November 2023 Special Meeting and Committee Meetings of the D128 Board w/AD

001um kick off our special Board of Education meeting where where we will swear in our new board member um although after we swear uh our new board member in there is an invitation for public comment if you are here to make public comment about one of the agenda items on P&P or fnf I would encourage you to wait to make public comment until we close the special meeting and then your public comment will be part of the meeting to which the agenda item you are speaking is actually occurring so without further Ado um we are going to call this meeting to order and ask everybody to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation indivisible

002with liberty and justice for all okay for purpose of the special meeting we do have a roll call here here okay we note uh sonel karney will not be present tonight and Cara Benjamin will be joining us shortly uh we do have a quorum um and we're not voting so it doesn't even matter so um it is my pleasure to ask our new colleague mides cotwell to stand and I will um administer the oath of office I mythes gwal to solemnly swear that I will Faithfully discharge the duties of the office of member of the Board of Education of Community High School District 128 in accordance with the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the state of Illinois and the laws of the state of Illinois to the best of my ability I

003further swear that I shall respect taxpayer interests by serving as a faithful protector of the school district's assets I shall encourage and and respect the free expression of opinion by my fellow board members and others who seek a hearing before the board while respecting the privacy of students and employees I shall recognize that a board member has no legal Authority as an individual and that decisions can be made only by a majority vote at a public board meeting I shall abide by majority decisions of the board while retaining the right to seek changes in such decisions through ethical and constructive channels as part of the Board of Education I shall accept the responsibility of my role in the Equitable and quality education of every student in the school district I shall Foster with the board

004extensive participation of the community formulate goals Define outcomes and set the code course for Community High School District 128 I shall assist in establishing a structure and an environment designed to ensure all students have the opportunity to attain their maximum potential through a sound organizational framework I shall strive to ensure a continuous assessment of student achievement and all conditions affecting the education of our children in compliance with state law I Shall Serve as education's key Advocate on behalf of students and our community schools to advance the vision for Community High School District 128 and I shall strive to work together with the district superintendent to lead the school district towards fulfilling the vision the board has created fostering Excellence for every student in the areas of academic skills knowledge citizenship and personal development so the

005board has um administered the oath in an open board meeting um and we are very pleased to welcome Mr cotwall to our board [Applause] congratulations okay before we adjourn is there any public comment regarding Mr cotwell appointment seeing none we will uh have the special board meeting um pardon me I move to close the special board meeting Carmichaels Batson second thank you voice vote all in favor say I I I any opposed okay you're returned congratulations thank you and I will turn it over to the P&P chair Don Carmichael for the next meeting I'd like to to call the meeting of PMP to order um we have several items on the agenda tonight uh the first of which is an invitation for public comment followed by discussion uh there are five items for discussion the

006calendar recommendation uh for the calendar committee the employment employees Educational Tours um course weight adjustments the Illinois report card Summit of designation graduation rate and chronic absenteeism and then uh 20 2425 course proposals I'll ask for future agenda items and then adjournment so I will open to public comment did we had a signin sheet I believe we do have a signin sheet if your name is not on the signin sheet that's okay we're just gonna it just gives us an order I would remind you that comments are to to um be brief 3 minutes I will set a timer uh when the timer rings I will tell you that your three minutes are up and at that point I would ask that you uh finish your comment all right uh ham and you can state

007your name uh okay my name is hakeim and uh thank you for giving me the chance to talk on my behalf and my lot of friends here from uh from the uh parents so I have one point to make so we attended the meeting on September where a lot of public comments happened you have seen the emotions you have seen all what that change or reversal of that decision means to us today I have one point and one point only to talk about which I discussed during the the meeting past week Wednesday regarding uh when we we get in meeting with calendar committee and that question which I didn't get a clear answer on is we have more than 20 schools I know who has who have the Jewish holidays as day is off and

008we are we had that for 20 years almost in our district when I ask you why we cannot find the pathway like the other school are doing why we cannot find a pathway which is legal which is cannot can which put us out of risk because I know that the the challenge is the risk is that people will say this is not secular agenda this is not this is not going well with the with the direction not to have religious holidays why we cannot find a path like the other 20 schools who has who who have Jewish uh holidays off and the thing which was striking to me that it was mentioned at that meeting that other schools have Jewish holidays off but we are the only school the only one who has Christian Jews

009Muslim and possibly Hindu which will put us at a challenge will put us a challenge because we're trying to accommodate the others and I wondered about the daring Mission are we really working with their mission are really considering every word we have there I looked further and I found d stand for dreamer and door and it's written there that we believe we can make a difference but now the decision we're making is not to make a difference just to be like the others and reverse the decision we made everyone was proud but the decision made four years ago after long and long of discussions challenges now we believe we cannot make a difference maybe this is the right word we participate in change for the greater good but now we're reversing that the are in

010daring is St stand for resilient and it's written there that we Preserve through difficulties we thank you we preserve for through difficulties and overcome adversity so what I ask you as board really we need to find the way not just to block block is easy we just need to find the way as the rest of the 20 other schools in Illinois doing to have Jewish holy day is off not only for Jewish not only for Muslim but Jewish holy day Jewish Muslim and Hindu who all of them have decent kind of percentage based of the calendar committee report thank [Applause] you AA hi everyone uh my name is alvia mid um I have a sophomore here at LHS and a sixth grader at Oak grve um and as the gentleman spoke prior uh this is

011in regards to the fact that d128 we currently have the Muslim and Jewish uh holidays off and we're moving away from that so first of all I wanted to point out that thank you for having these meetings however for the working parents who support the school it's hard to come to all of these and the timings are getting earlier so I think we might have had a larger turnout if the time had been a little later also we need to keep in mind in the context that we may be having less turnout because for the Muslim and Jewish communities currently this is a very difficult time for all of us so there may have been a larger turnout ALS also and so regarding the current calendar which we all know and I I know that

012we've talked about this at prior meetings that I've been to but it's important to reiterate currently based on Gregorian calendar which is based on the Christian faith and I just want to point out that if we're worried about taking holidays off because they're religious then we have to keep in mind that Christmas is a Federal holiday and conveniently winter break Falls during that time so in that sense our Muslim and Jewish holidays are we being penalized for not following um the solar we follow a lunar calendar more of that so it's not static so it changes so therefore it feels like maybe being penalized by not having a static holiday off that would conveniently fall during the winter break and if we're going to follow the operational calendar then again I know this has been

013brought up before but we need to look at all aspects Good Friday in Easter will these are usually days off how is that possible and again like uh the excellent comments made before me we need to move towards trying to find how this can work um as opposed to saying okay we're worried about the this issue and there's no way around it and let's just strike it from the calendar uh many of the measures are most of the populations are working companies corporations schools working towards adhering to Dei measures becoming more inclusive but this feels like it's exclusive uh as we talked about before parents and families of Jewish and Muslims faith we have been proud to move here we tell everybody that this is a safe place our holidays are recognized and unfortunately that

014will no longer be the case if this is passed um and we probably will see less diversity we'll go to different schools that do uh seem to welcome us more um and so uh one of the points is that um we need to think about the fact that we need to embrace Dei measures and work towards that and you know we voted for our board members because we feel like you all support our values and then moving to data data is really really important as a physician I understand this and as a scientist the survey we've mentioned before I heard it was only a 33% response rate I saw the survey come in it I feel like it would have been great to say this is a very very important survey and it will change

015um your responses has a very important significant impact on the operational calendar so you know usually in my understanding is to Be an Effective survey we should at least have a majority of 50% respons so could we have missed many families that might have answered differently where we could meet the threshold where we could say okay we have a sizable Muslim and Jewish population that's possible but we won't know if we don't do the survey again so I have two asks one I would like to recommend that we redo the survey where the importance of the survey is stressed and that this could impact significantly the calendar and we should aim for a higher response rate and the second is for now I would recommend that we hold on making this decision until we have

016more data and we analyze that thank you for your [Applause] time amen uh hello everyone thanks for taking our comments tonight uh my name is Ahmed ner hopefully some of you remember me from the September meeting um and I I want to say reflecting on the uh last couple of months um I spoke on a similar podium in Vernon Hills High School in September um and then I had an interaction through emails with Dr K and Dr uh Herman on the um public announcements in Libertyville High School regarding the global events and then we attended the listening session for the calendar committee recommendation a week ago and here we are uh today and reflecting on all of that I think this is very revealing it's revealing for all of you to know what we stand

017for and what we believe in and what's important for us but honestly it's also very revealing for us to understand what the board stands for so I want all of us to use all of these events and the Intensive interactions we're having to actually expose what everyone really stands for um so I'm not going to repeat a lot of the stuff that has been mentioned I want to actually be very pragmatic very practical I mentioned an alternative solution um to um Mr Varn and uh Dr Herman at the listening session I also sent it by email and I'm going to outline it uh tonight for the board and the committee recommendation um consideration um so I understand the the school's drive to ensure that there is a secular reason to taking any day off and

018I absolutely understand that Under The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment but I also understand that Under The Establishment Clause there is flexibility for you how to Define a threshold for taking a day off so the whole premise of setting 25% attendance for determining days off which is really the core of the calendar committee recommendation is really unjustified by being legal or illegal there's a lot of room for flexibility if you want to be inclusive to play with that threshold my proposal specifically set a threshold at 10 or 12% which would be equivalent to the threshold you have for for staff 12% attendance uh sorry 12% absence or 10% absence you have a base line of 6% average absence per school day per of the data we saw from the calendar committee this means that

019if you have four to 6% additional planned absences on a given day you know that for that day you're going to have 10 to 12% absence student there is nothing really in The Establishment Clause or the first amendment that prevents you from setting that as a district as a threshold for taking the day off second determine the number of days per school calendar that you can afford to take off and this is something I would was surprised we didn't see in the calendar committee recommendation I don't know how many days we can accommodate while also being uh following the uh Illinois school of board education in terms of the number of Maximum days that can be taken off so that needs to be very clear is it four days five days Six Days on top

020of what's already federal holidays so once you know that number send out a survey I'm almost done send out a survey that is really religion agnostic forget about religions being completely fair to religion non religion ask students at the beginning of the year mention or uh uh indicate one day you know you're going to be taking off this coming year for personal or cultural reasons put the religion aside get that estimate pick the first three four five days depending on the maximum number of days you've identified say okay these three days we have the majority or the top number of students who have indicated they will be absent which means we will have at least 10% absence we don't care what the religion is but these are the top three days this is something you

021can defend in court that is not in violation of The Establishment Clause um but at the same time is built based on the um student feedback on when they would be absent thank you so much thank you those are the only names that we have on the list of course all of you are welcome to speak if you wish to so if you would like you may step up to the microphone say your name and address the board do you wish to address the board if there aren't any others we will move on to the next agenda item okay for discussion item 3A uh the calendar recommendations and d128 calendar creation guidance and implementation procedures hello everyone um I came to the podium so that I can play the role of a presenter from the

022uh calendar committee uh Dr Yia Sanchez could not be here this evening so I am presenting in herstead as one of the co-chairs of the committee um also as superintendent knowing the political and the cultural and the multi-dimensional nature of this agenda item I wanted to make sure that my voice accompanied um all the information that we're going to be considering tonight next slide so the first thing that I want to do is recognize the 30 plus people who have served on our calendar committee um we have a district office folks but the majority of people who serve on this committee are staff members administrators paraeducators um teachers um our athletic directors from both buildings so these are people who have served on this committee for many of them many years um and typically these

023people meet twice a year so again we want to note that uh it's a very uh comprehensive set of voices at the table next slide however rather than meeting two times per year which they did last fall and made a recommendation based on some requests that we had that came to us the calendar committee added six additional meetings in the last six months so starting in March of 2023 and concluding most recently October 18th 2023 um the committee has put forth enor effort um to consider the uh research and the legal information that we've brought to bear they also have made sure that they have considered many many options so what you see coming to the committee excuse me coming to the board right now represents a lot of ideas distilled down to what we

024think is the best recommendation some of the things that parents and other members from the audience at the last meeting and tonight have suggested we consider were considered by the committee so I think it's important that although many of the ideas that were generated um were considered what you'll see before you is the committies best thinking next slide one of the most important things for me to start with in the past many of the decisions made by the calendar committee have been very technical in nature how do we take a certain set of days and plug them into a a uh calendar that has moderate constraints and there have been a few years where it's been a little sensitive but there has been very little controversy and or very little adaptive kinds of issues that

025have accompanied these recommendations this year is different this year it is not simply a technical recommendation what I have up there is what I continue to feel from when we started these dialogues in the spring to where we are now is a polarity and a polarity doesn't necessarily mean that they're opposing it means two things that can be say true at the same time and sometimes they're pushing towards each other and sometimes they're pulling away but it's two ideas that we know can be true and how can we balance out the needs of each so one of those Is our commitment to diversity and inclusion and making sure that every student and every family feels welcomed in our district the other is that the need to comply with state federal and local laws as we

026saw in Mr kwells um uh swearing in ceremony every board member agrees that the votes that they will take the work we will do will be aligned with state and federal laws as an administrator in the state of Illinois I also am obliged to bring recommendations to the board that are aligned with state and federal laws so both of these issues that are influencing our recommendation are extremely important and we're making sure that we're bringing both to you next slide so just to remind everyone what brought us to this place right now last November we received a request um to add an additional non-attendance day for a holiday and the board members again knowing at the time that this was something we were doing in good faith considering adding non-attendance days for the purpose of

027a group's religious practice asked the calendar committee to reconvene knowing that we have uh Hindu faith we have Greek Orthodox we have other growing populations of religious practice in our ever growing diverse community and the board asked for additional criteria so should additional requests come forward we would be prepared so the calendar Committee reconvened in March of 2023 and began the exploration of what might additional criteria look like what could additional things we consider as we schedule nonattendance days next slide so the first thing we did is we made sure we were very clear on our current calendar criteria we had some very clear required ones it has to be aligned with our collective bargaining agreement it also things that were set in um agreed upon previously in precedent sending is that we end the

028semester 1 prior to winter break and that we end semester 2 prior to Memorial Day and the other fourth one again is going back to that legal complying with state and federal laws and at the time we felt all of our recommendations to that point were in compliance the other things that we need to consider that have a little bit more flexibility are to align our start date as closely as possible with our sender or feeder districts and again families let us know that that's very important to them another would be to account for new staff orientation our calendar does include two teacher Institute days in the official calendar but we also make sure that we set aside time before school to welcome all of our new staff and make sure that they have the

029support they need to be successful we also look to the Lake County Roe and its calendar when we look at the starting and ending dates for winter break and for spring break because many of our teachers live in a adjacent school districts and so we always try to say let's be as consistent as possible so we have shared vacation dates for students and staff um we also work to try and balance the length of the semesters many of our classes are year-long classes but some of them only meet semester one or only meet semester two so we try to have that very close in the balance of semester 1 and semester 2 dates and finally we have had additional things when requested to consider adding non-attendance days in addition to those and options for those

030change from year to year sometimes as in the past we've had non-attendance days that were aligned with religious holidays Sometimes some of them fell on the weekend in which they wouldn't need to be added to the calendar and in the past sometimes they fell on a school day and they would be added on the calendar so that is why that that has fluctuated from year to year okay so that is what we were clear on at the start what were our existing criteria next slide but we knew that we needed to consider additional information especially when considering what might help us with those non-attendance days so we first looked to Illinois school code um and where it states that the district must establish that a school closure is warranted based on an operation need or

031educational interest um and that sounded different than what we had imagined it saying um and we thought about okay maybe the second part would help us be a little more clear on non-attendance days it went on to say that each of those uh anytime we close school it needs to be um connected to the likelihood that high absence rates for students Andor staff would operate would impact the operation of the school so the school code really did not give any leeway or suggested criteria for the option of taking non-attendance days for the purpose of religious holidays so we knew that that really wasn't a source for us to look for additional criteria next slide so we also said we know some of our neighboring school districts also have non-attendance days on their calendars so we

032did a survey of many of the school districts in the uh North Suburban Chicagoland area and noticed that of those schools some do have Jewish holidays as non-attendance days but not all and when we looked at the data next slide we saw and when we reached out to many of the districts who do include Jewish holidays on their calendar so Stevenson um District 113 several of the other districts that we reached out to they do include Jewish holidays on their calendars because they have a high percentage of their staff who are uh who will be taking those days as holidays as in Illinois as in the United States everyone has the right to take off um a day of work to practice their religion so in the districts that are currently listed there the reason

033when we contacted them that they gave for including uh um the non-attendance days was for student and or staff absences we were not able to find any of those districts that have a published clear criteria that is not something and that is something that many of them said they were reluctant to do that they were using patterns of previous attendance data and also informal conversations with their staff about if they were planning to take holidays off or not of the schools that did not have Jewish holidays on their calendar there were a few that have recently made the transition who previously did have Jewish holidays on their calendar but because their student and staff demographics are changing so rapidly they no longer had the data to justify having those as non-attendance days so one of

034those being Niles Township High School District 219 who traditionally has had a very high Jewish and Christian population and over the last 25 years the community has become more and more and more diverse and their teaching faculty has become more and more and more diverse so so as that happens you no longer have an operational reason to document having the non-attendance day so I believe it four or five years ago that Niles made this decision to go from a calendar that had a non-attendance j for Jewish holidays to not having any and their data showed that they did not even have Good Friday but they were so pluralistic in their religious views that no one group Rose to having enough people who would be absent that it would warrant cancelling school next slide so we

035had this information but how some of these things play out it's not like it was linear like we had all that information and chop chop chop it it it it went through the committee when you're working with a group of people and when you're trying to reach consensus sometimes times you take a step forward and take a step back so at the very first meeting in March when we were looking at our original criteria we assumed those original criteria we had been using were a legal and good to go so one of the very first outcomes was let's continue observing the religious holidays and see how we can add to volley because again our assumption at the time is that our previous practice was aligned with state and federal law then at the April meeting

036we realized from looking more closely at school code that we needed to have operational reasons that it could not purely be for religious reasons and so the team started to generate what might be some attendance data that would help us clarify what those thresholds might be and in May the the um they settled on the first set of attendance thresholds that were presented to the board okay so we went from in March having an assumption that our previous practice was aligned with both our value for diversity and state and federal laws but by the time we got to May and we were presenting those first set of criteria to the board there were many more questions that were emerging and even the board said we think we need more data on this and so that

037was a charge to the board to say U if we're going to consider making a change in our attendance thresholds or adding criteria please bring us more information next slide so we did over the summer um we added a question to the registration uh uh form every family must complete a registration form that is where you update any of your home address or emergency contact it's also where you pay your fees when we consulted with our attorney we can ask that question of All Families which we did and we also put a very good um introduction to it saying please complete the survey the results will be used by the calendar committee to help determine future calendars um but we can't require that question to be answered we can simply say this would be very

038helpful data for us as a public school we cannot compel anyone to share with us if they have a religion and what that religion is so following the August 30 30th meeting um where we realized that the data we collected from families um could potentially jeopardize what we had previously recognized as holidays being the two Jewish High holy days and Eid that we recently added in 2019 we we said we need more information and so we immediately contacted our attorney and said this is going a few steps past what we had imagined and we need your advice so at the September 27th meeting our attorney sat in for over an hour and answered all sorts of questions many of the same questions that had been posed by people in the audience about why can't 10%

039work why can't 15% work and the attorney walked walked through all of the legal arguments that would we would be facing in a court of law If This Were to be challenged and how the committee needed to understand what the real parameters were we brought all this information back to the committee on October 18th again noting the uh legal implications and our desire to try and value diversity one of the things that we were challenged with is that in the past we had signaled that we value different religions by connecting that to a non-attendance day that was one way that we communicated the value of a religion that is not according to our attorney the role of a public school the role of a public school is to allow students to practice but not to

040promote its practice and that's where both the our our general attorney as well as the second opinion that we received from a completely different firm both gave us that recommendation next slide so one of the commenters tonight did talk about The Establishment Clause that is one of the federal laws um that guides the practice of public schools in the United States saying that we do we are obliged to make sure every person can celebrate and practice their religion we simply can't align our calendar or our decisions to promoting that being the case so we need to stay neutral on this particular issue and our calendar needs to be neutral on this issue next slide so again here's a summary of the legal advice and again this was from our current firms heimes and petraea and

041we also um got a completely neutral second opinion from another attorney um whose uh opinion I we shared with the board and was nearly identical to that um next slide when asked what might be possible exposures because again people on this committee were trying to find every way possible to continue to celebrate and recognize the holidays they were asking our attorney but what if what if the board continues to do this and the answer was if you we continue this practice or expand it we would be um uh facing potential legal and financial challenges so one of the things that they he gave as a directive is that the Board of Education be should be prepared to articulate any non-attendance day that we schedule why it we warranted its closing okay so next slide so

042that is one of the things that the committee said this is what we need to do so the thresholds that the committee set were at least 88% of Staff be in attendance on any given day or at least 75% of the students at each School meaning if one school had less than 75 we would go ahead it wasn't both um because we definitely are a district um and so to give you some more background on where those numbers came from I'm going to invite up to the microphone Mr Larry Varn who was another co-chair of the calendar committee thank you Dr Herman and so we want to explore where these thresholds come from and how we came up with these numbers as a committee so the first part of of our thresholds is around the

043staff attendance do we have enough instructional as well as support staff present to have uh a productive instructional day and maintain the Integrity of our instructional practices as well as promote Safety and Security in our building and so to decide this number we considered several things the first is adequate sub coverage for instructional staff do we have enough substitute teachers or other means of covering classes in order to ensure that students do not have to combine classes in large spaces such as auditoriums or gems in order to have sub coverage we also considered the number of safety staff members that needed to be present in the building in order to secure and provide a safe environment for our staff and students throughout the building and finally we considered how many in educational support Personnel members

044needed to be present in order to support the full operation of our building we determined that at least 88% of Staff members districtwide needed to indicate that they would be present for school anything above 12% would require us to make those those uh changes that are challenging in order to to preserve the Integrity of our educational environment and so when we asked our staff um to indicate to us what religious holidays they would use a religious absence to observe the top holidays that surface are located here and with our threshold of 12% uh the holiday aligned with uh a non-attendance day that would meet our threshold is Good Friday with 57% of our staff members reporting that they would be absent this allows us to be able to to determine that we are not observing

045Good Friday as a religious holiday solely we are observing a non-attendance day because it prevents us from having normal operations of our school based on the high absentee rate of our staff members on those days rashash Shana yam kapor Eid and devali did not meet the 12% threshold and therefore would not um we we would not be able to articulate a reason other than solely based on religious purposes for us observing a non-attendance day and then the second threshold was considering how many students need to be present at each school we looked at state requirements in Illinois the state requires us to have at least 50% of students must be present in order for us to count the attendance the state that we found with the highest threshold was Michigan Michigan requires 75% of students

046to be in school in order for them to count that day although we do not live in or reside in the state of Michigan we felt that this indicator would would allow us to have a point of reference of another government public government entity that we can say 75% is that number this is this was updated from the previous recommendations that we presented to you where we had identified 60% of students a second reason why we identified 75% was based on the historical student attendance data when we are going to be asked to articulate reasons why we've identified 75% we need a strong empirical data and so we looked at our highest days of student absentee ISM and we identified three days over the course of the school year where our average daily attendance Falls

047below uh our normal average attendance rate those three days are typically the day after prom the day before spring break and the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and for the last for four of the last five years we've collected this data we've excluded 2020 because that because of the closure due to the pandemic and so what we found is that over the course of these three days the lowest day actually is the day after prom um traditionally last year was an anomaly at Libertyville High School because the prom was later in the year and the day after prom actually was an exemption day for seniors it was past the last day for seniors so seniors last day was that Friday the prom occurred that Saturday seniors were not required to be in school on that Monday so

048that year was an anomaly but um in years where the prom does fall within the school year and seniors are expected to attend school the day after we see the similar Trends um but Vernon Hills prom was earli in the year last year and we saw Yes that that Trend continues this is the highest absentee absente ISM for students throughout the year and we still operate school on this day so if we were if we had to provide a legal reason as to how we came up with 75% we could not come up with a number any higher than 75% or any lower than 25% of students being abent because we have demonstrated the ability to operate school at that rate already and so when we appli the Ser when we applied the thresholds to

049our uh data that we collected we we surveyed families in several ways the first was through the collection during the registration process we also sent out emails for families to complete the survey and we' provided opportunities during open house in person for families to complete the survey we had had 1,275 families to complete the survey while our district has about 3,300 students enrolled when we look at that data based on families because some families have multiple children enrolled in our district we have approximately 2,714 families in the d128 Comm in the d128 district of those families when we uh disaggregate the data that way uh 47% of our families responded to our calendar uh input survey and of those families that responded um we found that these were the highest uh rated days that families

050reported that their student would be absent from school to observe a religious holiday there are other religious holidays included that were not as sizable as these um but still we do have families that observe various religious religions in our community they just didn't rise to um to the this level of participation and based on these numbers Good Friday for our families is the only religious holiday that more than 25% of our family said their child would be absent from school in order to participate in a religious observance now I'll turn it over to Brian Kelly for the application of this criteria to the to our um operational calendar thank you Larry thank you Dr Herman um so as we look at what our recommendation for the calendar for the 2425 year again um last year

051about this time um the board adopted um proposal for the 2425 and as it has been our practice we propose two years of the calendar so we are relooking at 2425 calendar and our recommendation is to start with our um Institute days August 8th and 9th which is a Thursday and then come with our um students on uh that Monday August 12th and again this calendar and the recommendation for the 2526 calendar is based off of the criteria that we discussed earlier Dr Herman talked about the requirement of the alignment you know looking at the end of the semester looking at the beginning of the school year um other considerations balancing with Lake County uh Regional Office of Education balancing the semesters and then also the attendance thresholds that um Larry Varn talked about so

052this incorporates all of those considerations into the calendar um when we go through the first semester then uh we uh recommend taking Labor Day Off um October 11th would be a full day teacher Institute Friday October 11th this actually matches up with the Lake County Roe recommendation for institute day so if Lake County decides to do um some uh staff development staff uh professional learning that we are alignment with them and we're able to partner with Lake County Regional Office of Education November 5th is election day so in 2024 it's a law that we have to take election day off uh November 27th through 29th is the Thanksgiving break and then first semester ending on December 20th with our grading day December 19th actually is the last day for students and the 20th is uh

053the grading day then we take uh two weeks for winter break and resume with classes on Monday January 6th uh Martin Luther King junr Day on January 20th um again a uh full day teacher Institute on Friday February 14th which aligns with the recommendation from Lake County Regional Office of Education President Day on February 17th and then um our spring break again lines with Lake County Regional Office of Education um recommendation um Good Friday is uh lar Varn talked about um is the non-attendance day Friday um April 18th and then grading day would be on um Friday May 23rd with um the students last day being the day before on May 22nd so that's our recommendation um that was included in the board packet online so then at the same time we are proposing for

0542526 calendar will come back next fall revisit this um calendar to ensure um that it it fits all of the criteria that we've discussed and part of this criteria that we discussed before is aligning with the Lake County regional office education we don't have all of their recommended recommended dates yet we are going based off of the history of when spring break Falls when their Institute day for teachers so if they come out with a recommendation later this winter or early next year we may have to revisit and adjust those days but I'll walk through it again on what our recommendation is again two days of our teacher Institute uh Thursday August 7th Friday August 8th uh starting with classes on Monday August 11th Labor Day on September 1st um full day of teacher Institute

055on October uh 10th no attendance for students and then Monday October 13th indigenous people's day um with the schools being closed Thanksgiving break November 26 through 28th grading day again is the last day for teachers the 19th students would be ending on December 18th two weeks for winter break classes resuming on Monday January 5th Martin Luther King Day on January 19th um and again February 13th we're anticipating would be the Lake County Roe um Institute day February 16th being President's Day uh closed on that day um and then um spring break March 23rd to the 27th April 3rd is um Good Friday with a non-attendance day and then ending with school on May 22nd with grading day the 21st uh being the last day for students so that's our recommendation for the next two years

056some other things though to consider we need to look at our board policy we talked about um the federal law and then also state law but our board policy says in 780 release time for religious instruction so student shall be released from school is an excused absence because of religious reasons including to observe religious holiday for religious instruction because a student's religion forbids secular activity on a particular day or time of day um the students's parents Guardian must give written notice to a building principle or designate prior to the students's anticipated absence so we already have board policy we also have this language in our student handbook and so the question is how do we then put that into practice um and so one of the things that you know we do value our students

057um to practice their religious beliefs with their family and so we believe that having a comod ations um instructional accommodations for our student absences for um practicing religious beliefs will be very helpful again we will look at teachers must avoid scheduling of major unit assessments midterm final exam full period assessments projects presentation or sumita of experiences um teachers will offer opportunities to take quizzes before the absence if an assessment is scheduled for the day that the student has to return to school they should rece receive at least one day to prepare for the test uh students who are observing a religious holiday must have an equivalent opportunity to make up any Miss assignments um and teachers will provide any assignments and resources to to support the students learning 48 hours prior to the scheduled absence

058so again with um you know notice then our teachers can help prepare um and looking at that you know I think again in valuing our students um we're going to continue to work with our community our religious leaders um looking at these instructional accommodations and also make our staff aware of these days um and keep them uh educated of the needs of our religious groups the other consideration is for extracurricular accommodations on um you know days so we will look at um a a shorter list of observations that may impact ATT tenants and again these go back also to the um um educational um accommodations um so again we'll try to We Will We Must avoid scheduling tryouts athletic contests music performances um special events such as assemblies field trips and back to school nights

059and again you're looking at those um huge um things that cannot be made up and so we will avoid on those days scheduling those uh practices and rehearsals however may be scheduled on these days but no student shall be penalized in any manner due to their absence um and so these are our extracurricular accommodations and so looking at our list the list of observances that may impact the tenants rashash Shana yam kapor Eid Al Eid ala and Dali and again we will look and review this list every three years and revise it n you know based off of our student attendance data um you know again going to our staff uh especially those that are sponsors coaches they do have a a smaller group sometimes and so they may they may have other days that

060affect them and we'll uh again continue to educate them I think our Equity coordinators in both buildings and our director of equity Larry Varn do a excellent job of sending out monthly newsletters of all the upcoming days um whether they're religious days or other days that uh may affect our students and families and we'll continue to educate um our families and that concludes so yeah that concludes our presentation and we would be happy to answer any board questions that might be helpful as you discuss the information we've Shar um I have one question actually a pair of questions um a lot of this information was gathered during the registration process um um will that continue with future registration each year so that we have a updated set of data I think we are committed to

061trying to gather as much data as we can to inform these criteria but again we can't require families to to answer right yeah I'm just thinking if the as the community evolves if there's you know particular thresholds that we then cross uh so that leads me to the second question since registration happens typically in the springtime um will we have an opportunity to revisit the proposed calendar for the for the coming year um would we have enough time or would that have to wait until uh the year following so what we are recommending is approval of the 24 425 calendar so next year's calendar and we are then sending a draft of the following Year's calendar knowing state laws sometimes change and like we said Roe might make an adjustment so we're asking for final

062approval for 2425 and tentative approval to 2526 so should we have any major um changes in our student attendance data or other information we would bring that back to consider for the 25 26 school year next and that would be next fall okay thank you any other questions oh I have a lot I do too go ahead oh um I may kind of be evaluating as I go down my list because some of them came up in the presentation um just want to make clear so I understand Good Friday is not a federally mandated holiday in the same way that say Christmas is is that correct correct okay thank you just be clear Christmas is a state legal I'm sorry thank you for clarifying that it is a state mandated holiday thank you um in

063is there a scenario in which we can look at holidays year to year in terms of how they fall on the calendar so like for instance I know I I believe based on our prior conversations 2425 is exceptionally difficult because all five of these holidays fall on school days but there are going to be some years certainly where that may not be the case and so in those years you try to accommodate as many holidays as possible uh if they happen to fall if some happen to fall on weekends and say let's say of those five two fall on weekends now we only have to accommodate for three of these holidays right and I know we go back to um the surveys and and the um what's the word I'm looking for the percentage of

064staff that may not be available but as kind of a compromise to this is there a way that we can look at this year-to year and say it's not going to work out say in 2425 but in 25 26 there may be room to take X Y and Z holidays the following year though it's not going to happen that way and we're going to have to go back to this operational calendar um I know that would be a lot of moving parts and asking our committee to look at things you know involving a lot of detail and planning but I think that's that's what they're charged to do anyhow and so um I'm just curious if if that's a possibility I'll go ahead and answer that and there are other people who were in the

065room when our attorney answered that exact same question um so just to repeat and clarify what if we were to say not all five fit but two or three of them might our attorney gave us a few different ways that could continue to be challenged the first way is that it would still be basing a non-attendance day and aligning it with a religious holiday rather than any other day that actually has higher student absences op it's not operational the second reason would be so we currently have requests from four religions that are seeking non-attendance days that doesn't mean that any other religion would have the legal authority to then request their day off too and so that could be Greek Orthodox that could be Wiccan that could be many many there's over 300 religions that

066um are uh documented by the international religion organization that we Ed to build our survey off of so because it would still be again the the he said what because we said that why can't we just put rashan on a teacher Institute day and he's like well why not Dali and why not this and why not that and when really is the best time for a teacher Institute day and why did you happen to align it with a religious um uh celebration and so again many people in the committee were trying to propose Whata ifs to find that happy medium and what our attorney kept bringing back to us is that this is a case where um the the legal Clarity around Public Schools not endorsing any observance of a religious holiday based solely on

067religion we could not find a place where the data would allow us to consider any of the other dates so the data every time will the supporting data would allow us to do this legally but if the data doesn't align there's no way to do this legally correct and maybe two examples again to other districts who have had a journey similar so that would be the situation that Nile's District experienced where they traditionally had celebrated the Jewish holidays for many many many years and as their school population and staff population became more and more and more diverse they realized that they didn't have have any one religion that Rose to the level of being enough to impact its operation so that's why their school board approved no they they didn't have a threshold for even

068Good Friday Lake Forest the district to our East about four years ago also adopted a calendar based on operational needs and the very first year their rejected attendance data they thought they would be able to hold school on Good Friday and so the board did approve a calendar with no school on any religious holidays but what they found that first year was that the absent rates for teachers and staff was much higher than they had predicted and they had to collapse classes and they had to do triple Duty and so using that data they brought it back and in subsequent um calendars the lake forest calendar now includes Good Friday because of attendance reasons not because of religious reasons um first of all I want to thank the committee I joined the committee somewhat in

069the 11th hour so I was only able to see two of the meetings and I would like to reiterate and thank you for pointing out the ctive work on all of the people to try to continue the Traditions that we have set in the last four years 20 to the last four years with Eid uh the Creative Solutions and the questions that came out the absolute intention to try to continue it and it was this cyclical and we thought we got to a a place where okay this might work and then it came back down to we don't have the data to support a challenge when we can show that our school is operational with 72% student attendance to continue this tradition and we would be defenseless if we were challenged um I feel like

070is in the board we are stuck in this impossible decision to continue our model of Good Intentions knowing that inevitably we're going to be faced with this situation again because there's going to be another student advocacy group that's going to be asking for another recognition of a holiday and if we were to deny them we again are unconstitutional because we can't possibly be Equitable for all of them and it's we all I know we all want to continue you because recognizing these holidays as a non-attendance day has somehow has equated our value even though I don't think that's where our value for our religions for our student religions are we want our students to meaningfully engage in their religious holidays whatever that is but we are stuck with are we in conflict with the law

071and I appreciate your diagram because both of these things are true we we do want our students to meaningfully participate in their religions but we also have a responsibility to be in compliance with the law and they are imp polarity uh so my questions are and you answered several of them when we question our survey protocols and our procedures that our stakeholders might not have adequately understood the severity of what they were answering or the importance significance of what they were answering is it do you think the committee would want to send the survey out again now that we've had these conversations do you think that would change what the recommendations would be um I know L for and my question was in an effort of equity if we were to I I'm struck with

072the Good Friday because we either have metrics or we don't right but in an effort to show Equitable Solutions and because we don't really have attendance data for Good Friday because we've been out do would the committee want to consider making 2425 a baseline year and do this based on actual attendance so that I don't know if that's something the committee would even consider if we feel like the data that we have collected is pretty um reliable and with 57% absence of teachers it clearly meets our threat our criteria and our metrics so again it's kind of another pull um well you were there for the committee conversations and I think that the committee was doing its best to say here's numerics that we think thresholds that could withstand a legal Challenge and here's what

073that would look like for 24 and 25 I think that what the board ends up adopting you have the authority to make some adjustments um as you see fit I think if you asked the committee to meet up again I think they would consider it um but there's really no new information that would necessarily change what the committee has access to right now um and in terms of redoing the survey we are committed to continuing this particular survey annually um but I I I don't know because we tried three different ways to gather the data it was through the registration through a separate email and in person um I think have shown a very good faith effort to try and get a very high response rate and I know it you know 47% doesn't seem

074like a lot but for an optional survey it is extremely high it is an extremely high return rate one of the highest we've ever had for any kind of parent uh participation in a survey one of the other things I had a question on is you know um because Good Friday and Russ sh on yam kapor have traditionally been non-attendance days we haven't really talked about the cost because our teachers are going to have the ability to use those as religious holidays have we thought about as a part of our metrics the additional cost because those teachers are now going to have free day you know they they will not be penalized by a s sick day or a personal day so what would the cost to the district be in losing that day from

075teachers benefits as well as paying for a substitute I mean could that be considered a part of our metrics um when deciding nonattendance days um ah Dan is our policy wonk but as I as you asked that question and I was thinking it um thinking about a response I think like many government mandates and policies that are approved we're expected to implement mement the policy regardless of the cost so for example we have some staff members who might be taking off other religious holidays that they have the right to do but we don't put that into our budget and it's to be clear some school districts and some employers require staff members to use their sick days or their personal days that is not something that our district does our district allocates three up to

076three additional days and that is just part of how we do business so we have not really thought to put that into any calculus any other comments so one question regarding the registration survey right uh you mentioned that if uh the registration survey shows us data that um the non-attendance days are trending towards other uh metrics we would consider that in the following year um one suggestion to the calendar committee is to revisit that just because you're trying to look at the registration data for the upcoming year and the data is reflecting what they are looking at for the next year and not a year in advance so it might be something from a data standpoint to look at it so that even from when we looking at the balance for legal challenges right that

077would be the basis because you're basing that Year's school calendar on data collected for that year because your registration data is very specific to the next year it might change from year to year and from a challenge perspective that might change our opinion or that might change a legal opinion also so considering the sources of data might be uh valuable there I I I I like the highly datadriven approach because that feeds uh you know decision making much more than um other sources but I I at least then this keeps our data current and and allows us to make decisions that way I think that's a very good point one of the challenges we face is needing to set our calendar typic actually it's typically approved last meeting in October or November um and that

078is because so many other things on the district calendar hinge Upon Our starting and ending date and things like that so the athletic directors and the Student Activities directors and other people who serve on that committee know once that calendar is adopted officially lots of other decisions are made based on that and as do our families we get phone calls regularly saying when is the adopted calendar going to be published because we are trying to make a decision about a family vacation or trying to make a decision about something else um and so while we would want to get the data as close as possible to the students we're serving there are many situations in which we are making decisions on next year Based on data that's one and two years old because that's when

079it's clean and reliable one thing I did want to say about the this the survey uh I heard a lot of comments through different meetings about um the priorities that were asked by the parents what is the parents priorities and I know why we're using them because I know they need to align with the future schools but I think in this instance when we're talking about holidays it's it's somewhat of a disingenuous question because it really doesn't matter I mean if we're talking about a strict operational calendar based on constitutionality it doesn't matter if we put two weeks on the front or two weeks on the end it doesn't matter how many days the argument becomes if we do not have substantiating substanti substantiating metrics underline every decision we make on a non-attendance day that

080is not strictly based on observing a religious holiday we fail so asking parents their priority of whether they want the you know we all want finals before winter break we all want to be you but it's a disingenuous question based on this and I wouldn't it muddies the argument it muddies the consider you know the conversation so I would not include that on future surveys based on holiday observance I could not agree with you more that survey was authored at the beginning of June and we tried to get it into the registration material so we could maximize the return rate for parents and that was when I talked about our journey of the learnings that we had as a committee that was prior to having the realization that our prior practice of observing Eid and

081and some of the other religious-based non-attendance days was not aligned with state and federal laws so we were not trying to be disingenuous by authoring that question I know at the but just so everyone who's listening and so we would not put that same question on a future survey because we now know the answer to that and the answer is we have to use other kinds of data than parent survey data and so survey data would be when might your son or daughter be absent from school so that we can then start to see patterns about impact on student attendance it would not be how they're ranking the importance of the priority that the calendar committee uses and I know none of us want to be sitting here making a decision that might possibly at

082a minimum offend and possibly disenfranchise some of our minority student at student groups but we've been put in this impossible position and I keep hearing why are other districts able to do it I can only go by what your Council has been to us we might be the first now because this isn't just about four holidays right do we we do we tell kuanza and Greek Orthodox sorry or you weren't first so we can't even consider you this isn't just about four holidays uh and are you hearing that this conversation is becoming more of a conversation especially in the high school districts this this type of operational decision with metrics and challenges is becoming more of a conversation with our I mean I know and I appreciated the data with our neighboring districts but um

083I can only assume that if other districts are not talking about it it's just because they're not talking about it yet correct that that would be the situation and I think Niles and Lake Forest four and five years ago and I think we are part of a second wave and I think we'll see many more um I mean Chicago public school had a challenge a while ago so there I think the idea of legal challenges coming to different districts you you can't anticipate when might happen um but it definitely those kind of challenges go across all states and across Suburban Urban all kinds of districts um so the fact that um our district or our neighboring districts or others may be faced with a challenge on their current practices it we we would all be

084held to the same standard and on while we're also monitoring our survey data we will also be monitoring our actual attendance data because it may come truition that our actual attendance I mean I guess I appreciate the conversation of the uh why we are being advised the way we are but and also one of my questions was how do we change this conversation to we want our students to participate in their religious holiday and practice our conversation needs to be how do make sure our policy with our teachers is robust enough and accountable enough so that when students that was always what was brought to us is we are always going to choose school over our religion and we don't want that to be the decision right I don't how do we make sure that

085our students can respect their religion have a day take their day and not feel like they are missing out and that they are going to be supported so when they make that choice I I appreciated the language must and will because that was missing in the previous you know what will the teachers do it was always they should so we have changed the language to must and will and I know our teachers are going to be behind it too right because I think we're all collectively wanting that um but I think that is where our the now that if we make this decision we have to make sure that that is as robust as possible so that our students can make that choice I'd just like to interrupt here um I need to remind the

086audience that this is a public meeting that means that we are holding our meeting in public we will not entertain questions from the audience or have a dialogue at this point um so I appreciate that your hands went up and I would love to hear from you but now is not the time yeah and feel free to send an email to any one of us with your question um Dr Dr Herman probably the first point but to any one of us would be fine thank you okay uh thank you cara do you have anything youa I want to be sure that we hear from everyone yeah um so I did have a um one one random thought and then a um a more General uh statement um car just mentioned our teachers and I am

087in full agreement with car's statement that no one should misconstrue changing our calendar with thinking that means they are supposed to be in school um the spirit of the First Amendment which I hold very dear is not to to penalize minorities especially religious minorities it was intended to protect them by not allowing government institutions to favor any religion or theocracy and while it pains me and I've had several sleepless nights over this issue although I'm not a constitutional scholar or a lawyer the first amendment is very clear it says that no government body that has that's a taxing body will establish theocracy or promote religion nor prevent the free expression of speech or religion so the way that I interpret that it's very clearly the right and the responsibility of the individual to choose whether

088or not to practice religion and it is the responsibility and the legal obligation of public institutions to neither prohibit the freedom of religious expression or promote it when we look at the way universities operate when we look at the way employers operate they do not close their buildings to demonstrate that they value diversity equity and inclusion I I don't go to my bank and demand that they be closed on yum kipur I that that that isn't the way it works and when my University students want to exercise their freedom of religion they send their Professor an email and they are guaranteed by the Constitution that they will have an accommodation for their absence getting back to our teachers and our building leadership they have demonstrated throughout this process a willingness and a commitment to continue

089to support student learning they already do it when a student has an excused absence for a field trip or for an illness and the parameters that we're putting in place the teachers and and we have had conversations with the Union representation which Dr Herman can talk a little bit about support the spirit of if we make this change we are not saying you are expected to be in school the right and the responsibility is on the individual to exercise their religious freedom and the obligation of us as an institution is to support learning even in the face of an excused absence and it makes this decision no less difficult but it makes it clear that by favoring no no one or two or three religions we guarantee the freedom of all of the religions so

090did you want to talk a little bit about the um teachers union and the support that we've received from the additional guidelines that we're discussing absolutely um we have have had um uh two teachers on the committee um and this also has been brought the draft language was shared with our Lor management committee meeting who again understands the legal thresholds and was in support in concept again they did not have the authority to officially endorse it and that would take um action by the union but when shared with them the feedback that they gave us is yes we understand board policy may need the language in our current policy may need to be more explicit to make sure that students and parents and staff are all on the same page about what that means for

091students to exercise their right to practice religion okay I would like to say um I have one question first I guess this goes to Bryant what are the the teachers doing on Good Friday on both of those lists it says the students are not in attendance are there all offices closed on those days or are the teachers in attendance the teachers are not in attendance no students but our offices are open so 12- month employees and 12 month the main officer okay good uh and then just general comments um the way to solve any problem is to pay attention to it and we're paying attention to it now but I think that we're going to continue to pay attention to it over time uh this is not a one-time fight uh and as our demographic

092changes so will our policies um and I I really appreciate how much effort has gone into this by so many people in the community um because it's an important issue um I I understand why it's important for people to freely be able to express their religious beliefs I think that it's uh that in one way it it does indeed honor uh our students by taking a day off but taking a day off is not the only way to honor diversity and I believe that our district has made a very forward commitment to honoring diversity and while I am very likely to support the recommendation that has been made by the committee I want the community to know that we appreciate the continued dialogue um and that this is a public body and as a public

093body I firmly stand behind The Establishment Clause uh and I believe that that's how democracy works is by being Democratic and continuing to work the process so can I add something about the Constitution and democracy and our Democratic process sure if we disregard what the Constitution says here what else are we giving permission to disregard what what happens then if we were asked to entertain prayer in schools because we did not fulfill the spirit of the First Amendment we decided to take it into our own hands and be because of how we wanted to continue a previous practice put aside what we understand as as board members who have taken an oath and as a district that has not one but two legal opinions that make our responsibility not to misuse our institution to establish

094religion clear so I don't want to overdramatize this but it is a slippery slope when you take the law into your own hands board members any other discussion on this point just to be clear this will come before the board at our correct November board meeting that's next Monday so and we will vote at that point whether or not to about the recommendations that have been put forward by the committee all right uh moving on to 3B the employment employees right wait minute employment of employees we do have a Personnel report I'm making this recommendation for these employees um for approval at the board meeting next week any question all right moving on to 3C Educational Tours uh I did make a comment earlier um to Carol that some of the links that are embedded

095uh some of us were not able to get into and she will attend to that in future uh efforts to put the administrative content up um but and thank you to the teachers who responded to the requests for Access I I didn't have any trouble with the link did you I did inside the documents yeah the itinerary link theary open that permission I see if anybody would like recommendations on where to go to Maran Illinois my son spent the summer there and I can't wait for poo like that's one of the coolest places in Italy is Sicily and I I think that's going to be an awesome trip so you're saying you're nominating yourself as a chap if they need a chapon you think they'll have trouble finding I don't trouble I've yet to be

096asked to attend any of these trips because they have very little difficulty finding chaperons there's something wrong when you want to go to Italy and I want to go to Mary and Illinois you got to get out more Cara uh best barbecue does anybody have any questions about any of the um the tours field trip I just wanted to thank the uh staff who who are planning and leading these trips there a lot of these are scheduled out for March of 2025 which seems like a long time from now but it goes to show you that so many of the um little moving parts to these trips and the planning start so very early and it's because of that early planning that our students are afforded these amazing experiences so to those of you who

097are planning these keep up the great work can't wait to hear about them here here I also want to add that not only does it indicate how much forward planning the teachers are doing trying to um also secure the best pricing for our students but it also when you approve these trips as far in advance it allows families to save over time for the cost of each of these trips so I also applaud the teachers and sponsors who are doing their best to get information gathered so you can approve it so we can have groups of people do fundraising and assist families in Saving for the cost over time all right moving on 3D course weight adjustments and um again I know that there was a memo that explained what we're recommending and this is

098aligned with our explore multiple paths um uh board goal in terms of trying to make sure that any course that is equivalent to college work receive the similar waiting and that currently is not the case and we feel that one aspect of honoring what we said about exploring multiple paths and making sure students know that there's more than one way to complete college level work and that would be through dual credit and some of the other things listed in the memo that we would be moving forward to more students feeling recognized for the high quality work that they're doing so I could entertain any questions you might have I just was surprised as all like I was surprised that our dual credit courses were not given the same weight as an AP course I just

099assumed and when I read this I'm like can't be so I'm delighted to see that anyone that's taking a a CLC course for example we had earth science honors yep those students were taking the class getting college credit but they were a 4.0 weighted scale instead of a 5.0 weighted scale and I appreciate that this move is being made agreed sorry I cut you off there well said yeah so again this came from the teaching and learning Department Ben Rodriguez who is our new coordinator is leading this charge but highly supported by both assistant principles at each of the campus um and this received the full endorsement of teaching and learning any other questions lovely okay Illinois report card summi of designation graduation rate and chronic absenteeism this is the first of a two-part report

100uh good evening thank you for having me here tonight to present on the Illinois report card I am Charlotte e director of data and assessment um as stated thank you as stated this will be the first of a two-part series of report card presentations no problem I always love a sequel right um so the um Illinois report cards uh for 2223 were made public on Monday October 30th and as I'm sure you know the report cards have a vast amount of information uh so tonight's presentation is going to focus on the three areas you see on the screen there uh the summative designation the graduation rates and chronic absenteeism and then again we'll do a second presentation uh next week that will cover proficiency rates and our Equity Journey Continuum uh so that is something

101to look forward to so just a brief uh for anyone who who's not familiar with accessing the report card just a brief introduction uh Illinois report cards can be found at Illinois report card.com and you come to a start page and you can search for any public school or public District in the State uh report cards are created at both the district and the school level so you can search for d128 or you can search for either one of our schools uh just a note that much of the information contained in a school report card is the same as in a district report card but there are certain things that only apply to one or the other so for instance tonight we're looking at summative designation that is only something that schools have a district

102does not have a summative designation uh next week we'll look at the equity Journey Continuum that is for districts only schools individually don't have one that is for the district so upon entering into a report card you'll see um kind of a starting page that um they call it a snapshot page you see some tiles on that page with some of the most pertinent information that is reported and all of those tiles are clickable um as well as there is a menu down the left side of each screen with tons of more information so there's so much to to get into and there's various ways to get to it you're seeing images of what it will look like when you first enter in to D1 128's report card that's the leftmost image with more of

103the green coloring and then the two school report cards have more of the yellow coloring so but they do look very similar in terms of where things are and as you are navigating uh there's lots of different uh routes to go so you've got a big menu and you've got those tiles that can be clicked on so tonight I want to start by looking at the summative designation uh each School in Illinois receives a summative designation these are calculated by assigning each School points for the accountability indicators at their level so um elementary and middle schools have uh certain indicators and then high school has different indicators uh so um you're seeing on the screen the high school indicators uh kind of in in that pie chart uh each indicator is weighted so uh different

104indicators are worth different amounts toward the Sumit designation score uh for high schools 75% of the score comes from academic indicators uh those are the pieces of the pie that are in shades of blue those are all what are considered academic indicators and the the largest of that is graduation rate which we will discuss uh tonight so that's worth 50% of a high school's summative designation score graduation rate and then 25% of the score comes from school quality and Student Success indicators those are in shades of yellow in the pie chart currently there are only those three things shown in in that Set uh but in 2025 there will be others added uh College and Career Readiness and Fine Arts indicators are coming in the next few [Music] years so based on the indicator scores

105that we just saw schools are placed into one of five categories and I know that's that's really tiny and and we're not going to go into it all just really showing there are five categories that a school can be placed into and we are extremely excited to uh announce that both Libertyville and Vernon Hills High School achieved exemplary status again this year exemplary high schools are in the top 10% of all schools in the state they have a graduation rate higher than 67% and they have no targeted student groups this means no student groups who are performing below the all students group of the lowest performing 5% of schools so congratulations to our schools for exemplary status this next slide shows a new visualization uh that um is available on report cards this year this

106is something we haven't seen before and this is showing us the thresholds so the the exemplary status and um the comprehensive targeted status those are based on the the top 10 and the bottom five% so the the score threshold of what that means changes from year to year because it's bed based on that Year's data from various schools so this is just showing where the thresholds are and where our schools landed uh within those thresholds so you can see um for exemplary uh that was at 91.2 Four Points um for the summative designation score and where uh Libertyville fell so just kind of a neat visualization to sort of put some of the numbers into context and we haven't had this before so it kind of helped to get a better idea of what this

107all means and here is the same image for Vernon Hills so that is a summative designation and so tonight we're going to look at the two pieces of the pie uh that um that are the the most weighted um so graduation rate at 50% of our summi of designation score and then chronic absenteeism which is 10% and we'll look at that as well so the graduation rate score is a combination of the four five and six year graduation rates so those all go into that score but they are in this portion of the score they are also weighted so the four-year uh graduation rate is worth 60% the 5e is worth 30% and and the six year is worth 10% so that's what makes up that piece um of the score uh both LHS and

108vhhs earned the maximum points toward their Summit of designation score in the graduation category so essentially 50 out of 50 points for that uh particular measure so let's take a look at them so um you will see the kind of in the center tile that you see there that's just a screenshot from uh Liberty ville's report card that is the four-year graduation rate and that's uh usually a tile right there on that snapshot page that we talked about and then when you click into it you can get some more information so that's the four-year graduation rate that we are seeing there and then once we click in we see the fiveyear and the six year as well so if you look at the image on the right uh you're seeing uh on the top the

109four-year graduation rate followed by the fiveyear followed by the sixth year and you're seeing a comparison of the school to the district to the state and the color coding remains uh the same throughout the report card so school information in yellow District information in that kind of lime green and state information in that darker green and they present on the report card this comparison throughout in in most of the metrics that you look at you'll see this comparison of course if you're in the district report card you don't see the yellow you see just the district and the state so this is Liberty ville's rates uh four-year graduation rate of 94.8% fiveyear graduation rate of 94.7% and sixe graduation rate of 96.3% those are really impressive numbers and uh we are very proud of Liberty

110though and we are also very proud of Vernon Hills uh they had a four-year graduation rate of 95.8% a 5-year graduation rate of 95.0% and a six-year graduation rate of 95.7% so really uh really impressive uh numbers for graduation [Music] rates so our report card of course lets us take a deeper dive into all of this and uh we need to look at the disaggregated data as we always do and take a look at how some of our populations are uh doing in comparison to our total students so what you're seeing here this is only for foure graduation rates we're looking at four-year graduation rates for the past three years so trying to look at a little bit of Trends and this is how it's presented on the report card I have a slide uh

111coming that that is a little prettier but um I had to make it so uh this is what we see on the report card uh because we're always seeing that comparison with the state uh we can't always manipulate it on the report card to see the year after year right right next to each other um in certain images you can in this one this is how it's presented so if you're kind of wanting to look at a trend you're looking vertically so we see all students all the way there on the left side and looking at those Trends going vertically because we're looking at three years there so here we're looking at all of our students we've got our lowincome students our English Learners our students with IEPs and this is really uh good news

112uh we see that there are some gaps in graduation rate with some of our populations but if you look closely you will see that those um those gaps are closing uh in several instances and our um lowincome English Learners and students with IEPs um are starting to uh get closer and closer to uh our overall rate and I especially want to point out the um English learning Learners and I know the numbers are a little hard to see up on the screen but the four-year graduation rate for English Learners in 2021 was 81.5% uh and in 2023 88.9% so not quite at that 95 is percent that that we have for all students but getting closer and closer and so that is really something that we should be proud of um that that students in

113these populations are uh successfully graduating and we are closing those gaps and here we are looking at um two of our uh race populations next to all students so we have all students again and then we have our black population and we have our Hispanic population uh the the gaps for our Hispanic population very very small um so so that's a a really great thing to see um for our black students though the the gaps are quite a bit larger and the thing that I want to point out for our black students here is that while the state uh black student graduation rates have increased over the past three years our black student graduation rates have decreased so that is really something that that we need to hone in on and and ask ourselves why

114and what can we do about it uh so you can see if you're looking at the middle uh green bars how they kind of change um which one is higher uh so something to to re for us to really focus on um especially knowing that Statewide that Gap is slowly but surely closing little by little we need to be doing the same uh so something for us to really focus on as we move [Music] forward and here is um something you won't see on the report card I wanted to show that um information that I was just speaking about again in in a way where we're really focused on um on just that piece U so I I did uh make this I you can't find this in our report card but of course it's

115the information from the report card so it's the same thing I I just spoke about um it's not new information but just looking at it um in a in a way that's just a little bit easier on our eyes to see what's happening there so that dark green State graduation rate for black students it's not increasing in a big way but little by little increasing and ours is decreasing pretty significantly uh so we can kind of see that a little better on this slide so again an area of focus for us as we move forward so next we're going to look at Chronic absenteeism this is 10% of our uh summative designation score um chronic absenteeism I want to find this on my list so that I read verbatim the definition chronic absenteeism refers to

116students who Miss more than 10% of the school year excused or unexcused so this represents any absence whatever the reason that's chronic absenteeism this is important uh right now now because Statewide we're seeing some Trends in the Illinois State Board of education's weekly message from October 21st it was noted that persistently High chronic absenteeism is an ongoing challenge across the state and chronic absenteeism rates have not returned to their preco levels so this is something that the state is watching very closely uh and something we also uh need to be watching closely in terms of our summative designation score this is worth 10 points LHS earned 6.74 and vhhs earned 6.63 out of 10 points toward their summative designation scores in that area when we look at the data we're going to look at districtwide

117we're not going to break down into the schools but we but they were very close uh with their score in that area so you're seeing here a couple of things the first uh on the the left side larger graph is simply showing the 2022 23 chronic absenteeism rate for our district compared to the state so looking at that graph we do see that our and this is a number that we want to be low we want a low number here uh so we do see uh we had 17.1 uh percent chronic absenteeism the States was 28.3 so when we do the comparison we're we're we're ahead of the game there but I want to draw your attention now to the second graph that's showing our Trend and so you can see uh evidence of what

118the state was reporting in that Weekly message of about a week ago that we have not returned to our pre-co levels of chronic absenteeism and we are seeing uh increases and you kind of see some ins and outs there but in the past two years uh some pretty strikingly high numbers for chronic absenteeism as compared to what we've seen in the P oops um and here we are looking again at our uh student populations um the top graph is showing our uh populations by race the bottom graph we're looking at our lowincome English Learners and students with IEPs and again this is just uh the current data the data from last school year and um looking at the district compared to the state so you kind of see a a number of lighter green bars

119that are lower so we're ahead of the game uh in if we're comparing ourselves to where the state is but we also see some places especially in that bottom graph where our numbers are are getting a little closer even in some cases higher than what the state is reporting so those again are populations that we need to be aware of and and and watching out for and and put some Focus um into we'll look at trends for each of those populations just to give an idea of the overall picture so you're seeing on the left that's for all of our students so you've seen that graph before a couple slides ago that's our Trend as a district as a whole and then next to it we're pointing out the um the trends for our black

120students and the trends for our Hispanic students so we do see some gaps there pretty significant gaps for our black students um 44% chronic absenteeism for our black students in 2022 23 and once again you see the all uh students graph in that light green the Orange is our low-income students the darker green is English Learners and the pink is students with IEP so we are definitely seeing uh that we have higher incidents of chronic absenteeism for these populations um with 178 school days on our calendar a student who misses 18 or more days from school will be chronically absent um and again we've seen this rate increasing and not returning to pre-co levels over the past couple of years uh we're aware that we need to find some solutions uh our students can't learn

121if they're not in school so this is something that uh we have been focusing on already this year we've introduced some new procedures around attendance and it begins with placing uh attendance rates into various tiers so you can see the tiers on the screen there and for each tier then there are specific defined supports in place and as students move um into the the tier 2 and then the tier three level we have set interventions that uh we are ready to implement um I'm going to turn this over for a moment to Dr Ellis Bowen she has been uh leading this charge working with our staff to put some new procedures into place working with our lsts and administrators to ensure that we are ready uh with the interventions that we need to make sure

122that our students are in school as much as possible so I'll let her speak just briefly on some of the things we're doing so good evening um Board of Ed as well as our d120 community members that are watching um online so a team of various St um stakeholders have uh been meeting since April um of last year to begin to review the practices and procedures for attendance overall within the district um as we have uh looked at our procedures as well as our practice and including data that we are collecting collecting um it was important for us as a committee um to take a look at The District's expectations as well as interventions which includes uh Outreach Services for our students pertaining to attendance as we reviewed and updated our interventions we wanted to

123make sure that there were alignment that there was uh alignment to ISB um recommendations and protocols especially in the areas of tiered interventions um and so those five areas are monitoring data um so what we did was not only identify data but then also created uh the thresholds for um attendance um we also began to identify practices that involved uh student as well as family engagement and begin to identify those gaps um recognize um strong Improvement attendance so um looking at uh implementing practices that not only recognize um the negatives of what's going on are our deficits but begin to recognize the positives even if that is um very small um uh uh Improvement is an improvement uh last but not least um our personalizes Outreach so beginning to look at um supp ports within

124our community um at the Roe that we can begin to engage with and bring into our district and then last but not least making sure that we are exhausting any and every barrier that is presenting our students from coming into the building uh information regarding our updated attendance has been communicated to our staff and there will be continuous communication um moving forward with our staff um there is also some information forthcoming to our parents and students regarding um attendance with full implementation we took this semester to do the communication piece for all stakeholders ERS with full implementation of these updates um for the second semester of um this school year um with the involvement of all community members improving um to improve our in informed practices which involves consistency um I can't say that word

125enough and effective communication structures as well as continuing to review our augment um review and augment our practices that are aligned with our current and future student body um hopefully we begin to address some of the deficits and gaps that you guys have been seeing or Charlotte has uh reported in a school uh report card can I ask just a quick clarifying question Dr eie um in light of the conversation we just had about the calendar if we have a student that is out two days because they're sick and then out two days with an excused absence for religious observance are they going to trigger interventions where none are appropriate so right now with chronic absenteeism uh the uh the the thresholds that you see before you are for unexcused absences so they are not

126um not part of the unexcused absences are not part of that uh criteria for excused absences which would be College visits medical exemptions mental health days um religious holidays however Within our policy um when a student has reached 10 excused absences unless that parent has some type of medical documentation or Court documentation or there has been administrative approval after that 11th day it becomes an unexcused absence and then that's when this um will provide a trigger but 10 but uh students within our district have 10 um have the ability to have 10 excused absences um for any of the criteria that's written I just want to clarify one thing though the tears and how we defined it does not include excused absences so our practices and protocols but the state does include excused and unexcused

127in its definition well that's one of the questions iism so I just want to make sure that we're being very clear but even with the state it doesn't it doesn't include it until that student has reached 10 so it aligns to our policy so what you see up there is that the chronic Asen ISM it um it is for it the state definition does say absent um absent uh absences regardless of what they are however um ISB as well as our policies allow those 10 excused absences so with knowing that it does not it will not trigger um any of our thresholds for tier one tier two or tier three for chronic absences and without taking into account those 10 absences that are granted to our students can I ask a question so are the

128five mental health days still allowable under this they are they are considered under the excused absence but a hypothetical would be a student takes their five mental health days let's say two religious holidays that means they get three sick days for the entire year and then they're considered chronically absentee so is that no so the next day the 11th day so even with the 11th day they're not considered chronic absent chronically absent however we begin our Pro process of beginning to look at providing interventions for that student so so with that specific example the 10 excuse absence as long as there are the um the parent has followed all the protocols to call that student in um along with following the criteria those students technically have a little bit more leeway versus a student who

129um does not follow the criteria and their parents are not calling in for them and is considered an unauthorized absence or an unexcused absence I guess what I was more generally asking when we're looking at our percentages of chronically absent preco we went from 10 to 17% in all students have we looked to see if those 177% students who are chronically absent are utilizing all five of their mental health days and is do you see mental health day exercising five mental health days as something that is contributing to our increase in chronic absenteeism so while I will say that we haven't gone and had an indepth look at our data when in regards to attendance what I can say is that there is a trend of mental health as well as school withdrawal that is

130impacting um along with some other um along with some other um concerns that is definitely impacting our chronic absenteeism which I know we are not we have no control over because it's something that is allowable under isby rule but you know just some kind of reasoning of why because uh I think that's something that's worth looking into yeah we can definitely um do more do more analysis there yes thank you so um that is about out all for tonight's presentation we've to review we've looked at our summative designation and we've looked at the two largest pieces of that summative designation Pi graduation rate and chronic absenteeism next week we will see a presentation on proficiency rates and uh the equity Journey Continuum uh meanwhile the Illinois report card is accessible to anyone there is a

131wealth of information um it's incredibly well-designed and userfriendly many many ways uh to to look at data uh lots of trend data lots of demographic comparisons available uh so I encourage you uh because we're certainly not going to be able to cover all of it in two presentations I encourage you to dig into it yourself and if you have any questions as you dig into it you know where to find me I'm happy to help help interpret or answer um any questions um and with that are there any further questions tonight well I just want to acknowledge Charlotte for the great work that you did to distill down the volumes of data to help the board prioritize understanding the summit of designation how important our graduation rates are and the differences we're seeing in subgroups

132and then to link chronic absenteeism to actual attendance practices that Dr Ellis Bowen is um leading among our staff and our practices um again it's voluminous and I appreciate you helping to make sure the board knows some of the key pieces that are linked either to some of the challenges that we've identified and want to improve on or some of the things that might be new in terms of indicators for the state so thank you very much thank you um I have a couple uh for any given population when we disaggregate data how many students are we talking about so that's one piece of the puzzle because if you have this is yearly data so you might have 10 students one year two students the next year eight students the next year like is there

133a way that we could look at how many students there are I don't know if you could do that or not that EAS um so I and if I could just add on to what you're wondering because I was wondering this same thing if we have a subgroup who only has a very few number of students they the impact of one or two students is disproportionate to all students so I also was wondering if there's a way not to use proportionality to avoid addressing gaps in subgroups that is absolutely not what I'm suggesting but just to be able to see the number of students in that group so that when we see a large swing up or down we can sort of accommodate for well it was eight this year but it's only two this

134year so that's why the um impact percentage wise is so large right true yes um and we we do um certainly have access to that I don't have that um off the top of my head but um certainly yes we can we can get those numbers and and when we do this we're we are aware our black student population is a very small one so we we are aware there is some disproportionality as we are looking um at that so you're absolutely right but we can get those numbers so that we really um know what how many students we're talking about yeah and again it is not because the smaller number makes it um not important every student is important and we want to address all of those gaps we don't want to use that

135information in any way to um to not address absolutely agre absolutely yes just a thr in a quick two comments um while there's not counts but there's percentages on the report card as well you can actually go back and look to see what percent yeah in the report what percent this population makes up the the other comment though and having done some some research on some subgroup populations and whatnot the thing to realize is we're looking at a three-year Trend but it's not really a three-year Trend it's three independent cohorts of students correct so it's not the same student being more absent being performing differently it's three different groups of students and those each one of those groups has their own story and their own challenges and so it's it's just while it's it's concerning

136that numbers are going you know the state's going this way and we're going that way and certain populations it's there's always more to the story than than what you see absolutely and then um if you could just remind me we've seen presentations before and you identify uh trends at what point do we come back and look at what we did to address those Trends I know that we do that I just if you could give me a timeline um I think it that is dependent on which data we're investigating so I can't give you a a straightforward um answer um but I can tell you we will certainly do those next steps and and then follow up so um yes yeah yes so we can uh get back to you with some more a more

137firm answer on that um but yes it is very dependent I think on what we're doing um and who's involved uh so but we will we will get back to you right I mean it might be a year from now but at some point um are there any other question questions all right then we are moving forward to the 2024 2025 course proposals 3F and again in Dr Sanchez's absence tonight I would be happy to answer questions as would um I know both Larry and Charlotte sit on the teaching and learning team and engaged in many conversations but again there are several things to celebrate about not only the new courses that are on this list the significant work that both Vernon Hills and Libertyville High School administration and staff has been doing to meet

138our goal of Equitable opportunities at both schools um so the idea once we was raised to their attention about some of the differences and opportunities between one school or another every year they have been bringing some of those things and saying yes we we want to try and bring these opportunities so that there's parity for every student um and so I really want to recognize uh the staff for not only the Innovative new things but also improving access that students have to similar learning experiences there's there's any questions way more than a normal year of new there in terms of I think that comes and goes a little bit with waves in um in terms of the number of new class courses I think there's maybe a few more than normal but a lot of

139these others are re retitling are making sure that the opportunities between both schools are consistent so the the the length of the overall list is longer but again it's because we're not just bringing new ideas we're going back and refining the existing course proposal or the existing course structures um and making a few other adjustments um that we've identified as needing to to be updated like opening them to sophomores Juniors as opposed to just seniors correct I'd love to see that yes no other questions oh I I'm just thrilled to see um how uh great a job as Dr Herman already said um we're doing it addressing U making sure we have um equal opportunities at both buildings so thank you for that right then moving on to uh future agenda items there are a

140number listed in the uh future agenda items on board docs is there anything else that anybody would like to add okay we're very quiet here I'm adjourning this meeting wish I had a thing yeah gaval I'm gonna take a quick five minute break before yeah facilities and finance Finance facil Carol that gives you time program and Personnel committee meeting adjourned currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next current currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance

141committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break for facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and

142finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and

143finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next okay we'll call to order the um facilities and finance committee uh for November 6th

144we previously did the Pledge so we don't have to do that um we we have uh on the agenda invitation for public comment now we have um three items for discussion long-term funding options for capital projects the 2023 tax levy and an update on the Park Avenue properties so we will start with uh invitation for public comment anyone wishing to address the committee seeing none move on to our long-term funding options for capital projects I will turn it over to Dan and our guest from PMA evening let me uh get this up on the screen and I will introduce my esteemed guest there we go you go welcome to do that e uh so this is Tammy Beck with Sham she's with PMA she'll introduce herself but I have been working with P Tammy I

145think it's got to be over 10 years uh that I've known her and she is one of my favorite people in school business and so um context for the discussions and uh mes this is a little bit context for you we've been looking at this for quite a while uh there's a lot of projects that there is desire to do and my Council has been there's not enough funding to do the projects that everybody wants to do and so um your only options if you want to do the projects your only options are you reduce spending in other areas so that you can spend money on this and or um you look at more funding and we have been looking um at different ways actually was at my annual conference that I just happened to

146walk be walking through the exhibit hall and I saw Tammy I said hi and it just kind of dawned me in that moment an idea uh for how how we could access funding to meet our Capital our Capital desires and so we started talking then this was back in May and then talked a little bit more over the summer and now I feel like we're ready to show you uh real I think realistic options uh for how you can access more funding uh so I'm going to turn it to Tammy she's going to explain walk through stuff I probably will jump in to give context as well but for now I'm going to turn it over to Tammy oh I now I'm going to share because I okay good evening everyone um thank you for

147that very kind introduction Dan I think it's a mutual admiration Society uh knowing Dan for as long as I have and working with him um really really Stellar person in the field um but I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you tonight we have several topics to go through I won't name all of them here but uh we will be going through these various um agenda items tonight and look forward to sharing quite a bit of information to you that I hope will be helpful in the context that that Dan provided just a very first topic a quick overview of PMA I know some of you may be somewhat familiar with PMA probably more on the investment side of things um but there's an umbrella uh under PMA of several different companies I'm in that

148green box on the left side called Public Finance um there are several different divisions within PMA but we are uh headquartered in naville we have uh offices in Wisconsin and Minnesota but our Public Finance practice is also headquartered in in naville but we do have a very active Midwest presence and I had the Good Fortune of working in the Public Finance industry for a very long time I actually also have a prior Life as a school business manager did that a long time ago but I've been in this business now for um about 26 years so uh I spent all my time helping school districts and some Community College districts in the state of Illinois with the issuance of Municipal Securities our firm acts as what's called a municipal adviser so on this graph it's

149that upper leftand corner and we work with issuers like school districts in Illinois and the issuance of Municipal Securities or bonds we'll talk more about in a little bit um that means that we are highly regulated by the federal regulators and uh we have a fiduciary duty to our clients making sure that you enter into financings that make the most sense for your District make sure that you understand all of the uh variables that you should consider when you're going into a financing and actually sometimes that also means advising our clients not to do certain certain things if we don't think it's in their best interest so we take that fiduciary duty very seriously because of course you as the school district issuing the debt or at the center of the entire process and there

150are other parties listed uh on this graph as well that I won't go into great detail about tonight unless you have specific questions but I just wanted to give you some context in the role that PMA serves uh in Public Finance we have a lot of experience I won't spend a lot of time talking about all the school districts that we work with um but I do want to let you know that for 16 years we have served as a municipal adviser to school districts in the state more than any other firm in Illinois so we have a very very deep bench of people um that we spend all of our time helping the education Market in Illinois I just wanted to give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the school

151districts in Lake County that we work with you'll see a lot of your neighbors here um and I also am a Lake County resident by the way only live about 20 minutes away so uh would love lots of opportunities to drive over to The District in the future so we have a very good familiarity with Lake County school districts as well so just to first talk about school districts and their abilities to borrow money I know some of you may have some experience with this topic some of you may not have really any at all but just to make sure we're all starting from the same point of view school districts when they want to borrow money for capital projects or really for any purpose it's not like they can just go to the bank

152and take out a loan the Illinois school code is very clear about the ways in which you can borrow money particularly as it pertains to capital projects so you issue municipal bonds and you say to an investor I want to borrow this amount of money from you with this maturity schedule so there's a fixed uh rate of interest there's a fixed Debt Service schedule or principal and interest schedule that you agree to as a board to pay back over time and most types of financing school districts in Illinois enter into have a maximum issuance of 20 years there are a couple exceptions to that but for the most part it's a 20-year maximum maturity schedule so you might have 20 different maturities with 20 different interest rates typically the further you go out on that

153schedule the higher the interest rate there can be some exceptions to that again depending on what's happening with the yield curve in any given Market but you are with that schedule for the life of your transaction when we talk about Bond and interest Levy that means when you are borrowing money and uh asking taxpayers to support The Debt Service payments on that you have the ability to extend a bond and interest Levy to the county clerk and we'll talk more about how you have that ability in a minute but when you see your tax bill every year that comes out in the spring and you see the total tax rate for the high school district that Bond and interest Levy would be embedded within that total tax rate it's not separated out it's not something

154that you see uh indiv individually on your tax bill but it's part of the total tax rate of a school district if they have bonds that are outstanding okay so the first thing I want to start with is just to give you a sense of how you fit within the statutory debt capacity in Illinois so every High School District in Illinois has to take its current equalized assess valuation or its eav and multiply at times 6.9% and then if you have existing debt outstanding then you subtract from that number you are debt-free so you have almost $228 million of debt capacity so a very sizable amount as as you can see but that's a good back pocket number for you to know as a board what is our statutory ability to borrow money and this

155speaks just to the principle not the interest component so going back to the school code and how it says you can borrow money for capital projects there are a couple different ways under the the again the Viewpoint of what Revenue Source would we pay it back from so we'll start with General obligation or go school bonds General obligation means that you have the full faith and credit or the tax base of the school district behind you that's your ability to extend have ask the county clerk to extend property taxes get those property taxes from taxpayers and then you make Debt Service payments on money that you borrow through a go Bond and there's two types of go bonds one is through a traditional referendum with school building bonds which we'll talk more a little bit

156about later and the other option or nonreferent Geo bonds via what's called a Debt Service extension base you do not have a Debt Service extension base or a d as we call it for short but we're going to talk more about that tonight and how you might establish one there are other ways that school districts can borrow money for capital projects but the main way that they're different than the options listed above is that you as a district would say we're going to use operating dollars to pay the debt back and those are by way of usually alternate revenue bonds or debt or lease certificates they're not uh appropriate for every school district they're not um preferred by I would say most school districts because again it's putting pressure on your operating funds dollars that

157you're using to pay teachers and provide other uh resources for students yep so so does to say it another way when we're talk we'll we'll talk about how to get the money but how you pay it back is one of two ways there's an additional tax levy meaning the residents pay more taxes or you pay it out of your existing operating budget and um what what I'm what I'm going to say to you is that I don't believe you have capacity in your existing operating budget to issue any kind of meaningful debt that would that would make a dent in the projects that you that you want to look at thank you okay so let's talk about this concept of a Debt Service extension base so this goes back almost 30 years and there was

158a law that was put into place in 1994 that said if you are in a tax cap County like Lake County and whatever amount of non referendum Debt Service your school district had at that point so the principal and interest amount for Levy year 1994 that established your DB and it said that going forward you could borrow money on a non- referendum basis as long as your annual payment didn't exceed that levye 1994 amount for non-ref Debt Service school districts back at that point actually had a few months heads up that this law was coming and so when faced with this situation some school districts stepped back and said we have some non-referring and whatever it is for that year that'll establish our DP some districts said well we have some debt outstanding but we're

159going to hurry up and go out and sell some more non- referendum debt to raise it so we give ourselves some flexibility as a district going forward in our ability to borrow on a non- referendum basis and some districts didn't have any non-ref debt outstanding like your district and said we're not going to go out and sell debt we believe the right thing to do is to continue the path that we have and we may cross that bridge down the road but your district is one of the districts that did not have non- referendum debt outstanding in love year 1994 but you can establish one with voter approval and what it would do is enable you if you establish a DB to borrow money again on a non- referendum basis and enable you to extend

160property taxes every single year up to again a certain amount for Debt Service as long as you go through the necessary proceedings legal proceedings that are required to issue such debt which I can talk more about in a minute so as I mentioned if you have a DB you can issue bonds for a period of up to 20 years at any point there are several types of non-referenced I won't focus on the last two listed on this page but I'll spend a minute talking about working cash and life safety most school districts when they have a d and they want to fund capital projects they issue what are called working cash bonds against that DB and so what happen happens is the school district generates Bond proceeds it's deposited into the working cash fund and

161then by way of board resolution the proceeds get transferred to the capital projects fund by way of the onm fund because isby wants those dollars spent out of the capital projects fund for such projects um so that I would say is the most common Avenue that School districs in Illinois use if they have a duub for projects on a non-reference basis sometimes school districts issue Life Safety bonds for capital projects and that's applicable if a school district has gone through a process with its architect to have approvals signed at this should be familiar to us we just went through this okay great um so isby has to sign off on your list of Life Safety projects and say yes you may issue Life Safety bonds as a non- referendum bond to fund those projects there

162are some requirements from a legal perspective listed at the bottom here all of these require what's called a bond issue notification act hearing or a bin hearing which functions much like the hearing you have for your budget or your tax levy every year you need to give the public the opportunity by way of a notice in the newspaper to come in and provide any comments on the plans to sell the bonds working cash fund bonds and funding bonds uh even though I didn't talk in great detail about funding bonds tonight those two types require also what's called a 30-day petition period or a backdoor referendum period so if you declare that you as a board are ready to start to issue working cash bonds after you have established a d that one of the very

163first things you would do is adopt what's called a resolution of intent and within a couple days after that board meeting oh thanks that's okay you put a notice in the newspaper notifying the public that you intend to issue the working cash bonds and once that notice hits the paper it starts a 30-day clock and if Within the 30 days at least 10% of the registered voters within the district sign and submit a petition to the board then the board would have two choices either to abandon plans to sell working cash Bonds on a non-reference basis or decide to go directly to the voters and ask for approval to sell working cash bonds that scenario is pretty rare as you can imagine but it is part of the legal process so just wanted to make

164sure you're aware at least at a high level today of some of the legal proceedings that you would have to follow as AB board so let's talk a little bit about a d referendum versus a traditional building Bond referendum for sure most school districts are more familiar and Boards of Education are more familiar at least contextually with a traditional building Bond referendum question so if you are putting a DB referendum on the qu on the ballot it's giving you essentially a long-term financing mechanism because you're saying this is what we want our annual Debt Service payment or our debt service Levy to be and over time into perpetuity we would want to issue bonds potentially on a non- referendum basis and continue to fund projects over time the wisdom of the legislature back in the

165early 1990s was to give school districts the ability to take care of a lot of facilities needs that maybe aren't a brand new school or a 100,000 square foot addition on a school but to be able to deal with things like renovation of class rooms and HVAC and windows and other things that are normal upkeep they wanted to school districts to have the ability to take care of those things without having to go to the voters every single time that was really what the logic was the General Assembly 30 years ago so it's giving you that long-term financing mechanism whereas a traditional building Bond referendum is saying on the ballot May the school district have permission to issue x amount of bonds to fund these particular projects so you're borrowing a specific dollar amount it's

166a one-time Authority go ahead sure so so I think the main difference here is if you think about think about in terms of like personally for a mortgage a building Bond says we we would like to borrow aund million to do X we want to borrow a100 million to build Veron Hills High School for example that's what that is it's it's onetime borrowing that you pay back over a long period of time 20 years but a DB is basically asking for what what's our annual mortgage payment DB says we want it's really not about how much money we're borrowing it's about how much money we're going to pay back a year and you set that dollar amount and so that's the dollar amount that you have to to be able to payback and so depending

167on how many years you borrow for and how much morgage you can afford that tells you how much money you can really borrow so there are two different things one is a big bucket of money or a small bucket of money but it's one time and the DB is more about the annual payments that you make back thank you thank you so as I mentioned back to the DB referendum that second uh item there so if you establish a DB every time you want to sell non-referring bonds they will not require direct voter approval but you would have to go through those legal proceedings that we talked about a hearing in every situation and depending on the type that you sell you may have to go through that that petition period as well whereas every

168time you want to issue the traditional building bonds you have to go to the voter voters directly you have to get that approval from your public before you can sell the bonds so going down a little bit further though we talk about uh DB referendum versus building Bond referendum we're going to take a look at sample ballot language for a d referendum in a minute but one of the things that will jump out at you pretty quickly is there is no mention of a project or list of projects in the ballot language you are merely asking for the ability to have a maximum annual Debt Service payment for non- referendum bonds whereas that traditional building Bond referendum question as I said it will at least generally spell out what the projects are that the district

169wants to complete with that voter approval um and in general the issuing or going to the voters with a d referendum does require more voter education as compared to a building Bond referendum not that a building Bond referendum process doesn't require voter education it certainly does it's also a lot of of of intense focus and work on behalf of the district to to bring such a question to the voters but a duub referendum is not as straightforward and I think if we look at the bout language that'll that'll sort of jump out as to why that's the case so we have two versions of a d referendum ballot language here so this is exactly how it would look at the top um where it's establishing The Debt Service extension base we've left blank what the

170dollar amount might be um we can talk more about that a little bit later but you're basically saying this is what we want that maximum annual payment to be but again there's no mention of a project there's no mention um at all of what the dollar amount would be for the bonds that you would sell now the difference between the two is in the bottom you can see there's some lighter green language added to the end of it so I mentioned that the D law went into effect about 30 years ago then back in 2009 another law was passed and en enabled school districts starting in that year going forward to increase its duub annually by the CPI or 5% whichever is less much like with the tax cap and and pel and increasing your

171operating Levy every single year as a district it's the same concept here so when you put a question on the ballot for a DB referendum you can do it either way you could list it just as I have at the top or you can put it at the bottom with that additional language that says to the voters we want the ability to also increase the duub language over time okay so shifting to some data we compiled some information for you that we thought might be of interest um these are Lake County High School Districts this is as of Levy year 2023 what their DBS are and we know what it is because the CPI is known through Levy year 2023 so the one that probably jumps out at you is adeli Stevenson 125 on the

172right hand side their DB is over $5.5 million they have funded I believe every single Capital project that they have completed over the last 20 to 30 years if not longer they have funded through DB uh through working cash Bond issues maybe some Life Safety but that's all been through non- referendum Bond issues because they've had a D since the Inception of that Law mundeline High School 120 has a d of just under four million uh Warren Township High School District 121 is just under 2 million um and you can see there's a few others that are hovering around 1 million but one thing that may also jump out at you is for the districts that are fully within Lake County your District uh High School District 117 and Lake Forest 115 do not have

173DBS so you are not alone but um there are a few in Lake County that do not and here's a map of the information so anything in blue means it's a high school district that has a DB and if it's shaded in yellow it does not and we thought this might be of interest as well so this is as of Levy year 2022 um for both referendum and non- referendum debt so if it's a blue bar that's a non- referendum Debt Service Levy the green portion would be a referendum Levy so looking at for example Warren High School District 12 one their Debt Service payment is about $6.6 million per year combining their non-ref and referendum Debt Service outstanding followed by Township High School District 113 Deerfield and Highland Park theirs in combination is almost

174$6 million again we talked about Stevenson a little bit earlier and you can see Lake Forest and mundeline 120s uh Lake Forest is all referendum yep so that I think one thing this slide illustrates is that we what we're talking about DB and we were the previous slide was showing you DB there's some districts that don't that the DB is one way you can get money the other one is like a traditional referendum so what you're seeing is there are districts that sometimes have a combination of both uh that would be like Warren for example would have a combination of both but but really the total the total debt service that they're paying every year and how they get there is interesting um like Township 113 when I saw the slide before I was like

175oh it's really small I I will say in terms of comps the two districts that are usually closest to us in comps are district 113 which is uh Deerfield Highland Park High Schools and Stevenson is a great comp for us um and so seeing how their their debt is structured and where how where that money comes from is interesting and similarly Lake Forest no DB but they passed a referendum and so they went the path of building Bond referendum uh and that's how that was passed so just different districts approaching it different ways and just showing again what she mentioned about Stevenson theirs has been solely the D7 just to clarify this says love a year 2022 and I know they recently passed a referendum is this an addition to the lake forest I'm just

176curious where that sure the four million is because I sure they um just sold bonds last week so The Debt Service levies for that bond issue are not publicly available yet however we do know that the intent was to try to keep their annual Debt Service payment pretty close to what it's best so it may have gone up a little bit effective with Levy year 23 but I don't anticipate that it would be a significant increase just to put this into a little context if I remember correctly last time we sold bonds was to build Vernon Hills High School we were probably I want to say it was in the six million-ish range for our bond and interest payments each year just to put it some context yeah actually the there's a in in the

177levy SE next agenda item we have the levy section I I shared the presentation of last time that has a slide that shows you what our what our debt service was uh for the last probably 10 years so it does show you those numbers I don't know what it is off the top of my head but yeah the data is there for you that's good all right so shifting topics a little bit but related we wanted to share with you upcoming election because again statute indicates that there are restrictions on how frequently you as a board of education could go out to referendum for the district so one kind of rule of thumb to keep in mind is that in even numbered years you have two opportunities and in odd-numbered years you have one opportunity

178to go to voters so the next opportunity coming up very quickly is March 19th of 2024 uh we're certainly not suggesting that that's a reasonable approach today but we wanted just to give you a sense that there is also a requirement for of the board in any election opportunity if you're going to go to referendum you have to adopt a resolution to do that and it's roughly 70 days or so before that election date so for example for the March 19th election next year the board would have to adopt a resolution as soon as January 2nd so it would be coming up pretty quickly then for the general election which we know it be a big one but no November 5th of next year the board would have to take action by August 19th after

179that April 1st of 2 which is a Consolidated or School Board election uh you would have to make a decision as a board via resolution by the middle of January of 2025 and there are certainly um different uh schools of thought as to should it go in a general election for example versus a a Schoolboard election and happy to have a qu or a conversation about that at any time um but in general I'd say school districts put questions on the ballot when they have the need and if they can clearly communicate the need to the public and and gauge that support and Garner that support then that's the best time to go but but it is also important to talk about the dates that are coming up what else is going on in your

180community are there other taxing bodies perhaps putting questions on the ballot at any point should definitely have that conversation but just wanted to make sure you saw some of the uh dates that are coming up over the next couple of years and then at a high level just wanted to show you if hypothetically you as a board said you know we think we should be positioned to go out as soon as a year from now and ask the voters for permission whether it's a a d referendum for example what might that look like and one of the things that is definitely important is the concept of community engagement because Boards of education and administration work so well and so hard at knowing what the needs are of the district but that doesn't always mean that

181the community understands that or has that same Discovery process that you might have so one of the things that we do talk a lot with our school district clients about is uh engaging in some sort of process with the community whether it's open houses or surveys there's lot of different ways you can achieve that to gain and and get that awareness within the public and ultimately so that the board feels like the community has an understanding of what we're trying to do here and we feel like we'd get some support at the ballot so the board is in a position uh to take that vote so we've just at a very high level laid out for you really for November 5th of next year you're at that point really now if it's something you wanted

182to do then that important Community engagement work really should be getting underway here fairly soon so that you'd have time as a board by the spring probably that may time frame to really finalize a project scope if you feel like you have an understanding of what the public might support and then work toward June or July finalizing ballot language what would that if you went for a d referendum for example what is the right dollar amount and get to a place where you could adopt a resolution ution to put it on the ballot and once you do that you formally adopt that resolution up till that point you as a board can have as many conversations as you'd like about why a referendum may be needed why it's important to pass it but once a

183resolution is adopted to put it on the ballot any conversations about advocacy for a referendum shift to a separate referendum Campaign Committee you as a district as board members as administrators at the table you can put out as much informational information as you want to but anything that's advocating for the referendum has to shift to a committee which again we can dive more into that topic another time but that's a pretty important date just to kind of keep in the back of your mind how that shift occurs can I pose one quick question this is for Dan as much as anything um assuming this type of timeline we get the voters to agree on November 5th when's the likely first project that these bonds would fund when does that occur 2025 or is it a

1842026 can't depends on the it depends on the year because if you notice there's also a year you have to put into there so let's say you did November let's say you did November 5th that of 2024 could you even realistically have something in a 2024 Levy yes but that that would be a super like the theoretically tightest timeline you could do which means the 20 24 Levy you started getting that money uh in the calendar year 2025 so that's the timeline you're talking about when you'd start getting the money so really I would say the summer of 2025 would be the likely soonest you could do that under but that would be a tight time frame it would it would be tight just in terms of the the vote and then the levy having

185to be adopted by last Tuesday in December thank you last Tuesday in December thank you class um so that that's that's really what the timeline we're talking about that would be really really tight but I I guess I what I don't know is from when the vote happens to when you can act does it have did it need to be canvased or something like that I'm not sure how that works typically it's about 30 days after the election that you can sell the sell the bonds but so for the example of no if you passed a referendum in November of 24 you actually have until the end of February of 25 to sell bonds and impact the 2024 Levy you get a couple extra months um so you could you could make that work okay

186that's good to know thank you and then does the D accumulate and then so for example if we were intending on using funds from DB to um complete a larger scope project um would we need to wait for funds to accumulate in order to do a larger project you want to answer that so let's say let's say you wanted to do a $10 million project and your D was2 million uh once you have the authority to have a d of 2 million that means based on that math roughly you would have to borrow for five or six years to get $10 million so you can borrow on future money that you're going to get so you would sell bonds potentially right away sir we're going to sell for 10 million for six years assuming interest

187and stuff we're gonna sell 10 million for six years and kind of know our payment our annual payment is going to be two million a year you'd get that money right away uh very similar to a mortgage like right I'm going to I want to buy this house now and the bank says okay we'll give you the money now and then you've got whatever 30 15E mortgage similar it's similar math sorry no that's okay here's a similar timeline for April of 2025 so if you're thinking maybe we give ourselves a little bit more time in the process overall to get to April of 25 you could begin the process in February of 24 which I also know is not that far away either but just to try to give you again high level view of

188what that time frame might look like and giving yourself particularly if you want to focus on the community engagement piece give your amp yourself ample time to do that because that can take several months nice good question newbie School Finance person here so if we were to establish a DB and let's say it's $4 million we want to do $12 million project so we need to pay it off within 3 to 5 years or whatever to keep it under so that $4 million duub cap is really going to be an addition to on an addition to the levy that we establish plus four million so each individual tax player is going to see a small percentage of whatever the tax levy is plus whatever it costs us to pay that D back annually yes that's

189a helpful clarification so I want to be very clear the options we are talking about is additional taxes yes from our community the only difference is if we establish a duub and we create these projects we no longer have to go to the indiv to the voters with every project but we're still getting additional money dependent upon whatever we're borrowing and it gives us the flexibility and kind of the ability the flexibility to decide what kind of capital and projects we want to make so long as our annual payments don't go past that duub to the maximum number of 20 years yes and and there's there's I want to get through all the slides because there's more context I think there's a lot of uh there's pros and cons of every every decision uh the

190reason why I think DB is probably the best path to go is because of several reasons that I think will be more apparent once we get through the rest of these slides particularly even um what Tammy said earlier was if you're going for a billing Bond referendum in general the most you can do is 20 years I'm personally trying to not look at a 20 a 20year fix I would like to have a forever fix um like I'm not sure who of us are going to be here not here but like at District 128 in 20 years from now um I I may or may not be I don't know how old I am anymore but um I'm trying to set something up for you will be there you go I'm set something up for

191longterm uh long-term addressing this issue um so that we don't we don't get into um a similar situation in the future so okay a little more data we thought might be of interest to you and certainly may want to look at this at your leisure but we provided a list for school districts in the cook and CER counties who have gone to referenda either for building bonds or a d referendum since November of 20120 so each district is listed the date of the referendum and the type of the referendum the amount and whether it passed or failed so this just might be of interest to you one thing that may jump out at you we've highlighted in yellow on this slide those are the two school districts that had d uh related referenda in the

192last few years so in the case of lindop school district 92 in Cook County that was to establish a d and that one passed uh Lamont High School District 210 in cook and DuPage counties had a DB but just wanted to increase it you can also go to the voters and ask to increase an existing duub and that one did not pass but this just might be of interest to you particularly since there are some in Lake County and get a sense of some of the referenda recently so as Dan mentioned you can see the Lake Forest High School District 115 uh one listed there for 105.7 million that passed mundeline High School District 120s uh last spring for 175 million did not pass sorry Jim about Fenton being listed but that is the data

193it's okay all right I I I Know Dan has shared this information with you before a list of projects for prioritization so I believe this is a pretty current list and it totals uh there on the on the right hand side you can see that just over 45 million um but just wanted to give that context because I think as Dan apley said the thought process is these aren't the only things that you're going to need to finance right these are the things that are more imminent but all school districts continue to have facilities needs over time they're just aging buildings like our home age and we have to continue to maintain them so the concept here is to give you a tool potentially that enables you to keep addressing those items into the Future

194Okay so before we look at just a quick Market bond market overview and a couple scenarios we did want to talk a little bit about the concept of the IRS and their spend down requirements so when you as a school district sell bonds for capital projects you will sell them on a federally tax exempt basis so that means thank you that's all right that that means that you get a benefit or a privilege from the IRS because investors who buy your bonds do not have to pay income taxes on a federal basis on their interest earnings on their investment in the school district so the federal government doesn't love that because they don't make money on that transaction if you sell taxable bonds then they would but you don't want to do that because taxable

195rates of course are higher than tax exempt Bond rates so with that privilege if you're going to sell tax exempt bonds for a project at the time you close on that bond issue you get your money it's wired to the district's account at that point the Board of Education the administration have to satisfy a couple re a couple reasonable expectation tests for the IRS and the first one says that within six months after you receive those dollars you have to have a reasonable expectation to spend or contractually obligate to spend at least 5% of the proceeds within six months that's usually a pretty easy target to hit because you can include things like Professional Services like architect fees that's very very common the other um Benchmark is that 85% one that's listed there so you

196have to have a reasonable expectation to spend at least 85% of the proceeds within three years so most school districts when they're selling tax exempt bonds they're very mindful we need to try to spend all of these proceeds within three years now again it's a reasonable expectation test because the IRS knows things can happen that are outside of your control Co is a an example of supply chain challenges and steel um delivery delays all sorts of things that were out of control out of the control of a school district so they understand that and and this is a point where you might say okay what happens then in that example what if I have uh 50% of the bond proceeds left to three years because we had all sorts of extenuating circumstances weather delays whatever

197it might be well at that point what you would have to do is invest the proceeds in a list of of restricted types of Investments and you'd be yield restricted on your invest investment so they'd have to be earmarked and put aside but you would be expected as a board to continue to spend proceeds as diligently as you can okay so that's just an important thing to keep at the back of our mind when we look at um at these scenarios here in a minute so as we have discussed various sources of funds for your capital projects we just wanted to list these here briefly uh fund balance I understand from a lot of of work that you've done and I know you've been a very strong District financially for a very very long time

198and been very diligent in the use of fund balance for other projects over the years but at this point there may be a comfort level for spending up to almost $16 million of fund balance towards project we would also consider referendum Bond proceeds as one of the examples but then non- referendum Bond proceeds upon a successful D referendum so we're going to look at a couple of those scenarios here in a minute before we do that I do want to talk with you a little bit about the bond market I know again it's not imminent that you would be in the bond market um anytime soon but just wanted to give you an idea of where things are right now so I know there's a lot happening on this graph but the gray shaded area

199is showing you what the FED has done with short-term interest rates and this goes back about 20 years so you can see the Peaks and valleys uh by the fed and along with that you'll see different colored lines there those represent points on the yield curve for What's called the municipal Market data index or the MMD for short it's kind of like the Dow Jones Industrial of the tax exempt bond market so PMA we watch this index every single day we're very interested in what the trends are we get updates throughout the day and as you can imagine there's different news that comes out that can impacted at 9:00 a.m. that it can change by 2 o'clock not unlike other markets that people watch and there's a story behind every Peak and Valley on this

200graph to in terms of the MMD and there's two highlighted on the right hand side of the page which you can see with coid and inflation so this is same data just a shorter term view because I know it's a lot easier to to to distinguish here what's been happening more recently so we look at the leth hand side just to give you some context that Spike right there March of 2020 you can guess what that was coid and for about three or four weeks things were extremely volatile in all the markets but it was no different for the tax exempt bond market but things recovered pretty quickly and pretty drastically because the fed put money out there right with Esser funds they were doing things to try to stimulate the economy and for the

201latter half of 2020 and virtually all of 2021 we had historically low rates in the tax exempt bond market then we got to January of 22 and we all know concerns at that point were really growing about inflation and the bond market was responding as the Fed was moving short-term interest rates as well a lot of people think that the only thing that influences the tax exemp bond market is what the FED does with short-term interest rates that is absolutely true on the shorter end of the yield curve a one-year Bond maybe even a five-year Bond when you get out longer 10 15 20 25 years there are lots of other variables at play so we're on the right hand side of the graph now and you can see in 2023 it's been somewhat volatile

202not extreme vola ility like we had in 2022 in general but we've had some ups and downs so why is that so the main reason is the tax exempt bond market is not convinced that the FED has things under control when it comes to inflation and I'm sure that's not a surprising statement to any of you because we all live it in different ways but the bond market is really waiting to hear you know what is the the FED going to do they've talked lately about well maybe we're going to pause on raising the rate again in 2023 maybe we'll do it one more time but more importantly what they're saying now is we may be more patient in terms of when we start to lower interest rates which is making the bond market a

203little bit more anxious there is no question that what is happening in the Middle East is also causing some anxiety in the market but for sure the main driver of some of that volatility that you see is the concerns about ongoing inflation and keep in mind I'll go back here I had this red line going across just looking at the 10year the average for the 10year MMD since 2003 was a little over two and a half% as of October 27th when we presented or prepared this graph it was about a 360 I was looking at rates earlier this afternoon and that current 10e is now down to about a 340 we have had some recovery in the last week or so which has been nice but we got really so spoiled in 20 and 21

204and and yes rates are higher and they are above the average but they are still from an historical perspective they are not so out of whack relative to history I do anticipate rates are going to stabilize and hopefully start to come down whether it's the latter half of 24 or early 25 remains to be seen and I don't have a crystal ball but it's it's important to just keep in mind where we've been and and just coming out of of an interesting situation from coid okay yeah yeah I think this slide is helpful also to show um if you look at the different colors those are like how long you're borrowing the money for the longer you borrow the money the higher the interest you pay the shorter you borrow the money this the less

205interest you pay because the investors are going to expect more because they're tying up their money for longer periods of time same on our end we usually other than now usually we invest in multi-year CDs we we had a five-year ladder going for a while because that was how we could get better yields because we tie up our money for longer periods of time we would get better yields that's how it normally works the short term is it's a little thrown off right now but in general that's how it usually works yeah we have a little bit of an inversion in the yield curve on the short end that is true okay so we do have a couple scenarios to show you just really more for comparison sake as as Dan mentioned so this scenario

206is looking at a $100 million building Bond referendum in November of 24 with a 20-year payback so we used current market rates as of a couple weeks ago and what we're trying to show you here so the that light blue column shaded in the sort of the middle of the page is showing you if you borrowed at current rates over 20 years your average annual Debt Service payment would be about $8.5 million totaling principal and interest for about $165 million over that period of time based on the district's equalized assess value its current eav so being conservative there as well because because presumably your eav is going to go up over the next couple of years but conservatively that would increase the tax rate you don't have a bond in interest tax rate now it

207would establish one it would be about a 26 Cent increase in the tax rate so again that would be added to the existing tax rate of the district and just to give you some context for a $400,000 market value home that would increase property taxes in the first year by about $325 so this is borrowing all 100 million at once let me caveat that you might not borrow it all in one bond issue you might do it over a couple of years just because 100 million is a lot of work and your construction team needs to be able to satisfy help you satisfy that IRS spend down reasonable expectation test I talked about so you may sell the bonds over a couple of years but in general you're going to do a significant amount of

208projects relatively soon okay and this is just a bar graph showing you what those annual Debt Service payments are at about 8.6 million per year so this is where we start to compare against a d referendum so ultimately trying to get to the same point to fund a $ hundred million of work but over a longer period of time because now you'd have this mechanism in place to be able to do that so in this this case you go to the voters and you ask for a DB and it would be about 5.7 million because that amount at current interest rates would enable you to borrow $25 million every five years so when you look at this in isolation this would be just the first issue so what you can see again the light blue

209shaded column about 5.7 million per year totaling at the bottom about 28.4 million in principal in interest over the five years and on the right hand side that tax rate increase instead of 26 Cents is about 17 cents so the impact on that $400,000 market value home is about2 $17 so it's a smaller impact and this is just again a bar graph the red line is showing you that's where your DB would be so when you have a DB again you have to live within that DB unless you have the type of D where it increases by the CPI annually in that example I mentioned earlier but in general you need to make sure your payments fall within the DB so this is extrapolating that DB now and saying okay $100 million of work we

210wouldn't necessarily do it as quickly as we would with a building Bond referendum question but we would get to all that work we would sell 25 million every five years so we'd have Bond issues 25 30 35 and 40 over time what you can see is that is that the red there it is okay this now is about 113 and a half million versus the 165 million so one of the benefits that I Know Dan likes not speaking for Dan but minimizing again that interest cost this is another thing to be mindful of and as I mentioned again that increase is still that roughly $217 on that $400,000 market value home so you're getting to the same place in terms of how much you borrow you're not getting the funds as quickly but time value

211of money not borrowing at all at once or as As soon your interest cost would be smaller over time okay and then here's just the graph of that same information so just the different colors represent each bond issue every five years fitting within that 5.7 million desp okay and here's a summary page which we thought might might be helpful so this is the building Bond scenario all 100 million we're saying here in this scenario all of it in 2025 and then the duub you can see the four issues every five years getting you to the same total amount of proceeds here's what that estimated average annual Debt Service payment would be in each scenarios we talked about here's the difference in The Debt Service it's about a $52 million difference in debt service the tax

212levy impact in terms of the rate is estimated here and then the impact on on a $400,000 market value home if you structured the bonds whether you passed a duub referendum or a building Bond referendum if you determined you wanted to wait to impact the 20 25 tax levy although you could go to 24 like we were talking about a few minutes ago but if you went with 25 that would impact tax bills payable in calendar year 2026 yep th this is the $100 million slide um when I'm thinking through uh ability to access funding to do the projects we want to do um I think you can see the difference between a d and a building Bond boring the money in shorter chunks allows you to have a much lower interest rate and is

213a massive savings for taxpayers in my opinion over the life of that um you're talk what was the number of difference you said you did the math real quick about 52 million the interest $50 million of savings in that I I think that that is that is the best path forward um to give you access to funding projects that so under those numbers that's about 25 million every five years you could do so you could do call think of a $25 million worth of projects every five years now you can do it every three year we had all kinds of scenarios going up three years five years 10 years whatever and I I I I truly felt five was a better balance uh because it to be honest it takes three years to do any

214project like from initial conception to execution it's done it takes three years to do so even a three-year timeline would be a little stressful I think I think five years is a nice balance in terms of of that process and you can see even like the impact on um the the $400,000 home of $218 versus 326 so it significantly uh lower for them and uh the DB in my mind um is as close to a forever fixes you can get I think the true forever fix is you set a DP at a at a at a real rate that increases with CPI that is the true in my opinion forever fix um there's a lot of there's a lot of considerations to go into all of these things but that's what I'm telling you is

215your ability to uh access funding that will give you the funding to do the types of projects that you've been wanting to do that we've we've seen and the projects that we have not yet seen um and so I think the numbers speak through themselves in terms of the different options what you're trying to look at thank you sure well said so um lots of information I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all tonight I'm happy to answer any other questions that you have but in terms of things you might want to think about as a board going forward uh again we know you have that list of of projects for prioritization but thinking about a community engagement firm and there are a few different firms out there that work with school districts

216in Illinois and help them set up that Community engagement plan that program might be something that may be very very helpful to the district and once you've gone through that process because again you may have a real strong sense of what exactly the dollar amount should look like for a d referendum or exactly the scope of projects that you want to contemplate may be but going through that process enables you to get that feedback and once you get that feedback then you can refine what that referendum type should be if it's a d referendum how much should it be for and which question are we going to go with which ballot date are we going to go with what does that timeline look like that will inform a lot of those important decisions that you

217as a board would need to make and I will not read the disclosure language to you oh darn um just a couple comments if my calculation is correct at $280 or whatever we're talking about somewhere between a two and 3% increase in the first year of that person's average tax bill but it it just that's it you know there won't be an additional one right so just to put that into a bit of context so a few percentage additional the other thing that I'm thinking about when we look at this versus traditional you know Bond go out to referendum build a building whatever it is a lot of districts will use this process where they they'll borrow a100 million do they'll build something and when that get gets ready to be paid off 20 years

218later they'll go out to referendum again and say we're not going to raise your taxes we're not going to lower your taxes but we're not going to raise your taxes and so they get another 100 million or whatever and it goes out 20 years the problem with that is not every time do you need a big big project you need these medium-sized projects that are too big for your operating budget to to fund but too large for really a a full-blown U Bond referendum type of building ref random type of type of process so I think that once you're you're sort of reasonably stable in terms of your student population the size of your District this makes in my mind far more sense than you know the the the other or any other alternative to

219the that's just my my comment so the individual payment to the te that I guess I'm not understanding so the $218 under the deab is a onetime payment it's not it's annual I mean it's in perpetuity but it's it's a onetime increase it doesn't increase another 2% in another 2% and then once you increase then you're there your new payment is here under under this scenario which is a fixed de it would go up 218 it might change based on the tax based on the the eav changed because right I mean so the reality is our taxpayers are going to see an increase based on their market rate you based on their market value increasing and we are going to be asking for an additional $218 every year no no the same 218 once you

220raise it it'll vary but it in theory under this scenario a fixed $5 million-ish TB it'll be around 218 for a market market value $400,000 home it'll vary mathematically it'll vary it might be up to 23 one year it might be down to 200 one year depending on the change in eavs but it'll always it'll always kind of be around 200ish from a selling point though we're not asking for a100 million we're asking for far less than that we have $47 Million worth of capital projects of which we've already allocated 14 million or more because we have two projects that we're looking at so that 47 million is much lower already so I I don't see us borrowing 100 million doll anytime soon the point of the 100 million was to just illustrate the two

221different options and how right and why I think the DB is a more coste effective right way to do that but you're right there's a lot of work to do to figure out what is the right number um the list that we have right now that was the list that we had when we asked last time right the next time we ask we'll probably have a different list right but that's the beauty of this is that we can continue to borrow as needed we don't have to ask 100 million to yeah right yes it is a great relief to me that there is a um reasonable option for doing those mediumsized projects that we require this beloved building that we're sitting in was built a long time ago and it needs new science labs and

222it deserves a steam lab like the one that we have at Vernon Hills High School and with our current balance and redoing this cafeteria I worry all the time about how we are going to take care of our aging infrastructure that that is a real obligation and things like science labs and steam Labs have a direct impact on student learning and I'm still thinking through everything that was presented tonight but but but it is a relief to know that we do have a mechanism that's not a major Bond referendum which we don't need that we could um engage with the community and get feedback and solicit and it's a recommendation that it appears Dan can get behind I believe you're right huge like if he says this is an okay thing to be doing that

223takes a lot of uh worry away well and what I'm hearing is it doesn't just take worry away it is really a permanent solution for making sure with the way public schools are funded we know that in perpetuity we have a mechanism to take care of our infrastructure and and I think that that's something really worth noting I think one of the uniqueness of the role of us at this table is to um not think small picture or short term um every area of our organization how far you get far they have their portion of this District that they need to focus on and we need them to do that as you grow in levels in our district we have a broader scope to do when you get here we're not even talking about just

224the whole District we need to think about the whole District over 50 years because the things we do now will affect this District 50 years from now um the decisions that were made 50 years ago are affecting us now and so um I truly believe if to access funding I think this is the best way to do it to give you that access at the best costeffective balance to the taxpayer um I the worst thing I would want is to pay $50 million in interest when there was another way you could have avoided it so hypothetically if we were to borrow and and I I thought the same thing as Don you know we're not talking about $100,000 so um but if we were to make an initial bond issue and pay that off in

225the five years and be in a position where we don't need to issue another series of five years then that money would come off the taxpayers tax bill right right as long as the bonds are paid so it's this is a this is kind of a trust relationship we're asking it is and and uh that that is something that you'd have to develop because there will be people that'll say you'll always find something to spend the money on um but and that that that Still Remains to be seen but I think this is the best path that gives you access to that funding without having to go ask for it for every single project so what Jim said like these kind of projects are they're too much for any operating budget to handle on themselves

226but they're not quite too big or they're not quite too they're a little too small to get a 20 year to borrow money over 20 years to pay for them to do it other comments questions what's our next step here well yeah oh sorry there we go uh well the the next steps are I guess what do you want to do um if you want to take the next step down this path it would be doing that consider an engagement firm and start talking about types and timeline and those are consecutive things not concurrent right your mic necessarily bring your mic down oh sorry and those are consecutive things or are they concurrent the both because during that Community engagement process you're going to get a lot of information to help inform the decision about

227referendum type what timeline you should go with so that's going to help you make those decisions but we will approach it sequentially like we need to do some of the community engagement first but you're going to be getting feedback along the way as to how that's going and and and what the best approach might be as it's happening go ahead and I will say that the community engagement piece is important to even determine if we this is the path we want to take so I think it's um you know not we shouldn't downplay that being able to get some feedback from our community to make sure and as was mentioned before this type of referendum is very different than what they're accustomed to hearing about so there's also some some back and forth too while

228we want to get information from the community we also want to start putting that information out that there are other ways to fund what we do and how we construct things so I think it's um you know like you say it's they're they're sort of about the same time but one the engagement definitely will inform the decision on referendum type planning timelines that kind of thing I may add if you think there is a chance you might want to go in November of 24 then you would probably want to move pretty quickly and talking to some Community engagement firms like I said that timeline is moving along quickly we are not voting right now but I'm uh I'm happy to say I'd rather move forward quickly I'm ready for a steam lab I'm ready for

229new science labs I think that's something that we can sell the community anyone have any objections to having the the administration start looking at options for an a firm to help us with a community engagement that type of thing I think that's where we start okay no objection okay all right thank you very much thank you it was a lot of information but nicely done I learned something thank you nice to see you all yeah same here thank you for hanging in there with us my pleasure okay moving on more Dan we have the 2023 tax levy uh yes um we have the 2023 tax levy there's I have the what is different from last time is I have the resolutions there for you now to see with real numbers in there um we had

230real numbers last time but now we have the resolutions for you this would be looking at for our meeting a week from today our board meeting that I looked to adopt the levy um it is due by the last Tuesday in December I always recommend doing it in November because it gives us an extra month because I have just in case we can't get a quorum for some reason it gives us extra time uh because there is no deadline past the last Tuesday in December to file this uh the numbers are exactly the same so as a big picture view uh what I'm recommending is that we are asking for a 5.99% increase I think I think we will be capped at actually 5.56 based on how the state law works with it um we

231have the levy hearing was noticed it's in it was in the paper in the right Tim Lane and that will be at right at the beginning of our meeting on Monday is the tax levy hearing and then adopting recommended for adoption at the same board meeting so same number same data is there I pasted the presentation from last time so you have that for reference as well um I don't have anything to add any questions comments no okay then let's move on uh Park Avenue properties yeah so I'm just going to introduce this and then I'll pass it on to Mr Kelly um it was requested that we uh look at um or it was it was asked about what was the history of the status of the Park Avenue properties that we had and

232so um to the fair point of some of the stuff has been has a few years on it now in terms of history and so it would be helpful to get the history so um Bryan and I talked he's going to walk you through some history one of the things I wanted to share that's in your packet is an aerial view so you can see those properties and what are the properties the district owns so the ones that are in the boxes that's properties that we own there's still uh if you'll notice a piece of property that we do not own right now so at this point right yeah so a little history the last that we actually oh uh it's in the pack it's in the pack I I was I'm not sure why

233I opened it but yeah I don't it's not shared so the last time we actually looked at this property combined with other properties that Libertyville was in July of 2014 um and and part of the reason was at that time we were still looking at the brainer campus so brainer building was still there um that's when discussions about the LHS pool started um parking discussions and you know looking at um the current tennis courts um and just kind of looking an overall view of possibly what could happen with the property out front um where really it's it's kind of open land right now um could that be utilized along with the pool um and the property cross street and the tennis courts and Brainard so when that was kind of done one of the initial

234thoughts of the property across the street um when we look at the property across the street at that time we um had the nursery property which was the old nursery for people that have been around town for a long time we own the property on the corner that's Open Fields there is a uh blue house that we somebody lives there um at that time we acquired the um another house right next to the blue house which was was a owned by the grams um and there's a couple other um there's actually two lots connected to that house that was torn down there's another empty lot and then we started approaching and looking at um discussions about buying any of those houses and then that's when we obtained the last two houses that we we purchased

235from strample which was a um purchase plus a lease back and then they Liv there for a while and then we um finally now own the property um I know Mark cman and his team they're looking at um you know the the property and tearing down the houses looking at the overall quality of the property but one of the things that we looked at is what can be done with that property um if you look at Libertyville High School's campus there are only six tennis courts on campus um they utilize tennis courts um down Libertyville courts and um some of their um players are busted down um to other tennis courts um in Libertyville and there are not many C there are not many tennis courts in Libertyville so one option was could you use

236the property across street for tennis courts you also um you know don't have as many fields in Libertyville in that Athletics uh teams are going to Canterbury they're going to um uh District 70 property which is down on diamond that open property is actually owned by District 70 we utilize that we utilized Butterfield property uh for practices um and then we used Adler for cross country um dowen was used for baseball but with the changes in dowen baseball is going to be pushed up a little bit more to Butler um because there was only one baseball on campus that was one of the reasons why brainer actually turned into a turfield was the ability to be able to use that a lot more than having grass um but but looking at the property across the

237street um the way it is laid out it's actually uh deeper almost um at the corner of diamond and 176 back to the path so there's a bike path back there um and then it's it it kind of it's kind of an odd shape it's not exactly Square because 176 doesn't run straight um with the pieces of property but one of the thoughts was to put tennis courts on the corner and then have you know um open field practice fields um basically the rest of the way all the way to 911 obviously still the problem with it right now is that in order to expand your tennis courts um across the street you need that other house that's sitting there so um that's when nothing's really been done across the way is it would the

238the thought of the board at the time was to be able to get all that property and then be able to put in tennis courts possibly plus field there was talk about parking but when the pool got built um we were able to actually expand the parking along the west side of the property um there's a little parking lot there there's Pool Park uh parking right by the pool and then parking all along the fence line and that was not really in the original um scope but we were able to get that extra little parking lot in there so what tenis courts yeah so the tennis courts would be you know really the diamond and um uh 176 that you could put possibly 10 to 12 tennis courts in there Vernon Hells has 10 courts

239um 12 is the magic number really I don't know what the history of why there is only 10 but 12 in Illinois um it allows you for doubles and singles um and put some um little parking over there for people for tennis they could still be utilized you know for if you um Wanted for physical welfare classes that they could cross the street um there is a Crossing um light there um so you could cross and use those for tennis courts take the other tennis courts and put them in a parking if the village allows I you know you don't know all the history of it because Can it can that be done it is impervious service already but could you put in more parking on campus there or you leave those tennis courts um

240and then you have more across the street so so those two properties do they it looks like they're not contiguous they're not connected so the one in the middle is that there is a blue house there in between the two red squares yes and we've made overtures to to them to try and buy that property many times it's the last time was probably maybe five years ago maybe or okay Rick midlan so Rick yeah yeah so there is a if you look there there is a house right in the middle of that so and do we know what the current value of those properties are because they they're assets that the ownes yeah I mean there's an assessed value but it's not tax they're taxfree we don't pay tax on them so right now they're

241well the the properties to the West are essentially vacant land and so that would there's an assessed value that's assigned by the I'm talking about a fair market value uh well I me if we were gonna consider it an asset that we would sell uh you would get it appraised at that point would if you would so the assessor does assign a value an assessed value which then you just multiply by three and you have the fair market value but I'm not sure that that would be a precise number in terms of what the um what the P what the potential fair market value would be when you actually went to sell it and I'm not suggesting that we should sell it um I'm just wondering if if we did what what the value of

242the property so we've I'm sorry I interrupted you I mean we've been waiting for several years for our middle lot and it seems like we can't do anything this is not usable property if we don't have a contiguous usage right so well I think the the original thinking in the Acquisitions was LHS is landlocked it's a long game it it exactly it is a long game um I don't I don't think we had any illusions that the blue house in the middle um would become ours in the near future it was made very clear by the owners that they had no intent of selling and although um the attorney that Dan referred to who retired made several o overtures in asked if they did change their mind to reach out to us um there's no

243guarantee that that would happen is that a fair correct yeah and and so obviously we've been you know District 128 and lville has been using the property on the corner quite a bit um and so if we're able to you know look at 911 through to the blue house you know it to turn That Into You Know practice fields and usable field Fields um because the end game would be is Fields over there plus maybe tennis courts where the current field is so then you know that's what I would you know start with at least and that's kind of what we did with the corner and then you know you you're you you probably are taking another team of during the springtime not traveling maybe to Canterbury or not traveling to Diamond or not traveling

244to you know Butterfield and keeping the you know the students closer right when we had last done an appraisal when we were looking at 911 and 915 um I believe like with the the value of the lot was probably a few hundred thousand for each lot so if like you Lo down look down the line like look closer at each each kind of lot there you're probably talking about a fair market value maybe a couple million would be my my guess and again my question is not because I think we should sell these properties it's that because it's a long game the longer we hold on to them the more valuable they become in the event that we decide it doesn't serve student needs but right now it looks like there is a legitimate I

245mean if it's tennis courts it's a curricular and an extracurricular need that it serves right but I think I'm hearing that we're not going to pursue tennis courts so as long as we don't have the entire land right when the when the at the time Str Str you know kind of looked at the lot and the size you would need that extra house to be able to you know if you're going to do it right do right you know like you said it's a long game um if you're going to do it right you would want that but in the inter term you know you could take the property from 911 up to the house and um you know once we get those other houses down we can clear the land and now you actually

246have almost as much space as the other one and usable for your students and I'm use that land Ian soccer possibly LaCrosse or something you know you could look at strip of field because we have teams right now going off campus yes be able to practice and that kind of thing so there is a need thank you any other questions comments thanks for the update um back to my agenda here um uh so that was the uh items for discussion any future agenda items anyone wishes to propose we have a list of uh things that'll be coming up okay hearing none like call the facilities and finance adjourned y thank you everyone and congratulations mides thank you welcome nice to have you