001here cara benjamin don carmichael here cara drumkey here lisa hessel sanato harney here casey rooney here okay great i note that we note that everybody is present a quick review of the agenda we'll start off as always with public comment um and then the president's report will include uh student recognition an educational presentation on our board policy 712 racial equity diversity and inclusion we'll hear our student school board rep reports we'll have a superintendent's report uh the consent put agenda which includes items that were discussed um in committee um those normally uh include things like uh where is it the things that are routinely approved each month minutes destruction of closed audio recordings educational tour requests employment matters disposal of obsolete capital equipment bills payable supplemental bills list and financial reports after the consent vote
002agenda we will move to our program and personnel committee followed by a report from our facilities and finance committee we'll have an update on the illinois association of school boards and cedaw we'll discuss future agenda items we will retire to executive session to discuss collective negotiating matters 5 lcs 120 2c2 as well as an employment of an employee and when we return to open session we may or may not be voting um after that i'll ask for a motion to adjourn so let's start off with an invitation for public comment do we have anybody that wishes to address the board lisa hassell president going once okay seeing none do we have any email public comments we do not okay um so for the presidents before we are going to start off with one of our
003favorite things which is student recognition thank you my name is john gilliam the principal of vernon hills high school and with tom clinton as principal of libertyville we are honored tonight to recognize students who have been selected as ihsa all-state academic which is quite a significant honor each year there are 26 students across the entire state some 800 schools something crazy when you consider the number of high schools 26 students 13 males 13 females in vernon hills alone i think i think we've had 11 over the course of our 20 plus years and so this is a significant recognition and we are really proud of three student athletes today these athletes have to maintain a 3.5 gpa which for on a four-point scale so that does not include honors in ap waiting uh which i
004think for all three of them is probably no problem uh plus they have had significant contribution and at least at least two ihsa sanctioned sports uh but again probably most of these have more than that so uh we are just honored to be able to recognize these three i get to introduce the one from vernon hills and i want to bring up devon mulchrone come on devin give him a hand audience clapping of course these are all seniors uh also all recognized in a pretty cool ceremony a couple weeks ago down in uh bloomington um but devon was let's see cross country swimming and tennis right and uh all three are all four years in each of those three sports uh and we're just proud of you devon and excited for uh your future in
005duke at duke and then beyond right congratulations [Applause] audience clapping tom cool and test principal you might see a pattern forming here because one of our lhs students is also duke bound we will bring up somebody very near and dear to the board our board rep and all-state academic um awardee is ryan mcgrory come on down right audience clapping ryan you may have set the record for not only doing 12 but 13 13 sports 13 varsity letters because you during the pandemic did four sports instead of just three seasons right so loves being busy and involved and so um not only your main sport is dance obviously but uh dabble in track pole vaulting a little bit of lacrosse on the side um a couple other things that i might be forgetting correct excellent you
006know just a few other things and then uh we are also excited to celebrate andrew brooks there's andrew audience clapping tom coolantes principal cross country swim and track i knew i knew cross country and track i wasn't sure if there was a winter sport in there so you're 12 varsity letters or 12 sport yeah 12 season athletes awesome awesome um and as john said this is something you know we celebrate a lot in district 128 um this is one of those things that is just truly remarkable most school districts don't have any students selected this is in my short time in district 128 this is the second time in um four or five years we've had multiple athletes from both schools selected in the same years uh it's just a testament to the quality of
007our young people and the commitments they make not only to academics but to their athletic endeavors as well and we're just delighted to see them recognized at the state level so we've got certificates [Applause] photographs being taken all right lhs come on thank you photographs being taken one more audience clapping twelve season athletes i love that i would be remiss if i didn't also acknowledge the commitment of um andrew and ryan and devin's parents who without their dedication and commitment to their uh students activities uh probably would have been much more difficult um not impossible knowing these kids but i'm much more difficult so i definitely want to recognize the parent [Music] audience clapping and uh so at this time i'd like to ask to have our educational presentation uh board policy 712 racial equity
008diversity and inclusion technical difficulties tom cool and test principal a good evening thank you mayan you're on i'm on all right uh good evening thank you for uh inviting us to share this presentation with you i stand as just one member of our district equity leadership team and tonight you'll hear from representatives of that committee tonight john gilliam is going to speak and our school equity coordinators are here amy christian terry young from vernon hills and of course anne singleton from libertyville high school um we are going to share with you as a as a board um just a summary of the work that our district equity leadership team has been conducting this year and we'll just briefly summarize some of the work that we've done and some of the implications that we believe it
009has for district 128 as we move forward in this important work i don't have a clicker so i don't know if i need to just give you the the nod bow all right as you know district 128 has our daring mission and fundamental to that daring mission is equity and inclusion that is embedded deeply within our mission and within the vision of who we believe we are as a district specifically if we look at some of the daring attributes aware we reflect frequently to discover who we are and who we may become inquisitive we are curious about the world's complicated past present and future we ponder problems question convention proposed solutions and of course global seeing diversity as an asset and a benefit and thinking about the ways we ca uh collaborate and communicate to
010participate in an increasingly interdependent world when we look at our daring mission found at the foundation of that is this belief that we in district 128 are about equity and inclusion because we are about all students in all classrooms experiencing and reaching their full potential in our spaces we're about equity of access that every child in our system deserves access to all facets of the school we're about equity of outcomes we want excellence for all of our students and of course systemic accountability and that's really where our work becomes special this is not just talk in district 128 um we believe so much in the importance of this mission and in the importance of equity and inclusion that we went a step further as you know we have embedded this work in district policy last
011year we um [Music] you as a board created the racial equity and inclusion policy sorry bo if we could move forward policy 712 and what's important about this policy is it not only um codifies our district's commitment to our work it also um says how we're going to walk this talk and it gives us very specific actions that we as a professional team take to ensure that equity and inclusion goals are met that we're measuring progress towards those goals and that we are reporting out on our progress to you as a board and to our community um so the d-e-l-t is a very large group of staff members of um both from vernon hills from libertyville and the district office representing different employee classifications and to talk a little bit more about the work we
012did is john gilliam john gilliam principal thanks tom so this group uh back in august dr herman challenged the entire staff to get involved in some of these daring initiatives that we were participating in this is the list of 50 plus staff members who took advantage of the call and signed up to work on the district equity policy we began meeting in the fall and uh began work on um on on the tasks that were laid in front of us um we began to review and understand the the equity policy what it asks for and understand the 11 commitments as they related to school work uh district work and community work we then prioritized those um 11 through some voting and discussion and settled on four commitments that we were to focus on this year
013bo so here are the the four uh in general they have to do with c1 commitment one is in uh affirming environments c2 has to do with hiring recruiting and retaining c3 commitment 3 deals with student success and c6 deals with curriculum remember all 11 commitments are important but these were the four that the team centered on this year and we'll be reporting here tonight as we did two weeks ago in our committee meeting uh once the four teams were selected we began work in a process that each team worked in kind of in sync together the first step of the process was to collect and analyze data the second step was to look at research and current best practice the third step was to consider what actions we can we currently were doing and
014what we might do in the future as we refine our work and finally the reporting component of that which is uh why we are here in front of you tonight uh so tonight we are going to just briefly talk through the four commitments again two weeks ago for those in the audience we spent a good amount of time interacting with the board looking diving pretty deep into the data diving pretty deep into the research and its implications tonight we're going to focus on a shortened summary of just the implications as it relates to the work that we plan to do in the upcoming years so hi there i'm amy christian i'm one of the equity coordinators and english teachers at vernon hills high school and i had the pleasure um of working on the c1
015commitment group alongside tom and an amazing team of teachers and counselors and folks and all sorts of roles all over the building so we focused on c1 ensuring that da128 schools are identity affirming environments and that is for students for their families and for their communities so that they all feel safe and welcome and valued and so based on a lot of research and pulling together a lot of the data that we have currently we saw there were two main strands for our implications and actions going forward the first strand is as it relates to our parent and community engagement and then the second as it relates to student belonging so the data and research suggests that as a district we need to create spaces for culturally and linguistically diverse parents and community members to
016collaborate to connect with one another to bridge between the feeder schools and the high schools and then to foster the opportunity to partner with schools it's all about making connections and making sure that every single family feels connected to our district um all around all along the way um from you know coming in when they're freshmen to leaving when they're seniors and getting amazing awards all along um so he wanted to improve our practices and understanding around culturally responsive communication with families we realized that's a place that we can do a lot more learning in order to improve our practices which would include bi-directional and face-to-face communication instead of you know always using emails and phone calls a multimodal communication that will accommodate for all of our families needs inclusive meeting times inclusive meeting spaces
017so that we're not always expecting for all parents to be able to come i mean all community members to be able to come at the same old times and places information presented in language that families understand so their home languages and that they relate to so not always speaking with educational jargon that perhaps families are not familiar with so that that way they can all feel like they are part of the conversation that also includes making all directions and all decisions that impact parents and families in concert with parents and families and telling them instead of telling them here's what we've decided bringing them in to be along the way with that process that's enabling all families to be empowered and informed advocates for their children and if you look through the report you see
018some suggestions for ways for us to be doing more and more of that when it comes to student belonging there's a lot of data in our school buildings and there's a lot of research out there that pushed us towards these three big key points we need to be providing both formal and informal opportunities for student affinity gatherings as well as alliance opportunities so affinity gatherings or gatherings where students who have a common identity come together alliance gatherings are places where students across identities come together and both of those are really really important we need formal staff directed programming for our students and also informal student-driven affinity groups and spaces so that students can take ownership of that as well we also need to foster more opportunities for dialogue across identities in order to help all
019students feel that safety that value that belonging we need to prioritize our staff connections with every single student in the building and this can be driven by a teacher coach mentor model with a formal structure so that we don't just assume that every single student has somebody in the building that they are connected with but we can ensure that that is in place we also need to ensure that every student receives mentorship so and our last strand is creating identity affirming classroom environments so it these are the sorts of things that need to happen both outside the classroom and within the classroom so removing barriers to student learning and promoting academic mindset is one of those ways to foster identity affirming classroom environments and and create a sense of belonging and that also needs to
020be informed by professional learning and culturally responsive education so in both of these strands we know that it's going to take more learning on the behalf of staff to learn to be more culturally responsive in our communication with families and in providing classroom environments for our students that are welcoming and safe and full of belonging for every single student who walks in our doors thank you yeah and what is important for you as a board to understand for all of our groups is when we talk about the um uh data that we used you provide us tools um to do that data work so the five essential survey that we invite all of our staff and students and parents to take is an important piece of data in this work but then our illinois youth
021survey that we administer and our panorama equity and inclusion survey as well as some of the sel surveys that we administered through panorama are very important because it helps us get a sense of our students and or parents and staff thinking about some of these environments specifically when we think about am i as a as a human being affirmed am i seen am i valued in this environment those surveys become very important tools for us to get a good sense of not only individual students but are large groups of students as well john gilliam principal okay commitment to uh focused on recruiting hiring and retaining ultimately retaining an increased number of staff of color data suggested in our country schools are increasingly more diverse in student population fifty percent of schools or fifty percent of
022students across the nation uh are students of color uh and meanwhile only eighteen of teachers are teachers of color and that gap is continuing to grow uh the the uh staffing trends at d128 are encouraging uh over the last four years we've seen an increase of staff of color from 6.3 percent to 9.2 percent and so those trends are encouraging but we are committed to furthering that work and increasing that percentage so that it mirrors our own student demographics and those of the global community we want to do that in really some intentional ways so first in recruiting and hiring we will increase our presence at job fairs and posting sites as covid releases its grip we will recommit to finding local and statewide statewide job fairs that get us access to a diverse and
023excellent candidate pool just as importantly teachers of color are drawn to schools where they see themselves it will be important for us to send administrators of color to these job fairs so that we can address and attract a diverse candidate pool we want to address the pipeline at a local level as well this is a little bit more difficult for us as a high school but we're going to do what we can we'll move uh we'll start by moving uh to create and build a future teacher of america club at both schools we always attract our own d128 graduates as teachers in the district we have several staff members who have been graduates of our high schools so if we can encourage our students and especially those of color to pursue teaching jobs then we
024have a good chance of luring them back upon graduation we have already taken steps to change the interview protocol to better track applicants and hires we realize that frontline keeps some good data for us but as we look at the metrics that we committed to reporting to the board we realize that it does have some limitations so in order to present you with all the metrics that we've committed to we've asked our uh hiring teams our building in school district administrations to uh to begin reporting data as they move along the recruiting and interview and hiring process we also commit to it to hiring administrators of color as you know we are committed to hiring high quality teachers and administrators and we've been fortunate enough in these last months to hire wonderfully talented individuals who
025also happen to be administrators of color so our work in that area has begun when we talk about retaining i just want to address a few things one of the things that research has indicated that we introduce and implement a feedback loop for staff of color we have already implemented this at the district level this year dr herman met with a representative group of all of our staff of color just last week tom and i met with a focus group of staff of color individuals as we met with them to talk about their experiences in our high school district and ways that we have succeeded in ways that we can improve we also aim to strengthen our staff of color affinity group we have heard from them and as we look at research it's really
026important for all staff but a staff especially staff that feel like they are in a a minority group in terms of percentage of representation to have a group where they belong and so we have been really intentional working with our equity coordinators to create a staff of color affinity group in which they can meet together and we support and affirm that work and then our lastly we want to strengthen our mentoring program we have done really good work over the years mentoring creating a mentoring relationship for our certified staff our teachers we've not done as good with some of our support and administrative staff so our goal moving forward is to kind of strengthen that mentoring program and be more intentional about meeting the needs of really all of our staff but especially staff of
027color so that is our commitment number two and i'm going to turn it to tara to talk about commitment three good evening i'm terry young english teacher and equity coordinator at vernon hills high school so commitment three says that uh it focuses on honoring and building upon the strengths and assets of every student promoting academic social emotional growth and providing multiple pathways to success this includes monitoring and assessing the impact of educational programs on the achievement of all students and so i co-facilitated the subgroup with shannon garcia amidst a lot of wonderful people from both buildings the district and we really focused on the academic growth of our students because this commitment is so large and there are so many factors and indicators that go into monitoring this we focus first and foremost on the
028academic growth of our students and one thing that the data revealed is that our students of color are largely overrepresented and are striving striving learner courses and underrepresented in our honors and ap courses and so that's something that we really focused on is how do we make sure that all students have access to those higher level rigorous coursework that will prepare them for whatever they want to do after they graduate from our schools and so after looking at the data and doing a lot of research and considering the robust discussion that we had a couple of weeks ago surrounding this commitment and thinking about how can we make sure that we're clearly communicating what our goal is for this commitment in order to ensure access for all students we have revised this our recommendations in
029order to more clearly communicate what our goals are moving forward so the first suggestion that we would like to make is continued exploration of strategies that increase inclusion for all students this is going to involve a lot of conversations around teacher mindset thinking about growth mindset and engagement and making sure that all teachers and staff feel equipped and prepared to meet the needs of all of their students which will involve professional learning surrounding differentiation within the classroom making sure that they can meet the needs of all the students that they are teaching it also will involve parent education and engagement for surrounding whatever changes potentially are made and then also could involve just some conversations around class sizing if class sizes change in order to increase inclusion and access to any higher level classes we
030also talked last time about the pilot alternative that we're going to pile on alternative pause structure at vernon hills this is really exciting because it's going to allow us to intensify math and literacy and executive functioning skills with targeted one-to-one and small group intervention so right now what's currently happening is we have some classes that are dedicated to those interventions and instead of having classes dedicated we're going to have small group interventions that are hopefully going to be really meaningful for our students and surprise and provide them with the support that they need this will also increase student ability to select elective courses one thing we heard when we were looking at our perception data is it's really important for our students to have access to a wide variety of courses especially courses that allow
031them to pursue their passions and interests so by doing this type of pause structure where we have our literacy and numeracy teachers pushing in to pause classes instead of having those classes set aside as additions to their schedule it's going to allow our students to pursue their passions and interests which is really exciting and then the other thing that we are suggesting is to research the effectiveness of an advisory program this would allow a mentor opportunity that could ensure that every single student in the building has access to a mentor a teacher mentor within our buildings it will also allow for the more more intentional sel curriculum which coming off in this post pandemic or current pandemic world that we're living in is really important that we have an intentional sel curriculum it again will
032allow students to identify and explore passions and potential post-secondary plans and will be just another place where we can have more targeted interventions which will as i stated earlier allow students to have access to higher level courses while making sure that they get the support that they need so now i'd like to turn it over to anne singleton hi i'm ann singleton i'm the equity coordinator at libertyville and i'm also an english teacher there um so i'm here to talk about commitment six and this one i uh co-facilitated with tiffany scott who's a counselor at lhs and so our commitment focused on curriculum and it's ensuring all students have access to a diverse multicultural inclusive curriculum that avoids stereotypes and includes perspectives of multiple identities in order to build their awareness as they see themselves
033in the curriculum and help all students as they seek to understand the varied experiences and realities of others so uh for this particular uh commitment we had two data points that we needed to be looking at and one of them the curriculum audit we didn't have uh this year so i'll talk a little bit more about the plans for that because that required some research into figuring out how to do that and where to go with that but the other thing we looked at was um the survey in november um the equity and inclusion survey and looking at that we found that not all of our students are seeing themselves in the curriculum so we began to research how do we incorporate more student voice into the curriculum how do we give our students an
034opportunity to share what it is that they want to learn and what they want to experience and from that research we found several recommendations that we'd like to share with all of you and propose tonight so um taking a look at that the first one is to continue professional learning opportunities for teachers on multicultural and culturally responsive education project-based learning using surveys in class to increase student voice and using student choice for content instruction and assessment and we know many of our teachers are already going through those professional learning opportunities have started applying that have been applying that um so we just are excited about that and we really like to encourage like just a little bit more systemic and and continued growth in those areas another recommendation we have is to use student advisory
035groups um so we have something like this at lhs it's the principal advisory board once a month a group of students meet at a different period each month so they never miss more than one class period to attend and it's an opportunity for students to share their experiences with dr k and with other building leaders in that meeting and we have a subgroup and they're actually focused just on curriculum and they meet with mr alban our assistant principal for curriculum and instruction so we recommend not only continuing the principal advisory board at lhs but considering expanding into some other student advisor groups potentially adding a principal advisory board at vernon hills as well and thinking about how we can have advisory boards that relate to classes extracurricular activities athletics and other aspects of school since
036curriculum is certainly beyond the classroom and then another one that we saw in our research that we thought wow this is really great because we already do it it's having students school board representatives so i'm so excited to see our students here tonight um you know you are the reason we're here right so um thank you for serving in those roles and thank you board for having that that's something we've done for a long time and it's a great way to incorporate student voice so i'd like to talk a little bit more about that curriculum audit the curriculum audit led us to an equity action plan thank you um and uh so rita is going to talk a little bit about this because she was the one who took the lead on the research for
037this she was on our team thank goodness um because she's got great uh resources so rita if you could talk about dr dubiella a little bit sure thank you anne um in our racial equity and diversity and inclusion policy we had included the commitment that we would undergo a curriculum audit and as we began to research the notion of a curriculum audit and i reached out to colleagues in several firms that engaged in that work we discovered that really our actions because of the work that our equity coordinators have engaged in over a number of years were kind of beyond the point where a curriculum audit would meet our needs um and so by um reaching out to dr yvette dubiel first from systemic equity systemic educational equity llc she's the founder and ceo we
038shared kind of where we were in our process and she recommended that we engage in an equity action plan which would live alongside the strategic planning that we're involved in this year so we could take the work that we've done this year assess where we are currently and move forward with an equity action plan that would include an audit of our curriculum and other uh strands and so she comes highly recommended from districts in the chicago area directors of curriculum and assessment when you put out a survey to them and talk to them hers is the first name that comes up and she's worked successfully with many local districts in our area kind of live alongside the work that we've done and to engage in a study of our curriculum to ensure that we have
039the that we reflect student experiences and voices as well as provide windows to the outside world to our students so that we all grow from understanding a culturally diverse curriculum instruction and assessment so that's how we found dr debeel and uh we are excited to work with her and she'll begin working with the team um in a series of meetings coming up next yeah and all the meetings we've scheduled them for first semester of next year we'll have eight different meetings with her and then that way we can start actions second semester so that's that was our reasoning for that because it could have been a year-long process but we really felt like let's do this first semester so that we can start working on things second semester um so we have the eight day
040different dates selected and slated for the work and uh we look forward to sharing with you next year about that um i'll go ahead and just talk a little bit about some next steps okay so at this time our next steps uh include the board of education and district administration review this report and consider implementation of the recommended actions um the district leadership team will continue monitoring and reporting on the remaining policy commitments because as john said at the beginning there are more than four on there so more information reporting is coming we are so excited to have mr larry varn join district 128 this summer as the direct new director of equity we had a chance to meet with them and he's it's just i'm i'm really looking forward to working with him um
041and uh we're also uh we've got that formal equity audit beginning in the fall with dr dubiel so that's where we're heading forward thank you dr denise hermann superintendent i just want to thank the district equity leadership team and the people who presented i know john and tom are getting up to say closing remarks but again it was it's been a wonderful presentation so anything you want to add i would just add in closing um that this work is a true reflection of the entire district and our commitment and i'm very proud to be a part of a team of so many uh educators who come together frequently to really dig into this work and make this commitment to our families john gilliam principal i concur and we're uh we're open for questions if you
042have any comments thoughts i know again we we spent quite a bit of time two weeks ago in committee work so uh if there's any other thoughts or questions from tonight or from last week we'd be happy to address them um i i just wanted to say i i noticed that um there's definitely a reflection of the conversation that we had at our committee meeting two weeks ago and i am really impressed with the amount of work that has gone into not only um this presentation but it's truly a reflection of how committed all of the people involved in this presentation were to really partnering with the district and um i think it's a reflection of the partnership that we have um you know the board passed the equity policy last year and a lot
043of that work um and a lot of the people around this table were all part of that policy um and getting that off the ground and getting it uh to be part of our board policy um the work that's represented here today is really truly a reflection of the partnership between the board and the people who are doing work um so i think the board for their commitment um for the really uh thoughtful and um intelligent questions that were asked two weeks ago and you know i think what we see tonight here is a reflection of how our professional staff was so committed to hearing those questions and those comments that were thoughtfully presented and incorporating some updates to the work so i just want to acknowledge that and say how grateful i am and
044really proud i am of the collaboration that um is represented in this presentation so thank you did you wanna um i think you said everything i was gonna say so nope you made it easier for me and the only other point i will add is i do think of myself as a person of color so i mean thank you thank you for doing all of this for all of our students and families um i just quickly want to thank the team for all the work that they did thank you for presenting to us two weeks ago and allowing us to um mull things over and you were receptive and open to feedback and we so appreciate that it's it's really uh you know rewarding to see that that feedback was taken and things were you
045know clarified and revised a bit to kind of i think find not not middle ground but just to find somewhere where we're all comfortable moving forward with this um and i'm really really looking forward to what this all ends up looking like in the future so thank you again for your diligent work as much as we all appreciate the work that's gone in so far i'm actually looking forward to the work to come because this is a never-ending project i don't even want to call it a project it's a never-ending um way of changing the way we do things and i'm especially excited the equity audit coming up will as much data as you've collected and analyzed and gone through um there will be some new eye-opening experiences um in that equity audit i i
046know dr duvio will will do a great job leading you through that process i personally have worked with her on another equity audit and she does a great job so i'm really anxious to see um what that does and how that brings us to the next level and really enhances what the work that we do oh yeah i'm going to weigh in i had the opportunity to go to a go nobody goes anymore they just look at their screen uh i was at a isb webinar on equity uh just a week ago and was surprised to learn i don't know why i didn't know this but i didn't know that equity is going to be on the report card starting in october and hearing the steps that we're going through yes so the state releases
047a report card about every district in the state it's online easily accessible it tells you everything about the district it tells you what our like a snapshot of our schools the demographics what our funding levels are what the curriculum is uh and how our our students are doing based on uh state testing and national testing so it's the way that the state holds all of those districts accountable it is the accountability center uh yes so it tells us it tells uh the community what's happening in the school um and i did not know that they were going to be including equity on the report card starting in october and hearing them talk about the equity journey being a continuum and seeing the work that has already happened here both in the board passing the policy
048and then uh going on to the work that you have done to put in the metrics and push us forward uh i i feel very comfortable about that first report card um because we already started um and i i just i i feel like we are in capable hands uh and that you are pushing us the right direction um i i don't know how other school districts are going to feel about it because i don't know if every like i didn't know about it did you know that we're going to be on that report card and okay so i'm the only one um but that's okay that's not uncommon um so i i'm just uh i'm delighted to see that uh that you're aware and that you've pushed us along and uh after going to
049that session thinking to myself oh man a lot of places are going to be in trouble they're they are behind and i feel comfortable that we're at least going the right direction so thank you very much cara benjamin seadaw i don't want to take any more time other than to say i know i was one that was asking a lot of questions i appreciate you educating me on the current status of where we are i have a much better picture and i'm all in for what your plan is for where we're going i think we just needed to understand we're getting caught up on terms and thank you for kind of hearing us and um we look forward to seeing i i love the idea of everybody rise up so that's kind of how you
050got me on board i think my peers said it best and i will just close it out by once again thanking you guys for all the hard work and can't wait to see what comes next we appreciate it great thank you we're uh happy to present tonight and just so you know we we look at what happened two weeks ago as what this partnership is supposed to look like right it's not just us presenting to you and you absorbing the information it's a give and a take it's a dialogue that's what we saw it as and so we are we're grateful to you for for um being in tune and also willing to to engage and discuss and ask the right questions at the right time so we're grateful for that so thanks for your
051partnership [Music] not that i need the last word john but um be so remiss because uh while there's a lot of the adults speaking tonight i think you as a board know and our students can affirm and attest to this this work is also being driven by our students um in every way whenever we ask for feedback they tell us this is a priority they tell us this is important to them and their future and they give us a lot of input on um the way they feel the way they hope our schools would uh be designed um and the the hunger that they have to learn and grow um as a community with their fellow classmates so perhaps uh during board report tonight you may just share a reflection or two on some of
052this work as well because you know how important student voice is to um the policy work and the the programs that we're developing great thank you dr k and dr g and everybody who participated in the presentation that is an outstanding segue to the next part of our meeting which is our student school board representative reports so i will turn it over to you um and by the way also a very nice touch to close it out on our students because that's really why we're here and what our focus always should be so great way to uh to really put punctuation on on that presentation so thank you again i will turn it over to you all right looks like we're starting and uh before i get into my report i just want to say
053that uh i think dr fisher and i are matching today which which validates my belief that is not sure by many however but uh that i have some semblance of style or maybe we both don't that could be it too all right and just uh before i get into also touched on what dr k just said i you can see the work that is being done on a daily basis whether it be like grading practices or just teachers push it and specifically i know they talked about affinity groups and alliances and i've attended some of the alliance meetings of the msa and talking with my classmates about how they they share their religion with others and how they practice it was a really cool and i think valuable experience for me and i think we
054should keep pushing students to go off and see how other cultures and you know a lot or affinity groups um work and what it means to them so but now i'll just start with uh my report so the cats are buzzing as the school year begins to wind down senior countdown is on and students are trying to keep it together before a well-deserved summer break nonetheless there have been many activities for students to participate in going back to wednesday april 6th we held our our second annual wildcat summit event juniors and seniors planned and led a full day of discussions and different activities with around 100 students attending the event the topics of discussions included healthy bodies minds discourse and relationships as an attendee and leader i can say that was a terrific and meaningful
055experience we held so many important conversations that you know just aren't talked about enough on a daily basis in the classroom so i hope that it can be implemented more in our daily classroom activity but students enjoyed being given the time to talk and learn about information that can help them lead a happier and more successful life special thanks to dr nelson and all the staff that helped put it on because it was a ton of work as a leader i did not do any of the planning work that there were many other people that actually planned and coordinated the event and it went perfectly and then our wildcat summit was followed by and built upon by last week's healthy relationships week every day students were pushed to focus on a relationship they had monday
056focus on your relationship with yourself tuesday was technology specifically wednesday the wildcat community thursday gratitude and friday was just a green out which i've talked or for our greendale program which i've talked about in the past and earth day liberty will students appreciate all the resources and events that remind us to focus on our health and i at talking to many students they it they're just appreciative that there's so many different resources that they can go to for anything also on friday some students chose to participate in a day of silence for marginalized groups and people they filled out a google form indicating what group they're representing and talking with the classmates that chose to participate after the fact of course he told me that he did it as a small sacrifice to show solidarity
057with a specific group the lgbtq plus community and he just wanted to remind himself of all the hardships that others go through on a daily basis finally probably the highlight of my month yesterday was the best buddies talent show the studio theater was packed full of students and their families to see members of best buddies showcased their talent which included many talented singers an electric electric guitar performance a mind-blowing magic trick and dazzling displays of art i also have to shout out my peer buddy vaughn who emceed the entire thing and he's great at it many jokes and went smoothly being in the crowd i just had to say that the support for the buddies was fantastic and many people decided to attend that aren't even in the best buddies club and each performance was
058followed by a roar from those in attendance just a great overall atmosphere and i was so glad that it was able to be put on and with that i'll pass it to ryan before you do that i'm sorry to interrupt but i noted with interest a group at liberty royal high school that i believe you co-founded called the gray area and i was really impressed with the goal would you mind just telling us just like a one minute what it is and how you conceived of this club of course um so the gray area as you've kind of highlighted is in going with these relationship themes and healthy discourses part of it is in our society nowadays we're very polarized and you know it's this or that it's black and white and gray area is
059kind of a combination of both so we we discuss a variety of topics from political issues to you know more more fun topics like what's your favorite cereal and we just we discuss uh you know both sides and we kind of make concessions and come to agreements because healthy discourse is so important just having respect for the person that you're talking to and understanding why they came to the idea like everything about them and overall it's it's going well so far we we have a group about 20 to 30 students and every week we dissect a new topic and we're going to continue to build on it hopefully it's in the room for the future because i think uh my friends and i when we decided to start it we're just like it's kind of
060ridiculous that i'm not calling out you guys as adults but lots of adults you see in on social media or whatever just in normal conversations that you observe are not respectful of others ideas and they see it as this or that instead of what is in the middle and what can be looked at together so that's just kind of a brief summary and thank you for pointing that out because i it's a really great club and i hope we can expand on it so more students can join i hope so too you have um some uh underclassmen that are participating yes yes we need more it's being a senior people i get to come are mostly juniors and seniors but we're working on creating a base so you know live beyond our ears well whether
061you talk about highly charged issues or breakfast cereal yeah it's it's a wide beret a variety of topics but whatever the topic giving people the opportunity to practice and model healthy discourse is a very timely subject i agree with you some of us adults could use some participation in that as well and i just want to congratulate you for a great effort and for starting a new club that hopefully will be permanent at lhs that's cool thank you so much good job spring sports are in full swing with many teams playing conference games and looking forward to the postseason some highlights of the spring season are in the girls track meet last saturday anna becker won the triple jump event with a school setting record jump the girls lacrosse team is currently undefeated eight to
062zero and play lake forest today hoping to continue their streak the boys baseball team is also currently ranked 11th in the state the crc which is our college and career resource center held a summer job fair on april 20th during the wednesday flex time students were able to attend and talk to employers of local businesses and franchises like culver's six flags the lake county forest preserve and more this was a really great opportunity that the school provided for libertyville students to get jobs and stay connected within the community final college decisions came out in early april which means many seniors are finalizing their college choices and choosing their housing roommates and much more overall among the students the stress of the year and all the choices to make are dwindling down as seniors finalize their
063path after graduation either through college a trade school or the workforce decision day is next wednesday may 4th where seniors have the opportunity to celebrate their future and everyone i've talked to is really excited to share that experience with our friends and classmates at this time of year when we've been back from spring break for a few weeks students tend to be more stressed as the end of the year is approaching and everyone's trying to keep their grades up many people i know are using the opportunity to retake tests to get a few more points and maybe get up a letter grade ap tests are approaching in the first two weeks in may so many ap classes are finishing up material and have begun reviewing testing will be a new experience for many of our
064students even those who took ap classes previously because tests are fully in person this year over the past couple years there have been very few in-person ap tests so students are having to find new ways of preparing and reviewing material only a few students remember what an in-person test is really like so we are having to adapt to get more to get back to a more typical year of testing i'm going to talk a little bit more about the bystander 2.0 training which is part of our healthy relationships week libertyville and life of wildcat has the goal of getting every student green dot bystander training this training usually takes place once a month or so and helps educate students on the best strategies to intervene in a potentially hurtful or harmful situation however one of
065the limitations of green dot is that it doesn't address identity based violence which is attacking someone's race sexual orientation gender or beliefs dr nelson mrs singleton and a group of students discussed those limitations and created bystander 2.0 training which was specifically designed to address situations of identity-based violence the training was during lunch periods and groups of 5 to 12 students were able to discuss personal experiences with identity-based violence or situation the situation situations that they have seen for me as well as other students who were green dot trained um this training was super helpful and added another layer onto what we already knew about how to step in and solve these situations we discussed a lot of possible scenarios and how we could best respond to each and at the end of the session 100
066of students said that they were now more confident in addressing a situation of identity-based violence i'll pass it off to faith um i just wanted to say that the presentation was so well put together um i went to the first strategic planning meeting and i wasn't able to make the second one unfortunately but i love talking with the parents as well as the teachers because you get to see that behind the scenes kind of point of view where the parents don't always know everything that's going on at school because obviously they're not walking the halls so it was really good to kind of connect with them and be able to talk about really important issues that is not only just going on at our school but in our community as well equity is an issue
067that we always should be worried about no matter what the places or environment and um i think it's so valuable that we're focusing so much on it because i know that there's so many other places that don't and i'm privileged to be going to a district that does so that's all i wanted to say okay here we go after spring break there's been lots going on at lhs one of the last chances for our theater department to put on a show is our spring play which was on the 21st 22nd and 23rd in the auditorium the play was william shakespeare's a midnight summers or a midsummer's night dream as for all our plays and musicals have hours and hours of rehearsal to put on these amazing shows that our theater department gets displayed for the
068entire school not only did the cast do an amazing job and put on a show that left you on the edge of your seat but personally i was so impressed with the makeup and the costumes that were done for it putting the audience in a mystical yet adventurous reality the reasoning behind the value in this play may be greater than you realize um like the characters in this play we escaped to our dreams to resolve some of our most pressing conflicts i thought i would share the beginning line in the program because i found it really moving and very valuable conflict and the stress that follows can often feel omniscient in 2022 the war in ukraine continued impact of coven 19 stress of financial inflation weighs on us all and not to mention the daily
069conflicts of our relationships and responsibilities i truly believe that theater is a place where we can both consider and let go of these stresses as shakespeare suggests the experience in theater is but a dream congrats for all your guys's hard work to the cast and everyone else that's behind the scenes speaking of fine arts the spring band and orchestra had their first spring concert april 28th featuring concert band concert orchestra symphonic band and string content i don't think i said that right the second spring concert may 5th will feature the other half of our band and orchestra which is symphonic winds chamber orchestra one ensemble and symphony orchestra the practice and difficulty of this music is harder than people realize so please if you couldn't make it all our concerts are web class live and
070on youtube under wildcat production productions amazing work and congrats to all of our music department staff and students for putting these amazing performances together for our school so you know seniors got a five day weekend a couple weeks ago while underclassmen took the psat and s.a.t thankfully everyone got friday off to kick back relax and watch it rain the whole day um i hope everything went smoothly for underclassmen genuinely that participate in testing because it definitely isn't easy and i know personally i suck at standardized testing and it's a big milestone that should be appreciated for each and every student after the past two years they've been through a lot so i know it can be difficult for students becoming a part of the national honor society the nhs ceremony and induction will be held
071april 27 from 7 to 8 pm at lhs congrats to all the students who worked hard to become involved in such a program for anyone who doesn't know for a student to be a member on nhs you have to work on maintaining a high gpa so this means members of national honor society must have a gpa of 3.5 or higher on the 4.0 scale and also students in the nhs also students in nhs participate in community service and leadership opportunities while attending monthly meetings to show their commitment so um personally i'm an nhs and we'll do canned food drives will go to feed my starving children you have to get hours within the program and honestly it's taught me a lot about responsibility and leadership so i'm very thankful for that um connecting to commitment
072true wildcat is something that we do at lhs and it's a part of the culture that we push so greatly for our school a new true wildcat will be announced on april 29th and this student p can be from any grade level and is a person that exemplifies and leads in the daring mission from lhs i can't wait to hear who the new true wildcat is for this month thank you okay um so first about like the presentation um i know like for me as someone who's like a person of color i i like i think it's really important to feel represented especially in school because like a lot of the teachers and coaches that i have they're like people that i look up to so i feel like the representation can be really like
073inspiring from like a student's perspective and so last week was daring week which was hosted by a prevention and wellness program each day was filled with different and fun activities to help bring awareness in a way that was really engaging for the students for example on tuesday we had the unity fair which is when a variety of clubs set up in the foyer during lunch periods and give insightful information about culture race sexual identity mental health friendships and many more topics also on thursday we had the dare to empower lunch and learn about body body image and social media i wasn't able to attend but i know many people who went and they said it was a really inspiration really it was really inspirational and they were so thankful for the opportunity to talk about
074these topics in school with their peers and teachers this past weekend we had our prom which had a record amount of students with 410 students attending the night started off with a dinner and then a fun kahoot game prom court and then of course the actual dance it was so fun seeing the senior class come together and enjoy our night together all students who attended said they had a super fun weekend especially yesterday with our senior ditch day students were able to do a variety of fun activities ranging from going down to the city or going to a water park on saturday april 9th vernon hills hosted its first annual els walk-a-thon to raise funds for our educational life skills program best buddies helped organize this event and it was super successful it took place
075at little bear lake and there was a great turnout best buddies hopes to make this an annual event and that it grows bigger and bigger every year on april 5th vernon hills hosted all incoming 9th graders for the 8th grade orientation activity fair the fair allowed the students to explore all sorts of clubs and sports to give them a preview of all the fun activities to join in high school the students were able to ask questions about different activities this made the many of them feel so excited for all the cool opportunities coming their way very soon on march 24th students in personal finance or consumer classes were given the opportunity to take part in interviews this allowed students to prepare for the real world and go through what a real job interview would be
076like many students have said that this was a cool experience because it made them feel less nervous about having to do a real interview in the future and they now know what to expect and how to prepare [Music] hello everyone sorry my voice is kind of shot um i'm so sorry about that uh can you tell us why your voice is shot please yeah um i'm i'm i play volleyball uh we won 32 to 30 and that is ridiculous that is like you you 25 and so and in that span we missed six serves in a row and i was one of those included which that's my first serve of the entire season so that was kind of tough um for the uh congratulations on your victory yes it's also coach uh hard-fought three-set yes
077happy birthday coach curry and so um for the presentation you guys given i was unable to make both of those due to volleyball conflicts but the way you guys explain it like i i really appreciate you like even though like i'm not a minority like just like i like i can see the way you guys are trying to take a step in the right direction and i feel like that will really benefit us in like the future all right the hhs announced its leaderships for the next student council congratulations to exec board president katie sear senior class president genesawa junior junior class president haley kalinowski and sophomore class president the tesla poser the day during school vhs career tech and educational department hosted the career expo with over 30 companies attending there were many career
078pathways being exhibited for people to see each period there was a specific business talking to students in the west gym and they were going super in depth of what their company actually does and how we can get involved in that company whether someone is interested in going to college trade school military or just wants a job now people there were plenty of people there to help you out on april 14th highland park hosted the csl art show every school in the csl was able to show off 55 of their own artworks by talking to mrs dostrom one of our art teachers she said that highland the highland park art center looked amazing with all these pieces in it and everyone was able to walk around and appreciate each other's work in the whole csl we're
079seniors we now have around 20 days left infested and festivities have started each day now we have an abc countdown and all of us are just constantly anticipating the next day uh any with like starting off with anything but a backpack day then the beach and soon karaoke i don't even know what's gonna go on there um seniors have a lot to look forward to uh with the upcoming days the crc is also starting to post on their uh instagram of uh seniors who have committed and they're now just showing off where everyone is going which is i mean i'm looking through that and i'm always excited to be like oh that person's going there it's super cool because i don't talk to everyone in the school but i just love my class in general
080for the past couple of months uh many people have been practicing for the spring orchesis with less than or around like half one and a half weeks to go students are preparing for their final preparations leila schumacher a freshman says that all the girls have been putting in a ton a ton of effort and are ready to show off what they've been working so hard and so long for unlike palms the girls choreograph their own dances and are also able to participate in around two to five dances um layla also states that may 7th cannot come any sooner she's so excited for sports now i've kind of already talked about volleyball but uh we were able to get a fantastic win against deerfield tonight on coach curry's birthday it was fantastic and it's two years
081in a row we'd be dear on his birthday that's pretty interesting um other big wins include um a win against uh sandberg york and dr herman you were able to watch that libertyville game and so uh next weekend uh vernon hills will be competing in a 16 team tournament where 10 out of 10 out of the 16 teams are top 20 in state which that is just amazing amazing competition i'm just so ready for that um it's like it's great to have that tough competition and going into sectional seating we are ready to fight also baseball is actually killing it in conference play and um at the moment is leading the csl south and um they're around one game away from possibly being the overall conference leader which i know in our conference has many
082top 20 teams on the north side and we've been able to beat two out of the five or six that we have so far and so surprisingly we're doing very well so yeah thank you okay thank you does anybody have any questions for our student board reps okay great job guys it's amazing you guys started off at the beginning of the school year doing a great job but i really observed tonight the evolution of your reports and not only the richness of the information that you realize that we're looking for but i feel like you've really found your voices your own unique voices um in terms of how you present information and i just couldn't be more pleased with your participation so uh great job to uh dr k and dr g for selecting these
083fine students and um your commitment this year has really been uh noted and appreciated so tomorrow actually uh our board reps and cara will meet to select next year's reps so we're already into that process i'm sure lhs has got that coming up as well so it'll be fun to have them at uh our next board meeting fantastic we look forward to meeting them and for you to give them some good advice so that they can start off the next school year on the right foot okay um so thank you that concludes the president's report we'll move on to the superintendent's report wonderful lots of good news to share so i'll start with that um the students had quite wonderful things so these are in addition to what the students reported on this morning u.s
084news and world report released its list of the 2020 best high schools lhs and vhhs were ranked 13 and 8 respectively among illinois schools in 238 and 334 among schools nationally again very prestigious award and recognition that our schools continue to earn next we had several staff members who received honors at the recent illinois directors of student activities award ceremony held earlier this month in rosemont lhs lhs staff recognized where ping pong club advisor christoph kiard gsa club advisor diane nasland and leaf club advisor dave lapish who received the distinguished service award for lifetime contributions to student activities vernon hill's staff recognized where principal assistant and cru advisor assistant robin levin and again congratulations john for uh administrator who fully supports student activities and the positive culture and climate at our school and finally for
085good news vernon hills high school fbla team was able to attend the state leadership conference in springfield a total of 69 students competed in slc events with 49 of those students attending the conference in person march 31st through april 2nd which yes was over spring break the students perform very well and 40 students qualified to advance to compete at the national leadership conference july 29th through excuse me june 29th through july 2nd in chicago the vernon hills fbla advisors are tony isabelly lynn benson and kate isabelli and i just wanted to add in addition to the good news i was able to visit um get the both campuses and and firsthand witnessed some other really great things going on um attending the libertyville vernon hills volleyball game was very exciting and it was so great
086to see even though the competition was uh very uh competitive as soon as the game was over everyone was shaking hands and just really congratulating uh both teams for a very hard-fought game um last two weeks ago i was able to attend a dare to empower session at vernon hills here with a student dare to empower group and i was invited to be a guest speaker and to answer student questions and to talk with them about some of the challenges that adult women face in terms of balancing career and motherhood and all of the other challenges and it was just an amazing conversation the facil student facilitator could have been hosting a podcast on like the atlantic it was an amazingly well facilitated meeting i also stopped by the career expo today and saw again
087a lot of students were very interested in picking up brochures and meeting with the adults who were trying to recruit them very hard for summer work opportunities and then lastly both today and tomorrow the ap research seminars the oral defenses are taking place and so myself and many other teachers and administrators have volunteered to serve on three-person panels to listen to the oral defenses and then to give feedback to each of the researchers on ways they can improve their presentation or as they finish up their research moving forward in these last few weeks amazing research being done by our students and it was just wonderful to have the opportunity to sit beside other today was lhs and tomorrow will be vernon hills high school staff members you know we get to experience hearing from all
088of you every month but it's just another level of connection to get to witness students presenting their research and and seeking uh feedback and guidance from adults so thank you on all of that great news and and great visits next up we have um a strategic planning update so that's me again and i want to thank several board members were able to attend the strategic planning stakeholder event that we had last wednesday evening we had approximately 45 participants and that was students parents and community members the outcome for that evening was to think think through talk through learn about the possible goal areas that have emerged from the data in our strategic plan work thus far and at the end of the evening each participant was able to set what they felt should be the
089top three priority goals for our strategic plan next monday all staff will get to participate in a very similar structured opportunity so at the beginning of our institute day all staff will also have an opportunity to engage in very thoughtful dialogue about each of those 12 possible areas for a focus for us for a strategic plan and again based upon their review their conversation and what they bring to the table as educators they will also be completing a form to say what their top three priorities are so we will use all of that input to craft what will then be a report to the board in june for the strategic plan update where you'll have recommendations from each of the stakeholder groups and that should be very helpful for you in terms of deciding as
090is the board's purview to set the direction and uh vision for the district moving forward um so that's the june meeting yes we were going to try and do may but we have so many other things on the may agenda we're going to move it to the june agenda and we next have bryant who will give us a kobit 19 update thank you um again all the covid 19 data is um up to date on our website and two things that we're looking at first our dashboard which includes the updated daily totals from staff and uh for students number of cases um and so i've tracked those there's been a little bit of uptick but um you know our nurses have been working you know with those students and those families again if the students
091are have coveted and have to have the five day they're still learning and they're learning remotely so it seems to be going seamlessly from the you know educational side [Music] the other thing that we look at is the community levels from the cdc and just a reminder the cdc community level is determined by the higher of the new in admissions and inpatient bed metrics and that's based on the current level of new cases per hundred thousand population the past seven days and so lake county is still in low transmission and the reason i bring this up again um i know it was on the news that dupage county moved from low to medium and you know when that kind of happens the one thing you want to keep looking at is what's happening in your
092school so um but right now lake county still is in low transmission and we're monitoring everything and um so that's our update and i it looks like um based on the definition of close contact even though we have a slight uptick there have been no school related close contact quarantines no yeah we don't have the quarantines and you know we're tracking any of the cases you know are they happening where are they happening are they happening with athletics are they happening with you know classes and we haven't seen like an outbreak in any case or anything like that and the last thing on the superintendent's report are the foia request and this month we received two the first request was received on march 17th and it was from a news reporter at abc7 requesting any
093data or requests we have for forms that challenged library books we responded on march 22nd that we had no challenges received to date the second for your request was a commercial request from smart procedure asking for all current employee staff contact information and we responded with links to our website on april 1st and that that's all of the superintendent's report great thank you we will move on to item number three our consent vote agenda again these are items that were discussed at length in committee may i please have a motion uh to approve the consent vote agenda so moved second three any discussion okay roll call please that's and hi benjamin hi carmichael hi drum key hi hustle i call carney i rooney hi great motion passes we will move on to today um we
094we do have um one of the people who is highlighted and then we discussed briefly at the the meeting when we went over the consent agenda but because charlotte eames is in our audience now i wanted to introduce her to the board and welcome her to the d128 family charlotte will serve as our director of data and assessment a new role in our district she'll be leading our existing data team who's been working very hard to capture a lot of the data you saw in tonight's presentation but under charlotte's leadership this will just continue to grow and provide more ability for us to analyze data and make very thoughtful decisions moving forward so would you like to say anything to the board thank you very much for having me this evening i am so energized
095by what i've seen this evening and i'm just thrilled to join the team and to start in this role so it's very exciting and i'm so glad to be here great well welcome congratulations we're very happy to welcome you to the d128 family uh we're sorry to florida for losing you but we are very fortunate that you are here in illinois and we welcome you to the team we promise the weather gets warmer for a while yes then it gets colder again do you remember saturday that was spring [Laughter] i hope you enjoyed it okay thank you for that very very welcome and uh important uh pause uh before we turn it over now to the program and personnel committee to uh dr batson thank you very much um we have uh two items here
096on the agenda to vote on the first one is the amended 2021 2022 school calendar and um anyone want to give a quick background on that sure i can provide an overview on that thank you um many of you will recall that um and some of you will not recall the long history of this is that the calendar committee has often been asked to uh address the notion of non-attendance days for students when religious holidays fall on school days and in march of 2020 a group of students appealed directly to the school board requesting that the school board consider the holiday of eid as a non-attendance day or an institute day and they presented a thoroughly researched presentation there were community members in the audience when they spoke to the board and following um that
097was actually in january or february of 2020 in march of 2020 we reconvened the calendar committee school board rep served on the calendar committee we also invited the students who had appealed directly to the board to participate in that meeting and we agreed at the calendar committee to present the board with a a calendar that included an institute day in the 2021 school year and the 21 22 school year that would coincide with the celebration of eid that worked well for the 2021 school year and during this year um we learned that the date we had selected two years ago was actually the not the date that eid would be celebrated in the united states and we learned that just a few weeks ago from students who came forward and pointed out the error the
098error is one that was honestly made and that we hoped to correct even with that discovery at the the late notice that we did and so uh thank you to both buildings for being flexible in adjusting schedules and um things that were planned in order to bring to you this recommendation that we make the very late switch of celebrating our institute day on monday may 2nd instead of tuesday may 3rd we believe that that would be convenient to other families in the district to have a long weekend with a monday off for many students but it would also coincide with the opportunity for our muslim families to be able to have a day off of school on the day that their holiday would be actually celebrated as was our original intention several years ago when
099that recommendation was made and so um that that is the background that is the request and we are planning um to make that move to monday with your approval okay can we have a motion please uh so moved second okay any other questions or comments from the board i know we discussed this in committee earlier in the month and it makes perfect sense to to make this uh correction as it will if you have it um for this year um do we know if there's any adjustment for next year or the distance that we'll make in the future is that we you know we do um have student non-attendance days in our calendar that coincide with other religious holidays and we always work to verify the actual dates of those holidays in the future uh
100we will check with local um the local mosque to determine the date that that will be celebrated in our community there are different dates across the globe based on the lunar calendar of when the celebration actually occurs and so we'll take that extra step in the future but um you know and we do verify other religious holidays jewish holidays that we celebrate to make sure that we're placing those on the correct date so we've approached this with due diligence in the past this time there was just at the time we scheduled it we had lots of people looking at the calendar and we thought we had chosen the correct date so that's the plan moving like you say it's an honest mistake and glad we can correct it in time so uh so for the
101patience of all those who participated in the decision making agreed to make the change so no other questions or comments if none can we have a roll call please benjamin hi carmichael hi drumkey hi essel hi cole carney hi rooney i batson hi uh motion passes our second item here is employment of employees these are um additional employees adjustments if you will for um they came in after the committee meeting earlier in the month so may i just take a moment to thank the board for that vote and know that that vote will be much appreciated by the students who again um we as a district encourage student voice and agency and appreciate when students tell us that you know we've made a mistake or that they would prefer us to investigate a different action
102and so i thank you on behalf of all the students who recognized this error and made it known to the adults who could make the change yeah i'm glad we were able to accommodate that's us it was both nimble and in line with policy yeah yeah nice okay so again we have a list of employment of employees here to uh to consider um can we have a motion please move to accept the employment employees as listed second okay any other comments or questions or yeah kudos to laura brandt she's going to be a new social studies supervisor former colleague uh i could also say nemesis because we competed against each other a couple of times good for her uh actually she won both types okay any other comments or questions roll call please carmichael hi
103from key hi castle hi carney i rooney hi batson hi benjamin hi okay that motion passes and that concludes the program and personnel committee report okay thank you jim we will move along to item number five the facilities and finance committee chairperson rooney okay well i think we're going to balance each other out tonight jim you're so short and sweet and we got a lot to go through for facilities and finance uh we will not be taking action on any of these items but there's quite a bit to discuss and we're going to start uh i'm not really sure what what is what are the fnf minutes doing on the uh so that was and i noticed they're not they somehow did not make it into the board packet so i'll just skip those two
104at the next committee usually this is almost like a redo of our committee uh now that i'm back in here ready to go so normally i would you didn't have anything really at the last committee so we usually share the minutes from the previous and i was just going to share those with you um so i'll just get those on the net on the may okay i saw the agenda was in there and i thought okay i missed something on that we're glad you're here we're glad you're back and we'll start with food service proposals this is something that will definitely be of interest to our students yeah so um i remember when we started the process um but we we decided to go out for rfp request for proposals for food service providers uh
105we've had chartwells for many years um and we've been working through some things and decided you know what let's see what's out there and so within the last few months we put together a request for proposal um and also to change the way that our our program is funded as well um so we put that out it's not a bid you could have bid something like that but we didn't we didn't set it out as a bid due to our structure and so we got four proposals back which was good i didn't you know other districts have done this recently and they've only gotten just two uh or three you know so we got four which was great we got from arbor chartwell is our current provider organic life and quest and so we got
106those in some were 400 pages long and trying to figure out okay how do we boil this down and analyze this and so i gave i provided you with some like a kind of a summary sheet of some of the analysis that we had on the proposal so um in in your packet there's a document and really there's four different four different metrics i think that helped us try to understand and also address some of the concerns that we had with what we're currently doing the first one was how many similar illinois high school clients do the providers have and arbor which was one of them had three so they had some high school districts chartwells has two organic life had two and quest has 11. and so this this really is meant to just
107show like what what is their what is their presence in the illinois high school market um elementary districts are are fair and legit but a high school is runs a little bit different typically than an elementary lunch program so i wanted to see that to kind of show how how prevalent are they this next one is lake county clients so how many lake county clients whether they're elementary or high school doesn't matter or unit district doesn't matter to us but the point of this is that when they're short staffed they have an ability uh to pull from other clients one of the things with chartwells because there's not a lot of clients around here we've experienced staff shortages and there's just not an ability really to pull from other from other clients to help fill
108gaps and so we had arbor which has seven clients in lake county chartwells two organic life three and quest has 11. it's not the same 11 it's different also a one client could be several schools right so we are one client you know so but we have two schools so you could have a client with several schools in them uh and then in terms of commissions so this is this is the like the way of the financial structure so the way this new this new contract would work is um there's no expenditure on the district the food service program manages all of that we don't collect any fees the management program they they run this program in our school and basically they give us a commission check um it's similar to how like our co-contract
109works right well a little bit different but similar issue in terms of we don't really have expenditures but we get a percentage of sales and so they offered in their proposal based on that seven percent for arbor six percent char roles 3.5 for organic life and seven and a half percent request um so quest was the highest there and then the last one was average per cap and so this this represents about like average sales per student and really what this shows us is how capable and how strong are they in terms of actually getting students to buy their products how long received are they by the students yeah a high per cap number shows a very strong program that students are participating in and love and enjoy and so uh 234 for arbor 234
110for chartwells coincidentally uh 79 cents for organic life so that would be on the low end and then uh 3.1 for quest um three dollars and 10 cents per cap based on the cost of the items um it it can it can be but um it's more it's more strength of their sales because if things are priced too high they won't buy them you know what i mean so it there's a little bit of both going on there um the next thing we did is we took a tour so we had um students and staff from both buildings and um district admin uh go on a tour um so we decided so at that point we decided to narrow it down from the four to visit chartwells and arbor uh uh quest and arbor excuse
111me chartwells we already have so we can tour them every day here um we toured uh for arbor we toured lakes high school um up in antioch area and they had that was a a program that's not on the national school lunch program so similar to us we're not on the national school lunch program so you can kind of see how those programs run on or off the program look a little bit different in terms of how they run it and what's offered and then they visited quest at highland park high school and we asked for survey information from them about um their thoughts on menu choices food quality customer service flexible grab and go availability through the day nutritional healthy choices and then just strengths from each vendor things you're concerned about from each
112vendor arbor scored i would say mid-range um uh and they i gave you all that information quest scored very high almost had all fours you had to scale everything one to four um they didn't have all fours but they almost had all fours uh chartwells was low to mid um except they had trended higher in quality of customer service um and then the final question that i felt was pretty pretty meaningful to me at least was um if you had to pick a provider for food service for district 128 which would you pick arbor quest or charwells everybody chose char quest excuse me um so that was meaningful information so based on all of that information the people that participate in the tour the data that i have available in terms of the rrsps we'd
113like to move forward with negotiating contract with uh quest so it's not a bid where there was a contract already and they're bidding on it and then we have a contract this really was figuring out right what what provider do we think will give us the service that we're best looking for and then we negotiate a contract with them and so we have started that process um and so we're we're negotiating with them right now um so that's really the update that i have and it's it's possible i could have a contract for approval for you in may um you know nobody here including quest is interested in wasting time and getting stuff going so there's a smooth transition i appreciate the commentary on each one of them i think my personal favorite is they
114can do our coffee bar whoop whoop talk to me about that one yeah uh in quest part of their proposal also was um on their own money putting up a hundred thousand to put a coffee bar at lhs um so vernon hills kind of has a spot built in for one but lhs doesn't really have that so that was something that they included in their proposal which we certainly find attractive as well yes so and as we still have one of our student board reps with us i would like to solicit a little bit of his thought on that um needless to say at libertyville uh i don't know for known for our cafeteria food so i think this will be refreshing i i can't speak to it personally i don't think i've eaten at
115the cafeteria since sophomore year which might say something about it but uh it'll definitely be refreshing i think students will really appreciate it and uh seniors and upperclassmen will be very sad to find out that they won't get to actually partake in eating and the coffee bar does seem like a good idea um be interesting when i come back to see how that looks and and we and the students that were on the tour you know we we went to so obviously they've been at their own schools i think some of them have seen the other school we went to lakes and then we went to highland park and it was like night and day when so the so the students saw the coffee bar which included coffee but also grab and go sandwiches grab
116and go you know salads so those students that are in after school activities you know could grab something the prices were reasonable obviously that's you know part of the negotiations but just the offerings that they offered from you know the food our students were just amazed and i know tom's daughter goes um to island park so some of our students went over to their table talk to the kids we grabbed some kids that were in line and asked is this normal are they putting on a pony you know dog and pony show for us but they said this is every day you know so you know i think you know just seeing that it i you know we look forward to you know having quest i think for our students and it'll be um it'll
117be amazing and the students that went that day uh really ate a lot including me we ate a lot well it's research it was recent research do the research thank you for letting me put you know how are those students chosen because i don't remember filling out a form the cookies at highland park were a lot better they were all students john that will be here next year [Laughter] oh that's a good point aren't you well otherwise you probably would have been yeah um so our contract with chartwells we've had a contract for a long time there and it's an auto renew and so you are required by the contract terms to have a 60-day notice and we've already notified them of our intent to terminate the contract and so that that's already done so
11816 0's would be the end of this month so we have already done that thank you and um just to confirm what i'm sure you've already verified but the quest ability to serve our free and reduced lunch populations same or better yep super great it's all part of the deal i have a quick question um so it sounds like quest is a wonderful option for our students while reading through the packet um i noticed that there were some um pieces of input from students and and i think even may have been commented on by dr gilliam regarding some of the employees who currently work for chartwells and how there's a bit of an attachment and an intense appreciation for these employees um and my question is will those employees have kind of a first crack
119at positions uh that become available when quest transitions in so the best director i can give you is every company is trying to find and hire high quality employees including food service providers and it is very common when there is a change made for the new provider to come in talk to the current employees and talk about a transition with them that's very common and that conversation is going to happen and i think it's already scheduled to happen between um quest and our current provider and all that all that kind of a thing um so they're aware quest is also aware um you're gonna do the best that they can but at the end of the day that's that's kind of stuff we've gotta work out a bit with them but um yeah i don't
120know that there's more that i can really it sounds like an effort is being made though um and i think that's that's nice to offer to people who are already such an integral part to our you know school community absolutely yeah i just had one question it sounds like the answer is yes but um that there are vegetarian and vegan options because a lot of students are there and potato is not necessarily the vegetable of choice and we have real vegetables here i would say quest has a demonstrated pattern of offering high quality alternative options at many schools in our area and would do the same thing here and that was even part of their proposal of kind of fleshing out nutritional options alternative can't find the right down but alternative somethings menu options and
121everything like that and so absolutely um [Music] i think you will all want to eat when we were at highland park we talked to the manager about that about gluten-free options about vegan options and and they would even they said they could even go where if they knew they had students like in the third period lunch that they would set things aside to make sure that that person that came through that like the first two periods didn't take all the gluten free so we did ask that i talked about that yeah i have a gluten-free child that that was always a challenge because if you have a later lunch there was never anything so we did talk about that and they they addressed that issue i appreciate that any other comments all right well we
122appreciate all the research that went into this and uh looks like we got some great options that are also uh a little higher sales commission so this is a win-win we'll look forward to the contract in hopefully may yeah we're actively working on it so if we can bring it in may we will wonderful thank you uh moving on to the property tax extension update yeah so um reminder you all passed a levy back in november and we've we get our final number so back then you know in terms of the four data points two of them we know two of them we don't know we have to guess we got what those final numbers are which tells us our actual calculations and so really providing that information for you there's there's data there but
123essentially i tell you we're getting a hundred percent of what we thought we were going to get so very accurate again and that that's not meant to be a pat on my back that's just we get really high quality information from the county so the county has the county assessor's office has to give us information on the values they're seeing going on and the estimate of new property and so um so for example the they gave us an estimate of new property at 17.7 million and we actually had 17.6 billion and that's not dollars that's eav value so um you have to multiply that by the tax rate to figure out how much dollars that's worth um so extremely accurate in terms of that um so that's great news in terms of that's what we
124were expecting in addition um back i don't know when recently-ish uh there was a new law passed that that um allows districts the ability to recapture monies that were lost from property tax appeals um so the way i've explained this in the past and i don't have a pretty chart anymore but the way this works is the the process about property taxes is to basically have everybody pay their fair share the way they determine fair share is based on the value of the property that you have but the reality is is humans are working to figuring out the values and we make mistakes we not me they said like people make mistakes and so there should be an appeal so when you get a notice of here's your here's your assessment you can appeal this
125if you think this is wrong if you think it's over too high or if you think it's too low most people don't appeal if it's too low but maybe if you think it's correct you can appeal to the board of review which goes to the county level and then we try to settle as many as those there because once they settle then they kind of reshuffle everything like okay we know fair share everybody's paying their fair share um if it doesn't get set on the board or if the owner does not like what the board of review decided on they can then either take it to court or they can take it to a state level property tax appeal board property tax appeal another level of appeal problem with that is there's a log that's
126years old so it takes years to figure out but that doesn't do me much good because we're getting our taxes now so essentially the default of counties is we're going to bill you based on this value of board of review and if you actually get a a result from the p tab we'll just take it back from the districts in the year in which you get that decision so the reality is is districts including ours would lose would lose like literally they would say hey we're going to give you a million dollars but wait you have a pta decision we're only for a hundred thousand we're only going to give you 900 thousand and so we would literally lose um in any given year a few hundred thousand dollars um now revenue we may have
127spent what could that conceivably be revenue we may have spent well that's revenue that we could have gotten yeah so that affects our tax collection rate um now when i got here we were having a tax objection issue that's a whole different thing that's because we had some fund balance in particular funds that were too high that we've now fixed so there's no tax objection issue but p tabs are always going on but the reality is if you think about it tax objections like what we're having that's on us that's our fault but p tabs is it really school the idea is is it really a school district's fault that people outside of us can't figure out what the values are right and the reality is they realize well no that's not that's not the
128school district's fault so why are we taking that money away because if say you could settle all the ptabs in the right year it would just get reshuffled amongst everybody else right and so their solution um that they came up with with this new law is okay whatever p tabs you paid you were paid you had to pay out or you were reduced by in the previous year we're going to give you that money as a one-time payment in your next levy so what happens is the the county clerk will certify hey here's how much district 128 district 113 all the districts were paid out in p tabs and then they say okay then we will add that on as an extra levy so let me say it back a slightly different way this ptap
129money is money that we should have gotten this year but instead we're gonna then get it next year it's one-time money it doesn't go into your base and compound it's just literally one time so for us and we have a slightly higher number than we've usually had that number is 580 000 so in our extension which is property taxes that we will start receiving in may and june we will get 580 000 more than what we had estimated going in because you know we didn't estimate anything because we didn't have any data um that's money that we should have gotten this fiscal year that i counted on getting for this in this last levy right so we didn't get that so we'll see that reflected in our revenues but for you're going to get it
130next year so it's just like a slight off timing for one um it's not annual revenue that you can count on it's it's just one-time money um and so the reality is is what this will do is in terms of our future conversation this will essentially lessen the blow of our projected deficit for next year based on a fully deferred method of property tax um so anyway so i wanted to tell you that so we're getting exactly what we thought plus a bit more to make up for the money that we lost this year is that in perpetuity every year we have a p tax it is just this one year 2020 every year the county will certify the amount of money that you were you lost from ptab in that prior year you will
131get it so if this for this future year in disbursements if we lose a hundred thousand they will certify at the end of next year they lost a hundred thousand they get that hundred thousand back the next level year and that hundred thousand is added to whatever levy we've already put out so yep it's not limited by the cap it's not anything it's just it though the way that our county is treating it is a one-time uncapped extension it's just a one-time shot of money and then it's gone so basically whatever we are recovering is being split amongst proportionately everybody within our taxes which is what what it was which is what would happen is if it all was settled at the county level and then the state didn't take that long if somehow the
132state could get faster at p tabs that's what would happen naturally so it's just happening a little bit later so can you just remind us on when you say this year or next year what's the start of that year and end of that year our fiscal year is july 1st um and so i'm talking i'm talking a little bit of two sides of my mouth because i'm saying uh i'm saying this year because our current method of recognizing property tax revenue would say that the money that we collect in may and june is recognized in this year should we change then it would be next year so it's money that we receive in maine we will start receiving in may and june and then we'll defer that to next year we'll recognize it in the
133next school we'll recognize it in that year so but that next one so maybe i should have organized this a little bit better but we'll come back to that yep any other questions on that okay oh like i said we'll come back to that um moving on to capital or to property tax deferral which we'll loop back in yep so i put a memo in there i just put it in there today for you because i was finally able to get my thoughts down and put some charts together um so at our discussion on uh long-term financial projections we talked that i believe that we have the right timing to switch to fully deferring our spring taxes um so as a reminder our fund balance the way the way our fund balance is reported right
134now includes recognizing the spring taxes in our fund balance um that that's just been our practice for a very very long time um we're on the accrual basis of accounting and it is it is my opinion that the spring taxes are really we should really recognize those because that tax those money is really for next year like jim has given the example say you get paid on the 30 the last day of the month right and so if you look at your balance your bank balance at the last day a month like wow look at all this money i have but i mean really a lot of that money is spoken for because on the second my mortgage payment is going to come out right so the idea is this money the cash is collected
135in may june but it's really four the next year which i think is more accurate the other thing that we as a district have had we haven't had as much lately but we've had it and it'll come up again is the idea of your fund balances and so we've we've always had the we've always had the vocabulary of our fund balances not including early taxes right we say okay our fund balance is 86 million right but but that includes early taxes so we kind of this we take out early taxes that's how we talk and and it's a very very reasonable way to talk but it would be better if our financial reporting actually reflected that and we can't there's a lot of districts that do that there's also a number of districts that do
136what we're currently already doing so it's not like there is a precedent out there that every district has to do it a certain way districts have the flexibility to do it differently i think doing it by fully deferring is the best excuse me the best method because we're on the accrual basis of accounting meaning we expend in the year in which it's attributed for we collect money in the urine which is distributed for us so the the school fees that we receive like in may june all that stuff is really needs to be deferred to next year property taxes is a huge example of that um so it'll give us i think more accurate reporting the second thing that it'll do is i think it'll make the other recommendation i had was considering a fun
137balance policy we've gotten tripped up a few times in fund balance policy because of the definition of fund balance what are you counting fund balance including early taxes not including early taxes that clarity changing this will make that a much smoother conversation because the fund balance will by definition not include early taxes and so i think that will help us be more clear on what we mean by fund balance because that is always very tricky fund balance and fund balance percentage are very tricky numbers because not every district defines them the same even isb doesn't define it the same um so there's there's confusion i would say and this i think will help us decrease confusion increase clarity um so our auditors put together an estimate so i met with them on friday and so
138they put together an estimate so there's a chart they're showing just a very basic balance sheet assets which equals liabilities plus deferred inflows plus fund balances so our fund balance that's reported for fiscal year 21 that last fiscal year 86 million and so what happened let me so if we were on the fully deferred our fund balance instead of 86 million would be 45 million so that difference of 41 million is the spring taxes and that's exactly what we're talking about so the 86 million includes early taxes and when we're talking even about hey what should our target fund balance be or how much money do we have to spend on capital project now the first thing is like well we got to remove early taxes and then go from there this starts the conversation
139already with that remote so essentially our fund balance would or appropriately show the 45 million now the 41 million of cash is already there it's just recognized as a deferred inflow and it's it's it's just not recognized as revenue yet um so cash is not the same as fund balance right those are those are two different things um not only does it affect how our fund balance is reporting meaning how much money is are we counting this fund balance at the end of the day it will also affect our surpluses um and deficits because essentially you're taking money that we we're getting earlier we're throwing that into the next year so if it shifts the way our surpluses look so i i have in here um the surplus projections that we had based on our
140current methodology from our financial projections um and then i've included the chart to show the the same chart of like if we flipped to the the deferred and this is the one where years ago when i was looking at this every time we flipped the numbers just looked really red and i what i did not want to do just for a pure accounting change is panic our system um because of a number of other things particularly the cpi that we're sitting that we're looking at for the future levy of five percent that changes the ballgame and makes this look much more palatable are the numbers closer absolutely but i would argue they're more accurate um but part of this is next year we would have a deficit we would have a pretty significant deficit but
141it's a one-year thing and that's really because of the five-year the five percent cpi kicking in in fiscal year 24. um another thing that's that'll make it more clear is every fiscal year we'll have one levy in it right now every fiscal year has half of one levy in half of the other next year it's the whole 1.4 percent levy year after that's the whole five percent levy and then future it just it's just cleaner in so many ways i know you and i sat and talked about it and the way i saw it and it made the most sense is expenses match income yes the income we get for school years going to match the expenses that we expend and none of this you know there's this ethereal extra 45 million dollars sitting out
142there it makes so much sense yeah you don't have to preface every sentence with but back this out and then yeah yeah it'll i think make those cleaner um so so i gave that in there to show you know i think this is definitely doable the other thing that i added there is showing you the importance of the cp the impact of the cpi and so i did a scenario with our current methodology but i did a new scenario with if we were fully deferred and say that five percent cpi that we're going to be talking about more in the fall say that was two percent instead of five all the numbers are negative by a lot so that is a very important number in our assumptions since the cpi assumption is always one of
143the most important numbers in our assumptions the other one is what is the raise on the revenue side so that's a very very important number for our financial sustainability so does that mean that we are expending more than what we're getting in i mean if it's negative theory basically if it's negative yes how is it that because we're working on the that's the one part i don't understand is that how can we show a surplus when we're working on half of a levy and a half of a levy but yet when the levees are somewhat similar now we're showing the deficit every fiscal year um so yeah we would only so the anticipation would show a deficit for next year and then it would it would go away um the reason why is because the
144sooner you recognize that money if you recognize it when it comes in it's more money right that every levy is increased by essentially the rate of inflation right it's increased by cpi so the levy that we are going to start get the the revenues we're gonna swell the cash that we're gonna start getting in may and june um is more money than the previous levy so you're getting more money sooner so we're recognizing it sooner so it's it's more money sooner so it it's more revenue so it shows a higher surplus or it's a higher revenue and then matching with our expenditures it shows higher but now we're going to not recognize that until next year and so that more money is not going to show up this year just the money that we have
145on the on that particular level daniel stanley business does that help or not i kind of yeah essentially what mathematically is happening is is hap so every levy goes up by cpi what actually would be happening is half of the value of that cpi is thrown into a future fiscal year right now i get that but am i reading this right that we are come fiscal year 2027. we're looking no matter what we're we are looking at a deficit that that's based on the assumptions that i used back then what i would say you have a you lose a 20 confidence rating every year you're out and so fiscal year 27 is a long way away financially and there are 146 million 146 excuse me 146 000 is an immaterial amount of money that we
146that that won't well we'll do our best to not let something like that happen and that's why like small changes or small assumptions you make now can have compounding impacts five years later so those are the kind of things we look at so like do i think that that fiscal year 27 is actually going to happen no because i think we'll keep watching it because as we get further excuse me as we get further and let's say fiscal 28 starts coming on and if saying that looks like half a million dollars neg down like we're gonna have more conversations of like we're starting to we're starting projecting the trend in the wrong direction what are things that we can change now that will not let that happen yeah i mean it certainly shows that we're
147close we're working closer to the quick than what we are reporting right now yeah i would say in any financial projection the first three years are more reliable than the final two you don't have a handle on what cpi will actually be there's a lot of us there's a lot of assumptions and the assumptions can change dramatically both ways better than we thought worse than we thought so so if this is where we want to move which is what i would recommend for us to move our next step would be uh to adopt a resolution of the board saying we officially want to change this method this accounting methodology and they would do that for our fiscal year 22. so this fiscal year our financial reporting would do that um the way the way that
148actually happens is they will issue our fiscal year 22 financial reports but in that in that issuance there will be a a brief mention of a restatement of fiscal year 21. so anytime you change an accounting policy they have to restate last year's and then do this years and going forward so you have kind of an apples to apples comparison but they're not gonna go back years and like pretend as if this was changed five years ago they don't do that so so we would have a resolution and so i'd have i'll have that resolution for you at the may committee to review so you can take a look and see what is that what does that look like so i i definitely think it much more accurately respon reflects how we collect our money
149and there for subsequently spend it so i i'm in support of making this change does anyone have any questions any comments no this is something that some of us have talked about for quite a while and i think we have the opportunity now to do this without significant um swing if you will in the in the surplus deficit uh model here and i think it's the right thing to do it's it's just so much more accurate we've had confusion on this topic of uh but uh you know um fund balances for since i've been on the board and uh it'll just be nice to have that cleared up right and the the deficit that we're talking about next year is a one-time effect of making this change it's not an effect of us overspending in
150any way it is due to this change that we are making to more accurately reflect our finances so i think that this is um definitely the way to go so okay we will look forward to the budget amendment okay capital e capital project transition pathways yep um so also added was our transition pathways program so we bought the lease for that program we have to build out that space are we actually going to open bids on friday um so all this stuff is happening fast we're finally finally able to kind of put together a comprehensive what what this whole thing is really going to cost so sat down with mark and we looked at all the estimates from str our architect in terms of all the trades and then adding in all the stuff that
151i know we're gonna have to pay for in addition to just the trade so you have design costs um and then we have furniture uh and lockers that are going in that space so we have estimates in there we've got technology going in there so that's going to need you know projectors and phones and wiring and cabling and all that kind of stuff and uh something called an mdf or an idf i don't know um horrible kidding i know appliances so it'll have a kitchen in there so there's there's dishwasher fridges stove things um i don't know if it's a stove but that's something kelly will text me later and tell me what i should have said um and then vehicles so part of the part of this program it's not really necessarily part of
152like constructing the space but it is part of getting that ish getting the capital outlay ready because our capital threshold is over ten thousand is vehicles so part of running this program is three vehicles and so our plan um is one multi uh one white multi function activity bus with a wheelchair lift built in that we have already ordered uh like visual pio and have that on our see look at that profession excuse me kelly professional culinary kitchen um i'm sorry thank you kelly thanks kelly multi-function white us with a wheelchair uh because this is our serving our our students with with needs that we need to be able to accommodate that and then two minivans uh so the minivans we'll we'll see good luck buying new vinnie mans now we may have to drive
153to tennessee to find some used minivans which we will do this summer um but but really three vehicles to start so get on that committee yeah yeah um uh i mentioned that and then there there really are two contingencies one is an owner contingency that i have in there for 25 000 in case we were wrong about furniture or wrong about tech you'd be surprised how often we're wrong um and then there's just a general construction contingency of 150 000 which is just a 10 a standard 10 percent of the construction costs in case they find something so with all of that what i'm saying is this project is about 2.1 million it's possible this project could be 2 million if none of the contingencies we have in there are realized which would be great
154um but so it's a little more than i thought i thought we were going to be between 1.5 and 2. it's a little bit more but there's hoping that none of the consistencies we actually have to use and we'll be at two um so really the cost of this pro this project we're estimating 2.1 we'll know very specifically what this will be on friday when we get the bids opening okay and that'll be another action item for may's agenda to get that approved so that that work can get started any comments or questions thank you for that update and thank you kelly for keeping us honest moving on to the budget amendment so in order to do that um we need to put a little bit more money in our capital projects fund for this
155fiscal year um what i'm recommending is just adding a million dollars to the capital fund expenditure because we're going to incur some of these costs this fiscal year and we don't have a pressure provision for that are other things trending under budget yes would we maybe have room yes but this is not a risk i'm willing i really want to take it's very easy to just we're just adjusting one item by a million dollars in a capital projects fund which is essentially we're just going to transfer a million dollars more from o m into capital projects funds so um so in order to do that we have to do a budget amendment and i don't really like doing budget amendments there's some districts that do them every year i don't like doing that because we
156set our budget i want to really see how it performs um but this is the this is the time that i believe it's worth it to do an amendment um so do it to do a budget amendment is the same process required to do a budget adoption and what that means is before you can adopt the budget you have to have a public hearing and before you can do a public hearing you have to give a 30 days notice in the paper and you have to have this budget posted um the district office and online for people to view it's already on our website right now um and we we certainly have plenty of time and so my plan is we can do all of this at our june board meeting we can have a
157public hearing for adoption usually like when we're doing a budget our budget adoption we try to separate the hearing from the final adoption just so there's more space but with our current structure of meetings there's not really enough time we'd have to schedule especially but also adjusting just our capital projects by 1 million i don't know that i'm not as concerned about that because we may not actually spend much or any of that in fiscal year 22 this fiscal year but i just i want to be safer i want to be safe than sorry um with that so budget amendment is for june and because now we're wrapping up the fiscal year we need to do our fund transfers to pay for the capital projects we've already done or that we're wrapping up doing particularly
158the lhs field house so that 6.5 million project that we're not all the way done spending money on but we're almost there um right now we've spent i think this fiscal year i think 5.8 million ish we need to transfer money we have to get money into our o m funds so that we get transferred into our capital projects fund so the original plan was to transfer it's not technically a transfer it's called an abatement but it's essentially a transfer 2 million from a working cash fund into o m or i think i originally had it working cash to capital projects but i'm saying working cash to o m fund and then um and then we would take that other 4.8 million just from o m fund balance because the o m fund has a
159large enough fund balance to just transfer the rest into capital projects um so doing that abatement and all that abatement just requires just a board action at a meeting nothing else in addition to that so that additional million what i would like to do is transfer a million from our transportation fund into our operations and maintenance fund why the transportation fund one reason is i'm watching that fund balance and as since we got our fiscal year 21 numbers that fund balance has been growing a bit the last couple years because we haven't had a ton of transportation expenses right we were kind of shut down for a quarter of a year and then there wasn't a whole lot of transportation last school year we've had some but that that balance has been growing and so
160i don't want that to get too high to put us in a jeopardy of having some type of tax objection so if we transfer a million out of there into o m that will alleviate alleviate that risk i would say so so in order to do that transfer that's a that's um that's an operating funds transfer and so that actually does require a public hearing and then board adoption again i think we can do all of that in june so at our june meeting we would have a hearing for the budget amendment and we would also have a hearing for the transfer and then once you have those hearings you can both adopt the measurement and you can do the approve a resolution for the transfer okay that makes sense yes where can we find
161the um amended budget on the website it should be under business office financial financial reports and budget so it should be there it should be listed as the fiscal year 22 amended amended budget not there not there well i will check and make sure it is there i thought it was there so financial documents budgets daniel stanley business all right sorry i had a folder that i used to dump this stuff in um i'll make sure it gets up there so all right so we will look forward to the uh resolutions um and the public hearings for both the budget amendment and the fund transfers in the at the june meeting not the may meeting okay any further conversation on that okay we got all kinds of stuff we're gonna be we're almost done addressing
162in the uh yeah the next one is uh dan almost had to resuscitate me when i saw the numbers on this some medical and dental insurance renewal rates that have significantly increased yeah so we have our we got our final renewal rates um for insurance and they're not good um but we kind of knew they weren't going to be great um our ppo renewals at an 8.2 percent increase and our hmo renewals at a 7.6 increase uh good news our dental is a 2.3 decrease but the amount of money we spend on medical is much more than dental this is really for two simple reasons one is we've had bad losses in our program um we have that we have spent more so we're part of a night ball but the pool has spent more
163money on our claims than the money that we have contributed to those clients so we've had their bad losses for two years now and so they look at a 48 month span so we've had bad losses not unexpected with the pandemic i would suppose uh they're not covered related they're just other things um so we've had bad losses across ppo and hmo and the whole pool has two so it's not like the whole pool is great and we're terrible like there's been bad losses across the entire pool um how big is the pool uh well i should know this um dozens of school districts um i want to say 35 school districts ish i could be wrong um but a lot of a lot of school districts are part of the pool so um in
164addition to that which is more probably to your point was the cost of health services is significantly growing and so everything is costing more in the health services and that is i think much more understandable with the covid pandemic but that's something that we're realizing too so bad losses and health services costs are going up so can i ask a silly question why would ppo 350 be more cost more than ppo 300 it's a good question it's very they're very similar so from a underwriter perspective they would say it costs the same but technically there's a slight nuance difference so the difference between the reason why uh the ppo350 would cost just a fraction more than the 300 is the coinsurance level is different so on the ppo350 coinsurance which so the way that works
165is you hit your deductible first right and then once you hit your deductible then co-insurance kicks in and so then you pay a percentage so really the insurance doesn't pay anything up to your deductible and then after that until you hit your out-of-pocket max you share and so you so you could have a 90 10 split you could have an 80 20 you could have a 70 30. a 350 plan is a 90 90 10 split so that means insurance pays 90 of those costs the employee pays 10 percent of those costs the ppo 300 is a 80 20. okay that makes sense so that that but again an underwriter would say that's mathematical equivalent that's not to say one is better than the other they're very different and actually depending on your needs the
16680 20 split may be better because you could hit your odd pocket faster depending on what you got going on right so they're they're not it's not that the 90 times better than 80 20. it's just different i guess i was assuming they were similar plans just different deductibles and that's not the case yeah that makes sense and can i reconfirm that you had anticipated the some of these cost increases and had yeah so budgeted for them so our preliminary renewal was a 7.9 in the ppo and a 10.3 on the hmo we have far more higher participation in the ppo than the hmo um so our renewal came down in the html but it went up on the ppo the blended effect of that like when i just plug in everybody is about an
1678.3 on the preliminary renewal and surprisingly mathematically it's about an 8.3 still when you blend all that works together so i did have that in my projection so when we did our projections in march what month is this april when we did it last month was that last month did we do it in march or february i don't know whenever we did that i had the preliminary renewal numbers in there so i had um the higher numbers in there so those those numbers are in my right projections that's just i wanted to that while the numbers look high they were accounted for and they are high and they were kind of anticipated okay great any other questions on those okay moving on to the sr3 funds and the plan for what to do with that
168grant money yep so we all of our ducks are now in a row um so the s43 grant that we were allocated this is the american rescue plan that was done by the biden administration we were allocated half a million dollars essentially for that program and part of that requirement to get those grants is you have to have a plan and what i have for you is our plan there's not a whole lot of uh guidance on what your plan has to say it just has to be written and so we've done our best and we've kind of modeled what some other districts have done um but we wanted to keep it simple and straightforward and so we have our plan for how to use that money the requirement that was new for this grant
169that was different for sr1 and sr2 um is you have to pursue you have to spend um no less than 20 on addressing the lost instructional time due to the pandemic and so so we've identified at least that much for that and so that that amount of money is reflected in the social emotional learning interventionists and the math interventionists and the tutoring and the rest of that is for the hvac upgrades that were done uh last summer that was to increase ventilation at lhs that we identified um so we've already done that and so this will be used so the the money excuse me it's fun that you can use for anything from the very start of the pandemic through um september of 2024. so there's a wide breadth to that and we felt this
170is the best way to use those funds um so this is our plan um an additional part of this process is you have to uh get feedback and get feedback from your stakeholders and so actually you may have seen there's a thought exchange that went out today to solicit that feedback to give thoughts or other ideas for that and you could see that i encourage you all to participate because you are all stakeholders everybody that can hear my voice your stakeholder and you're encouraged to participate in that um to give us that feedback i think it's opened the end through this right it's open for a week for a week so next tuesday okay so it'll be open and we'll share it we'll have that information uh next time and then in order to adopt
171the board will have to adopt this plan and we have to put this on our website uh which we will and there has to be a hearing at our next meeting so at the may board meeting or yeah the may board meeting will have a hearing on this plan so anyone can again come in so a lot of hearings coming up um but that's how it does so once we get that done and adopted in may we'll file that and get i think we can get we should be able to get most if not all that money by the end of the fiscal year i know that email went out today will it also be shared on social media we've had that discussion um and i have not put it on social media yet but
172we are our thoughts were not to do that because that would make it open to anyone anywhere on the planet that wants to give us is there anything to prevent someone from um participating multiple times yes we have it set that um that you can only get in there once you can each person can only get in there once right you can go back in and add additional comments to the thought exchange yes you just can't repeat repeatedly okay you can expand on your ideas that's the nature of thought exchange is not just to answer a yes or no but to give your thoughts and then see what that might generate in other people's thinking and you can always go back in and look again and maybe comment on some new ideas but it is
173set each email address only gets one shot yes one one palette mary will there be a like reminder email towards the end of that week for people i'll be putting something in paw prints on friday and then i'll do one more reminder probably sunday or monday we're having a lot of activity it's it's very very that's good i'm glad to hear that yeah there's a lot of good good information okay was this sent to just parents of students it was sent to staff students and parents um if we i wasn't aware we wanted to share it with the board giving feedback on its own proposal so i i can certainly well i think it might be helpful to send it so that for so all the board members so they can see the dialogue absolutely
174going i just want to make sure i wasn't missing something absolutely i'll send it now i don't wait down here i'd like to see the dialogue i i would yeah for those who have not used this application it it's interesting you'll just get a taste of that if nothing else all right so is the idea once we get all the feedback if it doesn't align with the plan here that we updated before we send it out is that how it works good okay yeah is the cost for the interventionists for their supplies or is that for salaries because i thought we couldn't use extra funds on salaries you can absolutely use that for funds and salaries and then this is just a one shot so is what do we do after well it's a i
175think a great question excellent question and it's an important thing for us to address so that there's no misunderstanding among our board or among the community of what will happen [Music] next so do you want to address that or not really these positions were hired and intended for the duration of which the funding would exist for them and the spending on that funding goes into next fiscal year um it we already have those positions here and so we it would be for this year it's free just like like for instance they're just upgrades we did last summer like it will go towards that money that we've already spent so it's for this school year for this fiscal year ending in june yeah so if we feel that those positions are still needed and required we
176will need to look within the budget and figure out how to shift some things to continue to offer those services should they be needed is that a fair statement yep you can do almost anything you just can't do everything right so you have to figure out what are the priorities which we're we're figuring that out and just all kinds of budget stuff right now yeah uh so we're we're in the throes of all of that yes it will be looked at within the bigger picture of the entire budget and how to meet the needs if we still feel that there's learning loss that needs to be addressed i didn't mean to cut you off go ahead you said it okay i mean i think we're going to have a lot of data to look at
177and to see how effective was it how much was it utilized and where does it align and our priorities of closing the gap because we have not closed the app yet right okay any other casey rooney facilities and questions on this thank you for your patience and again for the kind of redo of our committee meeting so thank you but nothing thank you there was a lot of work put into uh the facilities and finance information for this board meeting so i think barring any other questions or comments that is it for facilities and finance okay thank you moving on to number six the illinois association of school boards update from mr dr benson thank you uh just a couple quick things i'm not sure if everyone got this email but i'm going to describe
178what it is just in case um the as you all know i'm the representative for iasb and as part of that role i sit on the resolutions group that votes on the resolutions each year in november we've had conversations on those we get the booklet coming out in july or august or something like that and we review those and then we vote um i i cast the vote on behalf of the board uh that process actually starts much earlier um and i just wanted to draw it to your attention they're actually um asking for resolutions if a board wants to submit a resolution we can do that if somebody has some concept or some idea that you really feel is worthy of getting the iasb to support to get behind and and really push that
179with state legislators that kind of thing to try to get school code change try to get laws changed that type of type of thing so that process starts now the uh i believe the deadline for submission is in june is june 22nd is the deadline for proposals so what i would say is somebody has an idea let's bring this up at programming personnel in may so that if we want to actually create a resolution we can go through that process see how that documentation might look we can review it again in june and then submit it we'd still have time to submit that uh by the deadline so just wanted to bring that to your attention um and then i also wanted to add on it's not specific to iasb but i've been asked to
180comment um as you know this meeting was scheduled rescheduled to tonight because of the ed red meeting that occurred last night and i just wanted to give a brief description of what that is and and as much for the public as anything ed red is a an education advocacy group that's uh comprised of a number of school districts i believe like 80 school districts in the chicagoland area um and it advocates on behalf of all of us uh on education-related items almost specifically almost i can't think of the term i'm looking for but related to springfield related to the legislators in springfield uh last night was a celebration of their 50th anniversary which was was interesting and it's basically a dinner meeting with a rather some interesting presentations i was there cara benjamin was there
181don carmichael was there dr herman was there as an example we sat at a table with uh with daniel uh dedic i think is how you pronounce his name he's a representative from part of this area as well as senator adrian johnson who was at our table as well um and had great conversation also one of the board members from uh district 73 joined us and a board member from uh your former district 125 uh stevenson as well as the business chief business official from uh 125. so it's an interesting conversation that we had to have and uh share and uh discuss education related things whatnot um one thing of note as you came in there's sort of a social gathering up front and uh they often have uh small groups of musicians or performers
182from different schools perform at this one they had pre-recorded one so they had a screen on the side uh and uh one of the times i turned around and looked and there's vernon hill's uh wind ensemble performing for the for the group so we were we were represented there thank you mary for submitting that yeah had one from each school yeah yeah so i died it was kind of noisy and kind of crowded so i didn't hear all of the different groups but i did happen to know this for vernon hills when i was there they just uh again just the keynote was uh dr carmen ayala the state uh superintendent of schools uh gave a presentation talking about seo and and coming out of the pa endemic and whatnot and then they had a
183an seo panel and adrian johnson senator johnson was on that list group representative michelle mussman who's also the chair of the education committee and a couple other education related groups was on that group she actually won an award last night uh and then the superintendent from district 15 uh laurie heintz uh michael d bartolo from from district 21 the uh he's the student services um assistant soup and uh jody uh i'm gonna butcher this name um murgali murgo bree burgly yeah and cara carla owen uh was a board member from district 207 um i'm sorry uh dr merkley is the assistant superintendent um michael d bartolos the csbo the their dan version of dan so it was um a good evening and it's nice to see board members and administrators and whatnot from around the
184area that you don't necessarily get to see all the time so uh it's it's a great uh a great group and uh happy to be um you know part of the the team supporting that so can i jump in on a few things uh they presented on onegoal.graduation.com uh has funding for illinois tutoring initiative so tutoring is available statewide their isp has a coach mentor program that they are promoting affinity groups there's affinity group training available there's virtual training for resilience education at childhoodresilience.org which apparently is uh it's being well received but uh a number of you anybody here can go on if you want i can make that available to you the link um but it's an opportunity to receive training for free um to improve our uh ability to respond [Music] and then
185social emotional learning hubs are being created in the state of illinois uh there's one for our region that's going to be available and then also i was challenged by the executive board member from district 73 there's going to be two executive board member positions opening and he said hey somebody from d128 should think about that so i promised him i would bring that up uh so not one but two possibilities to get a board member through or on the unread executive board their feeling is that cook county is very well represented in lake county is not as well represented so they're looking for people so if anybody is interested i can tell you very little about it but i can find out a lot from joel because he's he's got his fingers everywhere he's uh
186he's very well connected it was interesting doctor i really as you mentioned a lot of her presentation was talking about the resources that the state's working hard to make available to districts to individuals to professionals to to whatever so there were a lot of things there and i took a few of those notes as well so there was also if i may add um a link shared to um let's see i have it pulled up right here childhoodresilience.org which uh is a a well on my phone i took a photograph so let me see if i can kind of that's the training one that's the training yes so it's to in case this wasn't mentioned so it's an online training uh in order to inform um educators parents any other members of a school district
187on uh trauma-informed practices so super relevant to uh life is the most pandemic so great thank you thank you for those updates um is there any seat all update there's actually not okay perfect um future agenda items for discussion uh if i might add you might have noticed that we discussed the renewal of the e-learning plan at the april committee meeting and we were to schedule a hearing and your adoption of that plan we postponed that for until may there was some pending legislation that could have perhaps lessened the requirements of that renewal we consulted with dr michael carner uh the regional lake county regional superintendent of schools who advise us to just go ahead with the renewal of that plan as we had presented it to you and so that will come with a
188public hearing at the main meeting another public hearing lots of public hearings yeah related to the renewal of the e-learning plan as is and once we renew that even if legislation changes we will have adhered to the recommendations that could be present in that new legislation as well thank you i forgot to mention um if there is any board member that uh does have any ideas for resolutions if we're going to discuss it at the main meeting please reach out to jim and denise so that we can put it on the agenda and make space for it yeah and don't have to do but just if you do yeah it would be nice so that we have it on the agenda yeah at fnf committee uh the vernon township energy resilience commission um we were
189supp or we're going to have a meeting with uh verity on thursday there was a meeting it was the same night as the meeting that we had just last what was that wednesday but so i wasn't able to go to that one but after we meet with verity we'll be able to update it to fnf lisa president okay any other future agenda items to discuss if not can i please have a motion uh to convene an executive session for the purpose of discussing collective negotiating matters under 5a lcs 120 slash 2c2 and employment of an employee 5ilcs120 2c1 so moved second roll call from key hi sorry hi cole carney hi rooney hi jackson hi benjamin aye carmichael hi great we are uh convene it's uh 9 34. let's do just a five six minute
190bio break we'll um convene an executive session in five minutes okay we um had a motion and a second to return to open session at 10 49 pm um can i ask for a motion i move to approve the last chance agreement as discussed in closed session do i have a second second thank you roll call please rooney [Music] um can i have a motion to adjourn please move to adjourn second thank you roll call please poor careful that's right no worries hi benjamin hi hi michael hi hi hi you're me hi thank you we are adjourned