001and 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 no can i please have a motion to prove the agenda second vivian and lauren uh all in favor any oppose eyes have it item six board member code of conduct review gary i will be sufficiently informed about and prepared to act on specific issues before the board and remain reasonably knowledgeable about local state national and global education issues all right thank you does anybody have any questions on the consent agenda no no no uh can i please have a motion to prove the consent agenda motion second yes all right do we have any public comments no superintendent's report mr gold all right uh first i want to
002mention that all the comments from last meeting i do have a meeting set up with her this week so wednesday night i think i'm gonna kind of go through some things i wanna make sure you follow it up uh item a the vendor expense report we uh try to provide this to the board every every year at this time nothing to present really just something for information purposes we try to be as transparent as possible so you can see the various expenses throughout the year to different vendors there any questions to let me know i just said i i sent bob some questions about i had on it um if anybody didn't know the analyze stevenson cost was for the vaccination pod yeah which was good and then this uh my biggest concern was the
003seed all cost yes so based on based on what we have in seed all we're spending forty two thousand dollars per student in cedaw and on average we spend in our budget i just use the expense line from this current budget that was in the packet we're at 28 000 per student so it's yeah yeah the tuition cost there is every bit that much that you mentioned there so we're at uh but that 508 000 from last year is a little higher than normal because our tuition costs went up because the ida funding was done differently we get all the idea funding now we they used to get part of it we now get all of it but yeah it's it's uh we i think we have and dr pittman you can correct me if
004i'm wrong we have 12 or 13. and we get we do get uh it's part of our special ed reimbursement from the state we get roughly i'm going to say 70 percent for cedaw yeah private placements would get up to 90 percent 70 of that seat all costs will come back through uh that's the categorical grants we get from the state so then what do we get reimbursed for by the state for our in-house programs for in-house okay yeah our general funding that they they incorporate our special ed population it's a hard thing to budget for because uh you can get people move in and all of a sudden you've got uh some expenses you want so when i when i it's one of the areas in our budget tonight that you'll pass that i
005uh i pad that quite a bit because i don't know what could happen during the year so last year i probably will have over 600 000 in the budget for that area just because this 508 is including is not just tuition charge it's a that's including we pay an o m charge operation maintenance charge that's all districts pay based on enrollment and we also pay an imrf retirement charge uh that's uh distributed equally or proportionately to all districts so there's that included as well we levy for that um so that's a separate levy it's about 25 000 i think um i'm thinking the o m is about 50. so there's about 75 000 of that that's that are those two charges the rest of it would be probably tuition that i would i would just
006love to know i mean i'm not familiar with see dolls some other people and i can't believe that their costs are fourteen thousand dollars more a kid than ours are i have a hard time grasping that yeah i mean we we've preached equity and education yeah throughout our entire tenure here and this is definitely not that i'll get some more information to share with the full board on how how that works and see what what i can give you that might help i think it would just be helpful for us to understand where the money's going yeah absolutely yeah no good so does the cost that we're paying like you said 65 degrees transport and all this other stuff does that is that included in our entire seed all expense because we have other transportation
007i saw vendors in here too yeah that's a separate uh that's a separate transportation piece all right i'm not as necessarily concerned about that as the money that's you're go directly going to see yeah i can break what i can do is give you guys give you all a report that kind of breaks down the cost of the different programs and why the costs are the way they are yeah i think it'd be helpful yeah because it is based on the fact that students have higher needs and need more support so i just set myself a note on that thank you all right um next item the citizen advisory council uh i have a list of council members for this year uh you'll see the uh the list on you on exhibit 10 or yeah
008exhibit 10. the only thing i have we have to add two students to list yet but we'll get that added before the first meeting so this is just information i share with each year but i always like to have the board approve the citizens advisory council list before we have our first meeting and remember this is uh revised where we have uh we opened this up to all parents and didn't uh we didn't turn anybody away so we were we would have kept it at about 75 but we didn't get that high so i just need a motion to approve that member list all right anybody have any questions on the cac list can i please have a motion to approve the citizens advisory council members for 2021-2022 motion second ashton gary uh all in
009favor of the motion is read say aye aye any opposed eyes have it and just a note on that if there's ever a topic that you want the cac to if you want me to run anything by the cac i know both uh ashley and lauren have been a part of cac before i mean it's a good group to run some ideas by if you ever there's ever anything just let me know and i can throw it on our list so exhibit 12 is a list of the objectives those will change throughout the year but those are things that we have on the list right now all right the next item is item c approved the recent board policy update on first reading this is for uh press issue 107. uh there there are not
010uh significant um changes in here a lot of them are just uh footnote and uh legal language changes we'll note the first policy that's number one there for you policy two colon 270 is a standalone policy that we really need to talk about as a board if it's something we want to pass i don't have had time to read that one i put a note at the top there needs to be more discussion on this policy it was developed by our attorney in response to questions from the board about use of our website pictures and things like that by you know in the community so so our attorney addressed that wrote this standalone policy it would be a new policy so i don't know if you've had time to read that and if you have
011any input on that if not we can we can this is why we do two readings because if not if you want to take time to digest it and then at the next meeting we definitely would want to have some conversation so either way i'm fine so did he did he add board of education candidates to the policy because i don't think that was under original policy okay let me see here this is the um last sentence on the first paragraph political candidates so the policy that you're referring to from the policy committee we were talking we were looking at a different policy this is actually a completely new policy with a different number and everything so yes yeah it's completely new policy standalone so yeah he did uh he wrote that specifically okay does
012this remove the old one that's basically the same exact concept just different words i i think that it will i i wanted to check with him because i i don't know why uh because this is actually in a different place in the manual so i don't know um i'm gonna double check that with with him before before we do it but it to me it seems to replace it the only question i still have with this which is the same that came up during the policy meeting is there's still the restriction on use of the name of the school district where it could become an issue for a candidate for school board would not be allowed to say so and so running for big hollow district 38 school board without getting the board's permission to
013actually say that they are running for it if we carved out an exception for candidates for office to be able to use the name of the office they're running for that would be a different story though does everybody understand what gary's asking there yeah and then how is this enforced more in the general public with the facebook groups and i mean are is it the school board's responsibility to send out notices or i would get i would think that it'd be up to me to uh if somebody sees something they let me know and then i'd have to follow up and try to get it taken down but in far as far as enforcement of that will be difficult uh yeah i mean what enforcement i mean what can we do i i i don't
014think there's a whole lot we can do okay i would think the better question what would we want to do if somebody has a forum on facebook for example that says parents of big hollow school districts according to this we could take take it down but it seems like they might be stifling speech no but that's what i'm saying we couldn't that's their pers this is just our rule it doesn't how does it govern the general public well if it's our trademark we have the right to go after whoever uses it so the question is we would have to go through that's yeah and uh just to confirm do we have the trademark on the school district name on the school district name yes i have no idea because if we don't then there's no
015issue because we don't hold a trademark to enforce i don't think public entities can hold trademarks right the village of lakemoor or the village of ron lake cannot trademark the bridge of wrong lake well the policy says use of districts trademarks i don't know well i thought the original question was the picture of the building on candidates social media platforms because if you look every time anyone runs for an office the name is there otherwise people would not know what position or you know what organization you're running for so i guess that question should be is it the picture we're enforcing pictures i don't think we have a problem with putting big hollow school board candidate on a sign i think it was when it was expressed to me as concern it was pictures and
016logos right okay uh off our website because people felt like it was school endorsing candidates and well and the question is what you just said is pictures off the website but could somebody come and take their own picture of the building because according to this my first initial reading you can't even come in public property and take a picture of the school and then use that as a picture i don't think that would stand up anywhere that they kind of take a picture from the street and post it i don't think it would either but we're putting it into our policy was this our was this policy already there was something similar to this in place there was yeah it's pretty much the same policy except it looks like he added board of education candidates
017no no i understand that i just it seems like a very fine line of where you on any of this what you can actually enforce and what you can't yeah i don't have that other policy in here i did have it but i took it out uh was the other policy from the press plus or was it yeah it was so if they're writing a policy there has to be some maybe umbrella law over schools or public organizations that trademark our stuff right otherwise they wouldn't write that policy yeah so if we're modifying their policy which is what it looks like i mean there's there's questions the question is is are we covered under some kind of umbrella law from the state that covers people from trademark infringement on the school right yeah this is
018this is i'll be honest this is uncharted territory for me so i'm gonna have to do some uh research on that piece well what is the this one this was brought up to the superintendent what is the board's goal of this policy i think we have to be clear with that and if he's going to try to write one because a lot of parents are going to have questions i mean every parent that takes a picture of their kid in a shirt or right because technically this is saying you can't do you can't post a picture of your kid in a big hollow shirt i mean every eighth grade graduation kids come and take pictures in front of the school or saying you can't do that anymore that's what this policy is saying so very
019all and i think all encompassing as a board we need to figure out what exactly we're looking for so did this come up at the policy committee meeting where someone asked for this policy well i think you want to keep it from personal gain right correct we can't use our images or likenesses or anything for the school for personal name it came up because i think someone contacted the superintendent to tell him that one of the candidates was using the big halo picture from the website as advertisement to run for the school board but there's something else specifically about using it to claim endorsement of the school can you give clarity because you're the one who told us that what the original thought of what's behind that policy that use of our logos or pictures
020would was endorsement of the school of particular candidates and was it the image off of our website yeah okay that was the policy committee last year asked me to look into it and we were in the middle of an election cycle so we did not want to mess with any board policy related to that because it would have not it just wouldn't have appeared to be done in a uh so i think i think it sounds like the board's intent is that we don't want any district property whether it's a picture logo or anything to be used for personal gain yeah that is the board's intent it's not it's not to limit the big hollow family pto no or big hollow any of those websites that use our logos i don't think that we should
021be hurting them they're not using it for personal gain the parent groups the different parent groups on facebook for every grade level uses yeah some sort of trademark or picture of a school we should not be i like the way you've ordered that so let me go back and see if we can mess with the language yeah this is this is all encompassing and yeah this is a little this is if somebody takes it if anybody were to take issue with anyone else and we had to enforce it then i mean basically anybody in the community could have free reign that yeah what this says yeah i like the personal game like every band concert i mean what kim christensen has taken pictures for 12 years yeah of every band concert now you're going to
022tell her you can't sorry no i think that i think the personal gain area is where we got to tackle so personal gain and endorsements and endorsements i think there definitely there has to be something carved out there of generic use for political office of running for the school board that they're certain i would say that was not what we just talked about we don't want pictures of anything put on any now if you want to take a picture with your kid and say kevin lyons is running for big hollow school board great great but i can't wait for christmas i can't put a picture of the sign no i'm using my own child i can use my own child on my political website but i can't use i can't use the school i can't
023use the front of the school the side of the school the sign i can't use those things for my own personal game in a political campaign that would be a personal game right but according to this also the name of the school district is forbidden as well so we need to at least carve out what we'll allow a political candidate to use while running for the office well i think we all said we're okay with the name just not the questions but the diff that also comes into play is if that candidate were to take a picture of the building itself that technically that's not no it's a third-party photo that's that's different from taking big hollows picture that they took but if the candidates stood in the same spot and snapped that picture that
024would technically be allowed yeah yeah you can't stop that it's a public yeah yeah but because we're using the example of somebody just lifting a picture i mean that's you can't do that anyways that's you're taking the copyright off of right anybody's photo um yeah i don't this is a very gray policy yeah you know the input you're giving me is i think i'll be able to get some things cleaned up and then if we vote on to proving this on first reading we're not accepting this policy as written so just we can we can do that tonight vote on first reading second reading i can either what i'll do is we can either i'll have something else for you and then we can if we don't like it we can pull it and and
025prove the rest of them this isn't an urgent thing we can just keep working on it too yeah because i'm wondering if if there's like law that was passed to that pertains to this because usually when press plus comes out with a policy it's pertaining to laws that came out and then also has cross-referenced policies too which might affect why he wrote the policy the way he did because this one has a colon 90 which is parent organizations and booster clubs so i think there's a lot going into the development of the policy not just the picture of the school or the district's name because as i said before everyone uses the name of the school district that they're running for i mean i've never we've never come up against people using our pictures before
026because most people just run for office with just their signs so but yeah but i would like to know why we have a policy like this so it should be pertaining to something legal i would assume 825 is the other board policy that yeah advertising and distributing material i don't know why he did you know he thought we'd be better off having a standalone right but if you read it it's very similar to 825. so there's legal reference i thought on the last one there was yeah i'll have to pull it well for the next month i'll have this i'll have some recommended changes for you and then we can kind of hash that out at that point too now that i kind of know what we're after i almost think this would be a
027separate agenda item too yeah i agree all right anybody have any other questions on any other policies okay please have a motion to prove on first reading 107 press 107. the board policy update on first reading motion second lorna vivian yes uh next item real quick is a student registration update just for any parents that are listening to this out there if you've got uh students we need to register we're probably uh i got noticed from the secretaries this afternoon i think we are i would say roughly uh 80 to 85 percent registered so we still have 15 to 20 percent that are not on average so that it does cause us some issues going into uh regis going into his last two weeks because we're trying to make sure we have class sizes and
028everything nailed down but uh we're not in too bad of shape but kindergarten's still a little light kindergarten we're and that's still a little light but uh hoping to get that at least to 170. so which ver could easily happen in the next two weeks but all right last item is curriculum instruction updates uh dr king and dr hetrovitz are going to start this one off sorry okay can you hear me okay these slides are also in your packet yes okay so thank you so much for giving us more of your time it feels like every week we've got a new update for you but that's very exciting hopefully we won't um bore you to death but i think some of the work happening in the district is very um i'll use dr king's word
029cutting edge so we wanted to spend some time tonight though just kind of going over some things that you may already be aware of but some things that you may not be aware of a lot has happened despite the pandemic so dr king and i and the principals have been working extensively on systems and improving various practices that have been either implemented or introduced so the purpose of tonight's work is to talk to you a little bit about the curricular work that's been going on that i've already discussed with you briefly standards-based grading and reporting mtss which stands for multi-tiered systems of support steps moving forward so you know what to expect and then we'll take questions all right so as i've already explained in previous board meetings the work that we've been doing and
030i kind of wanted to take a step back because i i thought to myself i never really explained even the history of the curricular work that's happened in the district dating back to when common core illinois state standards were actually introduced to school districts so just as an aside um in 2010 common core standards came out and with that obviously it was brand new to all districts but one of the things that changed the work that teachers do is that the common core standards are extremely specific and there's a lot more focus to them than previous illinois standards so i don't want you to think that we're redoing work that's already been done the fact of the matter is as we as a district didn't have resources in place to really attack the common core
031that we weighed that we needed to in 2010 and up until today so the work that i talked to you about is actually work that has been a long time coming and um with mr gold on board he's really enabled us to make steps to implement the common core the way that it was intended so i just wanted to say that to start so when i talk about reviewing you know priority standards content and courses it's all in light of our new standards and so we've done a lot with reviewing like i said standards we're talking about modifying courses um disciplinary content and then getting vertical alignment throughout the district so on the next slide you can see all of the work that's happened specific to all of the the disciplines but specifically to middle
032school is kind of where i was speaking to on this slide and i'll get into that in a minute but please know that all of the work that's happening here with math um science ela and social studies and all the electives and specials those are also focus points at the elementary and primary building so when we go over this slide there's a lot there if you have questions please ask i really don't want to talk at you all night but i want you to know that every subject area has undergone an extensive review and we've analyzed how we can improve in every single domain so when we talk about curricular work we're not talking about just our ela classrooms we're talking about an entire system that we've reworked in the past couple months one of
033the big points that you've heard about in the community is standards-based grading and reporting if you want to call it that and really what we want to do tonight is talk to you not about what we are going to continue to do with standards-based grading we want to talk to you about what's already been done and then any changes or things that might be tweaked along the way this year especially at the middle school and at the primary elementary buildings but specifically at middle school so we know standards-based grading is a great it's a great thing i'm not going to stand here and tell you that it's not it really puts the the onus of learning back on students and you know teachers always have the goal of delivering information and having students retain it
034but standards-based grading really helps students take ownership of their learning um it's a better accurate measurement of learning so again specific to the common core and what those standards are asking our students to know and be able to do by the end of a grade level so it's great stuff we have a slide here if you want to take a look at it it's a student's perspective of a successful standards-based grading rollout i put in the presentation also for you what a traditional report card looks like i think we all know what that looks like we grew up with systems that would produce traditional report cards for our learning and then i wanted to set that next to a standards based report card so when you look at math on this slide when i talk
035about breaking standards down into targets and objectives this is how specific it might look on a standards-based report card so when you get your child's report card or community members their students come home and they want to know what they need to work on specifically it this a report card like this is going to give parents that information so if a student like for an example the student here in this example got a 2 for i can estimate the answers of number sentences so as a parent you know you can go to your child's teacher and say wow i saw my child has a two and this specific skill what can i do at home when i was a teacher i had parents coming to me all the time what can i do to help
036my child do better in mathematics well that's a loaded question because there's so many standards and targets that we are responsible for without a reporting system like this it's very hard to give that feedback unless you've got all the students work sitting in front of you so these are just some some items for you to take a look at the next few slides again are not to talk about what we're going to do this year i just want you to be aware of the work that was done previously many of you are already aware but these are some of the practices that were implemented um we've we've had lots of conversations with parents about these things already but i want them there as just documentation that we know what's been done and dr king and
037i also know what needs to improve we have been talking to staff to students to parents about the way that the standards-based rollout was done specifically at the middle school and we have very very focused ways of improving what's been done and dr king threw this slide in here i don't know how to say it besides we need to stop building the plane while we're flying it and essentially that's what happened this past year but our goal is to get the wheels on the plane so we can land it effectively make sure the motor is running make sure anybody you know i guess dr king and i would be the people in the car right now anybody working on our planes is is dedicated and committed to the work which we are um but this
038is just our way of saying we're going to put a pause on many of the things that have been done and we will be fixing and cleaning up and clarifying and then we hope to roll out a full successful standards-based grading system for next school year i say that we hope because we want to make sure that we're ready we want to make sure that the plane is functioning properly and that might take until the end of this year for us to determine that and there's a good chance that we will that we'll be ready but we just we want to be very thoughtful and purposeful in our work this year and make sure that our staff feels ready as well so dr king's been working a lot on mtss and this all ties in
039so i'm going to let her take over when do you want us to ask questions if you would like do you want to ask them now i just mine is about the standards-based grading sure yep um so so this is not being implemented this year correct or it is no it's not you'll the students will receive a stand like this that the grading system that was night um 1920 school year will be back into effect while our we have time so a couple of the things that dr hetchwitz was talking about in the slides that you have we need to answer some questions to before it can be implemented moving forward we need to be able to answer some questions for not only our families which we have a plan to have quite ongoing infra
040like meetings with families they call them town halls so we'll have that but just more open forum where we can help people understand the purpose of standards face grading but internally we need there's in order for mtss to work well there's some questions that haven't been answered yet that we need to be able to answer before we can move forward so students will be receiving the abcd grades that they've experienced in the past thus we have informed our staff that it's we will take this school year to finish the rollout that was started so it's complete like i said there's pieces that aren't complete yet that have to be finished um before before you roll this out okay and when you say full roll out do you mean all levels of education are you talking
041about a group first do you want to stay sure ideally we'd love for the entire district to go at once but i'll be honest the elementary and primary teachers have made a lot of progress this year with english language arts and math but we need to shore up science and social studies and so without overworking and over stressing our teachers to make something go when we can easily kind of hang back and just again make sure we're completely prepared we might need a little extra time and that rollout might just happen here at middle school because all of the teachers here at middle school have received the same training and will continue to so the issue that we ran into this year was with the pandemic we had two wonderful coordinators from the regional office
042of education working with our primary and elementary staff but we were only able to get really solid starts um and progress made on english language arts and math so we just need to make sure we're ready for science and social studies and i'll be honest i don't know how that's going to look because this is a process and we know where we want to get but we just need to be thoughtful and i don't see any issue with rushing i don't i don't see why we would want to rush something like this so then when you say um pause so then they're not going to be doing any of that training this year the elementary and primary teachers will continue all of the background work i guess you can call it all the work happening
043you know behind the stage curtain is still going to continue it's just that the report cards that go home will not be changed unless we're completely ready so when we talk about grading and practices those are the things that we're putting we're putting steps and practices in place in order for teachers to adjust what they're doing in the classroom and make standards-based grading work the reporting side is what you see as a middle school parent on skyward or the report cards that come home for primary and elementary and we cannot possibly change the primary and elementary report card until all of this is shored up so that'll be our very last step it's not going to be a surprise to anyone and everyone like dr king said will understand the purpose and the benefits and
044so the principals have been working really hard um to gather some resources to put those in newsletters and then we'll continue to have meetings with parents to discuss then i have one more question on the rubric that you have here is this um just a current sample or is it going to be out of a four-point system and then second to that is grant ready to take to interpret our grading system into their question so um we can i'll speak to start with grant and then go backward um so grant is actually like they're in the process of readjusting their system they don't call it standards-based grading but it's the equivalent to that so the answer is yes they will have a system in place and we're talking quite regularly with them um about this
045and some of the antecedent to why we're pausing and with a pause is middle school because we rolled it out and we are pausing that roll out we're we're taking a step backward to fix some of the things weren't finished yet great work just needs some finishing but it was that conversation with the high school that we found that there are systemic concerns that we need to address which is why part of when we look at that four point scale which i believe we we're still needed we need those are things we need to figure out so we can't answer we have pockets where we can't answer that even in this building how that scale works so i don't i wouldn't say that we can tell you is it going to be out of this
046scale or that skill because that that is also something that needs to be clarified before we move forward also and so the pause that i like the middle school to do and that works we are doing is there's this part of like catch-up and like with the rest of the district so the fact that the elementary and primary might be a little bit farther behind in some pieces but farther ahead in others and so we have an opportunity here that dr hetrovitz and i and the rest of the building leaders that we want to take advantage of there are pockets that have experience and can answer some of these questions across the district and across the campus um and then there are other places that we that the inverse will be like we can be
047the experts and help pull our colleagues along so we need the whole district to be in a spot in order for us to identify what students know well and what they need support in i can't answer that in many cases because some of the questions you're just right now asking we can't answer them clearly and so until we can answer that clearly across the district we're really tr we're flying a plane while we're building it which is i would say the poorest adage public ed gets away with thank you mm-hmm okay that's good um so so something like the foundation theories of like not grading homework um are we going back to grading homework then okay absolutely so for us at least at the middle school what i can tell you is um if we're
048going to assign something this is part of things that we didn't finish yet i'm going to keep saying yep because i do not my staff i talked to them i put a video out last week and i've talked to my leadership team i don't want them to think that i'm discrediting the hard work that they have done it's tremendous work it's excellent work and we will be doing this just not this year but that to answer that question students should still be held if we're going to sign something it means we value it enough that we're giving you an assignment to do and so therefore it needs to count and so we have this idea here that zeros aren't committed well they're not permitted because we're still expecting the student to finish it and so
049some of the things we're going to have in place when we have this policy in other districts we want to have that here we're assigning something in a homework for example or class work saying a zero isn't permitted it's because you're going to stay after with me on tuesday during homework call to finish it or i had students with me on a friday afternoon and they sat with me and they finished on a friday or they came with me on saturday and we'd set it for four hours and we'd finish it the zeros aren't permitted because i'm not going to let you not do the work because the work is that important if it's not important i'm not going to let teachers assign it so i think some in some of these spaces we've we've
050gotten our wires crossed about like how we assign work and prioritize it and so that piece it may it's going to go under formative practice but it counts it all counts because if my teachers are assigned it it's because they believe it's important and i when i've talked to families during these meet and greets i i would say that many of them they feel like their students are like they've kind of given up on certain things i don't care well it's because we've given them permission not to care and so we're going to we're going to reinfuse that and so if students want to not do their work during the day they can see me on saturday for four hours and we can get it caught up then or after on friday or tuesday we'll
051become best friends um so those are some of the things that weren't finished yet other pieces when i talk about mtss if i'm supposed to be able to try to find my 80 to 85 percent of students right now we have an 80 20 philosophy the trick with that that we didn't finish yet and that we are working on uh talking to we're going to talk to our department heads and billing leadership team for this building that'll be ironed out for the elementary and primary already but when when we don't have a ratio there should be if you have an 80 20 there should be a ratio of the number of that 20 percent to offset the 80 percent because what ends up happening i could go forward and try to find 80 of my
052students who are meeting across but if they did really poorly on one assign that 180 percent the 20 doesn't make up for that difference unless there's a ratio there to offset it so what ends up happening ultimately in mtss i may be capturing kids i shouldn't be capturing for tier two or tier three simply because we haven't solidified the ratio between like minimums and maximums for um summative and formative and if i'm getting too nitty-gritty i'm just afraid you're going to ask a question about it or you're going to ask a question i'm trying to anticipate um but those are some of the things that we need to think about and we didn't get there yet and we will this year and so part of our pd to ensure that all of our staff are
053ready we've got extra staff at the middle school we've got differentiation in all of our classrooms for mtss and dr hetrowitz and dr pittman and then even the principals we've got a really stellar pd plant literally job embedded for the entire school year like i can tell you what dr hechovich is planned for the whole school year but i can say when i'm in this building when i'm in those buildings supporting with mtss like it's we we know our marching orders and it's job embedded pd like we've got a plan this year and we're really gonna do the best we can to execute on what is a really good system and a a really good idea we just need the middle school needed time to finish it so you're right i do have a question
054actually there's several but i'm hoping they're really quick questions okay so you talk about going back to the 19-20 school year grading policy and back then and i saw this kind of in the deck we had that whole 80 20 80 20 formative 80 summative which led to several issues in classrooms where some instructors were giving literally one four question tests for the entire summative so you basically were forcing the kids if they don't get everything right they're going to get a c or below because there's no other physical way are we setting any standard for how much they need to give for summative informative work to ensure there's enough opportunity for grading yes so sorry if i didn't clarify that so absolutely so dr hetch of us have an immediate we were meeting with
055our staff here because this is the space that is happening most often in this building um and we that already came up in the blt in my department head meeting last week i took them on a retreat we're going to set up at department level so it won't be by grade but it's going to be by departments because science may have fewer summatives or fewer formatives for example but there will be a ratio a minimum and a maximum by department for every every subject area that we will create a matrix we've talked about this and present it to families but i need time to talk that will it will go into effect starting like the start of the school year but we need time to meet with the team to kind of like what is
056a reasonable like i want to talk to the experts what is a reasonable minimum and maximum and they're not going it's not going to be a choice we in order for mtss to work i have to have a minimum a maximum to offset that very what you just talked about like that that was the p that's a big piece of the framework that we didn't have in place last year and so students are being penalized or put they would be captured for tier two when they have no business being in needing an enrichment for example so that was question one by the way yes would have worked just as well you could have just said yes and moved on uh question two and this goes back to beforehand when you took an exam for example
057the student and 85 was in 85 and last year somehow we got into this policy where an 85 was just an eight which rounded everything down are we going back to if you get a grade on an exam that's your grade are we still keeping the whole round again yes that was in an effort to try to fix what you were talking about ash like that was we hadn't finished that that process yet okay the third one i think is really an easy question i hope uh technology wise we use skyward for reporting now going forward with whatever you end up doing whether it's that four three two one or whatever you figure does their technology support other ways of grading well either way so we've talked a little bit about otis the management system
058that we're introduced and again this is new to staff so we can't expect them to be using this with a hundred percent accuracy this year so a lot of training is going to happen this year on otis and so what they have available to them is um a system that where we can build rubrics in their system and then all of the assessments that are given to students get run through that system so it's parent facing i know some parents actually accessed it this past year um and so parents can look at any time and see how their student performed and to add to your question about the eight points or the ten points or whatever most systems i'm going to say most i'm not going to say this is what we're going to do
059but most standards-based systems are four-point scales um and so our staff is familiar with this because the pd that we just did this last year was focused on developing four-point scales and four-point rubrics and so we as a as a staff as a whole staff district-wide and then specifically at the middle school we'll need to be talking about how when you enter a grade into otis um and you can use the decaying average so that the most recent learning is the one that has the most weight um and so those are all things again that we need to clean up and have common understandings developed amongst our staff otherwise you get mass confusion so then in that case you'd be able to receive threes for 75 percent of the year because you're not exceeding proficiencies
060but then at the end of the year still finish with a four correct yeah yes yes is the i guess part of the concern that i would always hear from my kids was that they could get everything right on a test and only get meats because they didn't put any of the extra stuff in there but they get it they get their summative and they get it graded everything all of the answers are correct but they only got a meats now how how is that the general philosophy of this or no so part of the issue this year well two things but part of the issue with that this year is that when teachers were using specific assessments didn't necessarily have standards tied to each item on that task or the assessment so when we
061looked at how performance was happening on standards there wasn't a way for a teacher to determine how a student was performing on a specific standard because we hadn't tied our assessments back to our standards so in the system of otis we're able to assign items on assessments with uh tags to standards so every time you put a standard on an assessment um it gets counted i guess you would say in the otis system and the child is getting credit for every time they come into contact with that standard so the teachers were using like an overall performance so they didn't go above and beyond or here's one question that they didn't give more information on but we are going to create our assessments to ensure that there are many opportunities for students to show mastery
062on an assessment with one specific standard does that make sense yes now will that allow otis allow for the rubrics and this everything to be more specific and consistent amongst vertically and horizontally absolutely yes okay yeah and it'll be very like face like outwardly facing and internally facing so you will see just as just how frequent your student is coming contact with certain supporting standards and certain standards so you'll be able to see are they getting more threes out of four um than than in other instances and that will be like going back to what doctor hechovich was talking about earlier when the family asks well how can i support my student they'll be able to actually see in real time some of the areas whether that student needs enrichment or intervention they'll be able
063to see it live yeah i just think as long as i think it's great you guys are taking a pause and take a look at it and able to be a little more consistent with this and so we don't have the backlash we got last year um but i i think that as long as families are aware of what their child needs to get a like a four or whatever the highest grade ends up being as long as parents are know that and the child knows that i think that it's a win-win situation so it sounds i mean looking at the report card that you put an example in here i mean this would have been great it's very it reminded me actually of the primary elementary report cards yes our report card at that
064level just it lends itself to more of a standard base so that'll be an easier push when the time comes yeah but i think i don't want to speak for everybody but i think i would like to hear this again when you guys are ready to roll it out before we give it to all the families um just so we can kind of warm you up for the questions you're gonna yeah and our hope is that i mean that we would be actually talking with the families throughout this year yeah because we don't want any surprises no i think that's great i did have one last question and uh and i don't know if you'll have an answer for this one yet so it's okay if you don't but going back to the sample you
065gave that sample report and i know that you guys you still haven't come up with a numbering system yet but my only concern i still have with this and this is something i had last year is if we start saying that meets expectations of three in this example here and then kids who are going to high school and thinking about college start thinking about the standard four-point scale where if you've got all threes it sounds great you're meeting expectations but in the old way the mentality of all threes were not really as good because people were always told you need to get fours or better if you want to go to a good college how are we going to set that mental expectation that all threes means that when you get to high school you
066you know if you're aiming for all threes you may not be getting into any good school with that right now having not gone through the process myself what i can say to that is i think this year part of the problem was students didn't know how to even get a four if they were told how to get a four it was a it was sort of a halfway developed definition of by the teacher themselves and it wasn't a systemic understanding so when we talk about like rubrics and that scale when you look at the four on the rubric that rubric is going to be handed to a child and it's going to be very specific so the the the discussion about points and grades we're trying to move away from that because if a student
067decides that they want to show the highest level of learning on a standard we need to make sure we're really specific and clear and that student will know exactly what to do and so all i can say is we have to develop our systems with all of our courses to make sure that that teacher and student clarity piece is there and we're even doing this at the elementary and primary level so when we talk about an elementary level you know math standard we're developing not only what we know as a prerequisite skill but what's going to come after that student shows proficiency on the standard two so a teacher is going to know exactly how to even challenge them into the great next grade level if that's what their child needs so i don't i
068can't give you a wonderful answer on that but i can i can tell you that it's going to be basically teacher and student clarity about the learning goals and i'd also add that i think we can talk to our neighboring districts that are doing this successfully often and that they're still having students that are being accepted into not only local colleges but also the colleges of their choice that may be outside of illinois so this is occurring in not just other middle primary middle districts it's also happening at high schools and so how are they getting their students to not just settle for d for diploma or b for meats or whatever it like how are we pushing that that that is i would say a mindset piece that we can ask and see how
069are you doing that in your district because that's the language we want to use to ensure our students are ivy lee right ivy lee ready if they want to be grant is using stevenson as a model right now so they're they just they just got a new curriculum director and um i think we're going to see a lot of movement in their district that's just my personal prediction and more of toward this model um they call it evidence-based grading we call it standards-based grading but grant is looking at the same system so one of the things that i thought might be helpful to you as parents and community members is instead of asking your child did you do your homework or did you study for your test you can really hold them accountable to their
070learning a little bit more even this year based on all the work that we've done our staff is using a completely different language it's a completely different vocabulary when talking about student learning so just some suggestions is you know what standards are you proficient in what standards are you struggling with is there anything that you think you might contact your teacher and ask for a second chance to demonstrate learning um so based on the work we've already done those are just some questions for you and then moving forward all of this work um one thing that we didn't talk about that's going to take place is the this idea of inter-rater reliability with assessments so it's not only a matter of getting the assessments developed and tied to standards but educators need to be able
071to sit next to each other and look at models of student work or look at assessments that have been taken and talk together about what grade or what level of proficiency they would assign to that student if we have teacher a saying well that looks like a 3 to me and teacher b is going well that looks like a 2. that's a problem because then we're still going to have inconsistencies so that's just yet another learning opportunity that we need to provide for our teachers and um one more thing to add to the the list of things that we'll be doing this year in addition to the rubrics and making sure our assessments are quality so um we already talked about means and we'll we'll talk more about how we'll be calculating grades in the
072future um but at this point do you have any other questions you know we talked a lot about some pretty heavy topics i can't reiterate enough how uh how important this work is and how good how good of a job they've done and kind of pulling things together not just dr hetcheves and dr king the whole group of administrators really have teamed up with this and uh but but dr petrovitz and dr king are definitely leading the charge on this so it's it's good good work yes item of business i won't talk your ear off i promise we've received and this is just general observations of me being here for nine years i think it is now we as a principal i got questions about spelling instruction and obviously spelling is something we need to
073teach it's in the illinois state standards common core state standards whatever you like to call it it's very vague i think sometimes spelling gets overlooked and i just the the research is there it tells us that students don't learn to spell by memorizing words so those of us who were given a list of words on monday and tested on a friday our teachers weren't really doing much for us in the way of developing our spelling skills so really the focus now and the focus for a while has been on students depending on reading level it really depends on reading level a lot of the times they're all functioning in different stages of spelling development and the only way for us to differentiate and push them along is to assess and see where they're at with
074spelling and word study word knowledge and use that information to provide differentiated instruction in spelling so that students are more focused on patterns and words and they can apply those patterns when they see them in their reading they can they know when to use them in their writing so i put in some charts a chart there for you so you can see just an example of some of the stages of spelling that students actually go through and so this year we will be using the developmental spelling inventory by donald bear and teachers will be giving that to students at the very beginning of the year we're going to teach them how to assess how to grade if you will that spelling test how to find a student's developmental spelling level and then how to implement
075differential differentiated spelling instruction for small groups if not individuals so i used to teach first grade and i did this it was probably one of the most helpful useful assessments i could have possibly given to my first graders and second graders and i think parents were really excited because certain students were coming home with lists with words with greek and latin roots some parents you know they were happy to provide support for their children who were just learning vowel pairs um so that all will be addressed so if you hear big hello doesn't teach spelling please know that we are it's going to most likely take place during uh the guided reading blocks that teachers will be doing because like i said spelling level often correlates with reading level so often times when we assess
076students reading levels we see similar spelling abilities so any questions about that what grade levels will it be this will be grades one through four what about my sixth grader who can't spell so it's in the standards our sixth grade ela teachers still are responsible for teaching usually the instruction with spelling um comes in the form of like a writer's workshop where a child's getting feedback on a written piece and it might just be a circle like check the spelling here um you know here's some tools you can use to do your own spell check um so hopefully what we hope is by sixth grade students have very strong skills in place already um so for example again the greek and latin roots um affixes suffixes the idea that you know root words can be
077kind of um blanketed across you know many different words with that same root so we hope by then they've already got the skills especially after being given differentiated instruction and spelling but um usually sixth grade eighth grade seventh grade teachers will be providing feedback um and helping students find tools at that point to help them with their spelling or if they're extremely you know if they're struggling could take these resources up to the sixth grade level as well but that would probably be and more when we talk about mtss that would be something that would be addressed um as an additional support for a child in middle school all right the next item is the budget anybody have questions on the tentative budget i can run [Music] thank you no you're good um just a
078couple things on the budget uh this is a tentative budget next board meeting we'll have a hearing and we'll have some things finalized in here i don't have uh a grasp yet of the uh health insurance benefits we're just finished open enrollment and that so by the september board meeting i'll have all of that in here attack right now it's just my best guess um uh so i i think that uh the time can be spent better at the next meeting i can give you really details on or really deep details on the specific numbers uh this this tentative budget is a is looks solid we did get uh extra state funding that i did not anticipate so that was a that was a definite positive so it looks to me like if you look
079at the budget right now it's going to show in the education fund it'll show a uh anticipated deficit of one million seven hundred seventy four thousand and um with the total total expenses at nineteen million one hundred twenty five thousand typically we we spend between 90 and 93 94 of our budget so if if that were to be the case we'll be really close to being right at uh budget neutral for the year in the education fund and the other funds all look pretty solid as well we'll have to we had a finance committee meeting and we'll be looking at when we do the levy in november we'll just kind of we'll look at the uh some of the funds because we might be uh able to shift money from one fund to another through
080the levy next year so all in all it looks pretty solid and the expenses are a lot higher revenue is higher because uh probably over a million dollars because of the essa funding coming in we've had which increased our expenses and our revenue both so that's why it's a little it's jumped up from years prior which you'll see in our board documents next month so all right anybody else have questions nope can i please have a motion on first reading to approve the tentative budget for school year 2122 motion second cash and doug yes all right anybody any questions on the july employment report can i please have a motion to approve the july employment report motion second lauren and vivian yes anybody have questions on the parent student handbook nope can i please have
081a motion to approve the parent student handbook for 21 and 22. motion second gary and ash all in favor aye aye any oppose i have it the strategic planning process anybody have questions we'll start this after the new year probably in january february and really looking forward to getting that process started so yeah sounds good anybody have questions can i please have a motion to approve the strategic planning process process proposal from educational leadership solutions oh sure doug and jerry yes yep yes we accepted some resignations from christina dinapoli a bus driver christine nirenberg a 10-month primary school secretary jason watt 8th grade special ed teacher lynn wingard 8th grade math teacher kennedy vilt primary school music teacher we had no foia requests this month anybody have a question on the administrator report nope nope
082the next regularly scheduled board meeting will take place monday september 13 2021 with closed session beginning at 6 00 pm uh there is an iasb board member training tuesday august 24th 2021 at 6 pm that's it anybody hit anything else okay please have a motion to adjourn motion second vivian and morris all in favor all right any opposed eyes have it meanings adjourned