001all right welcome to the big hollow regular schedule board meeting it's tuesday october 13th it is 6 24 p.m um as we before we resume we're going to start with the pledge of allegiance i'd like to ask our scout pack who's here earning their outdoor adventure badge if they could come up and lead us in the pledge please right right up here guys right up here to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right thank you scouts resume open session can i please anybody have any questions on the e-learning program verification form you know i just noticed the date of public hearing it says tomorrow's date not today's okay thank you so we need
002a we need this is a hearing that we have to do so we need a motion to go into the hearing and then we could talk about it and then we have the motion it's kind of a formality we have to do for the county okay can i please have a motion to enter a hearing to discuss the proposed e-learning plan for big owl school district 38 motion second joe and doug all in favor the motion is read hi all right opposed eyes have it all right thanks kevin um so this uh this i want to make sure we kind of clear what this is about it's it's not it is not related to our remote learning that we're doing now uh to to do um in the future if we have a snow day
003a typical snow day an emergency day that we would use if we have an approved e-learning plan on the with the county we can um we can do a an e-learning day instead of taking an emergency day and so um that's all this is is just to get we have to go through the red tape to get that approved plan um and part of the the requirements are that we have a hearing and so we're in the hearing we're sharing exhibit one exhibit two that's just a a very simple plan and then there's a document in there that's the form that we fill out for the county so it's really we've got the remote learning thing down right now so i'm not concerned if we have a if we have an emergency day that if
004we could possibly use it use an e-learning day instead so doesn't mean we'll never use an emergency day because if it catches us by surprise and we aren't ready for it at all there's a chance we just call it but this gives us the ability to call it an e-learning day if we if we have the kids ready for it so so that's all this is and at the end of the at the end if you don't have questions or if you do i can answer them now but at the end we'll we'll vote officially to approve the alerting plan and then i will send it to the roe to get approval so that's just a kind of a little process they may we have to go through that's legislated is this the first year
005that they're doing this that the we could have done it in prior years okay we just didn't and uh i honestly i it's not they because of all the red tape i just thought uh but at this point since our teachers are so accustomed to it now i thought it might as well do it it's good for three years once we approve it okay and so we'll revisit it again every three years thank you yep anybody else have questions can i please have a motion to close the e-learning hearing motion second vivian and joe all in favor uh closing the learning hearing say hi bye any opposed nice have it anybody have anything to add to the agenda can i please have a motion to approve the agenda motion second okay julian vivian all in
006favors emotion is read say aye aye any opposed eyes have it accomplishment recognition um for the month of september the administration would like to honor the following individuals who've been nominated by staff and selected by the administration for the following awards our student of the month is oliver dempsey from first grade all right oliver come on up [Music] so oliver we have uh we have this award for you tonight yes it's a very good one yeah so let me let me tell you what a teacher wrote about you okay so it says oliver's a first grade student primary at the big hall primary last last year in kindergarten e-learning was tough for oliver it was confusing for him to see his teacher on the screen rather than person he struggled to stay with his whole
007class on zoom calls as the end of year approach oliver is making great progress in his ability to stay on the zoom calls and his teacher over the computer this year oliver has absolutely rocked it he sits down and is gauged with his teacher mrs wheaton on zoom calls he's eager and happy to talk and participate he does independent work oliver transitions so well in this crazy time of e-learning and i'm so proud of oliver this hasn't been easy but he has really grown and excelled i had tears in my eyes when i saw how amazing he was doing and how proud how proud i was of him so that was one of your teachers that wrote that about you oliver so congratulations that's awesome congrats buddy there you go will you take this can
008we take a picture real quick yeah all right let's do that mrs janice is right here let's mr lister lions here say cheese i know you can't see it all right congratulations oliver [Applause] then for employee of the month we have a unique situation this this month we have two individuals that were recommended by colleagues and uh they both have done outstanding work uh can i call up jessica lardisball and kelly murphy please our seven or nine so these two serve as our nurses for for the whole campus right now and i'm just gonna read a few points that were made always amazing going above and beyond for covid pandemic parent communication is kind considerate and always understanding friendly collaborative patient always going above and beyond to help us out incredible resources and if you
009haven't seen their uh video uh what do you call that your your video yeah the corona chronicles uh the series of videos they put out and have become quite popular even on twitter are outstanding so uh these two are definitely well deserving they are co-co employees of the month this month and uh i have we have one of these that will be coming to the to you kelly so so there's they're shared we only had one in stock so so thank you guys very much do you want to say anything or no let's get a good picture all right so kevin get in here and go ahead all right these two are very well deserving thank you so much thank you thank you guys thank you and you all are welcome to stay but don't
010feel like you have to so you don't offend us all right item 8 board member code of conduct review mrs plusha i will strive for a positive working relationship with the superintendent respecting the superintendent's authority to advise the board implement a board policy and administer the district thank you anybody have any questions on the consent agenda no no uh i'm going to point out she noticed something on something and emailed me today and i'm going to share if the the minister our teacher's out of bed report we had two administrators that were not on it realized that in our skyward system the way we had them classified was pulling them up as support staff and that report doesn't pull it so we fixed it today it's in the it's in there correctly now okay thank
011you anybody else have questions can i please have a motion to approve the consent agenda motion second tiffany and julia yes yes yes yes all right public comments i have one um from mrs grimes she has a list of five questions if a student is showing symptoms and is scheduled to go in person and can't what is the procedure to get them to remote smoothly so they aren't counted as absent they might be feeling fine and could do remote learning so it doesn't seem right to withhold that opportunity from them do they need a note to return how is it taken into account with students that have allergies and asthma with symptoms question two there is some concern with bringing students own instruments to school what are big hollows plans do students bring their instruments
012to school if so where do they leave them how are students storing their items will they be using lockers question three what is the plan for pe are they going to gym are they using equipment question four are students rotating classes in fifth grade or are the teachers how are you going to be able to contact trace how will rooms be sanitized in between classes with only five minutes question five what is the procedure for carpooling with other parents for drop-off and pickup and if it changes well thank you mrs grimes for submitting those questions um mr gold can you have the principles yep address them please yep we'll get those answers yeah we'll get those answered tomorrow for sure all right thank you we have any more public comment okay the superintendent's report all
013right monthly board policy review is exhibit and then exhibit 11. is our board policy update on a second reading for press issues 104 and 105. so then we should be we will be caught up i'm sure 106 will be coming soon so any questions on either of those exhibits all right can i please have a motion to approve on second reading the board policy update joe and doug all in favor of the motion is read say aye aye any oppose i have it okay um i'm going to give you an update on blended learning let you or blended hybrid model and feel free to ask any questions that you might have as well a couple items i'm going to start by saying that we have we have a website a link on our website for
014all covert related items by tomorrow i think tomorrow afternoon we should have the the remaining links activated we had some information that wasn't finalized yet but the first two links you'll see on the page are are metrics so i'm pointing parents to those metrics pages when i send parent updates out now i'll have those links on there just to point them to that direction we get those metrics uh the both dashboards that we have we update them probably three times a week currently if you've been reading the papers you see lake county is climbing and i think lake county went into a warning status but our uh our local metrics because we we do it by uh zip codes our local metrics are remaining pretty good uh we're at seven percent in positivity rates which
015is a little on the high end over eight percent is what they uh start getting concerned with um we are at 9.8 per 100 000 for the incidence rate which uh that the range goes all the way up to 14 before there's any concern so we're good on that the diagnostic turnaround time is still two days so that they're still the recommendation would still be falling in in the hybrid area for us they're taking out the covid like symptoms admissions because it's there's so few numbers in lake county and the data is so scattered that they're going to take that one out but uh the other dashboard it looks like a spreadsheet when you pull it up um dr king is putting in the data behind this but um right now things are reading pretty
016well uh but i want to you know on the dashboard it's going to say good it's going to be in green but i will say that a lot of these are on the edge of being a a caution for us nurse status we have two nurses in a health aide custodial status is solid transportation status is solid but we can't afford to lose any drivers we have a couple subs but we just if we had we had a number of drivers quarantined or something we would be in trouble um teacher attendance is solid uh um substitute availability is good but it's again it's we're they're just not a lot out there to that to pick from right now because uh the sub pool we have is just has just shrunk uh we got people that
017don't feel comfortable coming in or people that have already accepted in other areas so we've tried to hire people long term like get commitments so we just have them here student coveted cases is on this one we have currently have one we have one staff coving case neither were a result of being at school neither of them were one the staff coveted case with somebody who hadn't been here in weeks so but we were notified today of that one um we did have a situation that i really that worries me and i'm just going to share with all of you because it's it's uh something that i have to message out to our parents and our community to really help us with but just this past week we had just i'll just show you how
018easy a little uh a little problem can turn into a big one for us is we had one student who came to school on a tuesday but the family was waiting a covet test for a parent and but the school student came to school on tuesday spent time with our staff and then on wednesday they found out the parents had covid so they got the student tested and found out on friday the student had coveted so now we have to go back and there's four staff that have to quarantine for 14 days because of that contact so if things like that happen we are not going to be able to stay open we just won't be we just won't have the people so i've got to really caution people on uh on do on those
019kind of things because it you know nobody's sick over nobody's gotten uh illness over this you know at this point but um we do have four teachers now that are quarantined and if we were in person that would cause us a real problem but uh um so that's that's we keep all that information on this dashboard and we'll keep that updated throughout the week we have staff some staff are returning next week with students many staff are already working on campus but staff who need to be here to support those students will be here next week principals are communicating very important information to parents right now this today and tomorrow they've divided up the am pm schedules uh they're sharing all the new procedures there's drop-off pick-up procedures that are different uh uh so there's
020a lot of new things they're they're sharing with them i have to tell you that countless hours by uh specifically in the things i just mentioned by the building principles just uh the scheduling was was a nightmare and i and i think they they really sat down and tried to do the best they could with it and they did a really good job with it at the primary elementary all but five sections i believe i have the number right all but five sections are because we had enough students choosing full remote all but five sections have have students in person half the day and then the rest of the students being served remotely half the day so the teacher is able to give both sets of students really good attention so when they're not with
021the teacher they're doing asynchronous learning but so that's been a positive middle school schedules were finished and those have been sent or will be sent out soon um transportation uh christine arndt and derek swaderski and the whole crew they're working getting that done i would imagine there'll be a notification to tomorrow or thursday on transportation i can you can last i heard i think i think we were able to meet most of the transportation needs with the exception of students that are in being served in the safe school learning space they currently transport themselves to and from school so they may have to continue transporting themselves to and from school but they're getting a full day here and we wanted to give priority to the to the families who were just coming part-time i'll be
022sending an email to parents at the end of the week and in that i'll include like i think in case you get questions board what are we going to do if somebody gets if somebody does test positive on campus how are we going to communicate that i'm going to lay that all out in a letter on thursday but in in summary basically we're going to if it happens in a building we're going to notify the families in that building that there was a positive case and that if your child was a close contact you will be personally notified and then we'll let them know that and so that's that's going to be and then we're just going to encourage them don't please don't send your kids with these kind of symptoms and things like that
023so but if you have any questions for me or any of our administrators uh this would be a great time for it and we can try to help you out yeah i had a couple yeah first was pictures for the students are they going to be able to have pictures this year i'm deferring to the principles on that i know we've talked about it student pictures photo company said they would come whenever we're ready to start doing staff pictures we can do staff pictures for on-site student pictures we can do student pictures for those who are in person and then we'll have to figure out another process to get those who are remote then we can do that middle school too okay you set up this district okay and then i i saw i only
024got the middle school schedule because that's the only kids i have now i saw they have epic i'm wondering why um so we do we did set some um parameters around it for teachers now a little bit more guided where they're going to be have hold office hours the first 20 minutes and then kids will be able to zoom in get help but the kids won't leave the room but they'll have to zoom in and get the help from the teachers during that time so just another opportunity and honestly it met our layout of where our schedule was at so we could finish a full day as i saw the pur i mean the period of epic is the same length as like their ela in their yeah natural natural way to get six periods
025in to have it all flow we just kept it the way it was because there's six sections with um three in the morning three in the afternoon with electives and pe in there and then but then only for the first 20 minutes they're going to have opportunity to get help well for now until we adjust that so the office hours are open to see how it goes how it handles without kids leaving the room the kids will have to zoom in from their classroom at the teachers next door to ask questions to get help typically the kids could leave there but with so such guidelines they're not going to be able to leave so they're going to zoom in so not perfect right now but we're going to adjust as soon as we get back
026in and see how it goes i mean that was honestly it's a general concern of mine i don't i don't understand why we're having epic um i get that it works within the schedule um but what you just described the kids can do at home um i i i was just disappointed at the middle school but i i thought banning choir was from what everyone said from the spring band choir was still pretty successful uh remotely um so i i don't know i i don't understand why the kids have epic i mean you it is what it is but i i it's my general concern is that i would they're missing i mean we we've got this report coming up from dr king and it shows the effects that this has all had on our
027scores even though they seem to be holding up well they still have gone down in some areas and now the kids are going to lose direct instruction time on the day that they're supposed to get direct instruction if they're coming to school i mean that's just my concern yeah so i understand what you're saying i just it's uh to to take to scott's point typically epic is a shorter class period when we have a regular school day but when you're blocking it like this we have to keep the class periods all the same when we blocked it so that's how it became the same amount of time and then it came down to do we you know we didn't want to our banning chorus they have plans on how to do this and so we
028didn't want to uh uh we i guess we just made a decision to you know hold to that and keep them in the in the in person learning as well so but we do have to we'll have to emphasize the use of that time though uh and like scott said we have to be ready to adjust if it's not used well for the kids who are not in bannon chorus it's a valid concern i have a question about transportation have we have you figured out when students are going to get their temperature taken are they getting their tests should they get on the bus yes they got on the bus yep we fixed it so yeah they will they'll get on there as soon as they get on the bus and is there going to
029be a second person on the bus that's taking the temperature no the driver is going to do it so they're not gonna leave their seat though okay so we're just gonna keep them in the seat and do it so with the with a few number of kids you know we think it we think it will work so we're keeping 20 to for uh i think the largest bus number is 24 right now because there are some siblings on that bus but it's one per seat and so we're doing yeah any other questions yeah if a student's not feeling well a certain day and they um normally opt to come into school can they just remote learn and stuff yes do they have to go through any procedures no i haven't i talked to the secretaries
030about themselves to amongst themselves to work on a procedure for that i haven't followed up yet to see exactly what it's going to be but we'll get we'll have to get notified from the parent that they're not going to be in person today but we won't count them absent because they'll be able to if they're going to remote in and participate with the remote learners then we'll be able to do it so we'll get that but yeah they would not because we're going to have situations where students who are going to have to just with symptoms they could have to be out 10 days even and so we want i want that to be 10 days of loss instruction they would get to remote in and participate with remote learners so that's going to be
031the benefit of how this is all set up so you know middle school they'll just remote in the classroom and at primary elementary their schedule might flip like uh instead of going in person in the morning and they might go with the teacher in the afternoon instead and kind of flip it over but it'll be uh the parents just have to email the teachers at that point will the parents have to email the teachers at that point for primary and elementary we're going to have to work on that procedure so we'll get that ironed out it's a good question we got to bring that up and then i have another one say a child has like allergies and they get a note from the doctor saying they have allergies yeah can they still attend school
032yes okay even if it's like an ongoing note like uh so that they've added some flexibility for us on that and the nurses can used to be just the symptom and they're out now it's uh new symptoms and they if it's a new symptom the nurse would have to make that decision to put them out but if it's a ongoing a symptom that's tied to an allergy then they you know and they've got a doctor's note then they're they'll be fine but there is some discretion with our nurses on that which they just added that last month that i think they were finding schools that were trying to follow the letter of the guideline as it was written it was very difficult what's the what's the guideline for close contact uh six feet for a
033cumulative 15 minutes within the day so uh so that's what that's why we're we really need to do our best to try to keep kids uh distance as much as we can so in a classroom situation of teachers as positive what's the the teacher that would be a diff that would be a difficult one because we would have to now students it would come down to the teacher deciding you know we'd have to we would go into we'd have contact tracing that would go into there and say was this student working with any of these other students did you keep them socially distanced or not if there's any question then we would you know students around them and lake county will jump in at that point and kind of take over that for us so
034at middle school they're they have three classes per day yes and so they're going to be switching classrooms and there's going to be a passing period in the hallway are all all students going to be in the hallway at one time or are you going to stagger or how stagger correct yes uh is so no bathroom or water breaks during the passing period okay okay thank you good question that's okay that's okay any other questions fire them away at the uh shoot me an email and i'll get the answers to you and because there's a lot a lot of new here we're all and we quit we ask questions i could ask questions every day that i don't know the answers to and sometimes it helps us just to develop our uh uh we find
035we think of thing we find out things that we need to know so is there something on the website for people to access like the faqs exactly and that gets updated the faq is up it's a live document on the website so uh it's it's linked if we're making changes right now the people are seeing those changes okay so if the answers aren't on the fiq who do parents email or contact i would encourage them to email their building principal first because a lot of these questions are building specific i get a lot of emails and if i don't know the answer i direct it right back to the building principles i don't mind getting them because i know my building principles are pretty pretty busy right now um if it's uh you know then
036if they if they really know if like if it's curriculum related they know they can enter email dr hetchevitz if it's assessment related or special ed related they can dr king or the transportation and they can go to pristine but i think most of them if they just start with the building principle we'll get it in the right hands from there oh i have one other question yeah especially for the middle school that i know that the teachers are going to be teaching on the in-person class and zoom at the same time what happens if it's is there a system to see if it's going well it's not going well a system go ahead or [Music] i think system's the wrong word i'm sorry is there like a procedure procedure thank you we don't have
037a system but i know and on my calendar for admin we picked a month out just to kind of reevaluate everything i was going so that'll include getting our building leadership team and then we have subcommittees as well we have an instructional subcommittee underneath that that is made up of our building team plus other teachers that are not on the overall building leadership team that are on that subcommittee so we'll be pulling them to kind of just review like qualitatively how everything's going and what what do we need to improve on so anything else all right thank you very much appreciate it all right next uh and spell on i'll give you my lapel and uh we're gonna have svetlana popovic here to talk about our humanx results for the district results were just recently
038thank you ready for some good news yes how is the culture and climate of our work environment of our employees how's everybody feeling is the biggest question and i'm so happy to report with all of the districts that i am working in in chicago 22 10 that have gone through our inside x survey eight have shown increase in their dream box in their culture and climate which is really proving for all of us that the biggest difference in our conversation about the difference between climate and culture when we had this conversation and when i did this with the staff is that what's happened globally for all employees in every industry is that the climate the environment in which we were asking our employees to work in that has shifted and it shifted overnight to be
039remote so when we think about ourselves as employees you are all employees what's happened is that you are now asked to do your work in a different location in a different environment and so that climate change does not always and shouldn't is mutually exclusive from what the culture is culture is the way we behave in a work environment and that's what we feel so just because our climate has changed we are asked to do our work in a different location doesn't necessarily mean that the way we behave with each other has changed in fact what i hear in multiple reports from teachers administrators superintendents is that this climate change as we as americans face adversity has actually brought our culture together teachers reaching out people are calling each other instead of just texting texting out
040of the blue people that you never did text before just to check up on them so when we think about climate change and the work environment changing doesn't necessarily mean that our culture and the way we behave with it with each other in our work environment has changed at all and so today i'm so happy a quick reminder online assessment confidential and anonymous that is a reminder too to say that participation in these perception data surveys is critically important the data is most has the integrity and is most informed when we can have a hundred percent participation so it's not just that we want 100 participation for the most informed data but because we use this data to goal set we want the most informed data when our teacher teams set goals last year every
041building did the impact that those actions would have on building a healthy culture and climate if it was a hundred percent informed would have a hundred percent impact so participation is critically important 24 statements 15 dimensions of culture and climate and four different question stems in each dimension so that we can tease out the data even further to say where can we celebrate and where can we find areas for improvement so as you're looking at the data here are the 15 dimensions a little data literacy up at the top is that 192 employees were expected to take it 169 did so your data is 88 informed that's phenomenal that's actually i think higher than we were last year in participation so when you think about last year where we were the same time period um
042and that employees were asked to do it we i think it was part of a teacher institute day i think we had designated time for when they were going to take it and what it looked like this year during that same frame um actually we took it later than we did last year that they were they were still participating at very high rates so that in and of itself tells us a lot about what our employees are looking forward to having their voices heard um and they see that this data and the goal setting that we did is very valuable to helping their own school environment as well as all of big hollow then you can take a look and see the celebration is that every single dimension increased so this is out of a
043likert scale of five last year uh previous top mean was 4.56 this year 4.58 even those that are holding steady is still a very testament to the employees that took the survey and how they feel the other thing that i draw also attention to is that we've kept a very tight differential from the top mean 4.58 to the lowest mean 4.10 it is a tight span and i liken that to um when why it's important that it's very tight uh kindergarteners come into our classrooms and you have kindergartener already coming into a classroom reading at a level c already knowing their letters and their sounds and then you have kindergarteners coming into kindergarten and they don't know their letters they don't know their sound so that range that differential is something that the teacher then
044has to make sure she differentiates that learning when you have a closer range between the top mean and the lowest mean that is telling us that more of our employees are experiencing the culture and climate similarly so remember that a perfect template is that every single dimension it gets to a 5.0 at that point it won't matter what's at the top which one's at the top which one's at the bottom that's a one-dimensional thing that we have to get through but we want to make sure that the the experience that our employees are feeling is more consistent and you have that because you have a very tight difference between your top mean and your bottom one and then we look and see you're all above a 4.0 and in our field of work and in
045our experiences with a local in our benchmarking and standard is that once a district reaches a 4.0 in any dimension you're already showing we are noticing a significant difference so anything over a 4.0 is a significant um positive impact on climate and culture engaged inspired i feel pride at work the quality of the work that i do the quality of the work that my team does continuous improvement mindset and then innovation some very key things and very high rates of reporting again 88 percent informed 169 individual employee voices that's phenomenal that truly is phenomenal considering everything that impacted us from march 13th how quickly everything shifted and changed for all of us for all of us and even the ones that are at the bottom which i have to say is a relative bottom support
046and equip even increased i feel supported and i have the equipment to do the job that i'm asked to do performance planning is evaluation cycle communication even went up every one of these went up and it's significant so these are truly celebrations when you see the celebration on this page this is the three by three i'll populate it all the way when we talk about 88 percent informed this 3x3 is taking satisfaction and engagement the two main drivers of culture and climate and employee engagement and we went from 81.56 in the dream box that red circle to 79.7 but when we look at where we are with that whole corner the satisfied and engaged the high corner around the dream box and last year it was 91.8 uh is that six one and eighty nine
047point eight eight so when you're talking about that close of a uh of a dream box of employee satisfaction and engagement you really can't ask for more than that um even holding steady in this time of adversity these results would have been great without any kind of obstacle in the way and i really do want to commend you as the board and mr gold in going ahead and having your employees take this i can't tell you how many um superintendents actually called and were concerned to say should we be even giving this right now like my teachers are so stressed and you know my my administrators are so stressed and i said absolutely because what's your alternative that you don't want to hear how your employees are feeling so i think that to commend you
048as a board and as an administrative team to say no we really are interested we are concerned we want to know how do you feel because we are going we are going to keep actively goal setting and increasing and doing whatever we can to help the climate and culture in your building and the district and then what we want to make sure in the red corner is that the whole point of this 3x3 is to see year after year as we get trend data are we consistently moving from the people from the lower left that low engagement low satisfaction and are we making a difference in moving people up toward the middle and always up to that red dream box section so you see that we are 2019 2.23 this year 1.2 in that lower
049but if you take a look at just the zeros the zero percentiles in those quadrants it truly is remarkable and and again i can't say enough 169 people reported this so it's it's very valuable data to be able to have and kind of helps us put into context what we should be and gives us places to celebrate a lot of celebrations when you look at the top i'm going to have to move a little closer my eyes aren't that great when we talk about the top questions this is now out of all 74 questions that were ranked you're looking at the top questions and the number one question is i am committed to the success of this organization as a number one question organization questions almost never make it team questions and organization questions they
050are typically just i statements about myself but you have a comment here from your employees 169 said we are committed to the success of this organization that's huge that's it that really should tell you something about the the mindset of the educators that you have working here at big hollow and then the other one that i want to highlight i am driven to contribute to the success of the organization that's another one as well engagement is not just that i'm committed to the success but i am also driven for that that's a motivational thing so it's not just oh yeah it's good to hear about it but no i want to be an active participant in it and that goes in line with that last question the satisfaction i am satisfied being a part i
051am satisfied being a part of our team so a team question even showed up in the top five to say that it's not just about me it's really the our concern about my team and about the district and i think this goes back to my case in the beginning the difference between climate and culture is that what we're seeing here at big hollow is that the teachers the educators are really pulling together and their commitment is solid to all of you all of the the whole stakeholder group not just their students and their parents but to each other and i think that that is that is amazing and i don't know uh that you know maybe next year when this all goes away if it does what that shift will be but i think it
052is such a testament to the level of educators that you have here at big hollow when you look at the low your lowest five again i can't even say that it's low because it's a relative low if you're looking at 3.67 to 3.93 is your lowest questions we see some of the same things that we saw last year they are increased all of those questions from last year's last year increased but we're looking at how do our lowest questions give us ideas for professional development so data should do two things it should give you opportunities to celebrate and it should give you opportunities to look for professional development and so when we look at professional development i've had several conversations because the administrative team set goals around these as well we are talking about how
053do we help with coaching how do we help support our administrators as an organization as a whole what are we doing about training and getting the right talent in the in the position um and i feel in on things as an organization that communication one shows up almost all the time in the lower five organizationally it's a hard one to move because it depends on the whole system and what everyone would like to know so then the graph this first one is participation again it's important i think it's motivating um and i also think that it's important for us to realize we're part of a whole as a big hollow so participation was fantastic this year we want to always get it closer to a hundred percent and then the dream box as well so
054this is every school stream box department dream box and again we're seeing how the success and how people we have to remember we are not living we are not working inside silos we really are working together as a whole and how can we share information and how can we share across schools and departments what's going well and how we can celebrate and how we can support this was just the process that we used for goal setting in each one of the buildings with the teacher teams i can tell you that those conversations i don't know that i've seen you since then but the conversations with the teachers and the conversations that i'm continually having with teacher teams and teacher groups and supporting the principals in their buildings has been phenomenal the level of ownership the
055engagement in it they they really are inspired by this work and really do see themselves and all of the whole school as part of the equation for how do we get a better climate and culture and i think that's it i'll take any questions that you might have on any slides state is great thank you thank you and i do want to remind the board that please complete your tmx's so that we can meet um and and go through your team ex culture results as well thank you all right thank you and i too was a little nervous giving that survey out in a little pandemic but it was it was just good to see um we wanted to see where our staff was and i think i told them begin a year the i
056think the strong culture has helped them kind of overcome the climate change that we've had so it's been tough so they've been doing a great job i'm going to bring up dr vicki king to talk about an assessment review so vicky's up next okay all right well thank you mr gold and the board for having me uh here to review our fall assessment information at any point during the presentation um i know you've seen the report i provided last week but if you have questions about any of the graphs and slides that you see please feel free to stop me and i can go ahead and jump in all right so an overview of the presentation so tonight i'll share some of the findings both nationally and locally related to the new map norms released
057by nwea we'll explore how students have started the new school year and discussed some possible implications of the covid19 school closures and their impact on our data as you already know critical aspect to equity is meeting the immediate needs of all of our learners is ensuring that we're also paying attention to attainment and growth of our students and so we will look at information provided by map which reveal how our students are projected to perform on our state assessments later on this spring and currently the state is still based upon the department of education requiring all states to administer the state assessment so as of now though these projections are important for us we'll also briefly examine results from our kinder screener we decided to administer the one-to-one screener versus map to our kindergartners because
058many of our kindergartners this was their first exposure to the buildings and so we didn't want them to come in and take a computer test we wanted them to be able to interact with the teacher to the best degree they could and then finally we'll discuss how some of the current work we're doing both internally with our staff and then also externally with various stakeholders and then i'll also have dr hechovitz come up and share some of the specific items related to professional development all right so let's first dig into the 2020 versus 2015 norms and so when we look at these norms they allow us to compare students to similar students when we're looking at norms and nwea groups students into percentile ranks to give us an idea how students are performing over time
059and in july nwea released new norms they do this about every three to five years and so they were it was time for these data to be updated in it's important to note that these new norms were prior to covid so the cove any impacts covid may have on our data will not be reflected in nwea norms until they renorm in three to five years so what happens what we're going to discuss today and what will happen in the future across the nation we won't see that reflected in kind of longitudinal data for a while now but regardless nwea is recommending all schools because of the covet closures and because of these new percentiles and new norms to use these data as benchmark information and what we can see from the data based on report
060of over 4 million student test scores across all 50 states the nation has shown an overall decline in achievement in reading and math and you may recall last year the nape it released information that looked at fourth and eighth grade reading scores in math scores and they saw the same thing last year that the nation as a whole has declined and so what that means when you look at some of those tables that we'll look at and with the graphs we'll see in a few minutes the percentiles shifted up so in 2015 some of you may recall that we got new norms for map and the percentile shifted down and it was because there was a national increase in achievement across the nation we've seen the inverse as a nation over the past several years
061and so now there's a decrease and so all the percentiles look a little inflated so what we had to do when we looked at this we look at the overall achievement of our students we wanted to compare does this data that we're looking at the increase in information reflect um just the norms that the national norms compare nationally or can we see were there changes over time just in our student population so you'll see in the information i did some disaggregating of data at both using old norms and the new norms and then i also look at cohort information and on the very back of your report that i just provided you the hard copy i've also disaggregated by ethnicity and race because you'll start to see there's a lot of interesting information that we'll
062look at okay so here's the first one comparing the 20 20 percentiles to the 2015 percentiles and i may say 2015 and i may say 2019 it's the same thing that's it was in that group from 2015 to 2019 so so what you can see in this first chart that blue line it represents the new norm percentile scores for grades one through eight in ela so for example a fourth grade student who earned a 198 in ela using in fall 2019 that student would be at the 48th percentile however these new norms place that same exact student scored that same exact score at the 52nd percentile so it moved them above the 50th percentile which is the national average that's for ela for math we see the same thing following the same logic we look
063at a first grader first grader received a 163 for math in the fall of 2019 last year they would have been placed in the 59th percentile and now they're placed in the 61st percentile so this is interesting because when we some we use both local and national information to identify needs in our student populations and so when we start to look at the national norms this the data are indicating that we're above the national norms all right so then we're let's take it a little deeper and we're going to go look at the results by subject and grade so these next four slides are going to reveal evidence suggesting that our students were less negatively impacted by the school closures than originally estimated now that's not to say there are still not concerns and there
064are not still things we need to really brace ourselves for and i would say i've talked to our admin teams and our principals we've talked about the idea of the students being resilient but if we have consistently changes back and forth there's only so much that students can retain without us starting to see an impact in that so while the decision to move into full remote was challenging for many districts and for us too the information we've collected over the summer and fall demonstrates that our students are coming into their grades at relatively the same spot that they typically do in the fall every year there's what we call summer regression so these data are showing that there's just a very small change from where they would have started out in the past all right
065so here's our first one so you can see by the solid blue line here the line represents the grade levels overall mean rit score compared to the grade levels means mean rich score the previous year for instance a seventh grader their overall average writ in ela for 2019 was at 214.4 this year it was a 2.2 14.2 uh and to be clear declines at the higher level 7th 8th 9th 10th 12th grade those are more significant even the tenth of a whole but even that tenth of a hole is still not so significant to what we were i would say a lot of educators were expecting embracing ourselves for in the same way if we look at math we see the same trend it's a slight there's a slight difference and these data are important
066as we assess our return of investment and the rate of improvement of our students in both remote learning models and on our on-site because now we have been starting some starting information that we can work with to see how we can compare students from our remote learners and the students that we're going to have on campus and be able to compare them to previous school years and in the same way in that for that very same purpose i wanted to look at cohort data so i've got ela and you've got ela and math on the same table i've just separated on two charts but what i did is when we looked at this information typically we look at cohort data we want to see as many data points as we have possible within the system
067to see how they're doing over time well as we mentioned we have new norms and we have the covet closure so starting over it was a little bit of an intentionality of only comparing last year's students to how they performed last fall to how they performed this fall so for example the yellow box the 162.9 for ela and the 174.7 that would represent a current second grader so that was their information from first grade that was the second grade's mean rit score for first grade and those same group of students showed growth over time to 174.7 so we can see regardless of how things shook out last year with all of the change that we started to experience still our students as a whole grew in every area and i would say a little echoing
068of settling this we want we're looking for some wins we're also looking to be honest and then you know i'll show some data that shows kind of reality check but we also want to celebrate some wins and there's math okay so we were looking at growth and we have seen that perhaps students didn't make as much growth as we would hope in a school year um they didn't regress so significantly that they're so far behind from previous falls but we do want to make sure and pay attention to achievement and so while our district was we were able to administer almost 100 percent of the students took the iar that were supposed to take the iar the illinois assessment of readiness last year and we have those scores they're all in pdf forms but only
06930 percent of the entire state was able to take the test because of the covet closures and so those data are not being uploaded to any systems those data are not going to be disaggregated for any schools they're not going to be combined for district use or building use so tech i literally have well actually dr hedgevis in her office like 1600 sheets of paper with students name all that's it so i asked the state i said are we going to receive electronic information so at least we can do something with that information and yes they sent me the pdf versions of those same 1600 sheets of paper or whatever it is so bottom line is we can't disaggregate that information unless we literally hand splice it and we're not going to do that so
070we're going to take it as a loss that will share that information but based on the linking study that map has done with iar we can take the map test they've created scale scores and we can see which students would be projected to meet proficiency standards based upon these map data and it's all only illinois students and so right now nwa is doing another linking study collecting all the information from students who take maps in the winter spring and fall and taking the park or the iar test they've done park as well and so we can do projections to see how students are doing and so here's where we are with that and this is where we want to pay attention to this information because this is important now right now as you can see
071all of the grade levels currently based on the the information we took in the summer and the fall the students are not projected to take to meet or exceed standards on iar but that's not to say our students won't meet or exceed standards this is if they were projected to take it tomorrow we have an entire year and so what we what we do as a district is we start to take the information and many times iar they provide us complete information related to standards and benchmarks even some of the the subset skills that students need in ela and you can tie that to map and you can start to work and drill in to ensure that students who are struggling in specific areas in map and on iar we can target our instruction in
072such a way to ensure students are not only growing but they're growing towards proficiency we may not have that information from iar this year but we do have the information through apex and we do have information through imagine and so that's a lot of the work that you'll hear uh michelle talk about it a little dr hechtavitz a little bit about what she's going to be doing with with the teachers and building capacity in that area and then i look forward to working with her so this is just information to show you where we are in relation to those meets and exceeds okay quickly moving on to the kinder screener we did nine screeners i'm only talking about four but you have all nine data points in your board report i'll give you examples of
073four to help you understand what we were looking at and these data are interesting because it kind of reifies what we were seeing with our map data and that yes students came to us knowing information but there really isn't there's not this projectable with the exception of like we have a linking study to project how they'll do on the state assessment based upon those data the information is kind of all over the place and so it's not following typical uh patterns where they cut where information is typically bell curve you're about to see graphs that they don't follow a bell curve and so i'll be honest that creates a little bit of a challenge for us to predict what could happen next for students if we don't respond appropriately and i would say astutely to
074the needs of students all right so again we we did the one-on-one screeners for our students there were nine areas they are listed there and the first one when we look at upper and lower case letter identification most students entering kindergarten were able to identify at least 16 uppercase letters and a quarter of the students entering kindergarten were able to identify all uppercase letters so you can see again typical that bell graph doesn't normally do that spike like that and on average when we look at lower class lowercase excuse me students entering kindergarten were able to identify 13 lowercase letters and two groups at the 25th and the 75th percentiles were able to identify four or less lowercase letters and then 22 plus lowercase letters respectively again trying to help help you understand like those
075though that doesn't follow typical patterns that we would normally see which is i i mean i guess we can say we're happy now we're just going to pay attention to what moves forward and really be intentional about looking at the imagine and apex information and then we look at number recognition a negative skew on the graph illustrates that 25 percent of students entering kindergarten were able to identify 19 out of 21 numbers and on average students were able to identify 12 less out of 21 and then we got our counting by 100s this is tied specifically and the rest that you have in your um your board report are tied to specific standards that kindergartners are asked and required to meet objectives on by the end of the school year and it shows that only
07625 percent were other kindergartners were able to count up to 39 by ones and i and i think this is important to when i say the word only um it's just like map we're not expecting all of our students to come into us knowing what they're supposed to do that's our job so this gives us a bit a baseline i'm in a starting place to make sure we're intentional we will be doing a follow-up map obviously in the early winter we'll be doing these screeners again with our students but i want to talk about what we're doing in response to this information and so overall we can see that the academic impact may not have been as tragic over the course of the pushed or full remote but we want to make sure we see
077these data hold up and so one of the conversations we're talking about is you know when we go these hybrid models we want to make sure we're not moving back and forth too much back into remote hybrid remote hybrid because students can only handle so much change of placement and re to respond to that so much before they're no longer able to access the information we're presenting and i would say one of the most immediate ways we're monitoring these data are through our school improvement plans i worked with most of the principals to help develop their school improvement plans where we're literally monitoring the conditional growth of the students within their the the body the student body so we're not necessarily comparing students to the national norms we're only comparing them to the conditional growth
078within that student the building because we want to make sure that we're going to see growth for all of our students i'm working with dr pittman and the school psychologist and we are creating an mtss framework for the district so for pre-k through eight making sure that there is a continuum of services and that when students are receiving intervention or enrichment they can when they matriculate to the next grade that program follows them it also uses uh data in a way that that data also matriculates with them so we're working with our data management systems to create a dashboard and we're just talking with that system today and then finally dr hutcherwitz and i are working with the members here and some of the people that were in the audience earlier we were on what's
079called the assessment of infor learning task force where we are starting to build capacity both within the school district our excuse me with the school system and outside the school body to make sure that we're starting to i would say elevate the level of knowledge we have about the assessments we're using for our students so i'm going to give it to i just i just said this is great thank you um quick did we compare because i know in over the years we've implemented a few different curriculum programs with scholastic and eureka did we look at the data i was trying to figure out whether or not the spot the five-year plan you had here what if that reflected the change in curriculum because it looked like it had some positive effects and some negative
080effects as far as scholastic goes eureka looked like it did very well for us um that we could certainly actually that's something we can do even in our map reporting we could have it trigger so it can start to like almost like a return on investment on programs we can do a program evaluation certainly i didn't i wasn't thinking of that and i should have been so thank you no i just i because it is this does this would this data reflect this or is that not what this is no the the particular i wasn't necessarily looking at programs in that but it would if you're seeing increases you could be seeing results of things like programs most certainly i would say that's not outside of the realm of possibility at all that's a great
081and we could really target the way we analyze that information though so i could get i could get you that information i think that that'd be something that we would all like to see yeah because i mean it's this is something we've talked about for a really long time so i mean i think it'd be great information um yes a year longer than school-wide right but but then sixth middle school didn't go to eureka yeah and was the reading with the pilot was it a whole grade level that piloted or was it just certain teachers within a grade level for school-wide yes so when we piloted school-wide we also were um piloting what we did is like a half a year a couple of people in each grade level did school-wide and then we had
082um another program that we were piloting along with it and then at the end we did talk about you know what are the strengths what are the how do we want to move forward but there were two programs in contention i guess you would say okay so yeah not um not everyone had access to all the units but we did had have quite a bit of representation in each grade level to pilot it i think that'd be cool information yeah and one thing i wanted just to piggyback on about eureka is when we were looking because i was looking at the data even last winter after we had conducted some of our testing and we were seeing some increases but my the way i was looking at it through my curriculum instruction lens is there
083was still a piece missing it wasn't a eureka problem there's an instructional piece that wasn't happening across the board using the data from our eureka assessments and such so i had talked to mr gold about the importance moving forward at that point in time before covid of really talking about the instructional practices that need to be paired alongside of a great curriculum like that so i think the increases that we've seen so far with eureka are more due to the standardization and the guaranteed and viable resource that we were using but we needed to start shifting what we were doing in terms of instruction to make sure that was guaranteed and viable so i guess what that kind of leads directly into what i was going to talk about related to the presentation um so
084when we left right before covid i had met with each team at least twice to talk about some of these instructional pieces that could be paired alongside the discussions about curriculum about resources and when i say curriculum i'm not talking about eureka i'm talking about the what of what we're teaching and those are the illinois state standards common core state standards so our teachers are fantastic they're dedicated they had dug in a lot on their own even leading up to when mrs steincipher was hired but there was a lot more work to do in in terms of taking the what of what we're teaching and breaking it apart and really tying that back to student clarity so that that could be tied to goal setting because as we know research tells us students when they
085set goals from themselves it activates a part of the brain that act that really um it drives their behavior and it gets them to want to learn on their own so we started talking about taking those standards apart really coming up with what is success with this standard look like and what is the progression of you know lessons that we should even be introducing to get a child from point a to point d with a standard so we had started all of that and the reason that's important especially at the middle school level but also at primary and elementary is because the success criteria and what students know they need to do to be successful with this standard is directly tied to the assessment process so that was our next steps pre-covered i have to
086give the teachers props because over the summer even after you know remote teaching in the spring we had teams of teachers still dedicated to taking that that work and doing it this summer and really tearing apart the what of what they're teaching so that we could continue at some point this year the assessment development so um i have to give them credit for that so we will we will continue to talk about prioritizing content in our grade levels you know we've got priority standards or power standards and those are the most important standards that we need to make sure our students master by the time they leave the grade level so that work needs to continue and i'm confident it will at some point but the silver lining really truly is is that we've got
087all of these robust personalized learning programs and i had talked to the board curriculum committee uh just a very briefly about how when a teacher is in a classroom they're making thousands of observations of students on a daily basis they don't have that privilege in remote learning so we're depending upon these personalized learning programs to gather as much data as it possibly can and feed it back to the teacher i'm very happy to announce that we looked at some data with both lexia and imagine learning today and we're really starting to see the programs take hold lexia was already well established but the program imagine program is really starting to take hold and root itself and you can see the usage going up and now we're starting to get really detailed dashboards of what students
088need what so that'll be our next kind of goal is to talk administratively and then with our teachers about how we can support them in continuing to to encourage the use of the programs using that data to move students forward so um it's really i i'm not a fan of covet i don't think anyone is but if one good thing came out of this it's really changed our teachers focus to using data to inform their instruction so i i would just say that that is a positive that's come out of this they were doing it before but we've really given them the tools to take it to a whole new level so um best practices we'll contin continue to talk about assessment and again providing that feedback to students and then of course student reflection
089and goal setting is something that hopefully we can kind of return a little bit more to as we have students in buildings questions sure thank you real quick on the special ed performance report we received from the state so i'm going to let aaron take it over do you want to want this okay okay so um mr gold mentioned that he was going to put in the packet the illinois the isb accountability and support system lea determination this is very similar every year isbee would go through and see if we were compliant in a variety of indicators for special education so this year they did it a little bit different before you were compliant or you were not and if you were not you had to develop a plan have a committee submit it to
090the state and then show results so now this aligns more with like what they're doing for essa they took achievement for students who receive services out and put that into essa and now they're looking at the nine other indicators so it's a positive thing it looks at everything from pre-k to our ieps and just ensuring that we're in compliance with the law and you had can have a total of 27 points and big hollow had 27 points so kudos to the department they um really don't have any areas right now that we need to look at to improve this is using the year before data so we're hoping to continue with this trend perfect good five years ago we were having trouble in this area yeah yeah so they've done a really really good job
091of cleaning this up good job thank you thank you thanks doctor uh last item of my report is the eighth grade graduation i just put the date in here this uh duties here at this time and i did we have secured the mchenry outdoor theater for the program as well so that's great thank you on that date thursday i'm sorry uh wednesday may 26th last day of school we the may 27th thursday that's it for me all right uh does anybody have any questions on the september employment report just one thing we're still looking for health aide right mr gold we'll get we're we haven't posted yes all right we're gonna keep keep looking for one more okay so anybody watching out there if you know any health aides have them apply please yep um
092can hey please have a motion to approve the september employment report second julian yes yes yes anybody have any further questions on the e-learning plan can i please have a motion to approve the proposed e-learning plan for big house school district 38 as presented during the hearing promotion second joe and lauren all in favor as the motion is read say aye aye aye can you pose nice have it uh we accepted two furlough requests from janice hoffman a food service worker and christine knapp food service worker we had a foia request anybody have any questions on the fully request so anybody have any questions on the monthly building administrator report anybody have any questions on the meeting agendas i i had one i was reading the one agenda and it talked about a big hollow
093middle school equity project i was wondering what that is yeah scott you want to explain better jump over next to a mic so it's we've had two meetings um really it is a committee of teachers right now looking to expand to the community have students um and community members parents to really start looking at the systems we're doing here at big hollow make sure we're equitable and how we approach things such as race gender sexuality the whole gamut just we really want to be we want to be an inclusive community here at big hollow so we want to make sure we're addressing those and make sure our practices align to make sure that we are inclusive make sure we're being equitable across the board for everybody who comes a big hollow so it's just getting
094off the ground now so a lot of work ahead of us but it's two meetings in so we've barely scratched the surface so that's awesome very great idea thank you anybody else have questions i guess for the african-american parent advisory yeah how did that go i was curious to see what their feedback was it went great it was a very good meeting we did it via zoom the other night um we're going to have some follow-up tomorrow at our ministers meeting and kind of talk about our next steps but it was a really solid meeting i think we found out through zoom i at least have with the cac meeting and now the african american committee parent committee that we we get a little more engagement because all those thoughts that are going on their
095head end up on the chat and in a regular meeting we don't always hear those thoughts and so there's a lot of engagement happening and uh um so we have actually now we're going to put two parents are going to co-chair it with uh myself and i think i'm recruiting dr king to help with that uh she's got a good background in this equity area so um so we're gonna meet with them and we're gonna develop the next agenda and keep the conversation moving forward so it was good very good good you have anything else right the next regularly scheduled board meeting will take place on monday november 9th 2020 with closed session beginning at 6 00 p.m can i please have a motion to adjourn joe and julia all in favor's motion is read
096say aye any opposed eyes have it thank you everybody thank you thank you thank you