a demographic group or a program that is testing below that bottom so the bottom the bottom five percent I'm going to say they say they draw the line at the bottom five percent let's say that line actually I do the line for this year was like 31.6 so if your school number was below 30 36 you were comprehensive if any one of these programs children with disabilities economically disadvantaged English Learners former English learners if any of those programs in your school like I'll use children's disabilities example

036they take all of our children with that have IEPs and um they see how did they do if we only give them if we see just how they did as a group if that group tests or does lower than the bottom five percent whole school score for that bottom five percent then this the school they're in becomes targeted for assistance that's how that works I hope that makes sense so that school becomes targeted for assistance um if you can look at this one real quick I don't want to spend a lot of time I don't want to throw too much but I want you to see how there's a circle graph on the left says elementary middle at the top the data they use that's a if you that's a that's a pie graph and

037it's a hundred percent and it tells you how they get the hundred percent there's Ela growth there's math growth there's Ela proficiency math proficiency science proficiency El progress to proficiency chronic absenteeism and climate survey all of those things add up to 100 percent the state goes through and sees checks how we did in each of those areas and that's how they give you that zero to 100 score you can see that how high our students achieve on the iar is part of this but it's only that's under the ELA proficiency the math proficiency and the science proficiency that's how well the kids do on the test the growth is half is 50 percent 25 for ELA 25 math does that make sense so the growth is a bigger part of this I'm going to skip

038down to the page that looks like this it's just a couple Pages down it says Ela proficiency targets third and fourth grade this is to be the only one of those pages we'll look at there's several of these pages in here but I just want to explain how this works on the top on the far left there's a column that lists all the years 2022 just follow that across you have for all students the ELA proficiency Target for third and fourth grade which means all of our third fourth graders took the Ala tests the iar test if you see the number 21.9 there we have 21.9 or more of our students met the met or exceeded expectations and I are then we got 100 of the uh of that piece of the pie which was

039seven and a half points that's how they did that so those are the proficiency targets going across for all of those groups so if they were to analyze our children with disabilities group if you look it says 8.94 that's the target for the state these are numbers for the whole state not just Big Hollow 8.94 means if 8.94 of our children with disabilities met or exceeded the iar standards for third and fourth grade then we met the target for a special students with special needs that's what that means so all those pages there's like four or five those are just I just I concluded them so you have them but I don't expect you to go through those um all those pages are just proficiency targets and our staff are is very aware of those

040those go up next year and we just got we're paying uh close attention to that if I could now shift you down to a page that looks like this I have a question recording that so on that last grouping you could theoretically have a student that may score lower but being three different categories they'll count for every one of them whereas one student may only be in one category and so they only count once yeah it doesn't seem like it would make seems like it's waiting it they uh yeah they'll count for every every category that they fall into they will they will have a score that's how it works I've had multiple teachers ask the same question yeah I mean it just it's such a mix of yeah I mean obviously students are in

041multiple categories so why would you count so two or three times in some one time yeah it's a state question I guess so this uh this next one it says the title at the top says Elementary slash High School summative designation scores report slash summer summary and I have one in the middle of page it says Big Hollow primary you guys find that one okay so I don't want to go into a lot of detail with this I will I can I can ask like I can answer questions individually later if you want them but uh but in a in a nutshell this is how it works look at this the rows that say all there's uh there says under data type it says raw calculation indicator score weighted index if you if you look

042where it says all and then follow the weighted index across and there's a number that says 58.39 did you find that one so that's the score that's that zero to 100 score for primary um the cutoff was 31.6 for the lowest level we're in the commendable range if that for the all portion now here's the here's here's the thing about primary and this is probably not a good example to do first primary doesn't even have the iar assessment because they only we only have kindergarten first grade so where do they get these proficiency scores they take all of the kids in third grade last year who were also in primary as first graders their scores in third grade count for primaries proficiency if they were in Big Hollow in first grade and took the test

043at Big Hollow in third grade that's that's how that works the growth scores the next column are the kids that are in fourth grade last year because they had to had to get they had to take the test in third grade and in fourth grade in Big Hollow and still be it primary when they're in first grade so that's a that's how they get those scores you look and and Ash asked this question earlier um before the meeting primary if you follow the next row the CWD that's children with disabilities if you follow that across the number 31.25 and I'm going to point over one column to the left where it says chronic absenteeism that number for primary was was significantly High last year so uh chronic acid absenteeism is if I go back to

044the pie chart I believe it was 20 yeah so the pie chart showed that chronic aspenteeism is worth 20 of this whole score 20 points their children with disabilities 45 of them were chronically absent last year and so because of that they gave primary 2.5 points out of the 20. and then because of that we dip below the 31.6 by four tenths so that building is now listed as targeted for assistance with children with disabilities but that's the that's why so do you have a reason for the high absentee rate I the only thing I can point to two things when students were out because of covid absences we could count them as present if they were remote learning but there was a two-day delay getting them from school to remote learning so we lost

045those days and children with disabilities specifically at primary most of our children with disabilities are in the pre or in the Early Childhood Program and I think we had significant absences in that program there's so much interaction with the kids if one got sick they they went down that's the only thing I can point to have you checked their current absentee rate I have not I have not it's a good question though why is Early Childhood accounting um is that is even a required program by the state good question the only requirement is that uh children between three and five who have a disability we have to provide for and so those are the only kids that are counting here so we do have a blended program we have some people paying tuition to come

046they do not count here so their their their absenteeism doesn't their attendance doesn't count nothing counts for them because that's a that's a voluntary program for them but the students with disabilities we is a is a required program for us so those students are counting yes wow did I take this in math class it kind of makes sense because you have to be able to track and you can you wouldn't know their performance two different areas though I think it's yeah it's a complex system I will say this I mean I've told the teachers this too that I'm critical of state board quite a bit but as far as accountability systems this is a pretty fair system in most aspects a lot of States just say how well do they achieve how high they achieve

047draw the lines and this at least factors in growth because the growth measures are good um uh the with the challenge here look if you want to scroll down to the next page is elementary schools break down uh and if you could now that you've seen the tables you can just look to the far right the summative scores uh 31.6 was the break so all those all of our groups were above the 31.6 so the school is listed as commendable do we think that we've got room to improve obviously and we know that and we've been talking uh pretty uh in depth with our staff about just all of us all of us including me changing our mindset around this iar test but you can see that nowhere was the elementary school close to the

04831.6 their chronic absenteeism specifically was much better than the the primary and I think primarily because of the early childhood and the middle school is the next one uh then one this year yeah the one this year that one is not those kids will not be part of it they won't no the only ones that will be part once they turn three if they get uh if they have an IEP they become part of our program and then just yeah so I fully understand it yeah you could have children with disability and also be one of the other yeah categories yeah for sure okay yep they will be considered they would be in the all and then if they were Hispanic or Latino they'd be in that one too um low income it could be

049in all of them yeah yeah and two schools right yep it's interesting it really is I mean it's been kind of interesting for us to go through the data Michelle's going to be able to get you a little deeper into that but uh so if they'll go to elementary you can see the far right column you can see where we're at now Middle School uh you can see with children with disabilities in middle school we got that was our lowest area 36.71 but again Middle School is listed as commendable because we didn't dip below the 31.6 on any of those but we did see um and Michelle is going to get into this a little further but um we did see a dip in our test scores at the middle school period I mean we

050really did and uh we can we can talk a lot about why and I think it's just going to be a matter of right now we're trying to change the narrative around the assessment and Dr Hedgewood is going to show you some of the data we're looking at to see if we can change some things that are going on in the classroom but part of one of our bigger issues is just getting the uh the focus around the importance of this assessment because it is forward facing to our community and so we really need to change that narrative so um so again Middle School is listed as commendable but we do see a lot of areas where we need to have some growth the uh the challenging thing with the growth scores here is that

051we are comparing uh growth from uh two years ago where only half our kids took the iar because we were in a blended hybrid anybody who was doing full remote not coming to school at all they didn't take the iir that year so we had about between 55 and 60 of our kids take it so last year the growth was only on the kids who took it both years so it's hard to draw a lot of assumptions but uh we're definitely taking up I mean in my my time here this is the this is we've had I'd say this fall we've had more um conversations around IR than we've ever had usually we focused on map but uh you know I've learned that I have to change that narrative myself so I'm going to shift

052now to Dr hetervitz who's going to take over on some of the uh IR specific data all right so kind of picking up where we left off I've got slide 93 but it's the rainbow colored chart with this chart actually was given to us by the regional Office of Education they've been sharing this with districts in Lake County just they were doing some digging and kind of just wanted to give a historical view of the pandemic effects so we've got um you know great information there for you if you'd like to take a look um and then kind of moving forward we've talked a little bit about iar and evidence statements before but we wanted to make sure that we showed you just a couple examples um that might provide a little insight in terms

053of um you know some of the performance that we're seeing on our IR assessments throughout third through eighth grade so that evidence statement analysis that you see there it says grade four Ela 2020 2021 the way to read this analysis is when students take iar they are presented with different forms of the test but in general um every student was presented with the standards that are along the bottom there so they list them they've got kind of funky names RI 4.9 for example and as you look across the bottom of that graph each of those standards that are listed they're listed in order of difficulty so the ones closest to the bottom left corner are considered more difficult than the ones toward the right hand side and so this was our iir data for ELA

054in fourth grade back in 2020 2021 we didn't have everyone take the test we only had 108 students but what you're looking at here is the Green Dot is our district and then the blue squares are the state so anytime you see a little Green Dot dipping below that blue square that means that we did not perform as well as most of the other students in the state and so if you go to the next page it lists and this is what we're looking at with teachers um actually this Friday they're going to be doing their own analysis of the data for each of their grade levels and so when you look at that next page it's not only giving you the standard but it's also listening to listing the titum the item type so

055in terms of PCR that's prose constructed response techr or technology enhanced constructed responses so you can see that they even go as as in detail to give us the actual item type that students are struggling with so what we've started doing is we've started building in those types of items into our everyday assessments because students don't always have to drag and drop on an assessment sometimes they don't even know what they're being asked to do in terms of moving that Mouse on the screen so um I wanted to just include that just to give you some context and then the next page is actually the same grade level Ela again for last year's iar and again when you'd start taking a look at the green dots were starting to Trend a little bit up above

056the state so it's it's very um it's giving us a lot of hope I think as we go through the data you'll see some areas that we know we need a lot of work in that we're actively addressing as a district and then scrolling through um I threw math in there as well as an example and again you're going to see more of those green dots trending above that blue square line so it's very promising our work obviously is not done yet the following slides were also given to us by the Roe they conducted an analysis of the last three times that we've taken iar and again what they're doing is they're going through by standard to let us know exactly what students need work on and you'll see some consistencies throughout the school years

057and each grade but we know exactly what we need to do in terms of enhancing our instruction and giving students more exposure to those standards that are interested I'm gonna I want to make sure one point's not sure you mentioned that so the first two graphs 20 21 ones 20 21 yes one is 21 22. yep and it's both they're both fourth grade and this graph is after addressing correct so yeah go ahead and explain that so um I threw fourth grade into this presentation for a couple reasons one reason is because they um moved ahead of the rest of the district on their own when they started doing the Roe work the guaranteed and viable curriculum work um there are some talented Educators on the team and they just kind of decided they wanted

058to move forward before waiting for the meetings that we were hosting and so um the my assumption and my conclusion this is my own personal opinion and I I would have to prove it to you somehow but what I believe is happening is they've included more of the um item types onto their assessment students were getting more and more practice with that but a lot of the issues that were happening with scope and sequences were corrected earlier with fourth grade so for example I've had many meetings where I've sat and talked to teachers about data and they've said we never got to that unit specifically narrative writing they were telling me they never got to the unit at the end of the year and that's obviously an issue because as if we wait to do

059the unit in April May we've already taken iar and so fourth grade corrected a lot of those scope and sequence issues very early on and um so they weren't missing out on the most prioritized content that the roe has told us we need work on so like I said we need to make more improvements but that is my conclusion and I will stick with it I know exactly what the team's done they've taken every tip and every piece of information that the are we has given them and applied it and so what we're what we're doing is we're hoping to see that consistency across all of the other grade levels every team is still working on this but essentially that's okay my best explanation so is fourth grade the only grade that showed this Improvement

060yes third grade was close they had done a little bit of the work as well much before Middle School I yeah I just mean but so um were any of the grades significantly less improved like their green drops yes I will go through that um yeah I'll go through it for you sorry no problem there's a lot those charts are not in here but oh yeah but the writing is actually in here the writing data that I'll go over will show you because again that that the writing piece itself is a huge area of improvement for us so um going through the rest of the slides like I said grade six grade seven grade eight it's it's all telling you you know what standards we need work on um in terms of the reading especially

061and then we get into the writing so I'm looking at the it says third grade and it's right after the Big Hollow writing data slide um this is a great analysis as well and I think there's some celebrations to be had again third and fourth and fifth I would say um has made they've made some adjustments and as you can see back in 2019 2021 and 2022 all of that data is laid out for you and for literary analysis for example third grade maintained from 2019 to 2022. um we're trending above for research simulation again a huge celebration and then there's that narrative writing and we went down and I again I I just had a conversation with a teacher today and she said we never got to the right the narrative writing unit and

062so I said well how can we creatively integrate that into your whole school year that maybe on Fridays you're doing narrative practice writing activities so those are the types of adjustments that we're making uh fourth grade again if you take a look for research Sim literary analysis we're trending up and then for a narrative we went down fifth grade you see some anomalies there we were going down from 19 to 21 and then we kind of picked back up um so we're still going down literary analysis and narrative but we went we kind of trended up again for research Sim so that's good sixth grade here's the date I was going to kind of show you um we're trending down for all three writing types and then again for seventh and again for eighth and

063that's bringing down our overall scores quite a bit so if we're doing well in the reading portion of iar that the writing is what's kind of bringing us the other way um and then the next couple slides are just analysis um comparing us to the state you will see some interesting things there too um when the state went down we kind of went down so again sometimes it's just that fluctuation with that the generation you know the cohort of students that's taking it Statewide but in general it's telling us exactly where we need to focus our efforts um research Sim literary analysis all of it needs work but the narrative is where we really took a hit I'm so especially seventh and eighth so I I will be completely honest with you the conversations I've

064been having are very much we have teachers who um are not using the district approved resources and so there's been conversations about that very recently that we're addressing um the feeling is I think they're stuck a little bit on their resources that they were using during the pandemic and they have not had as much time to complete the GVC work because of all the canceled meetings as well we were able to get subs next door much easier than we were able to get them here um so in terms of rigor and high expectations for students we have a lot of work to do yeah because I mean if you look at their past ones they just they seemed like they were more mid-level and then all of a sudden it and there's again that is

065he that we were trying to get away from um a lot of the like fifth grade has made a lot of progress um kind of reverting back to using our school-wide resources we had meetings today with all of our ELA teachers here at the middle school and just reviewed um you know workshop model and what should be happening and how teachers should be working individually and in small groups with students on a daily basis and so actually the administration I have to really give them a lot of credit they spent all day lesson planning with teachers um it didn't get down to the granular level but it got down very specifically even moving forward what they're doing next week in the following week and the following week and trying to put some uniformity to that

066and again it's definitely adjustments that we're making so um a lot of the grade levels we don't have a far way to go they've got a lot of good work done it's just that we have to keep implementing um rather than reverting back to what we were doing during the pandemic um and then this glass School wide that's our district approved resource yes that the elementary is using consistently but um I mean this chart go back to third grade or writing is still at or below state level let's go starting in third grade yes and then we weren't using school-wide in 2019 right we had just adopted it I think in February of that year so then we implemented yeah it was the first of the previous year we adopted it so this chart would

067be 2018 which is before school-wide and our scores are five to ten points higher back in 2019 than they are and 22. so is this resource uh commendable resource is it a standard nowadays or um there's many different resources that are used in the county um I will tell you that the first year we used it was a very our very first year of implementation and then we went right into the pandemic and didn't touch it right so I don't know how we how I can make judgments yet um I want to believe that it's just because we've been inconsistent with our implementation and we're getting back on track now um obviously it's something we'll continue to watch um but the the practices have to be there too the instructional practices have to be in

068place no resource is going to make any difference if you're not using best practice I mean how how long do do we wait on these I guess is usually Trend date is three years of actually using the resource that's what other districts that's when they start to make judgments about whether changes are needed yeah because I mean even if teachers weren't using whatever we provided back in 19 our scores were still better than they were when they're still not providing using the resources that were provided were provided they were still better you see I guess yeah yes I completely understand and I like I said I think we need to continue to monitor it um we know research tells us small group instruction but what we're hearing in a lot of our classrooms is they're

069struggling to get to the small group and so that's something we're working on and actually that was part of the discussion today is really looking at their actual time period for each set each class and how can we break down that 68 minutes so that you're doing the mini lesson and you're moving in a small group and you're providing that reteaching and and what is actually being covered in iar is actually taught before the kids take the test would probably be that's critical correct if you had to make other adjustments to um you know some of the other subjects same type of thing like they were saying they didn't get to things or they ran out of time so then we started looking at that pacing for each unit and are they spending too much

070time in one unit and not enough in the other and how do we make those adjustments so something we're working on across the board frankly and then the the whole other issue is the um the students approach to the exam you know like uh just if we're gonna put all of our stock and this data then we've got to make sure that we are getting the best out of them when they take it and yeah it's hard it is but you I mean if you look back if they're like the eighth grade's previous scores at some point they were trying because they were excelling so yeah and I'm so I'm not putting it on this other than their characters have yeah had to have changed as well yeah I mean not that it's it's yeah

071yeah I'm not putting on the students either it's more like it's our entire uh I think definitely I can say in 21 when they came in to take the tests and during the pandemic we heard uh yeah 21 it was more like I remember it was kind of like this is ridiculous why are the kids yeah but even at that point they did it better than they did this right yeah and then last year so it was like we didn't really harp on it last year yeah and they performed good and then this year yeah that's abysmal I mean yeah no for sure 10 of kids in the high school with literal being able to and whatever literary analysis means we're saying 10 of kids in the high school for that right that's what I'm

072reading here because yeah I mean I know we spent the summer talking about how important those exams were going to be this year and so I know the teachers knew the emphasis going into it but it's still yeah the exact well this this is like from last year since last yeah this data was this test was taken in uh April March or March from last year okay yeah and so I we received this data this summer so and then it's now finally getting out there so our hope is that the test is taken this March yeah that we're going to see some some up upkeep from there what is the time State puts out but we'll be doing it I can pull it up we pushed it back yeah we did push it back we

073pushed it we were doing it before spring break and because we didn't want it to back up to map but Dr Patrick and I talked about let's just push it back as far as we can so we can make sure we can get as much covered as we were finding in the areas that we weren't getting to so we just pushed it back to the very end of the window we've got um April 3rd through April 18th it's toward the end flash or didn't we make them do I'm not familiar with how we're working on starting a schedule yet we're working on that and uh Josh I know is working on that yeah they want to do it there's things they want to do one issue is that when we it's it's complicated but if

074you start the tests seventh grade math tests that day you have to give every student that test that day you can't uh you can't give some of them the test one day and some of them test the next day so there's that puts a wrench in some of our scheduling plans but we're still working on that piece the teachers prefer to give the test to their kids in their class so we're going to try to work that out but it's going to be hard but we're trying to attack the environment issues Dr hetovitz is attacking the instructional and the curriculum alignment issues it was hard last year too because like third grade they only took or the year before I should say only 100 students 117 students took the test and then last year was

075161 so fourth grade 108 took it and then last year 186 took it so it's hard because we're not necessarily comparing apples to oranges but either way the data is speaking to us so we have to respond I do have uh I didn't put it in the packet because I don't know how much the other schools want us to share it but I do have a date I can share it with you as board members anybody can get it online too if they want to do the research but I do have data from local schools I can share with you and um for the most part we trended about the same as the as when I say local there's a Circle right around us so anybody that's touching our boundaries pretty much is where this

076data is and and everybody trended about the same um it wasn't good I mean but uh the issue is going to be where we go from here and uh it's it's uh it's been the highest thing on my list since uh June since I saw the data because it's really disappointing where we're at sources I think we're set we are set yeah yeah I think we're set we really are we're in a good spot any other yeah any other resources that teachers ask for like we've had some requests for leveled text because like for example third grade teachers don't have some of the lower level techs that they're seeing students come in reading so we've purchased those using grant money it's been fabulous to have that um so if there was a silver bullet like

077do this everybody be doing it it's just not yeah the Roe it works with all sorts of different districts in Lake County and a lot of the same work they're having to rewrite you know some of the assessments to make sure they're more rigorous and match iar and then align our instruction backwards from the assessment so it's definitely a work in progress but I think again you know school-wide is a resource so if teachers ask me this all the time well our curriculum isn't at school-wide I said the curriculum is the standards we are teaching the standards you are responsible for teaching those in using a resource called school-wide is what the district has adopted um and school that doesn't align we pull other resources absolutely we've got newsella we've got common lit so we

078are strategically using things as we feel like school-wide doesn't line up well with something IR is assessing then they've pulled other resources to line up but balanced literacy is really the model that we're looking for um so shared reading small group reading you know small group writing lessons with students that's what we're looking for instructionally so that if we can make some tweaks there and make sure we're being consistent um that small group instruction is so powerful so same thing in math with workshop model it's a small group responding to student needs as the the data and formative assessments is telling us we need to so any other questions any questions very good questions thank you appreciate it all right I'm going to jump down to uh item G iasb resolutions committee report Vivian will

079be attending Resolute the uh I've lost that what's that called delegation delegate yeah so there are um there are free I only put in the packet some the resolutions I think are going to be up for vote again uh the first one is on exhibit 12 fun actually this one's kind of interesting I don't know if you had a chance to look at this or not but the fund balances Miller ratio adjustment the reason it's interesting is do you remember last year how because we had a fund balance that was more than double our in our o m is more than double our uh we had to pay uh we had some taxpayers come after us for that this is asking to increase that from two a factor of two to three so we'd have

080to have triple in order to get fined for that and uh so other districts must have had that issue looks like it was submitted by home or Community Consolidated District but my recommendation there would be to vote Yes get that thing increased but we're okay for anywhere in the near future but the next one was alternate fueled School Bus funding I don't know if anybody has any any uh actually they recommended not to adopt that which is what I didn't either I didn't get that either caused the Diesels who knows what that's going to be next year maybe they're worried that they'll take away from the current fund we receive or is that state money not federal state state I don't know I was confused when I read that because I didn't see that coming

081and in the end they said we recommend not to adopt it I don't have an opinion on that really yes they don't like me for real you know firearm dealer location any strong opinions on that one seems like they're trying to trying to yeah and that was Mundelein so only 1500 feet to 500. I mean it's a block yeah they just want one place they're trying to get rid of I guess right I don't know I mean I say no I don't really care yeah no one's moving in without a block not really until Joe buys the house across the street and these are just how do we want iasb to Advocate right if I'm going too fast tell me I I'm just sensing if there's any strong opinions let me know the next page

082is capital Grant fund for school buildings basically asking for the state to come up with capital Grant funds we would not qualify for this because of our buildings being so new that's going to go to buildings that are in our schools that have buildings that are 100 years old we would qualify because we're in the lowest tier of funding but the building's being so new so that one won't impact us as much the next one is school safety fund that would be great in my opinion but the next one is involvement with candidates for public office I didn't get this one I couldn't understand because it says they don't they're not recommending it I'd say no yeah I would we're a school we're not supposed to be political right yeah thank you man uh the

083next one's mandates Review Committee basically uh trying to get rid of some of the unfunded mandates which I think yes and then Financial contribution for School Board elections for people really taking political action funds for their school foreign I wouldn't say that one's a yeah says to adopt yeah that's all I've got Kevin I think I got everything all right thanks Vivian we're doing that again uh anybody have any questions on the employment recommendations nope can I please have a motion to approve uh the October appointment recommendations yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes all right I know I'm going to spend a little time on this one it's been a lot tonight so I'm gonna I'll do my best but uh just tell me if I need to move faster uh tax

084levy we have to do tonight's just a tentative Levy then December I bring it back to you for a formal approval um I've added this is a presentation that a similar format I've done in Prior years but I've added some stuff first Pages I've added some definitions for you in case there's anything there that because I know we only talk about this once a year so there's the levy that we're going to ask the county for the extension is what they decide in April what we are gonna or the March April they'll decide what we're going to receive from the county uh the eav is our equalized assessed valuation which is what they they decide our our entire School inside our district boundaries what are what our properties worth Consumer Price indexes impacts our Levy

085this year it's up over five percent uh we are in a p-tel county so um it's uh property tax extension limitation um basically the the five percent is the cap so even if inflation is eight percent we can only get five uh usually inflation's at like two percent and we're usually getting be somewhere between when you count new properties that we're getting between two and three percent max is where we're getting so this year's different it's an anomaly but if you go to the second page of the document I just listed all of our fund balances over the years this is a document you've seen probably before even this year when we did the budget uh all these numbers are are post audits so they're accurate I use these numbers to determine if we need

086to move some Levy Dollars around from One Fund to the other the one that if you look at the tort fund it's it's the end of the year balance was 38 792 that's pretty low that's the fund that we have we pay our property insurance out of and our workman's comp insurance there's no reason to carry a large fund balance there just kind of have enough to pay the bills every year and it's two checks we write so I'll Levy a little more money there just so we don't get too close to zero there uh the next table is a table of tax rates across the county I'll be honest with you I wouldn't I won't spend a lot of time talking tax rates because there's so many factors that go into this but we

087are right in the middle at 3.959075 that's what was our tax rate was last year where it puts us about right in the middle of this chart uh I put at the bottom of that table you see in bold 1.2151 of that rate is our bond payment so if you take the 395 and you take a dollar 21 off you're down to 274 and then that would Place us at the very bottom of this we replace our uh if we once a Bond's paid off it'll get us get us in the bottom four the next page is one I want to point you to that I think is important one for everybody to understand I will tell you I did a I've done it I've presented some of this information to the CAC I presented

088this information Saturday to a group at a coffee and chat at Starbucks uh so the parents find this pretty interesting but I think it's it's important that people understand this so you've seen some of this before this is a list of all the elementary elementary districts in Lake County it's not any of the unit districts and high school districts they're they're funded differently so I don't put comparisons out there the percent adequacy is if you remember this is where the state gives us a calculation 100 adequacy means that we're receiving 100 of the dollars they think we need to run the school district and to to run it to their standards so those that are at 100 that's what that's they're they're they're receiving the funds they need to run their school district and provide

089the services they need for kids according to the state you can see we're at 66 we've been near the bottom of this list for several years since they've developed this formula it hasn't changed we have been receiving more funds from the state which has been uh much um well it's been well received and well used uh but if you go to the column to the right of that where it says adequacy Gap that's a it's a new figure I'm giving you this year that I haven't done the past but that tells you how far away from 100 we are so the eight million dollars is how far away we are and the reason I think that's significant is that um all those districts that are 100 they're getting that Gap closed so they so when

090I talk to parents so parents ask me so what does that mean and I said that that's that means reading interventionists math interventionists uh that's that's those kind of positions that a lot of districts are able to fund that we don't have necessarily it's not I mean it's definitely on our list of priorities but the gifted programs the you know those are things that um these districts that are at 100 or more they have they should have the funding for that um not saying I mean it's still a priority for us but we have to prioritize more than other districts may have to prioritize if you go to the far right column resources per student what I did is I took the resource this is all off of State data that's where I get this

091information I took the resources that they are receiving divided by the number of students that they have and that tells you how much how many dollars they're getting per student um and you can see on that list the difference between some of the schools at the top to the schools of the bottom we actually I didn't know this was going to happen we actually ended up being the lowest on that list let's look at it at 9095 uh that's the lowest on the list for resources per student just important for us to know as we go into the tax levy and um I think it's something we can stand you know when I get when community members talk about taxes we can I think we're you know I hate to say that I don't I

092can't say that I'm confident in telling a Community member we're not over taxing you when compared to people around us obviously I want to make sure we are good stewards of the money that we're getting but um we just spent half an hour talking about test scores and all of this impacts that too um the next page tax levy history um I give you on the far right column what the what we're recommending right now uh for this coming year I met with the finance committee and this is where we landed this is a four this accounts for a 4.9 4.92 increase anything over five percent we have to have uh tax uh Levy hearings public hearings and we have to defend our reason to go over five percent uh we decided to keep that

093under five percent in the past we've always been around this 4.9 4.8 but this is an important thing to to clarify in the past that 4.9 that we would ask for in a levy would only be applied to property because everybody else is capped and that cap like I mentioned earlier is usually anywhere between one and a half two and a half percent so even if we ask for 4.9 people like all of us who have houses here ours is going to be at the under the cap which is about two and a half but if I built just built a house that just now is the first year on the tax rolls it's it's subject to that whole 4.9 and that's going to be the starting point so but this year because the CPI

094is so high when we do 4.9 everybody's getting 4.9 including new property owners I'll come back to that in a minute next page is the bond payment information um you can see we're getting close I know we're going to have a big Bond burning party at some point and uh if you look there's a payment schedule there and it says tax levy year 21 22 23 there's three years left the 21 11 year that was last year the payment date so we have that money already that's the taxes we all just paid so that money is in our bank accounts the payment's going to be paid in February of 23 this coming February 5 million and seventy thousand that's that's already done as far as we've got the money this Levy is going to be

095uh levying for 5 million five hundred thirty five thousand that's that Bond payment that goes up half a million we talked about that last few years then next year at this time we're going to do a levy and it's only going to be for 1 million on the bond and then after that we're done I'm gonna so the next page I have a couple of things that I I want to show you or talk about um let's see here I'm going to read number one less the bond extension and the CLR math the proposed Levy is 517 000 higher than last year's extension this is a 4.9 this is what I shared with you a little bit ago therefore a truth and Taxation here is not required what I do want to make sure you're

096all aware is that this Levy proposal is 174 thousand and fifty eight dollars under the maximum amount allowed so this is the first time since I've been here that we've had this situation we're levying money we're loving 4.9 percent we're leaving 174 000 on the table roughly roughly this is with our estimates on our eav we're leaving that on the table um to we're basically we're leaving it there and it's on it's uh if we go if we go after that money we've got to have tax anticipation hearings so um we're gonna have the tax levy hearing so we've chosen the committee chose not to do that now I did reach out to I did reach out to I was in a meeting with Lake County superintendents there's probably 30 40 in the room and

097it's everybody else except for one other district and us is going for the whole thing I'm just letting you know that um comfortable what we're doing but I want you to be aware that it's not the norm everybody else is going because once you do lose that 174 if we leave it out there next year it's not it's not accessible they have changed there's there's a law in place and I put Public Act I described it down here I can and I probably will uh if we if we stick with this Levy and leave that money out there I can petition to the clerk to make sure that that is there's a three-year look back where we can like three years from now we could go ahead and Levy for that 174 that we left

098on the table this this year yeah just to just to just to secure it in case we want to later but um something I didn't point out to the finance committee that I should tell the whole board because I didn't think about it until later if we go over five percent and try to grab this extra 174 000 that's out there the only properties that are impacted are the new properties so that's not because because all of us who have current homes in the districts that were capped at five percent it's the max uh anything over that that's because there's new property in the district so so that's why districts are going for uh all the dollars but how much new property about seven million between six and seven million right now it was it's

099new property is what they're estimating is up some of it's got to be but uh and like more yeah um yeah so that's the let's just go to the next page that we can talk a little bit about this the next page has I try to Hive all these numbers because I don't want uh I don't want to lowball them so uh this is on the the first table at the top is if we were doing three four five six seven percent we are at five percent we're like 4.92 so that tells you uh if you have if you find your value of Home in there it tells you the extension it with this Levy what your extension is towards Big Hollow not your whole tax bill just towards Big Hollow and then underneath that

100the table is how much that extension is higher than your last year extension so if and that what this gets a little bit I try to be as accurate as I could here so if my home was worth 250 000 this year last year according to our County it was probably 10 percent less than that 10 to 12 less than that so I've included a 10 to 12 increase in home value pushed them up and estimated last year you paid this this year you're going to pay this so for that homeowner would be 108 more this year with our what I did not include in here were like Homestead exemptions things like that so I hide these numbers are higher than probably typical the other thing I did include this is the most important thing

101we got to figure out to to one of the most important things tonight we've talked about in Prior years uh using 500 000 of our funds to Abate the increase in that Bond payment you remember that we talked about like kind of absorbing that so if if we decide to do that these numbers all go way down I I could I try to get numb accurate I couldn't I even ran it by a couple other business managers and they didn't feel comfortable with the numbers either so I just didn't want to put any numbers on paper to see what that would be but um those numbers do go down and uh we have to decide if we're going to Abate that or not um I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a recommendation and we did

102not talk about this at the finance committee meeting but um I I would I've always been in favor of abating that but I'm I don't think I am anymore at this point I feel like if we're going to leave the tax rate lower than than what we could I feel like we maybe should consider not abating the 500 000. um there's things that could come up we you know we've got that I don't know it's just looking at we are how where we're at on some of these charts and for us to take money out of our reserves I'm nervous to do that so if you ask me if I to give you a recommendation I would say um I would not Abate the 500 I do have um I do have that ready to

103go in December if we want to Abate though so uh I have to have you pass a resolution in December so that's one of the decisions tonight that we have to make and the other one is are you comfortable with the 4.9 Levy yeah after that money what would that potentially do for our test scores for our students I mean yeah that's a hard one to answer that's uh it's hard to wait but like I yeah yeah and maybe tax pairs with have that question especially for being graded on our test scores right or judged on our test scores I mean I can't I wouldn't I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that we can yeah I can just tell you that we are trying to prioritize our resources towards that issue and uh it's resources whether

104it's training whether you know we're trying to or whether it's more support you know we've added math interventionists and reading interventions I wish we had one for every grade level you know there's things that I'd love to do um but 174 000 you know is not going to go that far for that the issue is that that uh Italian underfunded it accumulates used to grow what was that Kevin 8 million that were underfunded and what happens what is the 174 thousand that's a little over because uh um so then how the reason I know it's confusing because it's over because the the new property factors in so that's why it goes over so it caps all of us at five percent the new property goes higher so they could go like eight percent so this

105it just doesn't it's that you're setting the bar for the new property is what we're doing so and your recommendation at this point would be as far as that I I'm I'm comfortable keeping it 4.9 okay I just don't want to do I don't want to keep it at 4.9 and Abate the 500 000 because then we're going to take 500 000 out of our out of our Reserves while we're also leaving money on the table on the tax levy that's that makes me nervous I'm okay with a 4.9 I know we're one of the only districts doing it but I'm okay with that is because there is a three-year look back um but even if we were to go petition for that three years from now it's still going to take a percent of

106up to five percent that we can ask for to begin with yeah yep whatever so that could be then we at that point we go over and have to do a tax hearing you know too but uh the state's goal is to eventually make up that eight the state's goal that'd be a nice goal for us be honest with you although I'm sure it would come out of somewhere else to be honest with you we are we are benefiting by keeping our tax rate low because that puts us in the low tier for the state and it gives us more State funding rather than relying on our local taxpayers as much we're benefiting from that the more we ask for from our taxpayers the higher our adequacy goes the less we get from the state

107so there's some benefit but yeah yeah I mean I I'm good with leaving it at four nine and not going after the abatement right I mean we're talking for all of them I mean my for my house it's 108 dollars what is that if we have made the tax 500 000 what's that going to end up being a hundred I mean I don't know how much 500 000 goes into all of the homes of the big Howell School District but yeah they can't be yeah more than a couple bucks I tried I tried I couldn't I the numbers didn't look right to me I mean it took it down quite a bit uh that didn't look right to me in it and I ran it by a couple business that didn't look right to them

108either so we just couldn't come up with the right number I would if I what was our number last year you know no I don't I mean I could look it up but I would guess that that 108 would go down like 20 bucks if we baited the 500 that's my guess 20 bucks yeah how does 500 because you're talking about 484 million is the total eav well our Levy is or no that was our Levy is uh 17 million 17 million yeah so 500 000 of that is is it three percent no something like that yeah we got a trouble levels yeah it's how many houses are in our district it's like uh if we were having this conversation at a different meeting and everybody wasn't thinking about the test and the performance it's

109like you're asking people for more when they keep seem like they're receiving less yeah how are we ever going to make up the million dollars we've never strived to it's been like that for you the goal is to be there so that we get I mean well it's not really a goal I mean the real question will be once that Levy comes off and we end up a lot lower on that scale where we're yeah yeah the lowest here 24. yeah interestingly the two parent groups and I know their parents CAC and then I did it coffee this weekend with parents I got a response I was not expecting because I told them we're going to let that Bond drop off and we've been celebrating that like this is going to be a good day

110and your taxes go down and neighbor's response was why would you let that Bond drop off we're paying our taxes now we'd rather see that money go into providing more services I know their parents they're not Community you know they're not community members not kids here yeah so I was really surprised to hear that um but they saw that eight million dollar difference I think that yeah so if we can use five million dollars to yeah that cuts that eight million were short down by down the three if you look at it that way because he even though 500 000 million no if we if we leave the tax rate at 3.9 and takes that extra five million dollars or five points yeah even though we're 8 million with our yeah and that includes the

111bonds but we're not using that money now anyway yeah at least you're shot doesn't sound as bad as bad that would have to take a referendum to do that something like that and that's that's a big deal it's a big ask yeah yeah so I it's my recommendation for next month's uh I'm looking for your guidance would my recommendation would you go with 4.9 but not not do the abatement but if I can do whatever you I believe put together whatever proposal you want me to put out there Vivian you have a puzzled book well I know well yeah some tax relief was that in the mailer you sent out to I don't think we 've said I don't think I put the abatement in there but we have verbally said it yeah and I

112I thought the same thing Vivian I one thing I I think that has happened since then that we didn't anticipate was the cost of the CPI going up so high inflations you know it has driven up a lot of things but that is true but yeah like you I see what you're saying now I mean you talk to people for years you're going to do something and then I mean and then if that's the case then I do think we should probably pursue the five percent plus five percent at least then we're getting I mean it's whatever it's like yeah 328 that we're abating instead of 500. what do you think we're talking twenty dollars a home I I shouldn't even guess I mean but yeah it's not really the cost but it's the fact

113that you told me you've told ever just like our test scores covid I mean come on we're one of them it's easier to do it when everyone else is having a hearing is there a cost to it no no it's not going to cost us 175 legal fees no we just do it before before an exports the only one having it right potentially two years I just think it's terrible I I don't think I could go to a truth and Taxation hearing I would not believe that if we're not spending the money that we get from the taxpayers now I don't understand how we would ask forever more than I'm up to pushing it to five percent whatever yeah but if we leave money on the table I foreign those the other districts the grants

114or whoever's asking for the for the sixty dollars okay that's great but I know that my week of groceries cost me way more than sixty dollars so we're gonna keep tacking that on I I could not support that I could I'm okay with going up to the five percent and leaving least amount of money on the tables we have to but I don't know I just think that we've done a great job as a board and Bob and everybody else the Edmonds in running a financially sound District compared to where we work being five million dollars following that every year for years to now being self-sufficient and having money in the bank to be able to cover some of these expenses and I do agree that yes we we did say that to families but

115I think that if we told families look we're going to do this instead or use this money for this I think they would understand it what are we going to use it for gas for the buses it's been up is up what compared yeah yeah I mean who knows what diesel is going to cost to put in these buses in March yeah the 174 that we're leaving out there turns into 500 pretty quickly in a few years because you lose that that's that accumulates so next so if we don't Abate we can say well we left money out there and that's actually accumulates over time more than 500. well that's my question what's that if we go after that 174 what's the 108 for Kevin's house turn into that 128 118. um it would be

116go down to like the six percent it'd be 128 or up to seven percent 147 but see Kevin's house wouldn't be impacted because it's not new property so his is capped at five it's only the new property gets hit yeah all right then the people that are impacted are the people we didn't make promises to this too they might not buy either because uh their taxes that's a good point tough decisions what do you guys what do you guys feel like I'm I mean I'm comfortable leaving it at 4.9 as long as a year from now or you could go back and reclaim it let's say and what about uh I mean paid the 500 000. abatement we said that for years and years and years I feel we should honor that for now are

117you Gary or at least what would like 4.99 how much would that cut into the 174. ah I had to pull my computer out and I just I can get as high as I can possibly go yeah get it all the way up there I think I'd be okay 4.99 yeah I mean I think that as long as we get hoop as much as we can we don't need to be at 4.92 or whatever but before it yeah let's get it as high as we can yeah the uh and I want to clarify that um the money that's left on the table whatever that ends up being and that my 174 is a guess right now because it really depends on what the eav comes in which isn't isn't official until like uh February so

118um but where we where a recapture would work well as if three years from now if somehow the everything recovers and the inflation goes way down again and our cap is like two percent like it always has been we could easily slide in we're also going to recapture that that wouldn't be that much it would be if the inflation stays over five percent it's going to be harder to recapture it because it's just when it gets when it gets back below five would be easy to recapture and wouldn't be a big deal and you said these other schools are going like for seven percent or they're just going high enough to make sure they capture it all which I I haven't actually even ran the number see how high we have to go but it

119wouldn't be that much higher than five we're I mean 174 000 on a third 17 million dollar levies not that much not much higher than five percent so but they have to kind of balloon it because you're guessing on the eav you're guessing a lot of things we're getting uh you know estimates from the county but nothing's insure writing so I would say it's probably closer to seven yeah on the recapture side of it though do you then get to use that as your base go es yeah yeah well even in these prior years extensions you've always been around 4.9 yeah and look at like even last year it's 4.9 we end up we're a better chance of getting the recapture then it's lower okay they have to give it to us how does that

120work well this is a brand new law so this is the first year for it so they don't even have all the rules written for it so I'm gonna all I know is I have right after the levee's done I have to appeal or I have to do something with the clerk to make sure that they know that we may recapture it someday so we can ask for seven go through a herring and then not get it yes that sounds like fun yes because theoretically that could happen right um well the only way we wouldn't get it is if this board voted to not go for that the hearing is to let the public come in and tell you why they don't want you to go that high right so we submit the tax level

121request that stuff percent which is what we've done not there but we've submitted it at four point s yeah in year in last year yeah I remember what it was but we ended up with a rate at 3.9 9 that rate was not the increase though I see what you're saying but I would say our our Levy last year I asked for 4.9 we probably got like two and a half because you go for something higher we have to here have the hearing and we may not we may get something on yeah it's possible Right we got no it is that is possible but last year like I was because inflation was not as high last year so I we did it at 4.9 the only people that got 4.9 were the new homes everybody

122else got the tax cap which was about two and a half and then uh but this year because of inflation so high we've got 4.9 everybody's getting 4.9 it sounds like everybody's pretty close on the 4.9 and you need a decision on the abatement tonight as well um I don't I just need to know whether I need it well what I'll do is I'll have it ready if you said no tonight then I won't get it ready if you said go ahead and get it ready December we're going to vote on it well let's put it can we just put it on the agenda be prepared to vote whether or not you want to obeyed it or not yeah because I have it ready to go so I'll just put on the agenda because I

123think we all need some need something I mean honestly I didn't promise anything I just got here but I know I would feel like I don't if I say something I darned as hell try to you know abide by it right yeah and I hate when like a politician comes and says well sorry situation changed so God said it I'm not a politician no I'm just saying in other aspects I understand why we all need to think that was my gut too yeah because it could always something like it's always something is always going to change right so if we start I don't know if we start using that excuse on this yeah no I but yeah everyone recently we have time to think about it if we don't have to decide on that tonight

124so I didn't make I and I I knew you'd want a recommendation that's why I gave it to you but I that recommendation wasn't in my mind until I found out we're one of the few that are not going after all the other dollars that's what I thought yeah I don't know we can do both but I get what it was my gut too was like we've been telling people I mean it really does sound like in three years we're going to have to take to the community you know the the bond is dropping off what do you want to do with that money do you really want it back or not and I mean if we need more funds at that point that's another opportunity so we're just voting down I mean I think

125we just keep it on the agenda right now and just holds it we all need some time to think vote on it next month okay all right and I'm going to take that up to like 4.99 right yes okay so then do I have to amend this motion or just um I would say we would just need an approval of the estimated tax levy and State uh at 4.9 yeah can I please have a motion to approve the estimated tax will be for 2022 or 4.99 Warren and Gary I didn't say anything yeah yes yes how many nines do we vote on there um are we accepted a resignation from Dallas took the resume for Mary Rowe lunch monitor accepted a resignation from Sean cray seventh grade social studies teacher uh no foil request anybody

126any questions on the monthly reports nope anybody have any questions on the meeting agendas nope thanks for regularly scheduled board meeting will take place on Monday December 12th 2022 with closed session beginning at 6 p.m uh can I please have a motion to adjourn motion second Joel and Ash all in favor all right