February 2022 Committee meetings of the D128 School Board with Audio Description

001thank you recording uh good evening and happy valentine's day to everybody i'd like to call this meeting of the program of personnel committee to order uh we will start with the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god i want to start first by welcoming everybody to our meetings this evening meetings that's plural there's two meetings tonight for those who have not attended our committee meetings before i want to provide a quick overview these meetings this first one the program and personnel committee and the facilities and finance committee which will be immediately after are committee meetings designed as an opportunity for the board to learn and discuss various topics in preparation for the regular board meeting that takes place

002later in the month we start with the program and personnel committee which i chair and typically follow this meeting immediately uh after that with the facilities and finance led by chairperson casey rooney here to my left as we follow the open meetings uh act rules both of these meetings are open to the public and provide opportunities for public comment which we will get to shortly however because these committee meetings are committee meetings the board will not and cannot take any official action or vote on any motion tonight regular meeting later in the month is when we have the opportunity to take any official action these meetings just like any board meetings are not opportunities for open public dialogue these are official meetings held in the public and provide time on the agenda for members of

003the public to comment during the public comment period all other discussion takes place between board members in the district administration on the stage the agenda tonight we did the pledge we will have public comments shortly we will go through covet 19 metrics and testing update we will uh review and discuss uh the culture of care covert 19 response plan we will look at the board document management sys management software uh an online platform for superintendent evaluation we have a number of personnel items uh to review and a series of uh board policies to look over for second reading uh prior to voting on in uh later in the month we'll do a brief uh review of the january committee summary and uh discuss any future agenda items so we will start um now under the

004public comment period first i want to say by saying we appreciate any and all public comments we receive at our meetings and encourage people to participate in this opportunity anytime you have feedback you would like to provide to this board we ask that anyone wishing to address a board please sign in if you have not done so we have some of the names up here already and you will be recognized and come to the podium as you're recognized to address the board when addressing the board we'd like you to state your name and please limit your comments to three minutes per person you will hear an alert at that time or you'll notice a timer and we'll ask you to end your comments so that others may be heard we want to hear as many

005people as we possibly can we'd like to provide this opportunity for as many people to speak so therefore we're extending our public comment period to a maximum of 120 minutes we rarely go over our normal 30 minute minimum set by board policy but we feel it's appropriate to extend this limit tonight while still providing time for the board to discuss items on the agenda some of which will be of interest to all of you in addition we'll be calling people in the order that you signed in rotating individuals from each stakeholder group so we'll have an opportunity to hear from each stakeholder group the parents the students that type of thing we will also prioritize the in-person comments so those of you who came tonight and if we have time before the 120 minute limit

006we will have all emails any and all email comments read into the record uh we can now however assure you that every board member has the opportunity to read all email comments submitted so we we make that commitment to you you should also note that we do not respond to any comments or questions during the public comment period nor will we engage in any discussion with any individual that chooses to speak during this public comment period this is our normal protocol nothing to worry and any response to any specific questions or requests will be provided by either the board and or the district administration within a reasonable time frame after the meeting concludes [Music] lastly it goes without saying that everyone in attendance is expected to conduct themselves and uh with respect and civility towards

007others as outlined in our board policies so with that we will uh commence with the uh invitation for public comment this evening to make it very smooth um we'll be calling up the first speaker and then saying who the second and third are so they can stand behind the podium so they're ready to go and keep the speakers moving along as quickly as possible so i'd like to start with john hassert who's speaking as a parent after him will be callie hill who's speaking as a student and following that will be anna dre who's speaking as a community member and then i will let you know who's after anna excuse me anna um as we progress through the list good evening thank you for uh the opportunity to speak here this evening my name is

008john hassert i have a daughter here at uh libertyville high school and a uh my youngest daughter is in uh at butterfield i'm here to recommend that you guys eliminate the mandatory mask policy uh preferably tonight but at this point there is no there's no reason to continue it um the the only reason i have a policy like this is if or to continue that policy as if the metrics in the state of illinois are are different or better than corresponding states or countries around the world and that's just not the case so it if if you cannot provide data you cannot provide actual benefits to why you're doing what you're doing or why we have this policy there's really no reason to continue it um so yeah i'm just going to leave it at

009that there's a lot of people here that can uh provide a lot more data for you but like i said what i'm asking for what i've been asking for for a long long time is actual benefits to the policies that you're implementing don't just tell us there's benefits um provide data that supports the benefits and then compare those to the costs there's been a lot of costs associated with what what has been done for the last two years no one wants to talk about that we need to talk about that you guys need to evaluate what it is evaluate what those costs are relative to the benefits so thank you very much good evening my name is callie hill and i'm a freshman here at lhs i also have a brother hunter who is a

010sophomore and an older sister who graduated in 2020 my grandparents are graduates and high school sweethearts from libertyville high school i have six aunts and uncles and three cousins who have all graduated from libertyville i am one of many students who have participated in my right to protest against the mass mandate and how wrong our district has gotten the ruling on february 4th we want to free be free of mass we want to see each other's faces many have spent the last two years of our high school careers behind mass many of us have spent our entire high school career behind mass we want to see your classmates smile we want to see the awe in our teammates faces when we sink the game-winning shot we want to see the examining hear the laughter between

011friends at the dance it is a crucial part of our learning to be able to read emotions on our faces we have been unable to do this we are done being forced to be hidden behind a mask for two years we have walked these hallways and sat in classrooms emotionless this is not the high school experience we have dreamed or want any longer we as students have given up so much in these last two years graduations proms field trips sports just to name a few but this is is this really about our health anymore other schools have continued to have all these events and in person learning with no math or mandates stop hiding behind the phrase the masking has allowed libertyville and vernon hills high school to remain open and in-person learning and extracurriculars

012it no longer applies if it is truly about our health you would also be considering our mental health depression suicide and substance abuse have all risen in teens over the last two years in a direct correlation from quarantines mandates and mass our emotional and social health is damaged over 500 districts within the state have changed their position and made mass optional ours has not is not even important enough to schedule a meeting isn't your job to serve the students and families of this committee if not who are you serving you've sat in silence for the last week and is unacceptable i ask our school board that we have elected and our administration to reconsider the position as soon as possible wait until february 28th is unacceptable for many of us time is running out of

013our high school career do what is right and take action now give those who are comfortable ready and ready the ability to smile once again thank you public applause continues thank you for your comments i i want to remind everybody that please continue to wear your face covering when you come to the podium thank you and i also want to um remind the next speaker so they can be prepared after we hear from mr a dale sherman who's speaking as a parent followed by emily bissing who's speaking at a student as a student followed by marnie mess massero excuse me speaking as a parent good evening board i'm anna dre i think you all know me i came here tonight to thank you for your leadership i appreciate how you've always incorporated the voices of

014the old parents community and members not just the loudest voices as evid i appreciate how your dedication to this community as evidenced by your being here on valentine's night i'm sure there's other places you'd rather be tonight listening to hours of comments at a meeting where if a member had bothered to educate them themselves they would know you legally can't vote tonight so thank you for for being here i know it's a treat for you to have community engagement like this far too often you're left to make decisions without any input as nobody bothers to show up at the meetings here's hoping this interest stays active when important topics like budgets come up for discussion later on i also came tonight to apologize to you i've been watching what's going on in the community and

015it's not right your neighbors you've answered to call the service and you have been vilified and name-called by extremists in this community and it's not right and i'm sorry that's happening to you i also wanted to tell y'all i uh i went got a haircut on monday after the student protest and one of the children who had um decided not to be educated that day got her hair cut before i did and the woman cutting her hair asked her honey why'd you do it and her answer was well all my friends were in there think about this what's going on here and who's pushing this agenda it's interesting to note that in all of the parent-generated noise other than a small group of students the students are happy to be back in school getting an

016in quality and pers a high quality in-person education and that is due in no small part to your leadership and your efforts to which i say job well done good evening my name is dale sherman i am a parent and a taxpayer um you got it wrong and the process you took to getting it wrong you got wrong you're human beings certainly all of us make mistakes it's not too late to undo this mistake but owning up to the mistake is where it begins so the how the process was wrong transparency is the cornerstone of trust if you want this community to trust you you've got to be transparent you're also legally obligated to be transparent sitting in your seats so how a decision of this import was made without transparency is just shocking was

017there a vote if there was a vote why wasn't it done out in the open if there wasn't a vote who's running the show is the board running the show on this topic or is its employee running the show on this topic when there will be a vote please let us know assuming one hasn't happened we'll all be there we'll be there for the vote and we encourage you to vote to reverse course it's not too late to reverse course why is the course wrong you're not following the law the email that was put out about we're supporting the most narrow path that means you're taking the path that exposes you to the most liability exposure to the most lawsuits and there's a massive jointer that's going to take place here and creates the most

018um exposure for the board and for the community we'd much rather see that money go into teachers and and spending there much rather see that money going into resources for the students let's not pay lawyers right let's pay our teachers and pay and pay for our students resources that's where it should all go the ruling was very clear from the downstate judge judge grishall that judge stated the law very clearly and found the governor's order executive order 18 to be invalid and unenforceable and the emergency rules promulgated by isbe and is illinois department of health to be invalid the joints guidance to be invalid so all the bases on which you claim to have for this policy for the last i don't know not the last two years but the last period that the schools

019have been open it's all blown up so on what are you possibly basing the policy that you have now 520 plus districts around the state that's two-thirds or better have all gone mass optional in response to this ruling it's clear as day what the law is [Applause] d70 went mass optional they're a feeder district oak grove one mask optional carmel is masked optional the appellate court didn't save you with a stay the appellate court's not going to save you with their ruling and by the way let's face it pritzker wants to lose he wants to lose that because it's the best outcome for him he can say he fought for his chief constituency and then say it's those darn courts they're the ones who are letting these kids go mass free perish the thought so

020it's not too late to reverse course and we encourage you to please do so and do so in an open and public and transparent way thank you hi my name is emily bissing and i'm a sophomore here at lhs can you please put your mask back on please i'm talking yes no even when you're talking please thank you okay uh please no outbursts from the audience so we can hear the speaker thank you we will add time sorry as many of us high schoolers know our high school years have been cut short due to covet my freshman year was boring as boring could be my sophomore year however has been a little bit better from going to homecoming and sporting events but all i want to do is to go back to school massless we

021have been dealing with mass for over two years and i think i speak from many of the students here at lhs and vernon hills thank you dr colentes and our administrators for always being supportive i'm here to fight for our civil rights on behalf of the students of d128 for going mask optional a group of 30 to 40 people including myself have joined together every day for the past week standing outside of lhs getting led in the auditorium to talk to talk with dr k he has done a great job of communicating with us and letting us into two classrooms without mask and no social distancing none of us have coveted symptoms and we are still healthy maths do not prevent the spread of covid for covert will always be around and everyone will get

022it at some point and another in their life it just goes to show that we should have an option to either be massless or if they choose remaster to wear mass during school if to the people that are massless will not bully or harass them at all that is their opinion and no one will judge them many people want to do this protest but they are scared that their friends and teachers will be upset with them i've gotten many texts calls snapchats saying that they want to do this but they're scared during this week i've lost many friends due to this because it's they think about they think it's what side i'm on which i've repeatedly said that it's not about that it's about my civil rights my friends had not spoken me since last

023week before all this happened during this my mental health has rapidly declined because all week i've been in one classroom no teacher and not actually getting taught as much as i love all the people in the classroom this past week i needed to go to class to see all my friends but i thought it was important to stand up for what i believe is right i hope you guys make the right decision and then you guys are representing us in all your decisions thank you public applause continues following this parent will be student kylie christensen and then parent aaron khan good evening board my name is marnie navarro i am a proud lifelong resident of libertyville a graduate of district 70 in district 128 i took my top-notch education and became an attorney and specifically

024a litigator thank you for the forum for public comment here this evening i come here to you to give you a different perspective both as a constituent taxpayer but as an attorney and i i want to share with you my deep concerns from a legal perspective about the decisions the board has made and continues to make on a daily basis piggybacking on my fellow parent dale sherman a fellow attorney's comments the legal basis and foundation upon which district 128 is unwisely um sticking to this masking mandate is predicated upon a foundation that has been held null and void specifically the court in a 29 pound not 29 page detailed reason reasoning found judge grishall found that the basis upon which it was predicated is null and void that pritzker used the executive branch to legislate

025in violation of separation of powers doctrine this is made more egregious by the fact that district 28 was a named defendant in that lawsuit notwithstanding this district 128 has doubled down on stupid and continues to violate the due process rights of all of our students [Applause] knowing that they are bound by this order and continuing to violate not just the the due process rights of the students who are um being segregated and disciplined as this brave young student just spoke to momentarily before me it also exposes this district to more certain liability um i and others have propounded foia requests against this board and once i get those documents i can assure you that there will be legal challenges to the bonds behind this school board our bonds the district's bonds will be unduly implicated

026and imperiled and each of you board members jeopardizes your tort immunity and risks personal liability you are needlessly and senselessly wasting our taxpayer dollars and jeopardizing our district um as you've heard more than 530 districts of 879 statewide have gone mass optional that's over 60 percent you're on the wrong side here it is nonsensical given pritzker lifting the statewide mass mandate to persist in this course of action but it is not too late please you are not listening to the judiciary you are not listening to your constituents many of whom who are here tonight to whom are you listening i beg of you that you act now before you make a bad situation worse that you promptly call a special meeting where you are able to vote and make masks optional at district 128 before

027the lawyers and the courts myself included make you thank you public applause continues kylie christensen hi hi i'm kylie christensen i'm a freshman at lhs from a personal standpoint i would like to say being mask has made a big impact in my learning ability ever since i was younger i've struggled with learning things at a normal pace i would have to learn things a lot slower and have to get help from multiple teachers just to learn one subject being math has mainly impacted me because i'm a lip reader and mainly read people's lips to understand and help interpret things sorry um being mass was already hard enough but now since i want to um voice my opinion not only am i far behind but i have to teach myself which is a lot harder i

028would also like to state that during this time protesting i would never say anything rude or out of place to anyone i think everyone should have their own opinions and everyone should voice theirs but instead we are worthy try each other trying to prove what is right and what is wrong during this time parents and kids have decided to harass and bully people online because of the opinions which is not right and should not be allowed public applause continues we have parent aaron khan followed by student nikki bursack followed by parent jennifer gifford good evening board my name is erin khan i'm a lifelong libertyville resident and a proud graduate of libertyville high school i am a taxpayer a parent and a concerned resident my husband is also a graduate of libertyville high school and

029also a local attorney i would like to discuss the issues at hand from my professional perspective i have been a local realtor for 16 years i worked through the housing boom the housing crisis and every market in between i'm on the front lines of illinois's mass exodus and it was never more apparent to me than in 2020 between july 2020 and july 2021 more than 122 000 people moved from our state that's the entire population of springfield it marks the largest exodus from illinois in our state's history the people are voting with their feet in march of 2020 cobot arrived while everyone else including the teachers retreated to the safety of their homes i was considered essential and i continued to work i had to wear a mask before it was mandated gloves signed kobit

03019 disclosures to enter properties carry hand sanitizer and bleach wipes to every showing it went on by april of 2020 i had a number of listings coming on the market right here in libertyville and for the first time in my career every single one of my sellers left the state at this time our children were receiving a subpar education online and employers were telling their workforce that they would be home indefinitely libertyville's real estate market has always been somewhat insulated from the real estate pitfalls and i credit this mostly to our educational system people want to live in our district and it keeps our property values high it's proving not to be enough oppressive mandates have been placed on everyone and have crushed our small business owners i'm on the board of directors for main

031street liberty though i know how badly our small business owners are suffering and they're the backbone of this community the decisions of this board and finance committee have real-life impact on every taxpayer district 128 has now made national headlines for segregating students denying them their education their rights to due process while participating in intimidation tactics and if if that weren't bad enough you've now made major financial decisions without complying with the open meetings act you have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers you work for us you answer to us [Applause] your personal opinions are irrelevant this is the job you took you work for the people you listen to your constituents you uphold the law you don't vote for whether or not you're going to uphold the law that's not up for a vote you

032answer to the parents and you answer to the taxpayers you are public servants and you the people are speaking do you hear us are you listening how loud do we have to be until you hear what we are telling you our town is in peril two-thirds of our property taxes go to these schools and you're failing us please wrap up your comments stop dragging this district's prestigious name through the mud stop aligning yourselves with division the solution is actually quite simple stop mandating people thank you public applause continues good evening my name is nicolina bursach and i'm a sophomore at libertyville high school first i'd like to thank dr k along with all the staff at lhs that have helped my peers and i continue our academic journey this past week i'd also like to

033thank mr and mrs gay for being more than generous and going out of their way for supporting all of us and all and all of our parents who have defended and stood up for us along with many hate brought by other parents and students i feel that district 128 should be masked optional over the past two years of cobin masks have not proven to stop the spread of coven 19. as a community it is time to learn that the virus is here to stay and we need to learn to move forward cover 19 is around zero percent danger for students my age and for students with high risk of the virus they are able to get the coven 19 vaccine if they haven't already getting vaccinated is a choice just like wearing a mask should

034be in america we have freedoms and are able to make choices for ourselves we are all lucky to not be living in a country where the government controls every move of the people my dad lived in a communist country and was able to come to america for freedom and to give his kids a good life now look at what this country and community has gone to not being able to even have a choice to wear a piece of cloth or not with all that said i know that i can speak for myself along with many other students and parents who feel that it is time to move on and continue to live our lives without being scared of a virus it is time to get back give back our freedom and it is time to

035make masks of district 128 optional thank you [Applause] public applause continues we have parents jennifer gifford followed by student sarah sterner followed by parent kim bissing good evening my name is jennifer gifford i'm a previous district one a district 70 teacher a parent of four two of whom are still in the local schools and a 25-year tax paying village resident the population is finally realizing that many of the precautions taken two years ago proved to be unnecessary it was reasonable in march of 2020 to pause and be cautious as no one fully understood with what exactly we were dealing however it has been known for a long time now that thankfully children are not only at extremely low risk from covid but they are also not major vectors in spreading it we're also at a

036point where everyone who is interested has had the opportunity to be vaccinated and they may continue to wear a mask if they so choose it's time to lift this requirement for as frustrating as it has been these last couple of years i understood that due to our governor's directions and threats you are all in a difficult position but this past week finally gave you a chance an open door to say enough and allow your parents to be given their rights back i cannot believe that not only did you not take this opportunity to lead and set an example but you doubled down while numerous other districts chose to lead the way be courageous or i might even add daring you chose to cower [Applause] public applause continues my husband and i intentionally picked this community

037as a place we wanted to grow roots and raise our children and a big reason for that was the excellence of the schools when i hear from my empty nester long time liberty resident neighbors they are shocked with the state of our schools just further validation that things have definitely shifted through the years i'm upset with how poorly this past week was handled actually i'm embarrassed i'm suggesting that you reconsider your position and allow us as parents to choose what is best for our kids something i would encourage you to consider as a statement i once read by a great institution we think creatively explore options and are guided by evidence and reason and for those who don't recognize it that's one of our missions as a district it's time we change our actions or

038stop claiming to be something that we're not thank you public applause continues student sarah sterner hello my name is sarah stern and i am a senior at libertyville high school we have been in this for soon to be two years and every student at our school has complied with the mandate for long enough to flatten the curve copa 19 is an endemic virus and will continue to stay with us for the rest of our lives being a student and wearing my mask all day is hard when my mask is on my glasses get fogged making it hard to see what the teacher is presenting it's also frustrating to wear my mask and gym class especially when i become sweaty this leads to bacteria building on my face according to town hall a group of parents

039conducted a study they found that throughout the day their child's face mask became contaminated with harmful bacteria their children's health was being harmed by wearing masks teenagers have a 99.9 chance of survival if they contact this virus this being said many of us are okay with not wearing our masks if one is worried about contacting the back contracting the virus and then transmitting it to someone else they may wear one wearing one versus not wearing one is the value of freedom that we should have another reason this one being more personal is that children in the developmental stage of language speech and social cues need to see faces to learn i take part in the preschool program here and understand the importance of children seeing faces dr lisa scott explains it best faces are arguably

040the most important social stimulus for humans and likely the most effective tool for promoting and supporting infant learning just like books our education tools used to promote language development and reading faces are also educational tools during early development needing to see teachers faces does not go away when you get older others and i need to see our teachers faces in order to understand what they are trying to enunciate and say one time this year i asked my teacher a question he said if only you could see the face i'm making under my mask then you might be able to figure out what i'm hinting at for these reasons mentioned i ask you to consider voting to make mass growing optional thank you public applause continues hello my name is kim bissing and my daughter is

041a sophomore at um at libertyville high school i want to thank the board for your dedication and hard work i know this is a volunteer position and requires an incredible amount of your personal time i'm not going to talk about the science of covid and how since last august thousands of school districts across the country have been successful in masking optional for their students and faculty i'm also not going to talk about masks and why we should have an option like 560 and counting other districts in illinois have decided in the last week what i am going to talk about is how the board's recent decision to continue to make mass required has created a huge divide in our community and among our children with judge grishall's decision you had the ability to take an

042off-ramp from this highway to nowhere we have been on you could have done what so many other neighboring districts have done and decide to go mask optional instead you decided to stay the course down the lonely dark road towards nowhere for our children this week who have decided to remain maskless there has been limited teacher instruction they have had their pictures plastered on social media called future criminals and even murderers my daughter's friends have stopped talking to her because they don't know what to say don't agree with her or maybe both when people say you are fighting against wearing a mask nope that isn't it i made sure to educate everyone i talked to about this including my daughter this is about the fifth amendment right of due process and how the legislative judicial and

043executive branches work the mandate or executive order order you are following does not follow due process and a judge has agreed you may be waiting on any decisions the appellate court makes this week but regardless this is going to go to the illinois supreme court two weekends ago you could have spent time discussing the mitigations that have already been put in place for our district reviewing and updating the culture of care plan and communicating a path forward instead with a small percentage of other school districts you engaged with legal teams and filed an appeal to the judge's order fighting the judge's ruling as a board member it is your responsibility to listen to your constituents and make recommendations on their behalf not your own personal beliefs i challenge you to be daring put our children

044and their emotional wellness first and immediately develop a path forward for our children and community public applause continues next up we have student caleb chris christians excuse me it's handwritten it's hard to read then after caleb we have [Music] parent mara and after miss sears we have student caitlyn jones hello i am caleb christensen a junior at larry deville high school i am speaking today because i believe that district 128 should become mass optional we will never be able to run away from covet this all started in the year 2019 my freshman year second semester i haven't had a normal year of high school yet without masks and i am a junior already kovan is now turned into symptoms similar to a common cold as it was weakened from multiple variants just the people who

045are at high risk or simply just want to wear a mask should have the right to wear one masks have been proven to only protect the person wearing it not the people surrounding them you guys also didn't call for an emergency meet board meeting even though our school's across the news when is it appropriate to call for an emergency board meeting we are being spoken about across the nation but our own board this that is supposed to represent our community didn't even speak on this topic before today also always um even though we have been completely respectful for our protests we've continued to be bullied and harassed by our fellow classmates and even adults on facebook and like other social media networks um douglas had started a petition for optional masks at district 128 and

046that in in that over a thousand people have signed it the school blocked the petition from being able to access on the school wifi for a short period of time the school board was voted on from the community community so why shouldn't you so shouldn't you guys listen to the community when there are over a thousand people that want optional mass then you lisa hessel signed your name and commented on a petition of no optional masks at lhs saying thank you for taking the time to make your voices heard the district welcomes welcomes and continues to receive input regarding this issue we will take and we'll take into consideration that the input as we make any adjustments to our plan when i saw it it was at 20 signs or maybe even less when you

047signed it you also have to sign your name to comments you must have signed it you taking the input from a petition with 20 signs just shows how you are promasked and i hope that one day we will get someone that represents different parts of the community community and not just one part of it also as president shouldn't you aren't you supposed to remain unbiased in being in the board and i think you should be the one enforcing it the most when you are the president there are also sporting events like the hockey games where there is a full set of fans without masks many people who are against this process were seen without a mask at a variety of games hockey games even though we're in school and all throughout the news i still

048want to say thank you to all the teachers that helped and gave up their time to stay in the room with us as we worked with or without maths without a mandatory mass mandate people will still bring covenant into the school we need to get back to normalcy code is here to stay making mass mandatory in our school isn't going to change anything when anyone can go no mask in any indoor places thank you [Applause] public applause continues hi there my handwriting might not have been the best but it's mark sears thank you mark i apologize i'm speaking as a parent a former graduate but most importantly a teacher the largest high school district in this state district 214 has gone masked option we've had zero issues whatsoever [Applause] i asked the mate about 70

049of our students are still masked that is their choice thirty percent are not with thirteen thousand students in our district thirty percent decided for themselves that masked are not needed get your act together vote this thing down public applause continues my name is caitlin jones and i'm a freshman at libertyville high school and one of the many students exercising my right to protest for two years we have lived in a fee in constant fear of a curona virus everywhere we turn there are people telling us that if we don't follow these outlandish rules exactly then we are going to kill ourselves and everyone around us for two years i have tried to follow the rules thinking maybe i will finally be able to move on with my life but now i realize that i have

050to stand up for myself and let you know that these masks are not helping anyone they are doing more harm than good i find it near impossible to breathe while having my mask on wearing a mask for almost eight hours a day is held not healthy or sanitary we should be entertaining our mass almost every hour but how many people actually do that we are breathing in the same rooms all day and it's disgusting i love to play the food i've been in band since fourth grade and i'm in the symphonic band here at the school however when corona came and everyone got locked up bands only became a chore zoom band is awful and i was glad when i finally came to lhs and i would at least be able to be in person

051but playing in a mask is exhausting i cannot get enough air and i begin to feel light-headed and dizzy it is painful to play my instrument with my mask on not to mention that the playing masks do absolutely nothing to protect us from anything there are massive holes in the side and in the middle of them which will not let anything in we live in america we have the right we have certain rights and freedoms that we should be able to and we should have the freedom to choose what we want to do with our life if we don't if we don't wear a mask it is not going to suddenly make everybody else's masks useless it has been proven that the forced separation and isolation of people has increased mental problems among children and

052teens many teenagers are suddenly are naturally social people and the many coven measurements have isolated them increasing feelings of depression and loneliness an increase in suicide and mental health problems among teens has coincided with the pandemic personally i'm not a social person but i even i have felt the strain of distance from other people people are divided pushed apart by differences where differing views may have once been celebrated or at least accepted there is now fear that if you let someone else know how you think or feel you will be rejected and ridiculed people are scared to speak out for fear of what might happen to them and that is not okay we should be able to decide for ourselves whether or not we want to wear a mask it should be my choice not

053someone else's [Applause] public applause continues next up we have parent amy franz followed by student keegan jones followed by parent kristin griffith good evening board members administrators teachers students and community members my name is amy franz and i have three children my two sons graduated during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 and i have a daughter lily who is a freshman some of you know me but for those of you who do not i come to you with a variety of perspectives i am a two-term board of education member from oak grove district 68 i'm a third grade teacher in a neighboring district a parent and a graduate of this high school i understand from a personal perspective how difficult it is to make decisions as a board of education member especially in a

054pandemic at oak grove we chose to prioritize planning using specific data points to support our plan with consistent transparent communication always keeping our staff and our students in the forefront of every decision that we made i am disappointed to say that i have not seen this happen in this district for the last two years i could spend all of my time talking about the devastating effects that this has had on my own children on my students and on many others but that is in the past now we have an opportunity to act in the future in a different way one that involves planning and not waiting on others the governor the lawyers the other school districts to make our decisions we all know that these mandates and the pandemic are going to end soon and

055we need to be prepared we currently have two big problems as i see it we have a court case that we are a name defendant in with a court ruling that has told you that the governor mandating certain pandemic mitigations is not legal and requires due process to enforce it is your obligation to to mitigate risk for this district and to follow the law second the district continues to place students including my daughter into a disciplinary process that they were not given due process for i acknowledge this is not easy and i acknowledge as a teacher there's still a lot of fear i am sympathetic and i know this is one of the hardest years yet we've had in the pandemic this is why we need strong leadership and a clear plan we need to

056adjust the culture of care plan this plan was created in august when we were trying to help all students adjust to returning to in-person learning it is now mid-february and the pandemic is winding down and we need to be prepared we need to have our own guidance for what contin continues to require mitigations how do we on and off ramp those what data are we going to use to make those decisions in the meantime we also need a process for how you're going to handle these students who are choosing to protest we need to give them due process and we need to provide them their legal right to have an education from their teachers and be with their peers [Applause] we need you we need you board members to bring this community back together with

057a clear plan please consider holding an emergency meeting and making some decisions thank you for your time public applause continues hello board my name is keegan jones and i'm a junior here at lhs in case you can't tell i'm very nervous and not i'm not one for public speaking however despite my nervousness i feel that sharing my perspective is more important than staying silent in march of 2020 just before the shutdown of kovid i received my eagle scout award for those who are unfamiliar with the boy scout program the eagle scout award is the highest rank you can earn after years of hard work along with an extensive service project that takes a minimum of 60 hours to complete needless to say it was a lot of work for my project working with the village

058of green oaks i organized volunteers and supplies and worked to paint about 40 fire hydrants for my neighborhood it was inspiring to see people come together to work hard for many hours to get something done that didn't directly benefit them but it was providing a needed service for the community so why is this relevant unfortunately over the past two years i've seen people drift apart it may not have been instant but over time people don't talk to each other they don't leave their homes they wear masks alone in their car some even wear them while walking outside alone people are hesitant to come together and work to serve the community and unfortunately our our diverse community has been divided by anger and hatred and by those unwilling to find common ground i have only one

059working ear therefore sorry therefore it's a lot harder for me to hear and it's also a lot harder for me to see facial cues i'm not the only one with problems though a passage from mind.org.uk says and i quote you might feel anxious or panicky as covering your mouth and nose might affect the air you breathe this can cause symptoms like feeling dizzy or sick i've had similar experiences where i have felt dizzy and with some conversations with other students i found that i'm not the only one a friend was in school when she fully passed out during class because of the masks she was supposed to wear she wasn't even in pe class just sitting in her chair i can understand why we were asked to wear them when this all started back in

0602020 but when we had a little very little knowledge but here we are over two years later with a lot more info i can i can go into more detail about the scientific data about how the poor size of even the n95 mask is larger than the actual virus itself making the mass useless in guarding against coven but i won't i could quote passages from recent court rulings declaring that the mass mandate was illegal in a violation of our due process rights but i won't i could detail the cdc data showing that teen suicide rates have increased 51 percent in the last year but i won't i only have three minutes i would ask that the board put aside their personal and political feelings regarding the mass mandate in school and allow families and students

061to choose for themselves masks should be optional families and students know what's best for themselves academically academically and equally as important emotionally i'd like to live a life with freedom to choose for myself i don't want to live a life of fear hiding behind a mask thank you [Applause] next is parent kristen griffith followed by student cozette vela followed by sorry parent gym man good evening my name is kirsten griffith we have five kids three graduated from lhs one is at lhs and then we have a sixth grader also the mass related protective measures that surround the current situation for covid19 as evidenced by various school districts across the nation is one of inconsistency do some districts wish to create dangers by not requiring mandates for masks in their schools are others enacting blanket mask

062mandate requirements with hard scientific evidence making the requirement undeniably defensible neither is true the practice variation is driven by governors mayors school officials employers and public health officials who reference each other change their positions without supporting objective data and impose summary edicts that are open to legitimate question for validation the differences of policy standards are bewildering to all of us for our students who are being taught how to critically think matters through the variation of requirements which can and do flip from merely crossing a state line or county line is disconcerting our students are smart and they see the inconsistency and lack of principle to scientifically concrete facts being replaced by do this because i say so facts surrounding disease don't typically begin or end at border lines they are constants until proven otherwise the

063common sense weighting of relative risks when exposed to covid19 for our students staff and teachers is rarely mentioned nor differentiated by age health condition one's natural immunity status or whether they receive the vaccine this would be baseline population risk profiling to not present these facts insulting to not present these facts insulting to our younger generations and borders on fear-mongering the actual subject of face mask coverings that might offer a definitive reduction in risk as a protective measure is sidestepped and not objectively profiled nor is a mask's effectiveness aligned to the risks of being exposed to someone actively infected and contagious symptomatic or not vaccinated or as one possessing natural immunity from prior infection well under the age of 18. and this was sent by todd and may evans who have um two kids that graduated

064from lhs but they couldn't be here so i said i'd read it for them thank you public applause continues thank you and again cozette is followed by jim mann who's a parent followed by socrates veyla hello my name is cosavela and i'm a senior at vernon hills high school if you follow the news at all you have probably heard a lot of talk in the past week about shifting from pandemic to endemic what this really means is that states are realizing that cobit is just something that we are going to have to live with viral respiratory pathogens have existed and will continue to exist in coexistence with the with humans and animals forever variants will also continue to occur as the way the viruses survive is through viral mutations which as a result creates variants

065we understand that the kovad-19 virus was new and had higher death rates initially like in 2020 and 2021 but at this point it is clear that the newest variants have been significantly less deadly on january 31st dr fauci himself stated that omicron was going in the right direction and that coronavirus cases would fall to manageable levels in the coming months we are in no way denying or undermining the existence of kogin personally i know for a fact that coronavirus is real as i have had a teammate whose mom has recently passed from it which was absolutely heartbreaking to hear however we think that it's time to transition to a different stage and learn to live with kobit in our lives that we can head back to normalcy additionally after the judge ruled the restraining order

066order against the masks last friday and our school district did not match that order it sparked a lot of controversy everyone has their reasons for wearing a mask and we think that if people feel more comfortable wearing a mask then by all means they should do so however we are simply asking for a choice people can wear masks if they choose to do so but we should not be forced to wear them furthermore looking at this issue from a broader perspective only 9 out of the 50 states still have school mass mandates including illinois and many of them are easing up on their mass mandates in the next few weeks we have seen so many of our neighboring schools like carmel lake zurich lake forest arlington heights libertyville districts 70 schools shift to mass optional

067which although brings hope for our school it is nonetheless frustrating because our school is one of the few who seems to not have budged please understand our frustration stems from all these factors but the main factor and the reason we are here and have been protesting this past week is because in three weeks it will mark the two-year mark since our normal sophomore lives for me um were suddenly halted we have lost half of our high school years to covet and we can't get those years back speaking for the seniors specifically now we are all here to try to get the absolute most that we can out of the next three years or three months we know there's nothing we can do about the past but we want to do as much as possible right

068now thank you public applause continues jim mann okay he may have stepped out i'll come back socrates bayla fella excuse me well thank you for being here you've done okay you know uh we've gotten to this point i was very shocked the way uh that we didn't take the jump into going mask optional and following judge grishall's order but now you have a great opportunity right judge grishaw has opened up the door for you the question is whether you're willing to walk through it um fear is in all of us okay so don't let it you 600 districts have gone up mass optional indiana wisconsin iowa mask optional and then you had the super bowl yesterday which i'm pretty sure all of you were watching [Applause] so i hope your decisions are not politically motivated

069or hindered politically if they are the truth will come out if and when each one of you are investigated the constitution protects all of our rights to due process i wore the army uniform to ensure that that we all have that ability if you're not willing to go optional as american citizens you must afford my children due process or you will be knowingly violating the 14th amendment and the fifth we're here to remind you to follow the law we've been following your mandates we're asking you to follow the law [Applause] before i go on i heard there was a child in bernie his high school that got a 60-day suspension i really would like for somebody to look into that and and make sure that that child gets a second chance i believe he's a

070senior i also heard that principal k was showing some bias in this building please look into that as well he should not be showing bias and bullying kids stress is up students are cracking educators are feeling guilty you have educators acting like bullies and policemen outside of buildings we don't pay them to do that d128 legal fund is getting exhausted 130 000 sits there just for consultation i'm assuming you're getting close to exhausting that i'd like to know if anyone in d128 acting on behalf of or has been in contact with illinois attorney general's office i don't need an answer today but if if anyone is aware of that if attorney general's office has been in contact with our council about this issue i'd like to know via email please please end it now before

071you break it completely and we will not be able to put it back together thank you public applause continues calling again for jim mann okay then we will go on to parent paula sterner followed by parent daniela gavrick followed by parent linda before i start would it be possible for you to uh board members to say their names we don't have a name plate i don't i don't know who you are is it possible cara drunky lisa hessel hold on okay superintendent herman jim batson casey rooney don carmichael cool cardi can you say that again please so now cool called me okay tara benjamin okay all right thank you i hope i get my minute back oh thank you all right well um i'm paula sterner i live in on greenbrier drive in green oaks

072i have a daughter here as a senior and i have three sons that have graduated i've also served as a board member i'm a teacher a retired educator so i do wear a lot of hats so i'm wanting to tell you that you know judge grisha gave illinois students their freedom back with a ruling that stated school districts cannot rely on their own authority to mandate masks exclude students and require vaccinations or testing given students due process under the law she explained that her ruling is not just for the name plaintiffs and i didn't realize that we had a name plaintiff but it is for every public and private district in the state neither the governor isbee the illinois department of public health nor school districts have authority to mandate masks require vaccinations exclude or

073test kids so with this tro temporary restraining order in place are you going to continue to require this stuff in our district even though you know what you're doing is going against the ruling if you continue to force masking and these other related practices like excluding students quarantining them due to contract tracing you are doing so knowing it is unlawful and exposes the district from a liability standpoint additionally unnamed plaintiffs such as the children in this district may choose to become part of the existing case with our own attorneys by seeking jointer it's getting to be a mess the board's stance on force masking is unlawful and even embarrassing especially given that many of our neighboring and feeder districts such as oak grove libertyville lake forest and carmel have decided to follow the ruling for

074mask optional besides the ruling there are biblical constitutional and practical reasons to support max mask optional among them did you know that veiling our faces destroys our ability to reflect god's image shine his light through smiles and share his glory second chronicles 3 18 says we are created to reflect god's image his image is not masked masking our children actually blocks what god called his believers to do from a constitutional perspective we are all born with inalienable rights given to us by our creator our rights come from god not government [Applause] to paraphrase peggy hall why does my student need to wear a raincoat to keep you dry if you believe masks work you may choose to wear them others who trust natural immunity may choose not to wear them when government creates edicts such

075as mask wearing is no longer needed statewide except in schools this is clearly not about health anymore it is about control and forced masking it's the right thing to do can you grab your comments thank you i would like to clarify your point about them not being able to vote vote is incorrect if they had had a special meeting with it on the agenda thank you you could have voted tonight it's a cop-out what y'all have done public applause continues hello good evening my name is daniela gavirich i'm a lifelong libertyville resident i have two children lahs and i have one and district 70. i also have parents who have lived here since 1977 i want to say and have been taxpayers um completely understanding why all their money or majority of their money tax

076money goes to these schools and recently and having a conversation with them they are just dumbfounded at why we can't allow our children to socially really communicate without masks so much of communication is non-verbal and i can just say personally with my two sons it's been really hard for them to meet um and really understand just social cues of their peers and i just think it's disappointing they're both athletes they struggle to always have a mass while playing sports um and it's just it's inhibiting i think for them to really flourish as students here my best memories at lhs as i turn and look at so many friends and alumni is about building strong relationships i also just wanted to tell you that it it it pains me to understand that we have the opportunity

077to be represented and you didn't really want to tell us that this was happening i just asked that we do have an emergency board meeting that actually addresses giving everyone the option to wear a mask we're not stating that students or administration don't have to wear masks we're just saying give everyone the choice just like in years past [Applause] we asked to either allow students to go virtually or to come in person so in the past few years i've had three students at three different schools with three different schedules and all of that i followed because i understood that we were trying to figure out the science and the understanding of how to deal with this we've passed that point in district 70 they've allowed to go mask optional and that is one of my

078own kids that doesn't have to wear a mask and my other two do the only other thing i want to say from an academic standpoint my both my sons are taking foreign languages do you know how extremely difficult it is for them to understand the material public applause continues they they struggle to phonetically see and respond they cannot see the movement of their teachers and it's not the same by them watching a video i just really implore you to understand academically and socially how this is impacting kids i don't want to repeat all the facts i just want to say this is personally for my two students been really a challenge thank you applause continues next after linda we have christian sorensen followed by student justin st louis followed by parent kevin huber hi um

079my name is linda sorachi i didn't prepare any comments because i argued with myself all day about coming here um so this is stream of consciousness but i'll be well under three minutes um new to the area came to the area for vernon hills high school um [Music] really loved the school and the reason that i'm here tonight is i would very much like you to consider going mask optional there's really nothing i can say that hasn't been said here already i don't have a legal background i don't have a lot of you know statistics on kobit i just am asking here as a parent a human to recognize that at this point i think we are at a point where if we could please just give um kids the choice and i think they

080would be respectful kids on both sides it would be less divisive if we give them that choice i work in an industry where i have to call upon people to change their mind and i know that if you come up and you're angry or you talk to them in a certain way they're not going to um i don't come to meetings like this i never have because i don't like to be in a venue where people get mad i see you know a few people um a few rows ahead of me getting angry when certain people would talk so i wasn't eager to come up here but what i want to say to you is in a state with i think 12 million or 12.7 million people lake county i look i think we have

081690 000 people we have hospitalizations of uh 1800 right now it's the lowest it's been in i think three months so it's very low if you were to make the decision today just with that information masks weren't required would you require it given what you have today another reason i came here was i'm having difficulty explaining to my child why certain districts have required this and others haven't i heard some kids talking amongst themselves they were wondering if wealthier school districts got to go mask optional of course that's not the reason so i came here tonight really because i just was trying to understand why when the judge made that ruling it didn't change here um i know you said no answers will be given no decisions will be made tonight but just please consider

082um that the kids who came up here were extremely brave i'm appreciative of attorneys that came up here with their legal knowledge [Applause] i'm just one parent having a really tough time watching this impact on my child for so long and if you could just please look at the facts as they are today and maybe change your mind thank you public applause continues parent christian sorensen oops good evening um thank you for the opportunity to speak my name is kristen sorensen i have two children here at lhs and one also in district 68 so i'm speaking tonight as a parent i also have children who chose to deal with this week's events in two different ways one who chose to peacefully protest and one who felt that the academic consequences of missing out on class

083would be too much and so briefly speaking to the comment earlier that kids were doing this because their friends weren't i can assure you that the kids this week who stayed out of class and enacted their rights by not wearing a mask only lost friends if anything public applause continues um we all know this this has been an extremely difficult last two years and i do not envy the position that you guys are in as board members there's no playbook as to how to navigate a pandemic well and i recognize that there are varying perspectives that you must consider as you make your decisions district 128 as we've heard this evening has prided themselves on being a leader in our community and i hope that this reputation can can continue and it feels that this

084is in your hands this evening there are now close to 550 districts that have made the decision to go optional including several in our surrounding communities as it has been said today many people have said to me over the past week that speaking tonight to our school board is a hopeless cause that your minds have been already made up regardless of what anyone in our district has to say but i have to believe that that is not the case i'm sorry should i pause no okay i'll continue okay just watch my time please i believe that each of you ran for the elected office of school board representative because you genuinely care about each of our kids about their academic pursuits during their high school years i believe that your interests lie with our children

085and that we can trust you to make the best decision for all of our kids as we've learned more throughout the pandemic and about covid's effect and the ways that we can protect ourselves and each other's our processes have changed we've prided ourselves on being adaptable and we've expected our kids to do the same and they have our district worked hard to provide fully remote learning then this past fall you worked hard to provide in-person learning after realizing the consequences that these kids endured by staying home they struggled emotionally mentally and socially and being remote and you allowed them to come back in i know my time is going to be up i'm paying attention and i'm almost done now six minutes into in per six months into in-person learning we in the state of

086illinois are an island in the midwest being one of only a few states in the entire country requiring mass for kids in schools as stated tonight we know that the number of coveted cases is no different for us than our neighboring communities and states we have vaccinated we have quarantined we have masked to prevent covet outbreaks and it has still found us we've now learned that covet is something that we all have to learn with live with and thankfully we are all about to do what is best to protect ourselves and our loved ones we can get vaccinated we can get boosted we can wear an n95 mask the only actual mask that will keep us safe but what we cannot currently do in district 128 is care for the emotional and social social needs

087of our kids by allowing them to choose whether they wear a mask or not we've been afforded that right by the court system but not by our school board i ask each of you today to consider that each of the students you represent the students you represent in our district is not only a physical being but also a spiritual and emotional and social being as well all of their needs must be care for and today we are asking for the board to continue to be a leader in the state of illinois we are not asking for a mask free school please wrap up your comments we are i know i was interrupted a little bit so and there was some clapping my understanding is that the mask issue is not something that will be voted

088on this evening i urge each of you to consider what your purpose is in not coming to a decision on this issue or laying out for our district a plan to the endemic i trust you will honor the elected position that you are in to make the best decision for each of our students thank you next we have student justin st louis followed by parent kevin huber followed by parent steve st louis we should ask you to put on a mask i do actually not have to as i'm a plaintiff listed on the case [Applause] public applause continues you are not here attending school so this is after hours so we ask that you does not apply yeah i i got it i got it i got it i got it if you make me

089put a mask on you will be held in contempt accord going against the court order it states any time in the school building i do not have to wear a mask if you force me to wear a mask we will with mr devore take you to court and hold you in contempt the court for violating a direct judge order okay uh the committee is in recess for 10 minutes microphones are turned off and meeting participants leave the stage for a 10-minute recess reason i brought it up okay i'd like to bring us back to order here uh we really do want to hear everyone speak we want you to be able to have the opportunity to speak but we need everyone to follow the the uh protocols that are in place uh currently in the

090district so um we will continue you really need to follow the protocols you ready to go to court for this there are i i just want to say the athletic director for our school is already having to do the same thing because he followed the same rule he forced me and my sister both plaintiffs to wear a mask though the ruling specifically states that any time i'm in i am it's for school it's for school and not for after hours be aware mr divorce we'll be notified what's happening here you guys will have to face it judge for your actions today okay thank you we we do appreciate it thank you thank you for wearing a mess thank you so hello my name is justin st louis and i'm a senior at vernon hills high

091school first i just want to speak about the ruling since the ruling stated that pritzker's mandate is nolan boyd that means you guys had to come to your own conclusion that you thought as a board it was your best idea to put mass on all the kids if you are to do such a thing you have to give all the kids their day in court to explain why you're masking them you cannot take out their due process and just totalitarian put the mask on them like you rule over all of us that is not how the law works second off i'm a student who plays sports i came straight from basketball practice i sold my practice jersey on to come here and speak i have to wear a mask while playing basketball my whole entire

092life i've struggled with asthma it has affected me since i got my first inhaler when i was four years old wearing a mask while playing basketball is one of the worst things i can do i have to take a rescue inhaler before every single basketball game i play because if i did not during the game my lungs would have an asthma attack i had to do that before the mass now if you can imagine the tool it takes on my body with the mass the mass already takes lowers the oxygen level i'm in taking and out taking with the co2 inside the mass and now you add that on top of the fact that my lungs don't work correctly as cited by my doctor who works at the condo in liberty bill i have scar

093tissue at the bottom of my lungs from all the asthma attacks i've had in my life so my lungs have never worked at 100 capacity in the past few years i then have to wear a mask that limits my capacity to breathing if you can understand the effect that takes my body to wear a mask while i'm playing basketball i have had other people's blood on me while playing the game i had other people sweat all over my playing the game i am touching and grabbing defenders the whole entire game so what does wearing a mask do i'm contracting everything they have on all other aspects of my body but i have to wear a mask on my face which only hurts me it gives no benefit to me it does not protect me from

094anything on the floor but all it does it has it has just ruined my respiratory system and how long i can go on with holding my breath how long i can play without just being exasperated and tired from stuff like that being a plaintiff i'm still here to represent the rest of the people i believe everybody should have a choice to be masked optional and you know when being around the school and just getting a pull from people i'd say it's about two people in every class to the 20 and the other the 20 and the other are just on the same board as i am and i can know because people move away from me now being masculist in school but it has never been more than three people in the class that moved

095away from me you should rule in what is in majority favor of the students and majority the students at both schools want mass to be optional so maybe stop with your totalitarian rule over all of us and do something for the students instead thank you public applause continues merit kevin huber followed by parent steve st louis okay i wasn't planning on speaking but i just wanted to have a few comments and first a point of information and i think the sport knows this anytime a meeting is published anytime an item is on an agenda and anytime there is a quorum present emotion may be made on any item on that agenda i talked to lynn hines about that when i was on this board personally so to say that they cannot be a vote is

096disingenuous there certainly can be a motion and vote if you have the desire to make one and take a vote [Applause] that's just straight robert's rules of orders not that difficult as a former board member and someone who looked at all sides of a problem i've been disappointed by the handling of the mass mandatory mass optional fiasco this past week while i may not agree with where you all ended up the way it was decided and shared with the public was poorly handled your lack of accountability and lack of metrics and managing a situation was disheartening those of you with board experience learned through the school opening remote discussions that tough situations need to be managed objectively with data and communicated timely and with grace this was a case study in how not to handle

097a difficult situation where was any type of leadership in this process you were elected to make a decision own it and communicate it properly where has been the debate on both sides of the mask mandate from the silence lack of urgency and lack of debate i believe we are to assume that you all believe a mass mandate is necessary at this point in time unfortunately your belief is not supported by local metrics data nor majority of the community you represent i wonder if each and how each of you weighed in as if you're going to be held accountable for a decision but you clearly are being held accountable for it then you should have the opportunity to debate it the board hiding behind the attorney which again it appears we're hiding behind the attorney tonight

098again and let's not kid ourselves and think that you all did not tell the attorney the opinion that you wanted came to a conclusion without any appropriate processes do you know or understand how a majority of your constituents feel you represent all of us not just the vocal minority that showed up at the polls and got you elected the majority of us understand there's a time and place for masking the majority of us are triple vaccinated and have taken all the precautions to protect others the majority of us fall in the mass optional camp but you continue to ignore this why i have to ask why have you talked with your teachers and asked them the thoughts or do you rely upon the national union narrative of randy weingarten president of the ft the masks

099are necessary until covet is eliminated i'm betting many of our local teachers also feel that masks at this point in the cycle are not necessary opinions of individual board members do matter opinions of the individual teachers do matter opinions of the middle eighty percent of our community matter i believe everyone agrees the handling of this issue needs to be based on local metrics not the cdc state of illinois or local health department recommendations solely this information has to be supplemented with more specific local metrics what's the vaccination rates of d128 hospitalization at condell all this matters uh well i had to have a point of information for the board first but that's fine uh since we have to keep educating when i sat with many of you you we all acknowledge as the board members

100it's about the kids when i ran against some of you as a candidate and it was a very polite polite election every single one of you said first and foremost it's about the kids you were not elected to protect the community that's the fiduciary responsibility of other groups yourself responsibly is the kids first please wrap up your comments we have many people i have one sentence left because i'm going to trust that future decisions by this board will remember it's the kids public applause continues next parent steve st louis followed by student christopher hannigan followed by parent jeff franz my name is steve st louis i am a burn hills resident and father of four children first i'd like to say how proud i am of my son [Applause] this is the second or third

101time he stood up from administration and requested due process and exercised his amendment rights that are not being hurt and falling on deaf ears so i really don't have a lot to say um there's we basically know everybody knows that the kids are at zero risk for this disease so there has to be something else going on here right what i mean there has to be something else going on [Applause] more more kids die of pneumonia than they do of covid so why haven't we been wearing masks for the last i don't know 100 years good question right if if in fact you guys are making decisions based on data that i haven't seen has anyone else seen the data i i think we have the right to know the data the matrix of which

102you guys are making your sound moral judgments about the faith of our kids right and i think that also we should have the right to challenge and bring other opinions into this situation rather than you're just little closed rooms behind your mass behind your emails that tell us what we have to do and take a knee to these tartarian tyrannical mandates and at last i just want to say there is no time in history of mankind that i'm aware where people with any kind of moral judgment put the kids in front of the parents as a first line of defense would you please put on your face covering please thank you again i'll repeat when is it that a moral adult puts children at the front line of defense to save adults it is the

103adults that stand in front of children to protect the children that's what this is supposed to be public applause continues hello members of the school board assembled parents my fellow students my name is christopher hannigan and i'm a senior here at lhs i had three older sisters graduate from the school and um i have to say that they were all very happy with the education they received and my parents moved here for the education that this district provides before the pandemic i was able to experience one year of normalcy one normal school year this school that school year gave me a baseline from which to judge the excellency of the school district that i have no doubt that it can achieve however these last two years have not proved the excellence this school can achieve

104i take some of the most difficult classes in this district and they have been a cakewalk for me because of the declining standards because some people on the board have decided to put politics over educating us the students [Applause] so as kevin huber said i would like to ask you to please focus on educating us the students i understand you have a lot to do and that there's a lot of data to look at opinions and on both sides not always expressed correctly finally i'd like to say that i'm a little bit disappointed my family was in contact with one of you and i was disappointed to hear from that person that there was only one of you on the school board who would even consider removing the mask mandate this was very disheartening i'm

105not sure that's true this is just what i've been communicating now in closing i would like you to reconsider your decision and i will hope that you will listen to all people and that you would not be intimidated by anyone on either side thank you [Applause] again next we have parent jeff franz student trevor jean and parent lawrence mary marx excuse me marks so i don't really have prepared statement because uh i knew my wife would do a much better job than i would but there's a couple of thoughts that i wanted to share first off as the husband of a board member i know how difficult your jobs are people see you at the meetings what they don't see are the hours and hours behind the scenes but as far as i can tell

106there's really only one reason to keep this mandate and the only reason is to protect others i can't see any reason behind that beyond that and i put some notes in here i read the new york times every day what i read yesterday was that drug overdoses are up for the last two years whereas in 2019 they were down is that directly attributed masks i don't know but it's a data point but what i really wanted to talk about as we refer to caring for other students is that what's lost is that every person in this room has the tools to protect themselves every student has the tools to protect themselves according to the new york times um i'm sorry from the atlantic one way masking works if you're vaccinated boosted and wearing an n95

107you're protected no matter what others are doing goes on to quote joseph allen a covet expert and ventilation expert from harvard i mean there's not much else in life that would have as low a risk as that i would qualify your risk as de minimis i didn't go to lhs so i had to look that up it means too trivial or minor to merit consideration this is an expert on kovid from harvard not some far right wing person saying that this is de minimis so why are we doing this everyone can protect themselves so i've got two asks for you one is show us the data that you will use to make these choices before i came here tonight i was speaking to a colleague in wisconsin i said i've got to go he's like

108where are you going we have a debate or we have a discussion about mass mandates like you guys still have mask mandates i said you don't he said we have clear metrics that are on our school's dashboard that determines when we have masks and when we don't that's my first ask for you my second ask is can we please do away with the theater i think it's ironic that we're in this room because most of this is theater for anyone who is serious about covid if you're not wearing an n95 mask you're lying to yourself [Applause] if you're not fitted that mask properly you're lying to yourself i see people over place replace n95 masks big gaping holes so please sit again i'll reiterate that show us the metrics that we will use to move

109in and out and again stop with the theater theatrics last point sorry basketball game the other night i have pictures i will send to you half the kids with respect to uh the student from vernon hills who says he wears it i haven't seen a single kid wear a mask at a basketball game all season long and none the fans are so either do it or stop with the theater and let us move on thank you and thank you for your service public applause continues hello my name is trevor jean and i'm a senior here at libertyville high school trevor can you pull your mask up please not on your chin no thank you gotcha um i uh i also wrestle here and uh if you know wrestling is probably one of the highest sports

110where you can contract the disease um virus um when i wrestle i don't wear a mask okay and but i think it's crazy over these past two weekends i've competed in regionals and sectionals surrounded by hundreds of strangers who have not been wearing masks and no symptoms alright asymptomatic no i attest a negative for kelvin twice i'd like to talk about the education or the lack of education i've been receiving due to being locked into a room filled with unmasked people although it is my choice to stay in that room and stand up for what i know is right [Applause] i just wanted to bring to the attention how just foolish this is i sit in a room all day and receive the lack of education i'm not being taught to i purposely actually over

111these past couple days of school i did not join a zoom meeting with my teachers guess how many of my teachers reached out to me asking why i didn't join zero now you say you put the students first [Applause] put the students first that's what everybody says but how true is that i look at you all i don't see an expression on your face except for a couple rolled eyes that that's that's about it i don't i don't see a face i don't see a smile you know maybe you guys should smile more i don't want to go over the time otherwise some people might start timing me and i just i just think this i know this mandate should just be abolished it's pretty simple thank you public applause continues next we have parent

112lawrence marks followed by clarissa le tang followed by sue mueller good evening i don't have a lot just a little story in 2005 my wife and i were looking for a place in chicagoland and i grew up near the airport my mom suggested that i check out libertyville and i thought it was a horrible idea libertyville was a farm town you passed once a year when you made the journey north to great america um that's what i thought and i finally did make the trip up milwaukee avenue and we looked at a house for sale and i met the senior citizen neighbors who had an orange paw in their front yard and i thought it was interesting because i mean they clearly for sure didn't have high schoolers and hadn't for a long time and

113so we talked about why they had the orange paw and after hearing what you know how behind the high school they were um and the kind of community it was i knew i was home and you know obviously we're here uh we finally have we waited all that time we finally have kids in high school and couldn't be happier to be a part of the libertyville community and today um i was part of the jointer that was filed downstate to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the reason i moved to libertyville against you against the school district and it's it's crazy town because we still love the school so the idea that now we're opponents but i couldn't let you guys continue to control my son or my daughter um after seeing how you

114guys responded to the judge's ruling um not in a public forum some sort of backroom conversations that took place between enough people to know that you had each other's back um and went forward it is mind-blowing to me that you guys have not called a special meeting yet um and thankfully um these what what the second speaker tonight called um ignorant extremists and the crowd were lucky that kevin huber was among them to let us know that we actually could vote tonight and so i am here i'm here to ask one brave soul to make a motion at the appropriate time and one more brave soul to second it and let's see where the cards lie thank you [Applause] public applause continues hello and good evening my name is clarissa tang i am a senior

115at libertyville high school along with my twin sister sitting here next to me in the beginning of my high school years i was unmatched and made many new friends coming from a small middle school i was hesitant to come to a big school being able to see new faces and expressions was one of the highlights of my high school career my second semester sophomore year that was that privilege was stripped for me throughout quarantine i was unable to see many of my friends and make new ones being able to come back into high school to learn in front of my teachers and not through screen was a big relief at the beginning of my senior year i began to notice how santa how sad i was not being able to see my peers faces at

116school which is where i see most of my friends i have developed depression through this time and that has lowered my self-esteem and especially my way of showing my emotions i am very nervous and scared to get up here to express my feelings as i wrote this in the audience i am proud of myself for taking this step one day i was sitting in class drinking water and i had a sub as he was taking attendance he looked at me and called me mrs omicron because i had my mass pulled down to drink my water this is not right teachers should not be calling kids out when i am trying to stay hydrated during my school day before the school year students were told if we got vaccinated we'd be allowed to come to school

117masculist my sister and i got that vaccine and here we are today fighting to earn our civil rights back and go to school mask lists as we had been secluded in a separate room from others we have been judged and harassed by others at school i became began to became very nervous to walk in the hallway during passing periods because i would be judged it was very hard for me to stay in this room the past week away from my teachers lastly i would like to thank dr k and the school administration for supporting us through this tough time thank you public applause continues parent sue mueller sorry if i mispronouncing it it definitely starts with an m sue naylor if you signed up to speak this will be our last in-person speaker this is

118um so my name is sue mulligan i am a parent of lhs i am my youngest daughter is a junior i've had four kids go through the school one of the previous speakers said they didn't have the statistics so my husband sent me the statistics uh according to the lake county coronavirus data hub the number of new incidents of covet 19 in lake county is defining an accelerating rate it's hard to breathe in these things on february 12th the average incident rate over the last seven years seven days sorry seven day moving average among children 14 18 in lake county was 23 per hundred thousand equivalent to about point one eight point one eight of a new case per day in district 128. i think that says it all it's not fair public applause continues

119thank you uh we're going to move into um a few minutes of the email comments we have far too many to read in the time allotted but i do want to thank everybody that came tonight to voice their opinions and their concerns in person and i appreciate that and especially the students who stepped up and i appreciate what uh what they had to say as well the uh excuse me the first letter is from laura rash to our principal administration and teachers thank you for all that you do to keep our children safe and a top priority you have my utmost respect and support next letter is from jennifer mulchron without any notice or communication to the towns that you serve this board filed for an appeal of the temporary restraining order granted by judge

120grishau instead of asking for a clarification to determine if the tro applies to all students in the district or just to the name plaintiffs you took it upon yourselves to waste our tax dollars and duplicate efforts by the illinois attorney general general to affirmatively demand that mass mandates continue what about what this community wants why haven't you sent out one of your surveys to see if we want you to spend our tax money on this why no emergency meeting of the board to allow the community to voice their opinions and direct your efforts illinois is one of only six states now with mass mandates remaining in schools do you really think that this board knows better than the entire populations of 44 other states are you that drunk with power mass mandates have gone on

121for too long and it is time to allow our children to get back to normal life children have not worn masks to school in dozens of other states for months and even years illinois kids have suffered long enough with masks and they deserve better it is time to stop hiding behind outdated health guidelines with regard to the events of the week of february 7th you called the police on children and had them escorted out of school yes denise school resource officer officers are police you forced your front line school administration into the horrible position of calling law enforcement on kids and then required your administrators to actively prevent students from obtaining the education they deserve the damage you have done and are doing is immeasurable and the waste of community resources is inexcusable no one

122wants you to violate illinois law as misguided as it is only to comply with it your lawyer undoubtedly advised you on the legal risks of violating the tro and if you are wrong in that the tro applies to all students in the district as many many other local districts have interpreted the ruling then you have opened district 128 up to unnecessarily unnecessary liability and you should all resign your positions in disgrace this shows a serious lack of judgment in illinois i believe a violation of an order of protection is a class a misdemeanor punishable by a jail sentence of up to a year and a maximum fine of 2 500 i hope judge grishau holds each and every one of you legally accountable for your decisions enough is enough masks should be optional in d128

123until a court order directs you otherwise the next letter is from emily le tang my name is emily latang i am a senior at libertyville high school i believe our district should be mass optional majority of the country has gone mascara in their schools including lake forest high school and carmel catholic high school the covid19 pandemic started when i was just a sophomore i got vaccinated wore my mask and still got coveted the virus is here to stay we need to learn to live with it the virus is exponentially less deadly or harmful than before which justifies why students should have a choice to wear the mask on school grounds in forcing students to get vaccinated just so they can stay in school if they get contact traced is unethical the vaccine does not prevent

124the spread of coven 19. i am one of many examples to prove it the guidelines for quarantine have gone down by nine days if students test positive for kova 19 it makes sense to have just those individuals stay home for five days but not their peers who are not sick as americans we should have the choice to wear a mask and get vaccinated especially for a virus that is highly unlikely to hospitalize or kill people who are not at high risk for individuals who are at high risk they can choose to wear a mask after all wearing a mask has been proven to only protect the individual wearing it not from people surrounding them the next message is from jake gimbert we should be mask optional because for the past two years i have seen

125nothing but my teachers and peers eyes and hair i don't know the person who i'm depending on to teach me to continue on the rest on in life because of success to become a successful individual i don't truly know the kids sitting next to me in class that i am supposed to be working with my teachers have been assuming the students in my class and i have been understanding what they are saying because they can't see our facial expressions the next message is from matthew kasian masks should be optional in district 128. kids are being held in separate classrooms that refuse to wear a mask while other kids are let to class just because they comply to put on a mask on many schools have loosened their mask rules and allowed optional masks we have

126all followed the rules for two plus years now and we want to move on and start living a normal life making masks optional is a start in the right direction to a normal life per the judge's order masks need to be optional it's the right thing to do and the legal thing to do the next message is from luke cajun i am a sophomore at libertyville high school and for the last week i have been protesting the mass mandate this has been a tough week standing up for what i believe is right i've been harassed all week by students and some teachers many schools around us have dropped the mass mandate and have made it optional for students i believe libertyville high school should drop the mass mandate 42 states have dropped the mass mandate

127and all have been fine libertyville high school has been wasting our tax dollars on covid instead of our school and our education there's only been more and more schools making it optional it's not the time to try and prove yourself right by not making it optional and continue to waste our tax dollars trying to stand strong and prove yourself right jb pritzker has lifted our mass mandate on the 28th and it's time to start getting back to normal highland oak grove and all the elementary schools around us have made it optional but not the high school doesn't make much sense to me the only reason i can think of is because of our selfish and same thought board if libertyville high school does not make it the mass mandate optional good luck in court next

128message is from joseph mavia my name is joey mavia and i'm a sophomore at libertyville high school i appreciate teachers taking time out of their day to sit in our alternative classroom with us but i believe the school should be mask optional they separate kids into two rooms and not a lot of our teachers send us work to do and if they do it is something difficult to complete we we want to go to class i understand that it is our choice to not go to class but we want to stand up for what we believe is right d128 should make masks an option as other schools in the state are doing this next message is from hunter hill hello board i am here to show my desire to have a choice if i wear

129a mask or not i was one of the kids who chose not to wear masks at school this past week and after the governor's mandate was null and void i was forced to be separated from my peers and forced to have a lesser learning experience than them i want to have the choice not to wear a mask which has been scientifically proven to not be effective in stopping the spread of covid i and many other students would like the same learning as our peers and be able to have a choice in what we do the next message is from jennifer ron as a mother of a junior at vernon hills high school and emergency physician i applaud and respect the vigilance and hard work that allowed my son and all students to remain in school

130safely and learn in person this year it is of utmost importance that we lend our support and help each other through these difficult times i'm sure that very soon based on the number of coveted patients i'm seeing now that restrictions will be lifted we must allow the public health experts and administrators to do their job and make the recommendations that have that have kept our children safe this message is from vanessa stalter thank you for taking the time to read my email i have a freshman daughter at lhs as a former teacher and a graduate of lhs i consider libertyville school district to be one of the most sought after school districts in the area when my daughter began her academic schooling my husband and i wanted to be a part of the district because

131of the accolades and recognition it has always had in the past although my daughter has had a great start to high school i do not feel as if you are doing enough to provide the best learning environment for her as she watches district after district move forward with mask option i can see her unhappiness and disappointment in the school as a school board you have various roles one a board should be the voice of the community two the board should act as an advocate for our school district in school and three the board should communicate with the community and build community support in my opinion you have failed in all three of these aspects while communities around us have held emergency meetings after the court order on friday february 4th you stood silent as a

132board you are responsible for the success or failure of the public education of the students you are failing them as advocates as parents we are asking to give the students a choice if they choose to wear a mask or not they have suffered enough already with the statistics going down there is no reason that this decision should be a difficult one i have seen so much hatred in our community against each other this past week that truthfully i am appalled i firmly believe that if you listen to the community and what is requested and at this point necessary in our community you may gain the respect that you have lost throughout this time i am writing to you in the hopes you can finally for once be the advocates that you signed up to be

133and provide a mass option choice for these students thank you for taking the time to listen this message is from carla burke dr herman mr kelly and the board we are emailing again with regard to the ruling in sagiman county the choice made by them by many local districts as well as many districts across our entire state to go mass optional we are again appalled by the substandard response by district 128 to the students our families the taxpayers and the community as a whole we expected compliance and that all associated legal precedence would be followed we are absolutely dismayed that you are the elected members to represent the community and our school again there is no regard for science metrics and what is the best in the best interest of our students it is honestly

134mind-boggling that our district leaders believe they are above the law and continue in this game using our students as pawns over the past week parents and students have followed the proper channels to be heard in order to ask for mask optional it's our right to do so the students have attended school only to be met with intimidation coercion and division you have quarantined our kids away in the auditorium in gyms in other subpar spaces away from their peers away from any sort of instruction teachers have been given the choice to allow them to zoom provide coursework or materials to their students you are violating your oath and the illinois constitution to each and every student to their right to an education it is disgraceful our students are being pushed out of the school given choices

135that are unjust and jeopardizing their education and participation in sports they have been met at the doors by principals administrators teachers security and the police they have been threatened with consequences and some have received them that is bullying you made an unscientific decision and determined our students are considered a health threat no you are the threat to their education to their constitutional rights to their mental health to their very safety and security which with with which you have been trust entrusted you have created an environment where our kids who are segregated have been bullied and threatened for wanting mass optional our students have been put in a position that is completely unacceptable and they have been more than brave to stand up for their rights in education they are merely asking for an option which

136is more than scientifically justified two years into this pandemic how do you honestly justify safety excuse me and security when most other schools around d128 are mass optional including our own elementary district 70. how many are left i'm sorry how many are left oh i have i have 50. [Applause] have a drink we'll do a couple more and then that'll be at our time excuse me um this message is from brad sterner remove the ridiculous mass mandate illinois is one of only five states in the united in the united states to have a statewide mandate all others have a recommended no guidance or mandates are actually banned including the surrounding states of wisconsin indiana iowa kentucky and missouri of 1070 school districts in illinois over 520 and counting have lifted the mass mandate to optional

137or no masking this includes sorry the two libertyville high school feeder districts oak grove district 68 the five school libertyville school district 70 and surrounding high schools lake forest and carmel catholic high schools as the board and superintendent well know oak grove has never had mass since the start of the 21-22 school year has the school closed sent students home were there mask bullying incidences were students who refused to wear masks segregated no of course not the board and the superintendent are aware of the above facts and yet they still wait until now to decide if the ridiculous mass mandate should be lifted libertyville high school has always led not followed it's disappointing to stay the say the least that we have had to wait this long excuse me the next message is from brian

138burnett thank you to the teachers staff and administrators of our school that have endured an unbearable burden throughout the pandemic both at work and home does two plus two equal four are science and math proper subjects to be taught in schools do we respect teachers and are we concerned for their health does the application of scientific methods such as placebo-controlled clinical trials improve our lives are we experiencing a once in a 100 year pandemic has the virus that caused cova 19 killed over 900 000 americans have health care facilities been overrun with patients corresponding to the high virus infection rates do masks and social distancing reduce the spread of coven 19. the answer to each of these questions is unequivocally yes wearing a mask is like basic arithmetic especially when our community is not fully

139vaccinated and a high incidence of virus is still prevalent proper mass squaring has developed based on the scientific method to reduce the spread of the disease it also benefits people who aren't wearing a mask of course we are tired of practicing scientifically proven cova cova 19 mitigation strategies we are living in a once in a century emergency requiring extreme effort along with the evidence that proper masking reduces disease transmission and eases burdens on the health care system wearing masks is our civic duty like returning a misplaced purse or wallet to its owner please don't let the politics of the day distract from what our schools and community need to reduce disease transmission mask wearing shows we care for each other thank you for continuing to require proper masking in our schools okay thank you mary

140we are at our our limit for the public comment thank you all for participating we will move on to the uh other items in the meeting so first up is the covet 19 metrics and testing information thanks jim we thought it'd be useful tonight to to give a background information some key dates over the past year and then also bryant kelly associate superintendent and then also share some of the cova data that is currently on the district uh website with uh with with people here in attendance um give you a visual of that data that is on the uh website so um thank you mr stanley well give me one signal okay i gotta show this zoom sorry he's sharing with he's sharing with zoom right now so that they can see we're able to

141see this on monitors in front of us so for those of us that aren't turned around we're we're following along by looking at these monitors so if we go back to march of 2021 so that right after spring break when we had more students come back in person that's about the time to that vaccinations became available for those 18 and over mass were required at that time um for everyone in indoor settings including schools and that's what we found at district 128. in the summer this past summer positivity's race declined vaccinations also were available um specifically for uh our high school-aged students about that time again mass was strongly recommended but not required in schools that was in the summer in august then the governor issued orders for masking in all schools and we aligned

142our plans to adjust to that state mandate moving into the school year beginning of school year our rates were lower there were then some spikes around november around thanksgiving again the governor mass mandate still continued public health officials stressed the importance of masking as part of the layered mitigation again we had no changes since the beginning of the year in our covid response plan in regards to some of the major mitigation in december vaccinations became available for younger although again it wasn't high school it affected i think the community and so we just wanted to add that key date in there again no changes around that time which leads us into january again there was a surge in january and coming off of um winter break um there was a surge and i'll show that

143when we get to our data quarantine timeline was reduced decreased from 10 days to 5 days and again we then reflected that culture of care plan that shortened quarantine length and instituted that for both students and staff coming back so instead of being out 10 days it was the five days then i would say about mid-january to february again there was the the rates in the variant declined and again you'll see that when we look at the data again public health recommendations mass mandates continued in school we had no changes to our plan february 4th that friday judge ruled on the tro for students named in a lawsuit to attend school without mass and the quarantine so those two pieces of lawsuit were in question on the next day district administration we met with our

144clique a insurance attorney in the lawsuit so we're represented by a group of school districts um we're all we're all in same insurance co-op and so our click insurance attorney on a lawsuit based on the denial friday on february 4th of the class certification the attorney said that the judge's ruling only pertains to the name parties in the lawsuit that was the recommendation of um uh our attorneys in the click insurance cooperative again no changes in the only change in our cultural care then was continued for all students except those named in the lawsuit the click attorneys decided to appeal we did not request to be removed in regards to their appeal as long as the district 128 we we remain a name defendant in the case we're still subject to all orders in the

145case regardless of any participation in the appeal process on a so there's two pieces in appeal um the district the school districts have uh have appealed really have nothing to do with the issue that the state the attorney general has appealed the districts have peeled have not focused on the exercise of executive authority or legality of the emergency rules the districts school districts have sought to maintain the question of local control front and center before the court is the line the judge drew the line that the judge drew has implications not just in this litigation but in a broader context by imposing additional legal compliance requirements on school districts so that's the appeal that the click the co-op insurance is appealing is that piece of it um just want to clarify there i know some

146people in the audience may have thought that the board members were a part of that conversation and that is not true that conversation was had among district leadership team administrators and our attorneys over the weekend and that's what led to that being included in the message that we sent to families on sunday and that was the february 6 was that sunday then that the communication came out that we will continue with the culture of care plan for all the students except for those named in the lawsuit again based off of recommendation you know from our legal uh council february 9th so that's the middle of the week the governor um announced the lifting of a statewide mass mandate on february 28th so again that wasn't with schools that was with other um you know places

147outside of schools but we thought we would point out that date um again our cultural career plan still remains in place so if we go to some of the data and all this data is on the district website if you go to coven 19 reporting it's all in percentages i thought it'd be easier to see trends of everything we just kind of discussed and put it in and put it into a graph so if i look at the vaccination rates the top line if you look at it's a aqua blue is our staff our staff as you can see from the beginning of the school year so all the data i'm going to show you is from the beginning the school year our staff is about 92 percent vaccinated lake county it's the bottom line

148i thought i would start there next um is about 50 up to about 62 percent right now um again i think our students we've asked them to get vaccinated we actually get uh boosted and you could see the orange in libertyville high school students are at um 82 percent and then the vernon hills students um at 80 percent some of the indicators at the cdc again going off their guidance that they've uh and thresholds that they've given us is based off of total new cases per 100 000 in the past seven days and percentage of positive positivity rate a lot of people call in the past seven days and they have low moderate substantial and high again all of our data sources come from either idph lake county health department northwestern medicine and then our

149district 128 nurses i'll show some of that data so if you look at our new cases the seven day again going back to the beginning of school year that's what we've been tracking since the beginning of the school year green line is lake county six zero zero six one is the blue line and six zero zero four eight so you could see that from the beginning of school year uh rates were low they kind of uh around mid-november and maybe started going up a little bit um and then obviously the what we talked about what i spoke about before is that over the holidays uh there was a spike um and then mid-jan so we came back later than most schools we came back january 10th um and there was a higher rate there and

150then they've um come back down you could see they've come to come down substantially now um to the um just our most recent data which i was able to get right on uh friday i think um our seven day positivity rate again very similar kind of data trend you could see that it was low um at the beginning of the year actually october was was probably our lowest point uh positivity rate um spiked up a little bit again after thanksgiving spiked after the holidays but as you can see what's the trend the trend is it's coming back down um similar to the um other data one of the other things that we track again daily and weekly so this is um weekly totals and i just this is our students so the number so again

151this is the number of cova cases of lhs students and vernon hills students so this is again this is on our website it's uh you can see the dashboard but again what is the trend it was very low spiked after the holidays and now we're coming back down so it mirrors the county it mirrors the two communities so when i went back to that other data that six zero zero four eight and six zero six one that was everything these are just our students and our schools so you could see it's pretty much almost looks like the same graph go to the next slide and then then same thing so if you look at our lhs staff that's the one in orange and then our vernon hill staff in blue so again same trend line

152low rates um through the school year spike but now we've come back down um here in february so if you look at all of that data point they're they're all very similar so from the county six zero zero four eight six zero zero six one our students and our staff so i i thought it was visually be able to see that again all that data is up on our website the other thing that you know people talking about with getting back into school and then also looking at mass is the hospital daily admissions or hospitalization rate so this comes right from the county website same thing rates are low they spike after the holidays but again you can see that the hospital rates are coming back down uh here in february so very uh similar

153data excuse me we're not here to dialogue with the audience you're here to observe us have a meeting so if you can keep your comments were there any questions from the board on any of the data or kind of background that we've talked about brian what the covid um hospital's admissions when it says 10 is that 10 so that's 10 emissions that day is that so these are daily rates and so it's the number of admissions per day covet-like so again i got it from i got it from lake county we haven't tracked this before but i was trying to show that there is that same very trend line that there was they spike after the holidays and it's come back down again okay thank you it's not a meeting for the public you can

154be sure to welcome to stick around and listen but it's our meeting right now you had your time for public comment should we let's continue to continue all right are there any other questions from the board on the data and metrics portion if you want us to continue our meeting we're going to have to have quiet yeah we're moving through the agenda please stop interrupting us right so again that was the day that we've been sharing since the beginning of the year and i thought i'd be put in a visual so that you could see again where the trends were after the holidays but again we're coming back down quite a bit if there are no other questions on the data i'd like to transition to agenda item 4 where we will review our current

155status and project how we could move our cultural care plan going forward so you'll see the next steps for our mitigation measures our overall goal as we stated in july and august and continue is to protect the health of students teachers and staff so that in-person learning can reserve resume and continue as safely as possible the guiding principle of our district has been to align our coronavirus response plan to public health recommendations outlined by cdc idph and isbe next slide sir i'm trying to present our plan we have some opportunities in the next few weeks where outside variables could impact excuse me the appellate court ruling is expected this week if the appellate court rules to uphold the judge's ruling that the mask mandate is not legal only for the listed plaintiffs then our culture

156of care plan will continue with masking required for all students except the seven students in the lawsuit if the appellate court rules to expand the judge's ruling that the mass mandate is not legal for all students then the culture of care plan will adjust to mask recommended for all students so that is our general anticipation of how we're going to proceed this week according to the appellate court next slide we also know from conversations with lake county health department that they have been in close contact with illinois department of public health and other agencies knowing that the metrics are changing and they anticipate changing the guidelines for schools the timeline is uncertain if the cdc idph or lchd recommends any reduction or removal of masking we would immediately have our culture of care plan align

157with that and reduce or remove masking to align with those public health guidelines so that is one other variable that could change in the next few weeks finally next slide bryant noted that in early february the governor did recognize that the data statewide is decreasing and that some of our metrics like transmission rates are more difficult to rely on because so many people are doing at-home testing so that's why rates like hospitalizations and some others are gaining traction in terms of being a better indicator regardless of the public health or appellate court decisions we i am recommending that district 128 follow the illinois guidance as outlined for other public spaces if a student or a parent could go to our public library and not have to wear a mask or to the grocery store and

158not have to wear a mask it is our opinion that we also believe that we should have the right for students and staff to have the option to go math as of february 28th [Applause] this is our recommendation we know if we can go to the next slide this is our recommendation to the board for adjustments to our culture of care plan why why do we think this is the right recommendation to bring to you we have a very high vaccination rate among our students and staff our students and staff and the whole community have really um listened to what we said we needed to open up schools and to keep them open we also as bryant shared show that we have very low transmission rates and very low all of the other rates everything

159in parallel is decreasing and finally the new metric we also have declining hospitalization admission rates why february 28th the public health data that we all looked at and that the governor cited shows the data is declining and that by february 28th it should be at very low transmission rates it also is aligned with the other timeline for all other public spaces and finally for students and staff who do have any health issues or need any time to prepare for this adjustment it would give time for any adjustments to things like 504s ieps or any other kind of plans that we would need to continue to keep all students safe so again this is the recommendation that i would like to make to the board and it is now your opportunity to discuss this recommendation bryant

160and i and anyone else are available to answer any of your questions thank you i'll start i think this is this is a good plan i think it's um aligning it with the 28th makes sense um the questions i have are if there's a um any change in that plan from the state because the governor did say the 28th is his target but said you know pending uh any possible changes i don't anticipate that i think we're going to see continued good numbers i think we're going to see continued decreases in all those metrics that we saw earlier but if that happens and he decides to do something different do you recommend that we continue on this path again our guidance has been to try and closely align with all of the epidemiologists and health

161care experts this does wreck this the recommendation i'm making does represent a change from solely the recommendation for schools to making an adjustment to other to the public health recommendations for the public in general but i still would want our actions to be aligned with that in talking with many of the scientists who work at lake county they are also predicting significant decreases to continue and would put a likelihood of the 28th being recognized by the governor okay and just from a timeline perspective we do have a board meeting between now and the 28th it's on the 28th oh it is on the 28th yeah that's right so we'll have an opportunity at that point in time to to revisit and confirm and do whatever we you know to have a uh additional conversation there

162but the 28th so that would be a monday monday so this would assuming all this goes through this would take effect tuesday it would take effect on monday okay right who else has comments questions yes i could yeah um oh i'm sure i do have a question um can you hear me okay i think one of the problems that we're sitting here today was our lack of plan and our lack of communication uh and i don't want to be the scientist but we've been forced to kind of educate ourselves on this because all of a sudden what we didn't think we had an option we do are sitting in a position and i under i i have looked at districts and districts i've spent countless hours and the one thing i've come away with is

163currently everybody's right and nobody's wrong and we're kind of sitting in a position of where do we go i like the i mean the plan is showing that we're moving forward but all of what i have been learning is there's going to be an ebb and flow in cova and it's not going away where are our metrics so that we can have transparency where is our rubric what data points are we really using and where do we be i mean because other schools do have that i would like to see a plan accompanied with some kind of a rubric so that there is some expectancy in the community if we are three out of four of these data points then we're moving to mask required or i mean we have to have some kind of

164expectancy for our community of where we are today and as we see trends we don't have chaos which is what we've i could stand behind our decision because i totally understood there was no reason with the possibility of a stay to have that kind of upheaval but it seems like exactly why we chose that we are sitting in the exact opposite position and we have chaos i don't want to see that again so i don't mind waiting not long but i want to see metrics so that moving forward as we see the event flow that's what i would like to see that's me but that's what i would like to see i this is not you know we know that we're gonna be masked again and then we're not hope not i i don't know

165but if we have a plan that has flexibility and expectancy our community knows it as things change i i but we should have expectancy can i have two questions one is with respect to the date um what was the um what were the metrics back before the mandate came when the board voted to keep musk optional um i think it was about two percent uh positivity rate between today starting today if we end up going back to that level before the 28th is there a possibility of us going back to mosque optional we'd have to obviously have a special meeting for it but is that something we want to talk about do you mean to tonight or not tonight i'm in class you're not there right now it's about eight point six percent um but

166one was about two percent when we last voted mass optional uh we didn't have nearly as many opportunities for vaccinations back then that we do now so the situation is is slightly better here so if the number comes back down to two percent or close by would we still wait till the 28th again one of the challenges the transmission rate is difficult because of the testing procedures have changed so much so that's why right now illinois department of public health is trying to give different guidance to schools exactly they're trying to give exactly what you're asking for we used to be able to judge healthy versus unhealthy with certain metrics but because the climate of testing has changed so drastically in the last month or two there's they're they're now needing to pivot to give

167us different metrics i will vary as soon as i know what those metrics are and if they're not available we will do our best to bring you the most factual ones at the 28th meeting maybe we need to update our guiding principle where it says we'll align our coronavirus response plan to public health recommendations outlined by cdc ivph and isb to instead reflect the metrics as cara was discussing our own metrics as well the the things that we've done vaccination rate the transmission in schools things like that make that part of our guiding principle now we we've transitioned away from when this was written cdc and idph was was all we had but their recommendations haven't really caught up with the facts of the day so maybe we need to update that guiding principle with

168something we can all agree on metrics wise so that we do have if those metrics change and we need to pivot to something we've updated in in facts that exist today does lake county have the lake county health department have a metric no no they currently do not the most recent conversation i had was last wednesday morning with the public health leaders and all of the superintendents from lake county where knowing that some super in some school districts and boards were saying we need matrix like this where we're going to be all of us school districts will be making our own up individually and they said we understand that we will communicate that we are working as hard as we can to get a metrics to get some data to you that is more scientific

169than you as an individual board can create so i will continue to be in good communication with lake county and hopefully before the 28th we will have that if not we will again compare plans and look at others as you as you've outlined to bring you our best next recommendation and then the appellate court ruling my understanding is they have five days to respond and there was lincoln's birthday so that put everything back a day so it's likely that we'll hear from them by wednesday i believe wednesday or thursday yeah i'm sorry what was your question we are expecting the appellate court ruling um i believe it's the 17th so be thursday or before so it sounds to me like there's there's some consensus for identifying new metrics that we can all agree to recommended

170by both the health department and us collectively that we would be uh interested in using those and i agree with kara that as we move forward and trust me i want to get rid of these as much as anyone in this room um but as we move forward if if this if this thing spikes up again let me finish if this thing does spike up again because we didn't think it was going to do what it did in january and if it does that again there's some metrics there's some transparent information that everyone knows that when we reach this point this is what when we have to respond otherwise you know we've been it's been a moving target and i i understand it's been a moving target but i think that type of um you

171know coming up with that will put us back in a in a situation where we can respond and maybe respond a little quicker than uh what we've been relying on cdc idph all those groups one thing i wanted to add so i want to make sure i understand our timeline so if the stay is granted we're back we're at that point of the stay so they're expecting the appellate court just to rule directly on the appeal okay uh and then if not are we recommending if the judge does if the appellate court does issue a stay where you're recommending that we stay masked recommended let me go back to that slide um from what we've heard from our attorney they don't expect a stay now they expect for the appellate court to actually rule oh

172i didn't understand that okay so they're actually going to rule they're actually going to rule okay i mean i understood not wanting to upheaval the procedure if we were just going to be stand you know right back to where we were but we're expecting a ruling on the merits of the appeal yes last week we were anticipating a possible stay so that would have been a potential back and forth but now because so much time has passed they are predicting that it will simply be a ruling body appellate court so and you know worst case best case whatever you want to say once that happens that'll be less than two weeks from our planned change in operating practices anyway so um i think that'll be i don't want to call it a moot point but

173you know we have to we have to respond to that we have to understand that is it something we can get together the matrix sooner than the 28th i mean i if we can get our matrix together and we have the data is it something we have to wait for the 28 i want to wait for a time because there is a large portion of our community that is not comfortable with this and they need to be offered the time to get prepared yes okay i want to make sure that we are preparing for them also and we have something for them and if we can get this done sooner than the 28th is that something we can do and i did want to ask with our is that offering a kn95 to anybody who

174wishes it if we go once we go mask recommended is that something that we can provide to somebody who wants it um i know that we have k95s currently available we have n95s that we've purchased for um you know for our staff that that we can distribute we are trying to locate more more more sources um for coming at the end of the month um the hard thing is when obviously the recommended recommendations change for people who are n95k 95 it's hard to find large sources but we are trying i know mark is and dan is so that we can hopefully have those available for those um that when we go mass recommended on february 28th that we could distribute those as much as we can so we're trying uh like i said we have

175some now um and then we're looking to see what what else we can have and do we have um i mean we have the obligation i understand to accommodate students that have and and teachers that have health considerations have existing plans in place for whether it's special education student or any other student and this will give them time to and and the district time yes at the building level to make accommodations for people that need it correct the other thing about the 28th date that was a a logical target in terms of aligning it with another idph recommendation of where the data they predict the data will be low enough then that across the whole state they feel safe to have that lifted in grocery stores and libraries and restaurants and things like that so

176we felt that was a good target date to give us enough time to respond for the students who may be more at risk as well as then be aligned with some other public health benchmark yeah i i think that the combination of getting some more clear guidance from the public health experts as well as balancing our local autonomy and doing what's doing what's right based on our highly vaccinated population with hospitals that are not in a dire situation uh makes sense and is a good roadmap moving forward cara um i you know i am curious kind of what our peer districts are doing who are in a similar situation um i'd be curious to hear from both districts that have currently gone mask recommended and those that maintain their masking policies i'm interested in hearing

177about their plans to for lack of better words off-ramp from masking and their ideas for metrics and data points needed to determine whether on ramping again would be necessary um so that would be my question is how can we collaborate with districts that are in a similar position as us um but i think what's key here is uh dr hermann for us to have a plan that allows for flexibility and adaptability and responsiveness um we owe it to every stakeholder in our community to provide that transparent communication when we determine that actions need to be taken so that's that's what i will be asking for as you work toward your uh district plan how we can how we can best provide that for every stakeholder we do have some summary of data of some of

178our local schools brian if you want to share again this this is up today because we do know other school boards have been taking action yeah and i think you know a couple questions there um try to answer so there are other school districts that are still mass required some are mass optional and i think still a lot of them are wrestling with those current metrics because they're the county isn't providing them to us or idp some of them are working on local metrics so we can you know as we look at some of our metrics to try to determine something for district 128 we have resources of other schools that are also doing the same thing as they're looking for you know their off-ramp and again so there are schools um in our area

179that are mask optional from antioch and lakes high school gray's lake their two schools lake forest grant barrington lake zurich district 211 which is five school districts district 214 which is six school districts um carmel some of the ones that are still mass required um munlin stevenson waukegan zion nutria highland park deerfield warren glenbrook north and south now's north and west and the main township school districts are still mass required our feeder districts so those are just the high schools because i think we're just you know when we're looking at you know schools were a little different than some of the you know ak five school or middle school so looking at those are the high schools the feeder schools around us mass required still district 73 72 which is round out and then mask

180optional district 70 and district 68. so but that's you know some of the schools around us and again when we look at our metrics we can start reaching out to some schools if they're coming up with some rubrics to look at because again we're trying to get stuff from lake county it's just you know that's the hard thing is trying to get those yeah and one one little thing i think we need to keep in mind also when we're talking about data points are these hospitalization rates that we sometimes look to um just as as kind of a reminder if we have forgotten at all about hospitalization rates they tend to lag about three weeks so if that's an indicator we're using that's going to be a tough one so that's just something to make

181a special consideration for i think it's essential that we do have some set of metrics to guide us if we've learned anything you know at the beginning of the pandemic we made data-driven decisions and i'm committed that we continue to do that and without metrics to guide us it doesn't mean that we still don't have that local autonomy but it gives clear expectations of when we can start removing additional layers of mitigation from our culture of care plan and there will be no surprise if we are forced to bring some back i agree i'd like to just add a couple points here while we are focusing on masking here there are other mitigations also um testing and you know this masking of teachers versus students i think your metrics ought to keep all of that

182flexible i don't know if it needs to be all or nothing or can you have pieces of it depending on what combination of metrics come out so please consider that the entire range of mitigations not just masking thank you we will make sure that it's parallel and that it's clear to students and staff and and one last thing is we need to also have an active communication plan about as things change they have to be timely i think in in the current environment probably more communication is better than less i'd like to really see more communication come out as far as how things are going agreed i would like to briefly speak to the idea of making a motion kevin made a motion two years ago at one of our committee meetings and i raised

183a point of order at that time about whether or not it was appropriate because committee meetings we denied that we don't identify to our constituents that we will be taking board action so kevin said i absolutely assure you this is a completely legal thing we can do this he also said graciously you can also table the motion and then we could wait and that's what we chose to do is to wait until we had another special meeting where we could actually vote i agree with kevin that it is technically um appropriate you can raise a motion during a committee meeting however i asked prentice to speak with our lawyers to say can you do that and prentice said you can but because our past precedent is to always indicate to the community when we will

184be voting on a topic it would be easily overturned in court so i would not be comfortable making a motion because i have past practice that indicates to me that it is not appropriate to do that during a meeting in which we have not told our constituents that we would be voting and i would i would add to that that i think given the recommendations that we've heard tonight we're on this off ramp we're already looking forward to what we can do to alleviate the the need to have everyone have face coverings and some of the other things so i think we're we're already on that path and we should be there by the 28th at least with the the recommendations so i i think it would be it wouldn't be necessary to do that

185to make this this happen i would say go ahead do you think you need to the 20 i understand we need time for a plan is it something that can could we put matrix together and have is there a way to push this is there a way to push our timeline up timeline for the matrix or timeline it seems i i don't understand but not tonight i mean i i understand we need to prepare but that's 14 days is if we have our metrics set do you need no i don't know i can't hear you i can't please so we can hear and talk discuss amongst ourselves how much time do you think you need as an administration to set up the metrics and we can uh come back together and get notification out to

186our community and if it's the 28th it's the 28th i'm asking you how much time do you think you need i think the metrics part we're expecting more information from lake county or idph soon but in the meantime we'll be gathering our own in terms of opportunities for us to respond to staff and student needs we have been in communication with other school districts who very quickly transitioned and who now have had some significant staffing issues in terms of hard to fill substitute areas such as special education teachers or other things and so i would ask that's the kind of time that we need to make sure that as teachers have health plans or students have health plans that we have the time we need to make sure that all students are safe as we

187transition to the mask recommended guidelines lisa we're circling back to metrics because that's in my brain right now um when previously we'd use the the covid dashboard from northwestern that allows us to get down to zip code that may be something that we may want to look at as part of our metrics rubric and then i definitely think that we should have some identification of outbreaks in our schools like well that you mean in addition to the data that's already on our website i'm sorry what in it's i it's hard for us to hear each other it's very echoey is do you mean that that's because the speaker's saying that in addition to the data that's already on our website on the covet dashboard because i think what you're asking for is the positivity rates

188from the northwestern dashboard not the positivity rates i'm i'm talking about adding that that to our guiding principle adding those to oh to the guiding price the guiding principle that now we're going to boil this down to more of our metrics i understand i'm looking at that guiding principle as kind of our rubric right i mean that's how i'm looking at it and i'm thinking now it's just too vague to say cdc and idph like if we could put our local yeah what specific metrics regardless of whether they come from cdc or idph or our own local data right but they're local they're local yes thank you right yeah that that would be what i would like to see on that is that i think that that would allow us a path forward for our

189schools specific to our community and recognizing that our community has done the things that you know to keep themselves safe they've gotten themselves vaccinated they've you know we've got the testing in place we've spent good money on ventilating our schools so that the the air quality is better we've done the right things and our numbers are showing it and now it's time to to recognize that these students need to pay attention to the learning and get back to something that resembles normal so so we didn't dr herman am i understanding correctly that in order to give equity to all stakeholders in the group it is in the best interest of the district to wait until rather to give that two-week window to gather these data points to come up with a solid plan is that

190what i'm understanding that provides equity yes we have students for whom this change will require some significant adjustments in their schooling okay i thought that's what i understood thank you and staffing as well [Music] please so we can hear each other and and discuss this i ask for quiet in the audience so the recommendations would go into place on monday the 28th and we would be publishing board packet material the friday before that so we would make sure that all of that information would be made available to the board and the public the friday before that in terms of communicating the metrics and then the board would have an opportunity to weigh in and see if the metrics that i'll be recommending are suitable for what you think the community needs thank you and we'll

191also have some communication later this week based on the results of the the appeal okay sounds like well yeah i think communication has got to be key in this uh i you know i i've talked and i've i feel like we missed an opportunity in communicating our reasoning behind i understood why we were doing it we had an opportunity to share that reasoning so as we're moving forward on both sides our communication has to be better well and i it seems like with clear indications of if this than that and if that than this well and something long term that people can hand it can people can rely on right as things change something long term that we can see if we as a community start to see a trend up we can rely on

192that but i was addressing the timely communication and because we have the clear rubric of if this than that if this than that then having timely communication prepared should be something that is available yeah okay any more board comments on this particular topic i have uh i have taught in a classroom with a mask on and it's horrible it's not good it's a difficult thing to do i have also experienced the loss that is associated with covid and i feel that having an appropriate metric is a good idea i think we have to have a metric that we can point to to tell us but i i also know i also feel i should say that we are not in a rush i'm not in a rush to change our current plan if the governor

193reduces the mandate on the 28th and that applies to schools that two weeks to me is a step closer to the endemic phase and i'm concerned that we are still in a pandemic that we need to recognize that we are in a pandemic and that an endemic is coming and so i would hope that we are patient i would hope that we are patient um and that we would continue to support each other through what is a difficult way to go through education and so so much better than the remote learning that we experienced before so i am glad that our kids are in our building i am glad that they are in contact with their teachers i am frustrated that we are masked i hate the pandemic but i also am patient thank you

194okay any other comments on this one okay we will move on to um let's see what's next uh item number five for documents management software yes so this um item uh is actually related to the documents that we're looking at right now currently we use a series of google docs to organize all of our board materials do we need emotions thank you for coming everybody in but please be quiet as you leave so should we let's take a recess yeah we're gonna take a five minute recess microphones are turned off and meeting participants leave the stage for a five-minute recess okay we're back thank you and for those sticking around in the audience uh i appreciate your patience uh and your uh uh stamina out there uh we're gonna move on with our agenda so

195we can get through the pnp rather quickly for the rest of the items and then we have another meeting to do so um right now we are at the board document management software this is a preview of a recommendation that we'll have that will be coming to the february february 28th meeting um this is a tool that will help us manage all of our board documents right now we use google docs and as you see we have our agenda and then we have about 18 to 20 google docs that it's difficult for us when we're in a meeting but it's even more difficult for public to know which google doc goes with which particular item so in an attempt to try and improve our own communication and our transparency to the public we are recommending

196that we move forward as many districts in the area already use board docs and one of the things that we're very excited about is for each agenda item it will say if it's action or not it will also say if there's any policy relations what those are but also see if there's any budget implications what those are so it's a very nice structured way to make sure we understand everything that's before us and that the public understands everything before us so we're very excited about this and you'll see it on the agenda do we pay a price for google docs do we subscribe to that or is that just free because it seems a little pricey the only thing you pay is just archiving for google but that's really gmail but other than that google

197is no cost i was able to fit in on the demo and i was incredibly impressed with the capabilities that board docs gives not only us to see all the documents but the public better access it makes it much more clear what we're looking at when we're having our discussions it's a significant level up from the procedures that we have here and from the other districts that are already using it they can't imagine going back to any other way of board governance because it really helps make it clear for much easier for the board to follow the agenda in the related documents it makes it much easier for the public i've been frustrated i've been frustrated with the uh being able to access documents during board meetings which is why i use my own computer

198download all the documents so that i have them i don't have to wait so good yeah i will say just from my own personal experience i've worked in or with a number of organizations that have boards that are public education organizations and have managed technology groups supporting both the use of like a google docs kind of thing or this kind of system and this is far superior it just gives you so much clearer access to what the documents are and especially like like you're saying lisa for the um for the public to be able to really have better access and more understandable access to be able to weed through what can be quite a bit of material is this what your district that you work in using we use a similar product yeah the other

199thing that i would consider doing is being able to connect the output of this to the actual calendar we have in the school because i can't tell you how many people have asked me just in the last few days how do i find the zoom link and it it was buried like three levels below some of these things we just have to make it easy for people to find so this does have that ability to have that be um on the front page of what will be our new board meeting um uh platform so how to watch the zoom link what the upcoming dates are what the previous minutes are it's very user friendly for the public and can we tie that to the actual calendar we have for district 128 um on our website

200to have which link to the calendar are you talking about the year at a glance right i mean that it is as as a parent yeah it's varied it's not user-friendly when you just want to look quick here at a glance you have to do three steps and i know it's on there it's just not um i find it difficult yeah we appreciate that feedback mary and i can work with our webmaster and make some of those adjustments immediately yep so anything that we are discussing like today i would envision we go to feb 14 2022 and i can tomorrow see the entire meeting packet there and if i were to go to the 28th i'll see the zoom length there and agenda there that's exactly what we'll be able to okay a similar vendor

201and the price is very very they're yeah change of each other yeah so is this an annual maintenance but it's we have to renew it every year or would they give us a discount if you like signed a i don't know five year term or something like that we did not investigate a multi-year until we thought we got direction from all of you i can ask but i don't think there was a multi-year pricing discount for this particular service but i can inquire about that it's a good question i asked the same thing um so we didn't receive that um i know that when we asked for a couple of changes to the contract it was quite a lengthy thing with their legal to change it so um hopefully they can get back to us

202with an answer about whether or not a multi-year contract is available not only from a pricing standpoint but the longer you use it the more historically rich it becomes it like builds as a historical record in a very um easy to navigate sort of way so i would anticipate that because we would want to continue using it to make it sort of more uh robust that uh that's a great question to see if that if that's available india because the other things you know i do software contracts all the time at work the things you want to also look at is protecting your service level agreements yes making sure the site is up and running at a certain time what happens if some there's an outage you don't want to negotiate this every year [Music]

203so i'd say even if it takes a little longer for legal to get to the process it might be worthwhile to do okay other questions comments this is to your point lisa this is one of those you don't change this kind of system every year once you start building that it becomes so valuable because it's on all in one repository and searchable and it also these things also provide a much higher level of safety and security for data that should be kept secure and for the you know from a privacy perspective and all those kinds of things far more than you know you have to jump through some hoops to make that happen in in another system but this is built designed to do that to protect information in closed session minutes and meeting information

204and stuff so it's a it's a really valuable tool i'm sorry i just remembered one other thing is also look for price protection so you don't want next year they come back and say it's 20 000. that's a good point okay anything else on that one moving on to um superintendent evaluation online platform i'm interested in hearing about this one yes so um currently the practice for evaluating the superintendents in our district is again much more narrative and not using necessarily state or national recommended guidelines for superintendents or educational leaders and so as i approach needing to receive my evaluation from all of you for this year's work i want to make sure that we're adjusting so that our practices are aligned um so that i'm getting the feedback that i need based on all

205of the standards that i'm being held to so lisa and i met with a vendor that comes very highly recommended from some of the area superintendents who've been using this tool for about the last 18 months i'm going to let lisa describe it more but we're pleased that it could be something very useful for both you giving me feedback and me receiving feedback yeah i think um you know coming from a time where our board president would solicit feedback from board members and compile a word document this gives us the opportunity to check in more frequently to set and adjust goals as well as collaborate to provide feedback and share that feedback uh with each other it is a significant level up from what we've been doing and it also gives the opportunity for it

206to be used with the district leadership team so that our performance reviews um are consistent that's important not just from a legal standpoint but it's really important that people get timely and specific feedback and this is a way to document it in a very user-friendly way is there the pricing is just for the superintendent we have we also included we did include in this sample adding the district administrators also to this but we actually have started another protocol so i would want to start the district administrators on july 1 2022 with their cycle in terms of the kind of process that we're using um so but lisa and i felt it would be very helpful to start using some of these tools this spring as the way to gather feedback from each of you and

207then in terms of goal setting once we have our strategic plan and other things in place it will be the perfect dovetail for us to then fully use the whole annual cycle starting in july when we do our annual work is this similar frontline are you familiar with frontline um it's just an evaluation tool it allows you to put all of your yes it is it would be for me to put all my archives so again it allows me to report to you what i'm doing as evidence of reaching the goals so you plug in your goals i do a self-assessment right i um and you give me if there's a mid-year check or again i need to show you what i've been doing to reach the goals that we've set mid-year you can give

208me feedback then as you get any time but it's a more formal way to do it then and then the end-of-the-year summative yeah i think it would be a very similar product but that's geared towards teachers and certified staff that have specific requirements so this would be an administrative version of that yeah i also think this goes a long way towards recognizing that hiring uh and you know as a board in terms of board governance this is one of our primary responsibilities is to hire and maintain a superintendent and i think this goes a very long way to helping us do our jobs that we have nothing to compare it to so i'm looking forward to it it's actually a relatively new i've not seen a product like this it's more it's being used at

209several districts in new york because we asked about that denise did you remember more than that it was very um it's becoming commonly known in uh new york school districts public school districts because we try to you know compare apples to apples did you recall the other districts that might well the the superintendents that i've met with in lake county um lake bluff is using this i think mundelline its superintendent is using this i think the round lake superintendent is using this but it just sort of was launched here in illinois last year so the the people who have started using it are raving about it um i know during the school board conference i attended a session on you know trying to align your practices to state standards and goal setting this product does

210what this district was saying they wanted to do it provides all the structure for more districts to be able to do that well it should provide a much more subjective view so everything i said about the other software product yes you know you know you know the only other thing that you might want to consider here is you know more more attention to privacy and security because you are talking about personnel and performance versus the other one is more for public use so you want to pay attention to where is this data hosted what kind of security and privacy controls they have on it are they selling it to anyone are they shipping it outside the united states all of that you know got to think about those things thank you i know nick torrez

211our director of technology has a very good eye and he reviews all of our technology contracts so we'll make sure he does a once-over on both of these kind of this is one of those that as i review these kinds of things i look to the new so-called that is in effect in illinois that's more specific to student data but i also look through that same lens and use some of those same sort of concepts of how to look at uh these systems that contain adult data that contain employee data that contain you know that that type of thing so i think it's uh you know it would be would be the appropriate person to review all that and temple murphy who also works in that department is right is really the one really dives

212into the security of so you know for all of our systems we again we have a lot of computer systems you know different data and so you know temple is constantly working on that to keep student data staff data and all the all that safe important anyone else okay moving on we have a group of personnel items anyone have any comments or questions related to those at this point yeah what's a uh sel interventionist and is this a new position so the sel interventionist was um two new positions for the second semester in using our esser funds to hire staff to be able to um you know help our students at both schools we were lucky enough to be able to find two people available at both of our schools and get them started um

213and in working with our students so they are it's it's for the this year you know this semester till the end of the year um and then we could just reevaluate and see where we go from there and what's their goal what are they doing so you know obviously our um you know school counselors our social workers our psychologists are really maxed out with the students and trying to help our students and so they want to be able to help intervene in our lsts and really be able to work with our students that are uh you know having the social emotional learning similar to what we're doing with our math interventionists at libertyville and to some of the things that we put in place at the arc the uh the resource center at vernon hills

214so academic needs but also the social emotional learning needs and again um you know we're using esser funds available to be able to do that and we thought we identified those needs in talking to our schools so you know both schools identified the need for the sel interventionists but then there were some other needs in the schools again that we were able to do and get in place right away it's perfect timing yeah yeah i was going to say if ever i did see an excellent use of esser funds it just aligns so beautifully but that's super exciting to have these additions in our schools and i know they will go to excellent use by our students these are not fte positions though there they're not fte positions they're just they're just for this year

215temporary okay they're just temporary temporary yeah they're not permanent will it and forgive me if you don't have this information but will it potentially be reevaluated at the end of the school year or over the summer if these positions um you know there is a need to maintain these types of positions yeah i think our goal is to evaluate you know all of that you know mid-semester you know um and we get towards staffing time um in march and we can look at those and um but and it's something that we can wait till the end of the school year and just determine um what we want to do thank you and you would be able to use esser funds next year for these positions no unlike other schools in the area who have received

216millions of dollars of sfs or funds we have not and so we are using the money allotted this year for this year's students yes so that evaluation would be important but i think you know to kara's point if it's a valuable resource i think we should definitely consider the results of that and we'll have almost a whole semester of data of the impact that they've had on the students that they've worked with to determine how we want to move forward for the next school year okay any other questions on that on the personnel items we'll move on to um word policies we have a group here for second reading any comments on these either from the board or from i have some commentary um on three items that i apologize for not um seeing sooner

217but i assume this is what second readings are precisely for correct yep so i i read again and again and again and um so here is my question policy um 660 curriculum content and i believe i brought this up before at a previous meeting and i apologize but just as a reminder is there curricular content uh or inclusion for regarding the history struggles and contributions of native americans i can answer that these uh the groups listed in this policy are those that are mandated and named in statute because native americans are not listed it doesn't mean they are not taught in our curriculum so they are a group that is not named in the statute but many of our courses include the study of native americans as a non-mandated particular choice to include that history

218and perhaps that's what included but not limited to alludes to okay thank you um policy 710 uh i'm sorry i didn't write the title of the policy equal education opportunities yes um there's a line i am looking at my notes so i don't have the policy in front of me so um but i put it in quotations no student shall on the basis of abcd all these you know identifiers be denied equal access to programs etc should we state building facilities as well so there were a number of things listed but actual facilities within the building i was just wondering if you have to specify if it's smart to specify i can check on that so i think um so up above in the paragraph above um no that's something else i will because it

219really it just says nothing shall on the basis of um sex sexual orientation gender identity be denied equal equal access to programs activity services or benefits or be limited in the exercise of any right privilege advantage or denied equal access to educational extracurricular programs and activities um i think it's implied that i can check on if we need to include anything about it if they have equal access to all those activities can you think of an example of how they could not be equal access to the facility presumably um i wonder sometimes if more specificity is better than less but i i asked the experts to weigh in i suppose i can i'll look that up i can check on that though okay and then um finally policy 7 210. expulsion procedures explosion procedures um

220i just want to make sure i'm almost there there we go uh list the students prior suspension so on one d it says the request shell the list of students prior suspension or suspensions so my question is um well i found the wording confusing do you need to indicate if applicable and the reason i find it confusing is because as a parent i would then ask myself well can expulsions happen without prior suspensions does that make sense do you need suspensions to build to an expulsion i there may be an understanding um typically yes but there are a few things in school code for which when they happen they can be immediately expelled but those are very clearly outlined others do require uh students to have um feedback repeat offenders yes repeat affirmations so my

221only question is do we want to be specific in saying list the students prior suspension suspensions if applicable i will have to look this one up because a lot of times with this one we don't stray from what the exact wording is um but i can look that up and okay and get back to you on that one too don i hope i'm not stealing your policy i don't even know who you are i learned from the best i don't know why i am okay with you guys asking these questions though because it does help out it helps to educate all of us on it's also funny what you find on subsequent readings yeah that's why we do it twice yeah i like it uh policy 650 school wellness i asked bryant about this and

222he said they're working on it it's a new section um that says that we will develop a food-sharing plan for unused food that is focused on needy students and i just wondered oh where is that and it's we're working on it because it's new right it's brand new so dan will reach out to chartwells and communicate with them so i'm intrigued by that and then the other one is also 650 under community involvement it said the board and superintendent will actively invite suggestions and comments concerning the development implementation and that was the only change was that they added the word actively so what what happened that so i don't know why they worded the um added the word actively but in reading through some of the background on this policy um it says that seeking

223community input or involvement during the policies adoption and any monitoring phases and inviting suggestions and comments to the public comment um aligns with this so because we're doing a first reading and a second reading and then also because we do review the sections that that really satisfies that but it is interesting that press decided to act you know add the word actively yeah like we weren't doing enough somehow i don't know and it could have been feedback that they were getting you know from other school districts you know over time and just in an effort to you know move things along because jim is going to get the record for the longest committee meeting ever thank you i will relinquish my time right a lot of these changes are as a result of um some

224of the new laws that were passed correct so either new laws that were passed or also some of their five-year reviews that the press policy does um so and sometimes you'll see like they change one word in a five-year review and i i don't know why they do that it's just different language but at the same time it's not a bad thing because then it does come before the boards and you guys do get a chance to read through them so some of them you look at you're like they just all they did was take a word and they you know right you know changed illinois to ill or something you know and but it's okay because then i think it gives the boards to a chance to look at them so yeah just to

225give the public an idea of what the process is and why we we undergo this we don't just pick them at random we we have a process to review all of our policies correct okay any other don has set the bar high you know striving to achieve okay um so those will be up for second reading and adoption so that'll be a motion at the board meeting uh in two weeks a review of committee summary from january any questions or comments about that no corrections there we got future agenda items uh annual staffing report to look forward to yeah so in um you know right now the students are selecting their courses finishing up with that and then we start working on sectioning with um the you know again the sectioning is all based off

226of the student um what they choose the the classes so the buildings will work on sectioning and then we all work collectively as a team all of us um you know from the principals rita dan myself kelly hartwig we all meet we look at the district sectioning and then from there the classes then determine you know our staffing you know for next year and so then we do bring um the staffing report and i know we have some board members that were not through staffing before and so when we come in march i'll kind of go through that whole process of you know when you have um from non-10-year teachers to part-time teachers and the legal procedure proceedings that we have to do the other reason it's in march there is a you have to

227go backwards from your end date of school and you have to make you have to make all your decisions on staffing by a certain date so it has to be done at the march board meeting we can't go into april because now it's so to give notice to people that are you know part-time or non-tenured being released so um so there is a little bit of you know but that'll come up in committee meetings in march and then you'll uh take action on personnel in march okay i do have uh one additional future item that i'd like to consider for next month's committee meeting and that is as we sort of approach this off-ramp we we put in place the process of accepting public comment via email a couple years back because we couldn't meet

228in person we had to have some opportunity for the public to to comment so i'm just saying we should that's maybe something we should visit at next month's meeting i'm not saying i want to get rid of it or you know but i think it's something that with uh the mitigations being you know continually reduced and us moving into hopefully a bit more normal environment that's a good question yeah it's a timeline question forward thinking yep other than that any other the future agenda items did you want to take a break before the next i'm good i can keep moving yeah okay i'll close this meeting uh during the uh program and personnel committee meeting and uh thank you all right i'm gonna call to order the facilities and finance meeting uh from monday february

22914th uh is there i'm going to start with public comment is there anyone from the public that would like to make a comment okay mary any email comments facilities in finance okay all right uh the agenda is as follows we're going to review the january committee uh minutes the fiscal year 21 annual comprehensive financial report will be presented uh capital projects update uh the fiscal year 22 mid-year financial review i will also be discussing the energy audit which i'm very much looking forward to hearing um and an update on that and then we'll go through some bids and contracts that will be up for uh votes at the february 28th meeting and then discuss some upcoming bids and contracts no disposal of absolute equipment and future agenda items and then we will adjourn so let's

230start with uh review of january committee minutes any comments okay moving on uh to the fiscal year 2021 annual comprehensive financial report all right give me one second here so dance um we have a buddy here we stuck it out everyone i don't believe any of you have yet had the pleasure to meet in person uh the managing partner for our audit this is betsy welcome no well yes sorry um this is uh from miller cooper um she is here uh to talk about our fiscal year 21 financial reports so again betsy allen for miller cooper i'm gonna put this up on the big screen so you all can see and she's gonna kind of walk through so the big picture um we got our annual financial reports but we've never really brought brought them

231out here and we thought it'd be a good idea uh to bring but yeah she's done she does this for multiple clients and thought it would be a good good thing to kind of provide that i don't know another perspective that's not just me talking all the time so with that i'll turn it over to betsy okay can anyone hear me okay can we zoom that closer closer yep thank you dan just make sure that's on for her yeah that's right is this okay yeah there we go um so as dan said this is oh hold on i'm sorry i didn't put this i didn't share my screen with zoom right there sorry that's we should be okay we're good good okay um as dan said you know this is the first time i've come

232out to meet with the board so thank you for your committee so thank you for having me um i tried to put just a short presentation together to sort of explain the audit and what you know not to go through every page of the hundred and some page audit um you know the numbers were the numbers at june 30th that you've looked at so i was really just sort of going to go over what's you know what's in the um annual conference of my financial report um try to get through quickly i know you guys have a lot going on but please answer let me know if you have any questions as i'm starting to go through this so the first item on here is you know why do you even have an audit you

233know each school district in the state of illinois is required to have an annual audit you know by a public accounting firm and the illinois state board of education also requires you to have your audit done in accordance with government auditing standards and also realize too that an auditor has to be independent of the district and the object the main objective of our audit is to obtain reasonable assurance um that your financial statements are free of material misstatement in order for us to provide an opinion through our audit procedures and inquiries that we do of the district so this slide shows you is just sort of a short summary of the services that we provide and like i said in the last slide you know the main the main objective of our audit is to

234express an opinion on the 2021 financial statements we do assist the district with drafting the financial statements which we call that as a non-audit service but mainly the part of the financial statements that is ours is our opinion that we have issued we would also issue which we did not issue this year our internal control communication our controlled efficiency letter we referred to it as and here we would provide any recommendations on internal control we found or if there's anything for improvements that the district needed to be um to be doing in future years and then i'm sorry did you say you did not include that in this year we did not have to issue a control deficiency letter this year yes thank you i just want a little clarification on that i'm sorry i'm

235jumping ahead no that's okay um thank you for being here but we did not issue a controlled deficiencies i mean we didn't have any um we did we did have one recommendation that i'll look at but since it was only a management advice we put that in our required communication to the board letter we did not have any controlled efficiencies uh to report to the board so that's why we did not issue a controlled efficiency level which is a good thing correct thank you very much that that's what the clarification i was trying to get yes thank you and then lastly our professional standards require us to issue what we call our required communication to the board letter which will uh look at a few items in an upcoming slide um so after we uh

236finish all of our audit procedures um you know through you know our substantive testing analytical procedures inquiries that we do um these are the documents that we issue uh the first one is the annual comprehensive financial report you will see i think in your agenda and i think dan who called it too the comprehensive annual financial report which it was always called until this past year so that is not a transposition they did change the name to annual comprehensive financial report due to the abbreviation of the other term not being a nice term used somewhere so there was a whole gatsby statement to change the name of the report this year there's also a an annual financial report considered on the regulatory basis it's filed with the illinois state board of education the district also

237had a single audit this year because they did expend over 750 000 um in federal funds so we issued our single audit opinion um as i said before isb required you to do the audit in accordance with government auditing standards so we also teach you that opinion along with our required communication to the board another item within the audit that's important for districts to look at sometimes within the annual financial report that's filed with the state board of education there is an estimated financial profile score that you will see and do realize this is estimated so it's finalized by isb um this is just sort of a take a take out of what the form looks like within the annual financial report and the district currently does have an estimated recognition of a 4.0 which

238is fours are the highest score you can get in each of those categories so um as i said just to point out here some things that help you sort of understand what's in what's in the annual comprehensive financial report this report is divided into three sections um there's the introductory section and i've just sort of listed under there sort of what's in each of those sections what we'll look at more in depth there's a financial section and also a statistical section so within your um introductory section you will have a transmittal letter that's prepared by the district an organizational chart a list of your officers and officials and then there's also the certificate of excellent financial reporting that you get from the association of school business officials international and also the certificate of achievement for

239excellent financial reporting for the government finance officers association so each year the district does submit their report to these to these entities um who who has a reviewers look at them and then issue these awards to the district um and then within the financial section of the report um you have the independent auditors report i tried to put the beginning page numbers on there if you want to go look at the information there's also a management discussion and analysis um i always tell boards that i meet with um and committees that if you don't want to read the whole whole report that management discussion analysis is a great part of the document to go to um it's just um it has some summary of financial highlights of the district it has some condensed financial statements

240it also reports a brief overview and description of the statements with the statements that are within the report and it also has a section on items that could have some financial effect on the district in the future but then the next part of the financial section are the for the basic financial statements um and here we have the government-wide and fund financial statements with some reconciliations between the showing the different basis of accounting and also the footnotes that talk a lot about the accounting policies and give more detailed information from the basic financial statement within those notes to financial statements there's also a lot of information on the pension liabilities for trs and th is and also the old fed the other post-employment benefits and i am sorry i forgot as part of the pension

241benefits so there's many many many footnote pages of pension and opev liabilities and then the final sections of the financial resection are the required supplementary information and then the supplementary financial information and then just a few things that are important to point out i think within the financial section um our independent auditor's report was an unmodified opinion which is the highest level of assurance that we can give as auditors i do want to point out if you happen to look at it there is an emphasis of a matter paragraph in the um in the independent audit report and this is only due to the implementation of gatsby which is a governmental accounting standards board statement 84 i was the fiduciary activities which there was a reporting change of where those needed to be reported but

242do realize our opinion is not modified for this as it was just a change in accounting principle i thought i gave you a wrong slide or something um we won't really spend a lot of time on this but for you know you want your pounding geeks as we call ourselves i guess um i think it's great i know dan loves this stuff right the as we talked about in the basic financial statements you have the government-wide statements and the fund financial statements so this just sort of lists some of the differences you know the basis of accounting you know what the statements are trying to report um as a district when you're getting your you know monthly financials from from the business office to look at you're really seeing more of the fun financial statements

243is what you'd be more more used to looking at so like i said this slide's really just trying to you know give you a snapshot of the differences between the two types of statements and dan you know what we say in our district pardon me you know what we say in our district dan puts the fun in fund accounting oh yes [Laughter] i've had a few great meetings with dan and he has this great big board up and puts everything up there and um and so then the last section of of the um of the report is the statistical section um this is where there's some schedules that contain detailed information most of them are 10-year trend schedules and i've listed the different five areas that have to be reported within the statistical section a

244lot of boards administrations that like to look at these because they are trend schedules they have 10 years of information so then as i stated earlier we do have to issue our required communication to the board letter which is required by the standards again we did perform our audit in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards government auditing standards and the uniform guidance which is the single audit the letter also contains pages of future and current accounting pronouncements by gasby and again gasby's the governmental county standards board we did like we already mentioned implement the sb 84 this past year which required student activities to be reported within the the general educational fund um it also i didn't list all the um the upcoming um gatsby statements but within the letter that you have it lists

245all the there's many more coming in different years um the big one that's coming up this year is in regards to leases and lease accounting so we will start working with the district um to ensure that we properly implement that statement in the upcoming year um there's also if you read the letter um the manchester was very prepared for the audit i just want to thank dan and his entire staff for all their help during the audit to help it be done efficiently and timely management did sign a representation a letter to us when we did release the deliverables there were no significant adjusting entries no misstatements and here is where i said you know we did not issue a controlled efficiency letter but we did include one in management advice in regard to technology

246and data security risk if you read it within our letter this is a comment that we do put in all of our clients letters you guys are having some discussion tonight about you know getting board docs and superintendent evaluation and it's really just a reminder to always remember to be assessing and looking at the technology especially with a lot of the remote different remote stuff that's been going on too so don't please don't take it as there's anything wrong with your technology this is really just an advice that we give to all of our clients just to remember um to be constantly watching watching for that and then lastly um as i said we did not issue a controlled efficiency letter this year um this slide is just sort of telling you the three levels

247of a deficiency if you had one and that our recommendation is within our required communication letter and then if anyone has any questions i would be happy to answer them and on the last slide i also left my contact information and you can always get hold of dan if anyone had any further questions dan i have one question um when it says day's cash on hand can you just do a little refresher why that's important to have those fund balances yeah so what one of the things that isb looks at when they're trying to gauge financial strength is they want to know basically at the end of the year how many days cash on hand so they essentially take um they take the cash you have on hand and then they calculate a daily expenditure

248essentially and so then they'll divide right how much cash versus what would be a daily expenditure for you and they figure out how many days the way they rate it is um anything that is 180 days or above is rated a four the strongest rating anything less than that gets teared down relatively so essentially what isbe is saying what they really want to see is at least six months cash on hand at the end of the fiscal year which is not necessarily the same thing as fund balance uh but for our district it's pretty close yeah in our 370. yeah that's a very good explanation i really look at it because i see the formulas it's a it's all formulated through the state annual financial report so it's really not numbers that were the only

249numbers we're inputting or the number or the numbers or linking them that show the total expenditures revenues and expense you know and assets so this is really all calculated by formulas within isb's state annual financial report right it's an organization independent of our district that's setting up the framework and we are inputting our numbers within it to show that we are within the guidelines we exceed the guidelines and it's it's and it's calculated for every district um in the state of illinois and there's there's four different ratings of it there's recognition i wrote these down i always forget recognition review early warning and watch and so each district will get a ranking based on their based on their score and is there some type of remediation or penalty depending on the rating or is it

250just a guideline i think it's more my understanding is it's more a guideline um if you guys mean if you get closer to watch sometimes i mean sometimes izb will send in an oversight board um there's been i know a district one time that asks for a financial oversight panel you know just because they knew they were getting on the brink of that but it there are some financial oversight panels that are there due to where their rankings have been and that this be says we're coming in and you're gonna have a financial oversight panel one example of that is north chicago for example had been under under a financial oversight for a very long time and it's not a secret who those districts are if you if you get on the website and look

251this up it lists who who who the financial oversight panel is and who has one yeah thank you but going through this process holds us accountable you know going through this process getting this information and getting it out in the public is part of the accountability process so thank you for your work on this anybody else any questions and anything else is this something we'll vote on refresh my memory yeah we usually vote to accept it at the february meeting it's getting late sorry yep no my brain is not trying to remember from last year okay thank you thank you very much thank you for joining us and for being so patient all right moving on to capital projects update one one who wants it sounds like a lightsaber yeah that's what i think it's

252the it's the interaction it's like sell signal lightsaber yes it does um a mom of a boy takes one to no one uh yeah so the vernon the vernon hills um i included the report there we have crossed wt and dotted every eye and i'm really excited the final cost for the project that feels like we completed like a year and a half ago but as i told you the the final payments all that has to get worked out and things weren't looking so great but i knew a new thing sorry at the end of a project you always have credits and more charges as you're trying to finalize this out and our final cost for the project ended up at thirty million five hundred thirty one thousand eighty four dollars um the estimated cost

253that we were sitting at was thirty million five hundred and thirty thousand nine twenty seven which means we came the final cost for the project came in about 156 dollars and 89 cents over what we estimated now just a reminder for those of you some of you weren't on the board when this project started our original estimate was 30 million 230 000 but as we progressed the project i knew that we had under we had underestimated for ffe particularly like tech equipment and stuff so we added 3 300 000 to the project but even with that and i think that was done since the board since you all have been on the board but since then we came in um and you know i i'd always want to be like under if i can but

254being over by 159 157 dollars is really exciting that's good all right well done 0.000 but that that's a credit to that truly is a credit to mark that is a credit to gilbane um for doing what we're paying them to do is to help get us the project we want at the cost that we thought we would pay so the comment i'll make on that is that gilbane seems to be uh has in the past shocked us at points in time with some unexpected um yes um i don't know change orders whatever it might be but they've always come through with uh really trying to get to the bottom of it and rectifying them yes we so we have been through now two major capital projects the first one 21 million this one 30

255million both projects we had a scare if you will of wow these are a lot of changes and really gilbane kind of saying i think it'll work out and me saying like now you gotta show me it's gonna work out um but it ends up working out um so that that's that's very exciting um because you know we don't wanna overpay for it i think that's a testament to the good working relationship you guys have with gildane and them knowing our district well enough and mark you working closely with them so thank you that's you can't ask for anything better than that i don't want to leave mark out too he does great job yeah congratulations again i can't be overstated how much we value that not only did they come in in budget but

256they came in in the time that we thought that we could get these improvements so that our students could be using them and um for that i i can't thank you and mark enough dan thank you i'm a little sad this has been a line item on facilities and finance since i've been on the board and this will be it that's right well done any other questions comments moving on to the field house there's really not an update of the deals we're wrapping up the final cost for that one as well that one's a much smaller project much easier that's not going to take years to settle out so we'll get that within the next couple months okay but that project i'm sure will come on the under estimate i'm also going to note how

257grateful i am that just as a matter of luck these projects were completed before supply chain issues really got as bad as they are right now i know that you know mark you got out ahead of a couple of things and ordered them and had them waiting so that we wouldn't face any supply chain or cost issues and i'm grateful for that and i'm also very grateful that we're not starting these projects now this i'm not asking for firm numbers on this but it might be interesting just for the public to see had we had you not had that forward thinking what that would have cost us if you could estimate that in any way i wouldn't hold you to those numbers i just kind of want to demonstrate that there was some real due

258diligence that went into this that that saved the taxpayers money and this was not a project that we would have had a choice to do um and i appreciate that just yeah we can we can talk it might be more less opportunity than dollars but let us talk a little bit okay yeah thank you uh shall we move on to mid-year uh 2022 financial review so i know it's late and i know it's been long i do though want to make sure you have some very important information in front of you and i've at least reviewed some portions of it with you here so you have my written report you can read it but there's a few highlights that i really want to point out really it's always a question as you progress through the

259year how are we doing and so i give you data and it's really basic and generalized but the the mid-year is a great opportunity to dig deep and to say okay really really how is everything going very detailed and unfortunately i just don't have the time to do a very big detail every single month nor would that be very helpful because to be honest the first quarter we don't we don't hardly spend much money because of teacher salaries and stuff like that not really kicking in until august so really december is an ideal time to really see how how is things ever how are things actually happening and i'll tell you there's a few things that i i still can't tell yet but there's a lot of things i can tell what's going on so

260i'm just going to review a few high points um i would say revenue so on the on the on the revenue side overall we're trending we're trending favorably here at 50 college 51 percent of the way through the year um usually we are about late 40s um last year we were at 52 but that's because we had a weird property tax timing thing so that is an outlier but being at 50 a true 50 we're ahead of the game right now in revenues so let me take a few minutes or a little bit to talk about some of the details so property taxes that's our most our most significant revenue that we have as a district um we are at 51.4 percent of budget on property taxes um for the last two fiscal years through

261december we've been about 51 and 53 depending on the year um and so based on what everything that i can see property taxes are on track we we're it's also a little bit weird because we're still in tax year and so we're still getting our final tax year payments and so what will be a better indicator is once those are done then i can get an analysis of all right what because we passed the levy for 2020 we've now collected almost all those taxes now let's see take a look back and see okay what actually happened for the whole tax year that will come basically as soon as the county tells me they're done and so they're not they told me they're done and then i said i think you got a little bit more

262money to give me so we're gonna we'll get that um shortly in the future uh so for property taxes i think are going really well this night last time i had to put a pretty complicated explanation about timing and it got delayed and the move payments none of that stuff is happening anymore we're kind of back on track in terms of timing which is really important cpprt is one that i do want to mention to you so this one we are way far ahead on receipts than we usually would be we're at 81 and we've only received four payments out of the eight total this is my fault um but in this sense it it's more revenue but it's more than i expected we would have so last year we got 1.2 million in cpprt

263just a reminder that is a replacement tax that a tax that was abolished many decades ago it was a replacement tax that comes out of uh companies uh state income tax they get that money and then they they send us a payment relative to a formula they figure out we got 1.2 million last year however my understanding at that point and what what i believe what was happening is that that 1.2 million was actually inflated because of economic incentives there were a lot of economic incentives that were happening last fiscal year that we thought that was making up some of this difference and so that the 1.2 was a bit of a bump and it's going to go down so i budgeted for 954 000. as it turns out um we're going to get closer

264to 1.3 million um this year so that's about a tune of about a 400 000 swing on revenue so that helps us um but still that it wasn't something that i anticipated we're going to see yet if that's something that will continue for the future but we'll be watching that pretty closely um the rest of this what i would say is we are back to a mostly return to normal in terms of timing when i would expect to see payments in um interest income is unknown we are kind of on track but who knows what happens in the next four months right rates are going up a little bit so we'll see we'll see what happens food service is mostly back to normal but it's a little bit under 1.3 million is kind of normally

265where we hit in a normal year we're trending closer to 1.1 but i budgeted 1.2 so that one looks like it's going to be a little bit less but we'll see as the year progresses if that if there's more um more steam picked up with that program um the other thing that i would just notice in other local which is kind of a group of other things e-rate i don't know i can't remember if i mentioned this before to the board i know i've at least emailed a board member about it um we got e-rate we got a lot more money in e-rate than i thought part of that was because last year we spent more money on internet connection e-rate is a federal reimbursement for telecommunications which includes internet connection we spent a lot

266more last year when we were remote to boost up our internet i didn't i didn't realize at the time that that would mean we may we may get a higher e rate reimbursement the following year which is what's happened so that's really for that otherwise state resources are are pretty much on track what i would say there's a few more details there but i would say those are pretty on track and federal funding is running in general pretty well there's a few things up there's a few things down idea flow through though is one thing that i would note that that that i think we're going to end up about 200 000 over budget over what i expected we would get um we ended up getting a higher allocation of 645 000 versus the initial

267estimate i had of 573 000 which was based on the revenue we got last year so we got more revenue this year an idea um so that was knock once of not quite excuse me something that i was anticipating when we were adopting our budget any particular reason for that um just curious i don't have a better answer for you right now i'd have to i'd have to find out a better reason for what happened specifically there just trying to get you data to plan yep yeah yeah for sure and and i mean we were up and we were a little bit more accelerated in our budgeting process than we had been in the past so some data isn't totally available when we do the budget as like in september but so we have to

268guess a little bit on that but we should be able to guess a little bit closer on those particular things uh the other thing is cobin covet 19 relief uh we've not gotten any of the escrow funds yet but that's because we're still we're still working on filing that grant so once we do file that grant we anticipate we'll get that funding really quick which is something that we'll pay for for example those positions we talked about in the pmp meeting um so overall i think revenues are doing pretty good there's some things that are definitely going to come in over what we did a few things are probably going to end up a bit under but i think the net is we're trending better than what i budgeted for revenue and not intentional i

269try to budget what i think is going to happen i don't try to budget for something less so on the expenditure side um salaries which is our biggest line item are doing really well particularly for administrator salaries that's dead on teachers are dead on which is very exciting uh to see teacher salaries is our biggest line item for the entire district so that is trending exactly at 37.5 which is 9 24 payrolls that they're through through december that's exactly where we want to be which is very exciting this time last year we were at 37.8 which doesn't sound like a big difference but if you extrapolate that for the year that's like 300 grand over budget so like we watch that line very very closely so that's very exciting the one thing is that esp

270salaries are trending a bit under we're at 44 which normally we'd want to see about 46. some of that is going to be open positions that aren't filled but also some of that is we had a big increase in the budget and so some of these are hourly folks and some of that kind of stuff you have to estimate based on what's going to work out so we'll watch that a little bit more closely but i think esps are going to come in under uh budgets um just to move us along on benefits i would skip the benefits and say in general a number of things are on track a few things are higher than i thought medical insurance is trending a bit higher and that's our biggest benefit that we pay um so i'm

271going to watch that but we're a little bit higher than i would have thought on on on that but medical insurance is notoriously somehow very difficult to budget because of people's elections and based on their elections what we pay for medical insurance for an individual can vary significantly depending on if they go from family to single for some reason or they go from single to family for a different reason that can vary so that's somewhat hard to anticipate what's going to happen um but yeah but so benefits i think they're they're doing okay they're some are trending a little bit higher but i think there's still time that they end up fine purchase services are running a little low but that's really because our biggest contracts which is food service and transportation they have not

272returned to full to full service um or full force is what i wrote in my memo food service is it's not trending towards 1.3 million on expenditures just like the revenue isn't and then transportation even is not totally where it's at too because they've been down drivers so we pay less those kinds of things aren't kind of where the full force that i would have expected them to be when we budgeted um supplies is is within a typical range um that we usually see uh capital outlay is dead on uh other objects which is tuition the biggest thing in there is tuition and so we spend millions on that line item it's a very big one that is trending a bit under um kelly and i were able to look at the data and essentially

273what's happening is um we estimate we we actually look at specific kids and where they're going to go and so we estimated about in in one particular line item 48 kids would be placed at different places there's not 48 places right now but some of them are some of them moved out some of we have some people move in some kids are in transition and so they will be added on as we thought they would they just didn't get added on at the beginning of the year they're going to get added on mid-year and we do have some kids that are being affected by availability of programs and that is a real thing so we will catch up a bit on trend on this but we will come in under budget my honest best guess

274right now is probably five hundred thousand dollars under budget on a light item that's five million dollars so um and that's mostly because of a few students didn't place how we thought but also we do have some instances where the programs are full and [Music] they're trying to find the right solution for the students does that make sense yeah non-cap equipment yeah i'm gonna skip this overall that's that's what i would say so on a big picture salary is our biggest expenditure it's doing great benefits a little bit high everything else is either within normal range or slightly under uh based on that so um so on an overall perspective i think revenues are coming in a little bit more expenditures are coming in a little bit less is my net gut right now which

275would be ideal to happen we don't we don't intend for that to happen i don't i don't budget you know i don't budget for more and then expect less to come in i try to budget for what i think is going to actually happen um but so that's what i would say in terms of hey dan what's going on this year this is how the year is shaping up to be okay that is good better than the reverse right exactly now we appreciate it there don't seem to be any areas of concern does anybody have any questions thank you dan i know that's a lot of information in one late meeting um but it's important stuff so i appreciate you taking the time with that moving on hearing no other questions moving on to the

276energy audit vernon hills energy commission yeah so we've been having conversations with the vernon hills energy commission um about doing an energy audit uh we're essentially a company at no cost to the district will come in and do an analysis of our energy usage and things that ideas that they have that we could do to improve our energy usage um we we've we've talked we've met don as part of that and that we've been participating in the meetings and we feel comfortable moving forward with it with an audit there's no cost to the district so there's nothing really to approve there's just a letter that i would sign saying yep we're going to do this and we agree that it doesn't cost us anything and then they'll give us this information so based on that

277information we can decide what we want to do with it maybe that is data that we use for a future project or it's nothing the the there's many options available to us so we're kind of letting you know we're moving forward with that so this is the vernon township yesterday commission bernie it's vernon sorry yes my bad not bad no i wrote that line in haste it is the vernon township you're right i thought the words looked weird but i couldn't i didn't i'm like energy commission that that's what it's called no worries sorry vernon township energy commission they've asked for data like square footage energy usage over the last few years and uh they'll crunch a bunch of numbers and then they look at because it's a commission uh they're looking at how they

278can purchase across the commission so if we said you know really interested in putting some charging stations on campus they would say oh well the city wants to do that and so does the village and so does the park district and so they kind of lump that together and it's their feeling is that it's more likely that they will be able to get grant money if it's an intergovernmental agreement first of all and big projects tend to go we do have some issues because uh our need isn't as great as some districts and they base that largely on free and reduced launch data and so some things we would be uneligible for we um but uh it's the nice thing is is that they've hired the the village or excuse me township has hired max

279whose job it is to help coordinate things so that takes some of the weight off of us and they also verigy the group that we've been talking to has on board grant writers so we would benefit greatly from not having to write our own grants so we'll see what they say i'm interested to move forward in a time where it seems like we're standing still i appreciate you taking the time to attend those meetings and get the details they're fun you know they're all nerds well i can't think of a better energy and sustainability nerd on our board to participate so thank you any questions all right moving on to bids and contracts we'll look forward to future updates on that by the way um bids and contracts got anything to tell us hi thank

280you um [Music] we went out to bid for our roofing our efus and our masonry and we had some numbers come back that were inflated from what our estimates were so i'll go through um each project um and talk about it um starting with the um vernon hills uh roof replacement um we were estimating um 646 thousand dollars for the project for the year we had a lot of scope increase we had added windows as part of the project [Music] there's some sheet metal um about seventeen thousand dollars worth of work um the efis work on the tower we took the work uh around the base and gave that to the roofer so we can tie in the roofs in the future have them build the bottom uh section up and do that cut out

281um so there's a little added expense using the roofers but we know when we go to tie back in that it's done in fresh properly that we can take it out put it back together um for future roofing um and then we also added you know it was only thirteen thousand five hundred but some um camera stands mounted to the building and mounted properly for uh our cameras for our parking lots uh and out on a property um last year roofing was running about 31 to 32 dollars a square foot and with all the bids have been opening uh the price increases right now um uh our consultants opening roofing and doing all the projects so it's coming in around 40 to 41 dollars a square foot so in one year's time it's already a

282ten dollar increase and that's all the materials because spell supply chain the labor labors are the contracts i think good for another four or five years so you you have built in their their automatic increases but it's the skyrocketing prices of materials um especially insulation is is one of the one of the main factors um which we saw when we did the field house uh one of the big problems was getting the installation for the roof with the rubber membrane wasn't a problem but because they had factory one factory that was flooded and down in texas and that and factory shutdowns that has caused a price escalation so um so our our bid we had three bids um our lowest bid came in at 868 000 uh over our original estimated cost which is uh

283200 not eight hundred thousand over no no i'm sorry it was came in at 886 868 000. um it was our original estimate was 646 so we were you know it was 222 thousand dollars higher so we had those other scope creeps involved um in the project so if we figure the scope creeps and take those out of the equation it's about uh 96 000 higher than what our original estimate would be just for roofing alone uh as part of the project so we had added uh we had also done an alternate on on it and we because of uh the increased pricing uh we're not gonna look to uh ask you to approve the alternate we'll save that for a future project what was the alternate gonna involve uh the ultimate was to do

284additional roofing another another roof area um since we were there at the base of the um uh at the library it was just another small section of another section a roof but it's an additional 120 000 so as we do all our projects come together you know at this point we we don't feel it's uh um that's why we bid it as an alternate so we we knew um that we could drop it out if we were if if prices came in high as we knew we could be price increases and if we were to approve it at the next board meeting um what's the time frame that you're looking at when would the project start and be completed oh the project will start when school uh when school is out let out and then

285we'll be will be completed on before school starts so it's a summer project um so that that was our roofing um [Music] our next uh any questions about the roofing is there any possibility that we're losing out even first of all is does the alternate have to happen it's not a safety or is it maintenance so the alternate project is not something that needs to happen no but then my next question would be okay um our next uh bid was for uh the efus uh work on the fly tower auditorium um so we went out to bed we had three contractors [Music] come to the uh pre-bid meeting and we received two bids um our lowest bid was uh 296 thousand nine hundred dollars um and we were our original estimate was 252 000. so

286price increase of forty four thousand nine hundred dollars on this project um and related back to you know we're doing our estimating and stuff earlier in the year you know in in late in the year and their price increases they came across the board we feel that that increases is not uh um so substantial that it would warrant to us to wait them doing the project i don't foresee that's in the future we don't see we don't know what's going to happen with uh prices of all these materials the way they've been escalating when is it ever going to level out um so um we asking you to you know approve that uh if it's project for 296 900. uh and then our last bid was for the masonry work uh in the steel lintel

287replacement uh at vernon hills high school over our three entrances and we also have an alternate ad for some masonry work at libertyville high school we have some leaks uh in some areas that were never addressed in the past so um there's penetrations in the wall we need proper flashing uh to be done over in those areas how old are those areas if you had to guess how old are those areas if you had to guess how old are the the areas that we're talking about at libertyville think that section of building it might be built in the 60s i have to i have to look i don't have it in front of me but do you mind but it's around basically where unit vents were were put in and stuff so we've got some

288leaks and some some flashing that needs to be done properly okay great um it's a it's a relatively uh uh small project um so we actually had uh six contractors uh come out and look at the work um we received three bids um [Music] our project estimate was for 335 thousand for both schools uh vernon hills uh came in at 199 500 and our alternate for libertyville came in at 29 500. um total cost for both projects would be 229 000 and we are 160 106 000 under our estimate for that project mark i see in the the other companies that bid were wildly different than particularly for uh libertyville's ad yeah um berglin has done work with us before in the past okay and we feel their their pricing was is it was uh

289right where we needed to be when okay and they understood the scope right that's that's what i'm doing hungry for the work i just want to make sure like and i know you do this but i want to reiterate for the public that you work with all of our vendors on understanding the scope of the work when they come in so different price wise that that's part of your process and the other thing especially with alternates depending on that company and how much of the work they have lined up they may just throw a higher number there because it's not really that worth it for them not something they really yeah so you have that at play as well okay the other thing is that they've already worked here and then done some work in

290on the buildings they know the building they know what the risks are more than somebody that hasn't done this one of the big variables in this was the east entrance at vernon hills high school was the shoring and how they their showing company how they were going to shore the roof so if they brought in their experts and if one said you got to do it this way it was more expensive than the other that could have been another contributing factor in the difference in some of the pricing um thank you so for for all three projects um um it told us about over our estimate with including consulting costs we're about 171 thousand dollars over our original original budget number but we feel these are three important projects and then we want to get

291them all completed and we'll we'll still be able to be in budget we still have the we're still working on the uh we're going out to bid for the libertyville the fax rooms so that's on um you know upcoming vids coming up so okay that's the big one that's a big one and when will that bid happen when will the bid happen for that oh for this uh we are pre-bid meeting for the facts from that's also the abatement for those projects uh we have a pre-bid meeting next monday uh for for both uh both projects and we will be bringing them to next month's fnf and then uh to the board meeting up next month for for approval thank you i know i jumped ahead a little bit i have a i have a

292process question but i think maybe a month ago we had talked about how do you prioritize the capital projects and such so i don't know where that is because if we if we approve this then i'll be inadvertently not approving something else and then that's the part that is a disconnect for me so when do you think we'd be able to look at the full list uh so we did share the full list that list has not changed and even with this that full that list is not changing um but really the process we were talking about is really moving forward from this summer how a process would look different okay so this this list that we shared whatever that was this is the same list that we've been operating from that we're getting bids

293on all that kind of stuff or more updating is kind of the prices and so once really once we get the big one which is the fax room we'll update that list and show all the costs there so we understand what those implications are going forward so um the one but even on that list there were some things to say well depending on what happens based on the allocation that we typically do there would not be enough funding to do this various projects on that list so we'll revisit that once we get this big data point uh which is the facts room next month all right so just as we move forward i'm sorry i mean i i was with sanal also and i do remember sharing the list right but it i'm assuming now

294that the document data base that we are hiding we can always be referencing as we're talking about these projects i mean that's yes in isolation it makes sense but when you look at it universally i'd like to see how it lines up with the other projects yeah that'll be very helpful uh and i'd like you know if it's something that we're talking about just for myself instead of having to go back i'd like to have that at you know what what it looks like from the whole the whole perspective each time we talk about something when a the recommendation is presented to us so that we can put it in context right am i alone in that no like a big picture bird's eye view of all the upcoming things and how these current projects

295fit in yep i think no you're not alone i'd like that too okay with our new software that'll make it easy to include documents yeah i i just didn't process it that's all i'm just 30 seconds behind [Music] i might not have said it but that's what i meant that's what you meant to say i think we left off at lhs yearbook agreement um so the yearbook for lhs is that contract is up for renewal uh they worked with harris jones they would like to continue to work with herrera jones so this is really a five-year agreement with a flat cost for them this is funded um by and large through the students themselves um so this really will help kind of keep a consistent cost for the next five years this is probably not

296likely the final final agreement but it's really really close i'm just gonna tweak a few language items between now and our final adoption but the substantive dollar amounts won't really change okay moving on to the district office lease agreement yeah so that one i have the final we have the final lease ready to go so we give you perspective we've been on a 10-year lease with our current district office that lease is ending calendar year 2022 so that's december so we have been work i've been working with our our tenant agent for gosh i don't know six months trying to negotiate a new 10-year deal essentially and so um i have that final final document i did not include in the packet just because of kind of some sensitive information in there but that will

297be available for um we'll share with you and it'll be available for public for view for the for the adoption in february but essentially the terms of that agreement are is exactly what i said last time when we had a meeting about it and we discussed the terms just as a reminder right now we end up paying about 190 000 a year for the district office in future years it starts at like 200 ish and then it'll go up a couple thousand a year after that so this is a very reasonable increase in addition the first year of the contract they are going to give us nine months free rent um that was part of what the tenant agent helps negotiate in addition to that they are going to replace the carpet lighting ceiling and

298paint the only time i think paint yeah ceiling tile and i think paint in the front suites so that's where most of the offices are the back suite where is like conference rooms abcdr that all has new carpet and new lighting this will make the front that and so the owner is paying for that out of their pockets okay great um and we are looking at expanding our current kitchen um in to make it a little bit bigger um okay for that and they're they're gonna they're gonna eat that cost as well and i don't know if kelly is still one on or watching exploring the idea of having some car chargers on site exploring i said exploring uh so we're going to try to see if we can do something there as well libertyville

299has a company now this would be a 10-year agree so just for numbers it's a 10-year agreement the total cost estimated cost for the overall 10 years would be about 2.2 million and we're very comfortable with that way cheaper than building an administration building oh yeah yes well it depends on how big it is but yeah yes you could build a really small building for two points that's a big space and we utilize it yes quite a bit sixteen thousand square feet we use it a lot yeah and that'll be up uh for approval on february 28th at the regular board meeting [Music] uh liberty mill plaza lease agreement so that is the lease agreement we also as a friday have the final lease document for that that is our transition program that we have

300been talking about we're still you know in process for getting the village approval but i think that that'll work out and this will be the lease for that for this so that is also a 10-year lease um those prices are the same as what i shared in december so there was not much room retail because of the location retail is more expensive than office like office kind of stuff um and there's a very intentionality with the location of that space to be of use educationally for that program um so that is a six thousand square foot square foot space and that will cost us um about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year and then go up a little not even couple thousand a year a little bit each year after that so for

301that for that space for 10 years um we're looking at about 1.3 million over the life of that lease so um the lynn hines actually himself was helping negotiate the terms some of the language pieces in that lease um and so that that'll be available one thing i should have mentioned the district obviously it actually comes as an amendment to our original lease so that it'll look a little bit different this is a new lease so this has kind of fresh documentation in it okay we'll look forward to seeing that one at the regular board meeting any questions no upcoming bids and contracts so we talk about facts that's coming next month um that's our family consumer science labs at lhs um the the one that's upcoming is photography services so right now we use

302vip throughout the district for four different areas athletics at each building and yearbook at each building all of them love working with vip but we have four contracts with vip i would like to have one and so we're going to work on consolidating that that won't be the next month but that that's going to be coming within the next couple months look forward to seeing that uh doesn't look like we have disposal of any absolute equipment so one more upcoming year yep food service rfp um so i have since i've been here i've heard uh several people talk about their interest in getting a better food than what they have and we've been working with the current provider to try to do that and we feel that right now would be the appropriate time to

303look at what else is out there uh or maybe stick with what we currently have but we think we feel that we have the timing capacity to look at this service so we'll put together a process for proposals there's some cool ideas maybe we could do so we would like to we would like to look at that process and really kind of as long as y'all are okay with that we're going to move forward with that it could be you change nothing but it could be you change everything so but we would like to look at that absolutely renewal is the time to do that so perfect all right i think we already covered absolute equipment none uh future agenda items we will have long-term financial projections at the march facilities and finance committee meeting

304any other future agenda items no okay then that adjourns the facilities and finance do it go for it oh i can be better than that just to be clear that was about an hour meeting i just [Laughter] all right you