001Let's call the meeting to order. Uh Julie, if you wouldn't mind, would you uh do a roll call, please? Cara Cast here. Ken Dawson here. Mr. Espinosa here. Fuller here. Jenny Hagstrom here. Greg here. Don Rener here. Rehan Hashim here. And Jason Trio here. All right, having a quorum, let's uh stand for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, Hank, I'll turn it over for student perspectives. All right, I'll invite uh forward. Good evening. Um we are really excited um to present these three students to you uh tonight. Um they attended the ISBY student summit at ISU. Um one of my favorite parts was that
002Dr. Hank the drove the mini bus. Um and safely um Dr. Dr. Demet and I just got to be passengers on the bus um with these lovely students and and their peers and it was just an absolutely absolutely wonderful day and the three of them are going to tell you all about it. Do you want to add anything? No, that's all right. So, I'll have you guys come up introduce yourselves. Um and they're going to tell you about the experience. Good afternoon everybody. How's everybody doing? Great. Great. Great. Okay. I'm Anvie Krishnarda and I'm a sophomore at Donner's Grove South. I'm Emilio Pacheco and I'm a junior at Downers Grove South. And I'm Owen Wills. I'm a sophomore at Downers Grove North. Okay. So, really quickly, we just want to talk about um the format
003of the ESB student summit. It was a really welcoming environment surrounded by people who wanted to talk like you wanted to talk about. They were really interested in everything you had to say and it was a really eyeopening experience with what we did really well and what we did what we could improve on because we have as u Miss Lip says never- ending improvement. And so with that, we were divided up into four sections and we had four topics and they would rot rotate around with the student board over at Isby and we would talk about each thing and it was just a really positive environment for us to be able to um talk about different experiences and see how our school does really great things. And so with that, I'm going to hand it
004off to you who will tell you about those great things we do. All right. So the first topic we talked about was the curriculum and one of the main points where some schools thought they didn't offer enough CTE like courses like engineering um art, drawing and other courses. And I think DJS does a great job and DJN at offering a multitude of courses like as a junior I haven't been able to take as many because my classes are like full. So, I thought it was great that we offered as many courses and some people thought that there was enough like clubs, but at DJs and DJM, we do a great job at making sure that everyone's included and participating in clubs. So, I thought that was a great for me because I'm a part of
005politics club me. So, I think it was great to have everyone from different variety of clubs coming and participate in those discussions. Yeah. Um, we did have a couple topics that we did feel were some areas that were very new to the education world such as AI as well as student management in terms of technology and new curriculums that come out in a lot more rigorous courses. We felt that AI is a new top a new type of technology used for students throughout the school. And with it being so new, a lot of students are misusing it. But we did feel that ignoring the problem was probably going to make it worse. So we believe that a good kind of conclusion with that would be trying to implement some areas in curriculums and some literacy
006courses to help students understand the best ways to use AI and where not to. And then I believe we also talked about it was student engagement. Uh a big thing that a lot of teachers harp on in our schools are going to be phone usage and we felt that a lot of the issue with student engagement did stem from that but we also believe that it doesn't just stem from the student as well. A lot of the in our discussions we found that student engagement kind of from the students perspect perspective stems from the teacher and how they structure the class periods with having a block schedule and having those long periods those times can become very very dull for students and that's when they will turn to some more enticing stuff like our phones
007you know that's a common problem with them. So we do feel that in that area kind of implementing ways to help teachers figure out an more engaging curriculum and just make it a more positive learning environment for students. Yeah. And that's about it. Just wrapping it up. is how we were able to form new opinions and ideas about how our district can better um phone usage and student engagement and all that because it's a very new topic but we have to learn to roll with the tide rather than fight against it. So with that um that concludes what we learned. Any questions from board members? You know, in your conversations in those groups, is there anything that you would like to bring back to South and North to improve on what we're doing here? Any
008best practices that you saw at other schools? Long time ago. I will say what we don't recommend which is we were hearing from a lot of students um about they they have those yawn pouches you might have heard that was like what they put their phones in throughout the day and it locks them. you can't take it out throughout the school period, then you unlock it at the end of the day. And we found that that was very very negative to the learning environment and even negative to like school spending because a lot of students would find themselves breaking in them open. Um so we did find that that that was something that we shouldn't do. Yeah. No, just on that, just learning how to use our phones through the curriculum, maybe taking short-term breaks
009because I know this is something we need to improve on, but our attention span um in this generation is a shorter attention span. So having those breaks to refresh, relearn, whether it's just getting up and stretching or just having your phone out for like two minutes to take a break between lessons, just making sure that with student engagement, we're keeping in mind the exhaustion that students kind of face and that's a lot what we learned in student engagement. Great. Okay. I will also add that bringing back a lot more areas because we have a great amount of career readiness programs in some ways that is very good. And then I'd also like to build on the idea because some classes do have great field trips and opportunities for that. I think it'd be good to
010structure curriculums around encouraging internships and field trips to areas that they might be interested in to encourage future career pursuit in terms of those classes. Yeah. Great. Thank you guys. Thank you very much for joining us. All right, student board member reports. All right. Um, I can start off. All right. So at DGS first of all coming right off tomorrow or no Wednesday sorry is yearbook distribution which I think we are all looking forward to especially seniors one final chance to get all our signatures in and later on in the week will be our spring art show which showcases all our talent from our fine arts here at DGS which is something I'm really looking forward to because I have a lot of friends in fine arts and they've been really excited to showcase all
011of that. And then later on, as you all know, we're getting ready for graduation, which is something that we're all looking forward to, especially that graduation practice barbecue that we're going to have. And um earlier this week or last week, we had our last PAC discussion where we met with a dean and a security officer on focusing on how we can implement students well-being and just overall bettering how um active they are and how tardy detentions overall just getting a student's perspective on all that. And yeah, that about sums it up for us. You know, it's not been too long since I've talked to you guys, but um overall, you know, things are wrapping up. Seniors just had their prom and overall the event was pretty put together and people learned a lot. Um and
012the fireworks were a good touch. Uh this week is AP test week, so most of the buzz is about preparing for them. So, um I took one today and I do want to say that the digital format is really helping with the time crunch and I feel like people have a lot more time left over after they're done with the question. So, that's one thing that I noticed, you know, after I was finished and I just looked around, you know, there's a lot more people done. people had way more time left. So, I think that is a really good improvement when we're looking at those AP tests. That's very different than your feedback from the last time you talked about. Yeah. Which was the ACT testing, right? Two different again. So, you're saying the AP
013is doing a better job than so like college board in that sense is doing a way better in my opinion. Okay. Right. But uh um and then another thing I wanted to bring up was um we had our last student advisory board meeting last week and a lot of our discussion um during that meeting was centered around you know communication towards our student body and you know how we're going to get across messages and different you know information to our students and how we can better do that right because as of now you know most students don't really you know check their email that often and stuff like that and like it's hard to get our student body more informed and like some of the solutions we we were coming up with was you know
014kind of employing you know more upper classmen and more um people that are have already been at DGN for a while to like you know communicate to our underassman, right? Because those are the kids that kind of get loose or do not get the information that we need to get them with. And then um another thing that we also talked about was um the access lessons and like trying to create more access lessons that are more meaningful because a lot of time what I'm noticing and feedback that I'm getting from is these access lessons that we're giving are not really getting through right like a lot of them are way too short or they're not really getting the students engaged in you know what we're talking about even though I know that all of those
015lessons are really important to like stuff that you guys have as requirements to deliver to the students right so I think we need to do a little bit better job. I don't know what what that would look like, but delivering that and engaging students in those in that time period, right? Um but yeah, other than that, um those were most of the criticisms I heard from the student advisory board meeting that uh that we got. But yeah, that's it for me. All right, thank you both. Their last meeting will be with us the next time. So, uh we'll be happy to celebrate you then. May 1st has come and gone, and I didn't hear any updates from either of you about uh any individual information you might want to share. It's the next board meeting.
016Oh, it's the next board. Don't I'm just curious, I guess. So, I guess I'll have to wait. I'll have to wait. Don't steal their thunder. I'm sorry. Okay. Uh item number four, um uh approval of minutes. Can I get a motion from the board of education to approve the minutes of the uh April 21st, 2025 business meeting, the April 21st, 2025 close meeting, the April 28th, 2025 parent teacher advisory committee meeting, and the May 1st, 2025 special meeting with action item. So moved. Second. Terry moves. Ken. Thank you. Terry Pavis, I. Ken Dawson. Hi. Chris Espinosa. Hi. Throw Fuller. Hi. Jenny Hagstrom. Hi. Cara Castton. Hi. and Don R. I. Motion carries. Item five, board workshop, parent teacher advisory committee meeting. Feedback. Uh, I'll turn this over to Scott. Okay. Yeah. So, we held our
017meeting uh last Monday um April 28th um at South High in the library. Uh we had a we had a pretty good turnout. I think we had maybe 22 confirmed coming in. We were around 14. Uh it was a beautiful day. Usually we get a storm when we're at South. Uh so um I can understand. Uh we were fortunate obviously um Cara and Jenny were there um so we could get input um from you two as well. Um but it was nice that Mike, April, and and Katie were there as well. So that was nice to have everyone uh um be there and kind of learn a little bit about it. Um, we went through uh Nicole and Pat talked about our PAT program and we gave some data similar to what the board had
018received about looking at recidivism and things like that. Um, had a brainstorming activity to try to get some insights on uh, you know, just reflections on improving our program. Um, we uh did talk about chronic absenteeism. Uh and then we posed a brainstorming challenge which was truly a challenging question of looking at data around students that are chronically absent that are passing their classes and not passing their classes. So it led to some um really good discussion around that. Um and then Gina had the consolidated district plan that she has to get feedback around. Uh we did send out uh a Google form to get some additional feedback. Uh if people are like me, I usually leave meetings and then I think like I got four other things that I wanted to share. So um
019we did ask for feedback. We had a couple um input so far. We have about three uh um attendees give some feedback. We're hoping for a little bit more. Um but yeah, I think it was a successful night. the path program whether it's small or large in our attendance has always produced quality um discussions and um you know Hank as we've gone through this we've seen like the creation of path um we've added like social work support and things like that through just ideas that have come out of this group so um we really do appreciate it regardless of the size so I don't know if you guys have any other insights on it was thought it was a a good night it was really good they they've highlighted, you know, a couple of areas
020where maybe we could use a little bit more staff support. Um, so hopefully that will lead to some meaningful discussions. Yeah. And I liked that we sort of posed like a a problem and sort of looked for I mean I think not just sort of a rosy picture and we're reporting out. And I think people appreciated the opportunity. Uh, and you know, some of those anecdotal stories from either teachers or parents help add color, too. So, appreciated that. Um, yeah, it was my first one. I enjoyed it. It was very educational. Okay. Any other questions for Scott or our board members that were in attendance? All right. Okay. Item six. Hank, I'll turn this over to you. uh recognition of outgoing board members. Uh we have uh three board members that are choosing that that
021chose not to uh seek re-election and to step down off the board um after very distinguished terms of service. Uh and we'd like to the administration would like to recognize each of them. So the first board member I'm going to recognize is Jenny Hstrom. [Applause] recognizing. Next up is Charerelle Fuller. We're recognizing her for eight years of service. And then someone that's been around for a day or two on the board. We are recognizing Terry Terry Pavis for 20 years. And in that time in her board service from 2015 to 2019 and 2023 to 2025 also served as board vice president and uh Terry was one of the board members on the board that decided to hire me. So running out of those board members. So thank you all for years of distinguished service. There
022was uh several of years in there that might have been some of the most difficult in public service uh that we could have had. Thank you for always putting students first. uh all three of you in the decisions that we were making and always come uh to the table willing to listen and to learn and to represent our students and our community in the decisions and the hard decisions that needed to be made. Uh well uh distinguished excellent service to your community uh over those years. So thank you to all of you. Thank you. Thank you. So, I think we're going to each just take a moment or two to say a couple of things and we'll go in order of shortest to longest term service. Um, thank you all very much. Um, I want
023to sincerely thank everyone um for the opportunity to serve on the District 99 Board of Education over the last four years. Um, it has really been an incredible experience and I've had the privilege of working alongside many dedicated and very inspiring individuals. Um, there have been countless highlights during my time on the board. Um, witnessing the outstanding work of our administration, teachers and students. Um, contributing to the progress and the growth of the district and uh, celebrating milestones like graduation. It's always a highlight. So, um, when I began this journey, I knew very little about the inner workings of a school district. Um, four years later, I leave with deep respect for the people that keep district 99 moving forward. I'm very confident that the district is in excellent hands. Um, it's always evolving, always
024learning, and always focused on preparing our students for the next chapters of their lives. So, um, thank you again for the opportunity. Um, it's really been an honor. All right. So, I want to thank the community for the opportunity to serve in Community High School District 99. In 2017, I'll stand because I can see people trying to in 2017 when I started this journey. I did not know exactly what I was getting into, but I knew one thing that was certain is that students, the staff, and our community were a priority for me. And that would be the forefront of all my decision-making experience. And that's one thing that never changed over the course of my eight years. What I learned over the eight years is that we volunteer hard for community district for community
025high school district 99. We are dedicated people that encountered some hard decisions over the past eight years. It's I did plan to cry. So, you know, it's it's it's in some cases decisions that I lost sleep over, but we got through it. I'm proud of so many things we accomplished like the master facility plan and things like the increased number of dual credit classes and trades and seeing the addition of student board members which happened in my tenure here. I watched the tenacity and resilience and I saw that I saw our students face with things like co we have amazing kids to my fellow board members the board members I have served with I appreciate each of you I appreciate the opportunity to serve with you and how not and how it was not always
026easy decisions but we are better because of it. We were able to be respectful to each other's opinions and work together. To Dr. Sele and administration, thank you for all that you do. Your jobs are not easy and require a lot of dedication and work. I also want to thank all of the teachers and all that that I have encountered, all the students that I have encountered and everyone inside the walls of community district of community district 99. Many of you have come to meetings and showed your passion, your compassion, our staff and commitment to our education. And finally to our community, the one thing I learned is that although we may have been on different sides of things at times, but the thing I learned is that the commonality that we had is that
027we are all is that we were all passionate about something we believed in our students or our community or all of the above. Let's continue to work together um in that commonality that we have and that's the passion for our community, our students and the things that we believe. But let's do that by remembering to be give each other grace to continue to exercise compassion and to also continue to be listeners because all the one thing I know we all want district 99 to continue to thrive. And finally to Julia Beckman. She was the person who thought it was a great idea that I do this. I do believe it was a great idea and I am happy to have served you all. Thank you. [Applause] I'm sorry. It's this is this is a tough
028one for me. Um I agree with everything that both of you have said. It's it it's a been a pleasure. Um I just want to say the number one thing I want to thank my family. They gave me the opportunity to come here on Monday nights and to be able to read all of the information. I just want to say thank you to them cuz they gave me a lot and that they were the reason I ran in the first place. My parents taught me that um not to stay on the sidelines but to get involved and uh if you want to make things better and that's the way I felt. And so um I just want to thank everyone in the community who have supported me throughout my tenure on this board. Without you,
029I couldn't have done this. So thank you. I also want to thank our teachers and staff. They have made it a pleasure to serve. Also to all of my fellow board members, past and present. You have mentored and guided me throughout the years and I truly appreciate that. Without working together, it wouldn't have been the outstanding district that it is. We have weathered many highs and many lows. I'm sorry. We've we've come through many referendums. The Woodridge property, we all remember that. Uh co well maybe some of us. Um and major renovations on on our buildings. They have made our district stronger. In my tenure, we have had the leadership of three outstanding superintendent, Dr. Elyn, Dr. McDonald, and Dr. The Thank you. Thank you all. All have contributed greatly to making this our district
030a desirable destination to raise a family. Keep up that great work. It's not easy, but I know you can do it. Looking back over the years, I will miss the challenges in in this district moving forward, and it always will have a place in my heart. I expect to be seeing our sports and our academics at the top of the standings. So, keep up the good work. Our students are accomplishing their goals. That's what makes me very proud and glad to put the time in to making our district better. Also, I hope that the foundation will continue to provide innovative and opportunities for all of our students. There are always ways to donate. So, make sure you go to the website and click on that donation button because that's how we keep that going. I
031will miss celebrating all of our students accomplishments. That's what I enjoyed most about being a board member. I will miss all of you the most. And along the way, I have made many friends and will not be you will not be forgotten. I hope to write a book someday that Jenny is suggesting on on just the uniqueness of my life. That's right. I do have one regret though. Of the 20 years I have been an advocate for this village to approve electronic signs. If we get one, I'm putting your name on it. Can you get that done before I leave? Again, thanks to everyone and and everything. I will miss all of you. Thank you so much. [Applause] Um item seven, any reception of visitors, Julie? No sir. No. No sir. I didn't sign in.
032Would you like to say something to Yes. Yes, it is. I have regular rules. Since my This is very tall. Since since my name was mentioned, I think I should I should speak. I'll just take this off. I can walk around. But uh no, I really intended to speak anyway to say thank you to the retiring board members and also in advance to the new board members who are who are stepping forward. I know we thought we had some difficult periods of time when I was on the board, but I know you went through some really tough times and you survived it and you were grace. You did it with grace and dignity and you made all of us proud and you came we came out ahead just as Terry said the district is is
033better for it. So I just wanted to honor all of you particularly Terry for her length of service and we were able to serve together for several years. We overlapped. Charerelle took my seat on the board. I was happy to have that happen. Ben, Jen, I didn't get to serve with you, but I know you've served with honor and dignity, and you've all worked so well together, and I know that will continue because that's so important for a board to really treat each other with respect. I know of a few other boards, which shall remain nameless, that aren't really really doing that as well. So, and I know it will continue with the new people, but you've really set a wonderful standard for dignity and respect and perspective. So, thank you all for your service.
034[Applause] Okay. Do we need a motion to adjurnn? Yeah. Motion to adjurnn. It should come from one of our board members. Do I just say so moved? So moved. Jenny moves and Charelle seconds. All in favor, please. Uh, all in favor? I I motion carries. We are temporarily adjourned. to say that. [Applause] I'm just ready for ready for a break. So, we don't need to call this meeting because we were just [Music] a lot. My wife would die. But we had a lot of down. That's pretty much it. It's four people. We're going to break it up. That's what I usually do. Are you sitting right there? Okay. Before we call the meeting to order, um I need to administer the oath of office to our newest board members. Um that would include Chris as
035well, right? Yes, sir. Okay. So, if Chris, Katie, April, and Mike can stand with me, please. There's a copy of the O in front of you. I'm right there. Can you raise your right hand for me please and repeat after me? I state your name do solemnly swear that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of member of the board of education of community high school district 99 in accordance with the constitution of the United States the constitution of the state of Illinois and the laws of the state of Illinois to the best of my ability you'll repeat repeat after me I do solemnly swear that I will discharge the duties of the office of member of the board of education of community high school district 99 in accordance with the constitution of
036the United States the constitution of the state of Illinois and the laws of the state of Illinois to the best of my ability I further swear that I further swear that I shall respect taxpayer interest by serving as a faithful protector of the school district's assets I shall respect taxpayer interest by serving as a faithful protector of the school district's assets I shall encourage and respect ect the free expression of opinion by my fellow board members and others who seek a hearing before the board while respecting the privacy of students and employees. I shall encourage and respect the free expression of opinion by my fellow board members and others who seek adhering before the board while respecting the privacy of students and employees. I shall recognize that a board member has no legal authority as
037an individual and that decisions can be made only by a majority vote at a public board meeting. I shall recognize that a board member has no legal authority as an individual and that decisions can be made only by a majority vote at a public board meeting. I shall abide by majority decisions of the board while retaining the right to seek changes in such decisions through ethical and constructive channels. I shall abide by my decision of the boarding the right to see changes and such decisions through ethical and constructive channels. As part of the board of education, I shall accept the responsibility for my role in the equitable and quality education of every student in the school district. As part of the board of education, I shall accept the responsibility for my role in the equitable
038and quality education of every student in the school district. I shall foster with the board extensive participation of the community, formulate goals, define outcomes, and set the course for Community High School District 99. I shall foster with the board extensive participation of the community, formulate goals, define outcomes, and set the course for Community High School District 99. I shall assist in establishing a structure and an environment designed to ensure all students have the opportunity to attain their maximum potential through a sound organizational framework. Assist in establishing a structure and an environment designed to ensure all students have the opportunity to achieve their maximum potential through a sound organizational framework. I shall strive to ensure a continuous assessment of student achievement and all conditions affecting the education of our children in compliance with state law. To
039ensure a continuous assessment of student achievement, all conditions affecting the education of our children in compliance with state law. I shall serve as education's key advocate on behalf of students and our community schools to advance the vision for community high school district 99. I shall serve as education's key advocate on behalf of students and our community schools to advance the vision for Community High School District 99. And I shall strive to work together with the district superintendent to lead the school district toward fulfilling the vision the board has created, fostering excellence for every student in the areas of academic skills, knowledge, citizenship, and personal development. I shall strive to work together with the district superintendent to lead this school district toward fulfilling the vision the board has created, fostering excellence for every student in the
040areas of academic skills, knowledge, citizenship, and personal development. Congratulations. [Applause] All right. Uh Julie, would you mind calling the role, please? Be happy. Cara Castton here. Katie Courtourtney here. Ken Dawson here. Chris Espinosa here. April Finn here. Don Rener here. Michael Riskey here. Rehan Hashim here. And Jason Trio here. Thank you very much. All right. Having a quorum. Let's stand for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, first item of business. Uh we need to elect uh permanent officers for the new board is con constituted. Um we're going to take nominations for president. Then we'll take nominations for vice president. We'll take nominations for secretary
041and before each uh moving on to each office, we will vote on each office individually. So can I get a nomination for office of president, please? I nominate Don Rener. That does not need to be seconded, right? No. Do we have any other nominations? Hearing none. Uh should that be a roll call vote, Julie? We can do that. Yes. Okay. Um Julie, then you can call the role on uh on the office of president. Um those in favor of voting for Don Runner for president. Cara Casten. I Courtney I Dawson I Espinosa I. April Finnen I. Michael Riskey I. And Don Rener I. Motion carries. Um then next can I get a nomination from the floor for vice president? I nominate Cara Casten. Thank you president. Okay. Uh are any any other nominations for vice
042president? Hearing none. Um can I get a motion to approve Cara Casten as the vice president of the board of education of Community High School District 99? Somebody needs to move. Oh, so move. Chris moves. We don't need a second. We don't need a second. We don't need a second on these. A weird one. Okay. All right. Julie Chris moves. Okay. Thank you. Chris Espinosa. I. April Finnen. I. Don Rener. I. Michael Riskey. I. Eric Caston. I. Katie Courtney. I. And Ken Dawson. I. All right. Motion carries. And then can I get a nomination from the floor for the office of secretary? I nominate Julie Idok. Any other nominations? Hearing none. Um, that was a nomination. Can I get a motion to approve Julie Naidk as the secretary of the board of education of Community
043High School District 99? So moved. Ken moved. Thank you. Ken Dawson. I. Mr. Espinosa. I. April Finn. Hi. Don Rener. I. Michael Riskey. Hi. Cara Castton. Hi. and Katie Courtourtney. I motion carries. Okay. Um item number five, um Julie, do we have any visitors? No, sir. Okay. Item number six, establish a meeting dates and times. Um can I get a motion from the board of education to approve the 2025 2026 proposed board of education meeting dates and times? So moved. Carrie moves. Second. Ken. Casten. Hi Ken Dawson. Hi Miss Espininoza. I April Finnen. Hi Don Rener. Hi Michael Riskey. Hi. And Katie Courtney. Hi. Thank you. Motion carries. Item number seven, appointment of board committees and liaison. Um so we have various committees as board members. Um I'm going to reach out to each of
044you individually um about assigning those committees um to each of you. Uh I'm not prepared to do that as of yet. I've had some initial and preliminary discussions, but I'd like to talk to some of you who I've not yet had discussions about what committees you'd be interested in. Um, so in the interim between tonight's board meeting and probably the next board meeting, I'll be reaching out to each of you individually and then we'll uh collectively assign uh each of you to the committees. Okay. Item number eight. I'll turn this over to you, Dr. The All right. Before we get started, welcome to our new board members and welcome to the to all to a new board uh of education group. Congratulations, Don and Cara, and your positions as officers. I look forward to working
045alongside of you uh in the the coming weeks and months and years. So, uh thank you for giving of yourselves and taking this volunteer unpaid position on. And as you heard from Terry, uh you know, your families are also committing to that commitment as well. I thank them, uh for allowing you to spend time supporting the students, staff, and families of our district. So, with that, uh I'm going to turn this over. Do you want the clicker, Ryan? Oh, yes. I will turn this over uh to Ryan Doherty, our director of student experiences uh to go into the uh survey that was given around athletics and activities. Hi, my name is Ryan Dhy. I'm director of student experiences. If I haven't met you, uh my nieces went through North. Um my parents live in town.
046I work for the district, so I'm triply invested. Um so you're also going to see a lot of me. Um I I'm told that I can be verbose and so I'm going to try to move it along because I know you have a long agenda tonight. So uh first we're going to you're going to see me twice. Um this first one is for a survey that we're um we give every two years. It's for board policy 6.195 in which we check on students uh participation and extracurricular activities. Um we also ask about their interests and also possible reasons why they may not be involved. So for this survey um several years ago we gave the survey separately. Um we started combining the survey because um when we gave the survey separately we had about 350
047students respond. Um and as you can see we have 2,675 responses from students this year. Um we had 2,683 last year. So it's pretty consistent. Also number of family responses last year was about 430. This year about 700. Um and staff uh was went from 318 to 295. So all of the numbers are pretty consistent. One of the first things that we do is we ask students about their participation. Um those of you that have students in the district, you know they're heavily involved and that doesn't mean just in a district 99 activity. So we do ask a range of questions. Um the very bottom, yes, I'm involved in the current club or sport. Um 896 from North and 933 from South indicated yes. Now that is of the 2,675 students that responded. Remember we
048have about 4,600 students in the district. So this represents about 56% of the students across the district. We do have a lot of students who are involved in club sports. If you follow IHSA, I know there's something going through right now that would talk about students being involved in a club sport while also being in a school sport. We'll see if that passes, but right now students who are involved in club sports during that season, um they're choosing between one or the other. So those students would not be participating with us. And also, we just have students who don't want to be participating after school. They're in um jobs. uh they have responsibilities outside of home. Um also there's a lot of students who participate um with their friends in either a band or they're
049gamers. Um and you'll see that in some of the other responses that come through. We also asked them if there's any sports or activities that they would like to see. Um I embedded two sports that are coming next year already to see if that students would indicate other um other interests. Uh we you can see though um once flag football and boys bowling came up on the roster there are a lot of students who are interested in that and so those responses were simply like I can't wait for flag football. Um competitive uh foot sorry competitive pickle ball and boys flag football also came up. I highlighted them in yellow. We do have pickle ball clubs at both schools currently. And the reason we don't um have flag football is because we already have football
050for the boy sport. So girls flag football is the partner to that. Surprisingly, boy bad mitten came up as a top getter. Some of the responses were I'm not interested in boys bad mitten, but the guy next to me asked me to write this down. Um so of those 66, it's difficult to tell um how many of the 66 are individual students who would participate. Um but that is a sport that is beginning in sort of a club level up north. Um oftentimes when you see something hit Stephvenson and new career eventually it trickles down to us in three or four years. Uh we will see how that goes. Um and the next uh survey that we ask um that might be a sport that comes up. I also highlighted HOSA. Uh we have a
051HOSA at North this year. At South there is a medical professionals club that is starting for next year. Um and so those clubs are um active. So it's nice to see that students are looking to get involved. For this question, we asked families uh if they're satisfied with what we offer at school and how do they feel about communication. You can see that about 95% of the families um rank it a three, four, five. I do want to point out the math. You might be thinking, how can that possibly add up to 100%. We have multiple families with multiple grade level students. So, you can see the 83% um in the fives. The student uh parents who responded to the survey that were very pleased about the activities that we have. Um they have multiple
052students who are here. Um most of them with two students. Um, but we do have some families that have three students, um, 9, 10, and 12 or 9, 11, and 12. Off to the side, we also ask what their students participate in outside of district 99. You can see sports um, specifically over the summer um, is a huge getter. Also, for sports that are cut sports, you will see those kind of hitting the top of the list. Um, baseball um is something that was uh pretty popular. Um, also the number of students who are involved in youth groups, scouting also makes a strong push and also performing arts programming. Uh, whether or not that be it like Ghost Light Theater in town or if that's private music lessons um that comes up quite a bit.
053Also we ask students um do you feel there's enough part uh activities to participate in and is school a place where you feel like you belong? Again over 90 uh to 95% of the students are uh indicating a three four five and then also we wanted to know why they might not be participating. Uh it is in percentage order. Some of them they're not going to change, right? Students who are focused on academics that may fluctuate for a year. Um, a lot of our ninth grade students selected focused on academic academics because they're getting into their school year. There was also a surge in that with our juniors. Um, but then also lack of motivation. Our senior class indicated lack of motivation um several times. Um and then transportation did come up not in the
054top five, but um sometimes the length of the activity bus going home can be um an obstacle for some of our students uh who don't have uh personal transportation either uh with their parents or with a friend to drive home with. Finally, in our uh our regular survey, we also ask staff about participation. Do they uh feel like we provide adequate uh resources for our students to participate? And also do you see a positive uh school climate because of participation? About 90% of the staff again threes, fours or fives. So from the activities and athletics range, it's all pretty consistent with 90 to 95% which we're really happy about. Um and we followed up with that. um checking on students who weren't involved. It's nice to know that the students who are involved and the
055families who are involved are happy with that involvement, but we also wanted to do a little bit deeper dive into why might students not be involved. So, we did run an activity and access for students who are not involved. We it involved uh the access teachers speaking with students about their involvement. Why might they not be involved? You can see the interview kind of questions that we have up there. Um, and then when we did the interview at South, we did not have an extra question that some of our teachers at North felt like we should add. Do you feel a sense of belonging at DGN? That was something that we asked because we wanted to see if there was still a consistent tie between participating and not participating and their sense of belonging. And
056so we were able to dig into that a little bit. The result of this work drives our indicators and measures which the activities and athletics team are in charge of. And so since we are talking about participation rather than separating it out with the other indicators and measures presentation that I'll be giving later um we put that here some of the data before I turn it over my to my team. Um I just wanted to let you know how many students we interviewed. So at North we had about 515 students who were not currently on a roster for an activity or sport and at South it was 881. After we did the interview we found that 60 students reported their uh active outside as um as south as 102. But more importantly we discovered about
057110 students at North who were unreed. So, they were participating in an activity, but they weren't on the roster yet. And about 81 students at South, most of those students, I'd probably say about 75% of them were spring sports. They hadn't finished uh tryyous for baseball yet. Track was just starting up. Kids were still in transition. The others just did not actually finish the registration process. And so, we were able to do that with them to get them um registered. Also you can see just lack of interest or lack of motivation from our students. Um that came across in both surveys. So we do know that there is a student population um both at North and South that while they have the opportunity to they've just indicated like they're just not interested. Um so you
058can see at the very bottom do you feel a sense of belonging? So, of the 515 students that uh we interviewed at North, 29 of them felt like they did not uh feel a sense of belonging at North while the other students overwhelmingly did. So, that is something for us to dig into next year when uh some of us were in high school. Um that that was the biggest sense of belonging that you got was the club or the sport that you were involved in. and most of us um may have had all of our friend groups tied to that things clearly have started shifting. So of the uninvolved students, many of them still feel like they belong at North and um you know we will look forward to uh adding that question at South
059so we can try to figure out where that sense of belonging comes from so that for the students who aren't involved we can help them get to that same spot that the other students have indicated. So, at this point, I'm going to turn it over to the activities and athletics team um so that they can talk about now that they've gone through that data, what are they doing with it, what are they currently working on, and what are they looking uh to do for next year. So, before we start our formal presentation, we thought it would be nice to introduce ourselves. So, I'm Jennifer Martinez and I'm the director of student activities at South High. Thanks for having us here tonight. Uh Dave Rose, the associate principal for athletics at Downers Grove North. Good evening
060everyone. I am Mark Mandola, director of student activities at North and uh Brandon Murphy, associate principal for athletics at Downs Grove South. Um as we get going through our slide presentation, we're kind of going to bounce back and forth. So, you're going to see a lot of us kind of randomly going up to the mic, but uh uh first right off the bat as Ryan tries to sneak out of the room if we really want to be show some it's like magic. That's exactly what he did where us this whole time. So, you're going to hear a lot of this as about about the process of what we did. This is the first time we've ever taken this big of a dive into the data specifically on that second portion um where we we got
061to find the answer of why students maybe weren't involved. Not just the first data, which we do I think every two years. This last one was the first time we've uh we started this process. So really grateful for the uh for Ryan uh for leading us in this journey. And uh you'll see as we go through the slide, there's a lot more involved than just us us four up here as well. So involvement is really important to district 99. So whether we're talking about activities or athletics, our goal is always that students are involved in two or more activities so that they're prepared for college and career readiness, but also we want them to have that sense of belonging that Ryan was talking about earlier. And so that involvement piece is just important to get
062kids connected and we know that when they're involved they're also going to do better academically. So we're always looking at how can we improve those things. Uh and it was really exciting for us to get a hold of this data. Um in previous years a lot of it was anecdotal. Some of it was assumptions that we were making about students and their involvement. Some of it might have just been from very, you know, casual conversations that we've had with students, parents about the reasons they're involved, they're involved or perhaps not involved. Um, but this was the first time that we were able to really get some comprehensive data to really drive our decisions and to, you know, for us to have a lot of conversations about what we're doing and certainly the things that we
063could be doing better. Yep. So, what we're going to get into in the next couple of slides is, uh, what what the data actually, um, led us to and the action steps that we were able to take and we're in the process of taking, um, and, uh, kind of our our approach here as we continue through, um, data collection and and getting kids involved and having those conversations. So, we were happy to see the results from the survey and from the the survey that told us that most of our students are involved in some form of activity in district 99. And the data also really affirmed our beliefs as Ryan was talking about some of the reasons why there's barriers to why people are not involved in something that's affiliated with district 99. They're still
064maybe involved in other things outside of school. So, we knew that, but now we had something to tell us a story about where are some of the areas that we can focus on because how he just said like maybe someone's like focusing on academics or that they have um a lack of motivation. Maybe some of those percentages are going to be a little harder for us to dive into and help change those behaviors or those um areas of lack of interest for being involved in district 99. but others that we could look at to be able to start figuring out what is the story behind this and what can we change to just continue to improve the opportunities for our students in district 99. Um, so I want to echo one more time just uh
065thank you to Ryan uh because this deep dive what it allowed us to do is that that one-on-one access discussions which we were not able to do in the past. Um, and just to go a little bit more in to those one-on-one discussions in the past, like we've mentioned, we had a pretty good idea of why kids weren't involved, um, what they were interested in, things like that, but the data definitively told us what they're interested in, and more specifically what kids weren't involved. So, those one-on-one access conversations allowed teachers during access classes to have those one-on-one discussions with kids um, and figure out maybe things that we didn't offer that there was potential to offer. Um and then more importantly, what were potential um obstacles to those kids that we could hopefully address and
066get those kids uh involved moving forward. And then as you see uh kind of to stick with the gratitude, um it takes the statement, it takes a village, you can see on here all the people that really involved with just getting us to the day. Uh our equity committee was involved right off the bat. We met with them before even did any surveys or any kind to make sure we're asking the right questions and make sure we're targeting everybody and appropriately. Uh ASC, our tech teams, uh teachers, uh coaches, and in our athletic and activities department all the way to our executive administrative assistants. They were the ones as you mentioned with Ryan that we were able to find 102 I think it was the number at North and 81 I think it was at
067South uh that were involved that weren't collected because this data for that second survey was done right prior to spring season. So we didn't want it we wanted this baseline data to be 100% accurate the best we can make it um because this is the first time we're doing it and this will be the baseline that we can move off on for years to come now. So we by doing that and going through it fine tooth we know exactly why with all the numbers to anyone that was involved and having that one-on-one access discussion really as they said puts that story but uh and assumptions away when you have students and you ask them why and not just thinking well it's not just a percentage anymore. It's an actual answer from their mouth of telling
068you exactly why uh they may not want to be involved or what they're involved in elsewhere. And that's what we saw a lot of times they are involved with something just maybe not in our in our in our building at the time. So, so as you all probably know, one of our core values in district 99 is belonging. And at Donner's Grove South, like we have belonging everywhere as part of our motto, from t-shirts to logos on our walls. And then as Ryan mentioned, there was a portion of the survey uh for district or sorry for Donner's Grove North um that they actually asked a specific question about do you feel a sense of belonging at DGN? And so that's just really important to know that students that might not be um recognized in the
069survey as somebody that's involved in a organized sport or activity at Donner's Grove North or Downers Grove South still has a sense of belonging. And there's other ways in which our students can be connected to staff and other students by things that we're able to put on during the day because life has changed so much in a high school that there's not just the things that are happening after school. It's how can we provide experiences for our students to be involved during the day especially in our new beautiful commons to be able to provide experiences for them that are sometimes like organized by adults and sometimes organized by other clubs or sports. So whether we're talking about a spirit week or we're talking about, you know, sales like our key club was just selling like
070kiss a senior goodbye. So whether it's a fundraiser or an experience, we just had culture week last week at Don's Grove South. So all the things that we're doing in teacher appreciation week, all these things that like provide a way for kids to get involved and connected and talk among their peers that those are like the small impact events that are happening during lunchtimes in addition to the big large impact events when you're at the community football game and you see this dance fully packed or your homecoming dance or your prom dance that just happened for both of us these past two weekends. opportunities for kids to get involved even if they're not involved in an organized like sport or activity. They're in an experience of something that's happening on campus. And I just want
071to add that one of the things that we've been really working on within the last year both with working with Ryan as well as some others is just uh removing those barriers for students to um to join different types of activities. um whether it's this the the barrier of them registering for us to get this accurate information, whether it's the barrier of them receiving that communication, knowing the opportunities that exist. Um we want to make it as easy and as straightforward as possible for students as well as their parents and guardians to know exactly the opportunities that exist and for those students to be able to take advantage of those things. So for us, it's a lot about the communication that we have and I know communication is going to be something that you're going
072to continue to hear from us. Um but also just you know the the ease in students to join a club. Um if there's not a club that's of interest to them, students understanding what that process is to start a new club. Um helping students kind of navigate that and and identify things to be involved in. Um so those are certainly some of the things that we've been working on in the last year, but in particular this year as well to make it as simple, you know, as possible for students. Go Oh, sorry. I was just going to say going off of what Mark said when we looked at this uh survey data, but then also the opportunity for kids to start new clubs and Ryan had already mentioned it, but two things that come to
073mind for both North and South are HOSA or the high school alliance of future physicians and pickle ball. So both are emerging clubs at North and South. So it's able to like look at that opportunity for kids to voice what's maybe missing in the building and what we can afford them a new opportunity. So those things are good being responsive to that. And then the other thing was there was one thing on there about it was a low percentage but sometimes we're trying to remove those barriers. So when we're talking about the finances that it costs for people to be involved. We also have something that we're very fortunate to have in this district called the angel fund. So students are able to apply if they're going through financial hardship or if they are on
074uh financial fee waiver that then if they need something that the fee waiver does not cover they're able to access that. So that's something we're really proud of too so we can eliminate those barriers. So we're just always trying to enhance our sense of belonging for our students in both north and south. Yes. No good. I think bring this down. I don't know why I went so tall. Um, no. Uh, so, uh, Dave and I got the a privilege of being here on, uh, September 23rd, uh, to talk about kind of the state of where athletics are at the time. And so, if you look at the left of this screen, that's what we kind of, um, projected out or that was actually what we presented at that time. And as a result of that,
075in the discussions leading, we started enacting two new programs. uh we saw this from the data we collected the year previously, a lot of that informal emails, things like that. Uh but things that we take in consideration besides just our surveys of our of our community is also our local schools and in the state. So there's a process to adding a new sport that isn't just here. We have to have someone to compete with. We have to have uh and all these things. So, as a conference, not only are we adding girls flag and boys bowling, but next year officially the West Suburban Conference, those will both those new sports uh partially because we'll be adding are actually going to be official sports within the conference next year as well. So, full conference schedules will
076go into that. Um, and a lot of those these sports started as emerging sports under the IHSA. And some of the sports that are listed uh on in our survey that maybe aren't quite where we're at yet are still considered emerging. Uh he mentioned boys badmitten that's considered an emerging sport. Uh we haven't seen a big uptick in our area with other schools take it from a club level to a sport yet an IHSA sport but that's where it's listed at currently. That's so that's the process how that works. you want to go. Next one. Um, yeah. So, as far as athletics goes, u both at North and South, uh, a few of the key takeaways that we we got from the data was, uh, communication opportunities and removing barriers, which we've kind of, uh,
077touched on a little bit. Um, but just things that we're focused on and we want to continue to grow within the athletic departments. Um, is is the ease of registration. Uh, making sure it's very transparent and making sure it's very accessible to all of our students and all of our families. um our Fanx app which both schools have implemented this year. We're kind of in the infancy of those still, but it's going to be a great opportunity just to get that information out uh on a very easy and accessible platform for parents. Uh Infinite Campus, which is is coming next year, is going to provide a lot of lot of opportunities again for uh making communication easy uh and accessible for our families. Parent Square um as well as the new website. Um and again,
078all these things there's we just want to simplify it and make it easily accessible to all of our community members. And we think focusing on these platforms and keeping them um specifically to these platforms will make it easy uh for families to access information and also to communicate to coaches uh teachers, administration um and just kind of bring everyone together. And the reason we mentioned that is if if you're in or not familiar, registration is there's a lot of different levels this there's registration to school, then there's registration for an activity, then there's registration for athletics. uh to register for athletics, you have to also provide an athletic physical. So there's a lot of steps that so anything that we can do to streamline that, make it easier to find and communicate that out that
079that helps our community and our families as well. So that's what that's why we're we want to continue to make that a focus and a goal as we move forward. uh opportunities. Uh obviously we tell all of our students uh as incoming freshman and non- freshman the first day of school is the school that is today will not be the one in four years when you leave because things that you come up with the thing you're going to change things and uh as we just got new programs changing that's because of the students that are currently here um and they're going to leave a legacy with that. So students that will be entering they're going to have different passions and different things that they uh they want to see happen and then we're the ones
080that are going to try to work on making sure that happens. Um, what we do here, I think that's where boys bowling came in. That's where girls flag. Uh, we've done a great job. We've talked about co-oping. Last last time we was here, we moved to a co-op for boys gymnastics was doing really well. They actually have sectionals this Wednesday and looking forward to state the following week for them. But that that's us looking at our our school district's resources and just making sure we can do everything we can to maximize opportunities to continue uh to benefit all of our students. Uh, and then removing barriers. Um, as far as transportation, uh, minibuses again is is they've been implemented for a while, but it gives us a great opportunity to cut back on some of
081the transportation time, which, um, as Ryan mentioned, is is kind of a concern for a lot of our our athletes and our parents, uh, those financial options for athletics, um, with the angel fund and and waivers and things like that. And then, uh, kind of long-term, um, is making sure that there's no language barriers that are present for any of our families. Um, and that goes across the board everywhere from registration to the information that's accessible on all those other platforms, making sure um that all of our families have access to it. So, we just wanted to talk about a little bit of some of the best practices that we want to continue to do and make sure that we're thinking of new ways to do moving forward to continue to encourage connections and involvement
082for all of our students in district district 99. So, one of those things is like how are we sharing the good news of the opportunities that exist and making sure that students know what they can get involved in. So, some of the things that we do, we have activity and athletic fairs at both schools. Um, we have like our future Trojan and Mustang night for our incoming students in January. Uh, conversations with students during new uh student orientation. So, like at South it's Mad Dash and at North it's their positively north runs it. So, they have their awesome freshman day too. Um, we've had opportunities during access to talk to students about the various activities that exist. We've had opportunities to go to like our transfer lunches. So, at South High, I know specifically we
083have our transfer lunches. So, once a month the students that are transferring into our district, have a lunch with the psych psychologists, counselors, deans to learn like how to navigate our school and transition into our school. But that's an opportunity to talk about the activities that exist. We've gone to AVID, our EL resource and breakout sessions. So just finding ways to reach out to all of our students to make sure that they know of all the things that do exist and making sure that we're having personal connections as much as we can, whether that's directly from us or from our student leaders or from coaches and sponsors. And so just continuing to get the information out there so that everybody is aware that they could come in in August and not be interested, but maybe
084by January they are. And there's always something to be able that they to do and that they could get started doing. Just to reiterate, um, with communication, um, something that we've all talked about, but that's something that we want to continue working on. And so, you'll hear that over and over from us, um, we can never communicate, you know, too well. Um, there's always room for improvement. So, that's something we're always going to be looking to do. Um, the four of us are all members of the district's communications committee with the terrific, um, Jill Browning, um, and her staff. And so, you know, we continue to meet and to identify ways that we can improve, whether that's stuff through the new website, uh, which is really great and we can do some really targeted stuff
085through the new website. Um, the continued use of parent square, which will allow us to also translate into different languages. Um, and just finding ways that we can be consistent and better with what we're doing. So, again, all students, all families, parents, guardians know exactly the opportunities that exist um, and that we can minimize those barriers um, for students to participate. uh next steps for us is to really continue collecting more data. Like I said, we have that baseline um that we were able to use this year. We wanted to make sure that was accurate and now we have that story. Now we can continue that journey with those students and see if there's things that we can improve upon to to get them more involved. Uh many of them are involved. We see a
086lot of multiport athletes as well. So it's kind of really interesting that that we were able to dig into that into that data as well. um he talked about communication and um and barriers and that's our biggest goal. So the reason we mentioned that multiple times through our through our back and forth conversation today is when we sat down when we said with Ryan, what are things when we look through the data? Well, the main things we want to look at things that we can actually control. Uh and some of the things we can control is how we communicate and making sure we eliminate some of those barriers. So that's why you heard that over and over as a common theme. uh that language barrier we have we have a plan and working with those
087uh and that's what in including that new some of that new uh new formats like the new website we're hoping infinite campus will be an uplift with our registration as well so these are things that uh we're really looking forward to but this has just been a great year we couldn't thank Ryan enough uh and everybody that was involved uh from access teachers because this without this data it's it's step one and uh it's really was it's well overdue for the fact that we now know something about each kid We literally took every single student and talked to them. So that's that's it's very impressive. Uh so that's all we have. Um just want to say thank you one more time. Um we are obviously very passionate about athletics and activities and what it brings
088to our students, but uh it means a lot that obviously the board and the community are are equally as invested in it. So thank you for having us and and thanks for your time. Any questions from board members? So collecting data. Um, are you relying on the survey data? Is that the data you're referring to? So, um, I guess my question is if my daughter registers and becomes a member of the empowerment club at North with Karen Spar Thomas, I mean, is that not collected? Is in and you know, is there a are we using five labs or is there are there some like software that's collecting this participation? Because it sounds to me like you're relying on the survey data. Yeah. So, we rely on multiple sources, but right now we're talking about the
089survey data that we got to be able to tell a story about our students and be able to dive deep into the data. Every year, we're able to look at the registration data to see who was registered and know a story about the students that are involved. But by being able to take the schoolwide survey, we just learned new things maybe about people that aren't currently involved and they're not on a roster for a club or a sport. And so then we're able to go in and dive a little bit deeper and talk to those students and have a one-on-one connection with the people that are currently not involved. And our students that are involved, whether it's us or our administrative assistants or teachers or their coaches or their sponsors, like they're already talking to
090them about the reasons why they enjoy being involved and why they love being connected to North and South. I hope that answered your question. It does a little bit. Um Okay. Sorry. Ryan definitely if not um there was two survey like in Ryan's beginning there was a survey about the students that are involved and kind of how they're the reflection of what how they're involved how they feel right the second one that we talked about right before we got on was the belonging activity that's the one that we're primarily focusing on in our presentation because those are the students that were that basically when we pulled all the rosters and all and all all that it's everybody your daughter wouldn't have been included in that one because she wouldn't have got pulled out because she's
091already involved Um, so this is every student that we we we were able to find out who wasn't involved. Okay. And then we gave then we had one-on-one interviews with them and survey with them. So we use the word survey, but that was this uh belonging activity. That's the brand new one. The survey that he started with is the one we do every two years. But is there is there a database that like you can look up and say my daughter Hannah Rener is on this club, this club, this club, and this club. Yes. Okay. Okay. And that's your starting point. And then from there you were looking at the kids who are not involved in any activities and then you were surveying them and interviewing them and getting feedback. Yes. Okay. Okay. Thank you.
092Can I just ask about the barriers? So are they I know you're looking at all of them. Is there any prioritization of them? Are some larger than others or are you I think that's where we looked at um kind of the controllables. Uh what can we control within there? you know, some of the students is I just want to focus on my academics. That's that's great. Is that something maybe we we're not going to try to change that? Um others are involved, but they're in a club sport, so maybe that's not going to possibly change. Um so what when I look at uh one is transportation. Uh uh is there a language? Did they not know about they didn't know how to get registered? Well, that's something that we can control. Make sure that they
093know more about registration faster, more often, more frequently. So, those are some of the things that when we got through all the list of questions that Ryan asked them in those one-on-one interviews, we want to go through and can we actually can we actually uh move that needle at all? Um, after school, I think we've had activity buses running after school now for at least three years, I believe. Um, and the 615 at the second. Yeah. So, that because we have had the 4:30 bus for a very, very, very long time, but three years ago, we added the 615. 615 bus. But if if you come I know I can speak to south for the amount of students that I sit around watch waiting for that 615 bus to think if maybe a good chunk
094of them wouldn't have been able to be at the school because of that offer not having that offering there's a lot of them every night so not saying all of them wouldn't have found a way but there's a good good amount that that they're utilizing that bus so that's one barrier that we eliminated over that time do we have data about I know you you mentioned a correlation between participation in clubs and activities and sports and student achievement in the classroom. Do we actually track that data within D99? Meaning like if if a student has two or more like clubs or activities, they they are achieving at a higher rate than students that are not participating at at that level. We can track that. We don't currently track the correlation between the two. I think
095a a lot of studies do show that. Okay. But I think more recently we've been tracking the sense of belonging students have and tied to their participation and we're starting to see more students who have connections within the school and then those connections move outside of school where they don't need to be in the sport to find that core or to find that connection. Um but yes, I mean we could because we have all the students on the roster, we could run a report and showing the correlation between grades and uh kids on the rosters pretty quickly. You think it's the sense of belonging that leads to the higher achievement? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. And that's hard to measure, right? Yeah. Because uh for example, I mean, we know some very high
096achieving athletes that don't participate in district 99 sports because they're playing club sports or travel sports and they excel at North and South just as much as the students who are on the D99 teams. Yeah. And still from your data say that they feel like they belong at school. Absolutely. For Sure. But that's like the intangibles that they get to be involved in through like like lunchroom activities, dances, other big schoolwide events that it's not connected directly to their sport or activity, but they're still participating in community. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because there's lots of different opportunities to be involved that that's not necessarily like tracked, you know what I mean, through data, but through their classes and through the feelings that they get from being involved with their teachers and their classrooms
097and connecting with their peers. They're still having that sense of belonging. For sure. and the staff versus senior softball game this weekend uh Wednesday, Thursday at South, right? Um that there are students who will participate in that and compete against the staff and that sense of belonging being able to compete and have 500 of your peers out there watching during the school day. That is a lasting memory that some of those kids have and they may not be participating in a club or activity at North or South right now. Yep. One thing that uh we do informally, some of our coaches do this um just for their own data and I think it may answer one of the questions is we don't always compare our students that are athletes versus students that aren't athletes um
098or involved. But we do is sometimes comp take our students GPA while they're in season in the semester they're in season versus the semester they're out of season. So some coaches do track that to see if that helps you know for their because a lot of times it does prove that when they're in season they actually do better in academics a lot of times. So, some of our coaches do pull that data. Okay. I appreciate all the uh work you guys have done to um reduce the barriers for students because I think that's a big issue when it comes to uh that extracurricular activity, especially when it comes to activity buses. I know like when I was a student, it was tough for me to find a time to get home after if I was
099going to join a club or something. So, so I appreciate all that. uh when it comes to the um angel fund uh the the the barriers when it comes to financial opportunity for students was was low which was good to see. Um how does the angel fund operate? Like how how do we fund it? Is that can community members donate to it? So the angel fund actually started in 2019. So, in 2019, we were able to work with the um education foundation and our community and leaders in the district to be able to do an initial opportunity for community members to donate money to the angel fund, which is then primarily for activities and opportunities, right, that are not covered by a fee waiver. So, it could be for paying for a summer school or
100it could be because they don't have the money to pay for a yearbook. And so, then it's really like a case- by case basis like through our counseling department and um other teachers like case managers from the special education department that are able to like know a student's story and where students may need help. And then they're able to fill out that fund. And so then they're able to do that application and access things that they wouldn't have been able to access because they're not covered by funding through the school to offset those costs for your extracurricular activity or like items, right? So if you want to buy the extra apparel or how I just mentioned like um the yearbook or a prom ticket or a homecoming ticket, things that are outside of maybe their
101budget and they want to be able to attend, we're able to help with. And so right now, I know the education foundation is going to be um cooperating with us because our funds for the first time since 2019. We were so fortunate to receive that money and then we went through COVID and so we weren't using it quite as much and then things have finally like gotten back to complete normal and people are accessing it and using it so much more. So, our funds are actually going to be depleted. And so, the education foundation is helping us find avenues to replenish those funds because it is a critical fund that is utilized to help whether it's that extracurricular summer school opportunity for academics or whether it's the prom night experience that they can remember for,
102you know, forever and be involved in activities. So, the angel fund has been a really critical fund that's really helped a lot of our students access things that they need to that they wouldn't be able to access otherwise. So, I hope that answered it. You know, I'll just add this time of year with like senior events, uh, homecoming time, stuff that, um, maybe isn't completely necessary for a student to do, but honestly is kind of like a foundation of like their high school experience and being able to do things with their friends and and to do these fun things that's part of the traditional high school experience. That's where we see a lot of the students putting in um, the request for the angel fund. So, kind of the big times a year for us
103are like in the fall um, around homecoming and then towards the end of the year. Um, and certainly we want to be able to grant those so that the students can participate, be with their friends, have those experiences. Um, and I'm proud to say for for just about every every request that we get, um, we're able to we're able to grant those so students are able to participate. And I just have to make one more connection because we were talking about barriers and language barriers and like the financial pieces. So, one thing I'm really proud of this year, like working with our equity team, there were some requests to help pay for some credit recovery for some of our EL students to be able to go to summer school. So, that's awesome. Like, we're able
104to provide the students that registration fee that they need to be able to go to summer school, to be able to acquire more proficiency in um English here. And then that also will hopefully help connect students right to more activities and feel more confident by being involved in our things at Downer South and North. So, it's all a win-win. I think back to registration though, I think that's great to hear. I think from my experience in my daughter in high school that the coaches and and activity leaders do a great job of promoting if you can't afford something like they you see that all the time. And I just think the community, people who can afford to help if they knew kids, I 100% see what you're saying, buying a yearbook, getting a prom dress,
105getting a prom ticket. Like, I don't know if that's something I know there's a line item in registration for the foundation, but I think if community members knew that there's a fund and it's getting depleted and here's what it's for. I think our community would there'll be another push for that. That's great. So, and when it opened the first time, there was overwhelming support. Yeah. Great. So yeah, we just haven't had to do a drive since then. Yeah, which was fortunate, which was fortunate, but then now people are also staff members are becoming maybe more aware of it again as like people are it seems strange, but it feels co seems so long ago now, but at the same time, I feel like there's more questions, right? Because people are becoming again more comfortable for
106like everybody to be involved. So I feel like it's more resurfaced. And when you brought up that question, it made us think as we are analyzing the data and really dissecting it, there's a lot of parts that we're really proud of. So when those numbers are really low that transportation, these are things are pretty low. It's because of things that have already been put in place. So this angel fund's been since 2019 and it's been community that it's it's being utilized and maybe that's why that number is so low. And if it wasn't, it may be a lot higher. Same with the transportation a few three years ago. They added that activity bus and now that number is is low. I don't know what that data was four years ago, but now we kind of
107know and we're kind we're really happy with it being open. Yeah. Is there an easy and discreet way for kids to access the angel fund? Yeah, there's um so there's an applica there's an application on the website, but usually students have conversations with an adult that they know in the building, whether it's their counselor, case manager, coach, teacher that they're connected to, and they're able to have those conversations. and then the adult is able to kind of guide them to find it, you know. So then it all happens that way. But I feel like it's always through a caring conversation that connects them easily to where that link is on the website. Any other comments or questions? Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Tonight is a night of feedback uh and going
108through that and looking at how that shapes our work as a district and how it will shape our work for next year. Uh you can see that is a subset of it here and the activities in athletics and kind of gives you a deep dive into that work. We're going to step back to kind of the 30,000 foot view and look at what our work will be focused on for the next school year holistically as a district and how we come to that determination and recommendation to the board as to what it should be. Uh to back up a few years ago we uh wrote a new strategic plan. uh last year uh we worked on identifying measures within that. This year uh as you saw in this last presentation was a focus on looking
109at those measures and data inside of it. And one of the things that we know about high-erforming school districts, which we are and should continue to be and be better at, is that they focus on one thing at the highest level at a time. We can do many things in this district, but if we really want to move the needle on something and make a difference, it's going allin on something. As the superintendent, it really makes no difference to me what that thing that is that we all go all in on, but it's got to be a thing that we prioritize and really work diligently on improving. Uh the goal is now that we have a strategic plan, now that we have these measures that we go out uh to our staff, our students, our
110families, and try to triangulate what it is that we should really focus and work on. Um as I said, as a superintendent, it makes no difference to me what that is. I'm happy to lead the district in whichever way our staff, students, families believe they need to be led. And so the exercise over the last several months has been what are we going to pick? What is that thing going to be? Um so that would be our primary measure. There's probably when you do this likely uh one or two secondary goals that kind of support that primary one and then you know we have 11 measures we're looking at. So if there's one at the top and a couple other that support them, then the rest of them not are not important, right? They're still
111important, but you're not going to throw all your chips on the table on those. Your goal with those is don't go backwards, right? Maintain where you're at. And what we know from the research about high performing schools is if you move that top measure, all of the others will move up right alongside with it. And the plan is now that we're here, now that we have the strategic plan, now that we have the measures, now we have a process year overyear to identify and have the board approve and select or challenge uh the selection from the stakeholders as to what that most important priority should be. And then once the board identifies that and approves it, the administrative team and everybody else go all in on moving that forward. This year, uh, there's this whole
112process. This has been shared with the board in print before this, but really we're at the point of working through the surveys and information to come up with a statement of work, which I will share with you at the end of this presentation. After that, tomorrow I will send out to all of our staff and say, "Last night, I presented this as the draft statement of work and look for consensus amongst our staff that that is the right thing to work on for this year. I will come back on May 19th with the results of that feedback from our staff and ask you I might tweak it based on the feedback we get or might just reinforce yeah we're on the right right path here but on the 19th I will ask you to vote
113up or down our recommendation for what we will work on next year and then over the next year you're going to get a lot of updates on that top priority where we started was first with our administ administrative team. We knew a bunch of other surveys were coming out soon. But before we got the results of those surveys back, we wanted to check in with the leadership team, which is all administrators and department chairs and uh Josh, the DGA president is part of that team as well. uh to see what did the leadership team think like what does the leader's gut say is the most important thing before we went out and asked everybody to see if the leadership team had its pulse on the feelings of our staff the board and incoming board members
114were all part of this survey feedback and you can see here up at the top uh attendance by far 35 comments uh a total weighted comment score. So for each prior each one you could pick your top one was three points, your middle priority is two points, your bottom one was one point. So that is total comments raw comments they picked any one of those is their one, two or three and then the weighted is that multiplier is added. You can see right now regular attendance uh from the leadership team is really up at the top. Uh then we kind of went through uh the data, used a little bit of AI to help look for some themes in that and weighted comments. So if you said attendance was your top thing, then your comment
115got three points as well. So we could look at the priority based on the language that was used as well. Regular attendance overall across the leadership team and the board uh was the top when you added up all the points. Student interventions and supports was the top amongst the board of education. When you dig into those comments of student intervention and supports from the board of education, the great majority of them related to student attendance. Um then culture of support and collaboration is really teacher morale which you'll hear more or staff morale which is more you'll hear more about that tonight. And then expected behavior from the leadership team uh was really high. About half of the comments in expected behavior were behavior related to attendance. Then there are three surveys that you're going to
116hear about tonight that were uh given out. So climate, this is the one that replaced the five essential survey. This is the statemandated climate survey. We use the comprehensive school climate inventory. This tool was also selected by the leadership team. You'll hear that tonight. Uh we do an annual spring survey. This has evolved over the years, but last year in conversations with the board, it was important to have an outside entity uh analyze and provide feedback on that survey. So that there was no question that like administration was putting their thumb on the scale, right? So, it's completely an outside group that uh helped us develop the survey and then analyze it. Ryan will present on the first one Jill will present on tonight and the spring survey Ryan will present on and then Rob
117will be here to present the second year uh or second set of data on our morale survey. The biggest takeaway that you're going to see from this uh in the biggest part of this exercise is verifying that the leadership team and the rest of the stakeholders in our organization uh both align with what the statement of work should be for next year and I will uh share the results of that with you at the end after you have the opportunity to make your own conclusions. So with that being said, I'm going to invite Jill forward for the climate survey. Hello everyone. Um, first I just want to say thank you as we've all thanked you for serving as board members. Um, I've been a resident of Downers Grove for 24 years now and I just
118appreciate all the work and everything that you do for our schools. I know there are long meetings but sometimes there's cake too though. Oh, by the way, Jill Browning is your role. Uh I'm chief communications officer here at the district. I think I've met all of you and u excited to be here tonight um to present about the comprehensive school climate inventory which as Hank said replace the five essentials and um as you may know all schools districts in Illinois are required to issue a climate survey every year and we have a choice between the survey tools and for many years we've used the five essentials and it's similar to the CSCI both are state approved surveys they measure the perceptions of our school community our families amilies, our students and our staff. Now, um
119the important thing to keep in mind is that it's the student response rate. It's not the feedback, but it's just the student response rate that counts um for our summitive designation. So, both of our schools are rated as commendable. So, that is factored into that calculation. We cannot customize these questions. They are not open-ended. It's off the shelf from the company and it takes about 20 minutes to complete. Uh the differences with the CSCI is that it measures 14 dimensions, not just those five. Um and it has indepth survey questions about school safety. Um and it we find that it's more relevant to a high school setting as well. Um it's also issued to all students, families, and all staff, whereas the five essentials was just the teachers. Um we're able to issue this to
120all staff. And as Hank said, the decision to switch came from the district leadership team. They reviewed both um several different um survey instruments and here are just a few of the comments that captured their feelings whereas that let let's go for it um and the board of education al also approved that change um the survey window as dictated by um the state of Illinois and that window is February 18 to March 18 March 28th and I just wanted to put in when we issued it to students was March 19th and March 20th towards the end of that window um and we didn't get uh a lot of everyone then. So, we um were able to target and um students who had not yet responded to the surveys and we tried to get clever with
121some of our text messages. I don't know if if you students received any of these or maybe you you uh were good and you filled it out the first time. They did it the first time, so they weren't harassed, but we were borderline on harassment, but we tried. Um our response rates are up there. They're similar to the um surveys that uh Ryan has issued. um 61% and that was similar between north and south response rates. Um the staff and you can see the teacher broke broken out down below. The DGN also includes T99. So I that that is not captured right there, but those are the separate response rates. So the majority of staff who responded were teachers. Um and then we got a strong family response rate as well. But unfortunately the bad
122news is that was not as strong students this year. um and our response rates were lower than last year with the five essentials. So, we'll need to take a look at that and how can we improve that student engagement for next year. Um the survey is definitely comprehensive. As you can see, these are just a few examples for each um category and and the families in the audience probably maybe you remember completing this survey as well. Um but it's very comprehensive. Um and you can see for the different um categories that are listed um res respondents were asked to strongly agree which was ranked of five down to one that likered scale and you do have a handout um I should point out that's Hank's showing you right now that handout and it provides um
123more detail. So, as far as the as the survey scoring, like I said, it's one through five. Um, and individual responses of four or five are considered positive, three neutral, and then two or one negative. And then for those combined responses as we go through it, and you can see down the list, three and above are generally positive, and then there's the neutral, and anything below 2.5 is considered negative. So, as I said, there's the overall snapshot of all of the scores, and that represents um all responses, and overall, it's it's pretty positive. Um we we have a couple that are lower and a couple that are higher in the staff categories. And I'm just going to go through domain. There are five domains and then categories within that. And I'm just going to briefly
124highlight some key takeaways from that. So under safety you can see is um comprised of rules and norms, sense of physical security, sense of social emotional security and online safety and um within each category as well there's a score distribution and we can kind of dig deeper into what is comprised of that overall number. So you see that the 3.0 know for staff is a little bit lower and we go into it and we can see the score distribution that 22% of staff responded negatively about rules and norms. Um so it's a lower level of sentiment and this kind of had to do with uh the consequences issued for when people break rules as well. But for the most part, physical safety was very positive for across all um audiences and staff were more neutral
125on the social emotional security as well as online safety. For the domain teaching and learning, it was very high for support for academic learning as well as social emotional learning and that 4.6 from staff is one of the highest and again the just the general takeaways it's very positive. Um all c all people feel the schools provide academic support and are encouraging and um for the social emotional learning that we help them to succeed. As far as interpersonal relationship includes these categories respect for diversity, teacher student relationships and peer relationships. You can see the 4.8 is the highest um ranking and that was by staff. But as we dug deeper, um we looked at the um the the details of the family responses, which was 4.1, but we saw that 20% responded negatively. So they
126marked a two or a one when it came to teacher family, teacher student relationships. And so that's something we'll need to dig into and and find out um more information what's going on there. Uh institutional environment includes school connectedness. We heard all about how important that is. physical surroundings and social inclusion. And these were all very positive. The majority of everyone listed a four or five. And then finally, the leadership and efficacy domain includes administration and leadership and collective efficacy. And this you can see is green. It's it was only um a staff question. And that three-point low is one of the lowest, but it was neutral too. When we drilled down, there was no there were no negative um categories with this question. 77% were neutral even though it's a 3.2 and then 71%
127um were positive about the how they work with one another. And again, just more positives. Um people who ranked four or five is the majority in these categories. 100% were students, staff and families for support for academic learning, school connectedness, physical surroundings, and respect for diversity. But of course, then there are items to address those rules and norms um which gets back to kind of the theme of the day. Um and teacher student relationships, we'll investigate further and then administration leadership effectiveness. We'll be taking a look at that. And also with this um survey instrument, we're able to have benchmark data from schools nationwide so that we'll be able to compare and look at that as we continue on with this instrument. So that is the CSC. Hello, I'm back. Um so if you saw
128me getting up gingerly, it's not because I'm reluctant to come up. It's because my 503year-old back wasn't ready for all the yard work this weekend. So um uh as Hank mentioned earlier um we did have an outside consultant working with me this year. Um Insights Incorporated uh CT long was um my connection and um this survey included the activity athletic survey that I extracted and put into the other presentation. So you will see a reference to it later and that is to the data that I had already presented. So before I get started, I did just want to kind of go through the process that we went through. Um in past surveys, I created the questions. I ran them through teams of administrators and teachers. Uh this year it was different. working with the outside
129consultant. We took the indicators and measures and I ran an ran an activity in our leadership team meeting and instead of asking them for the questions they want asked, I asked them what did they hope to learn from the survey and they gave me lists of uh things that they had hoped that they would learn. I turned that information over to our consultant. They created the questions. They sent it back. I sat with the administrative team. They sat with their department chairs. They looked at the questions, gave me feedback. Some of the main feedback was it was clear that the consultant didn't quite know what capstone experience meant in education. So, um I did a quick call with them, gave them a couple of examples, they reworked their um capstone questions. Uh and then they
130created the platform for the survey and then distributed that survey. So um they also then presented that survey data back to me and gave me the opportunity to drill down into that further. Um I presented at DT last week which is our district leadership team. I'll be presenting here and then Hank um Courtney and Arwin have asked me to meet with each department chair and also all of the other strategic indicator teams so that the activities and athletics team you can see that I've already sat down with them. we've gone through the data and they've presented that way they can look at the data as they're making their plans for next year. So I have a meeting with principles um Dement and Lip on Wednesday to prepare for the department chair meetings that will then
131happen through the end of the year so that they can prepare how they're going to work on what their portion of the district goal is as they set those um goals for the next school year. So, for equitable and supportive environment, um, one of the things that comes out immediately is, sorry, did it go back? Oh, sorry, one last thing. I'm glad I clicked black. Okay, so um, a favorable response is a four or a five. So, if a if someone answers a one, two, or three to a question, it will not show up in the favorable responses. So when you see that data for favorable responses, just know that that is for a respondent who has chosen a four or a five. Three does not show up as a favorable response. So for our
132behavior um in expectations, it's clear that the families and the students report that they understand what that behavior is and they even say that they under that uh they have trusted adults in the building that they feel like their students are treated fairly. However, the staff reports how much they struggle with the behavior and it's a significant difference between the two. So when we look at expected behavior, the first one is about the expectations. Do students understand the expectations? Do parents understand the expectations? You can see that that's a fairly high favorable response rate. Again, a four or a five. Um however the level of those expectations or the staff feeling like they can support uh positive student behavior is lower uh than 50% and so that is very different from our families but then
133also the consequences for the behavior. The staff really struggles with those consequences and are they doing enough to one correct behavior or two specifically get students to class? Our relationship mapping was also part of that. You can see that 78% and 73% respectively with our families feel like there is a trusted adult that the students can go to during the school day. However, when we did the relationship mapping activity, the question we asked staff was, did relationship mapping make you more aware of students who need that connection? about 30% of our staff reported a favorable response there. So whether or not they had a deep understanding of those connections already or if they we need to communicate better um out the students uh who need more connection and make the staff more aware of those
134connections that's something that we may need to work on. Um and then also questions about students belonging. We asked students on this survey as well because we weren't able to ask that on the this the activity that we did with our um South Kids. So, this was added. Um do you feel a sense of belonging? So, across district 99, uh 67% of students, whether or not they're currently involved in an activity or not, we don't know. It's an anonymous survey. But of the 2675 kids who responded, 67% of them said that they do feel a sense of belonging in our schools. student engagement in four-year planning is a pretty positive response. So there's a high level of guidance given from families and teachers and also that there the vertical integration. So if I'm taking classes
135is does one class lead to another that lead to my career goals? Um I choosing classes based on my interest and career goals. Families report a higher connection than the staff do. So when we look at capstone experiences, this is something where we ask the students and the families and the teachers are students able to demonstrate their learning from throughout the year at the end of the course. 63% of teachers report that 65% of students and 70% of families. um going into this question is going to be important in our department chair meetings because some some departments have moved away from uh final exams. Therefore, their chairs would not expect that number to be um high whereas others would expect that to be high. So, we'll be digging into that number a little bit more
136specifically, especially as final exams have shifted over the last several years. four-year plan. It was exciting to see that 91% of our families say they talk to their students about choosing their courses with their secondary plans in mind and also their interests. And 75% of the staff also provide that guidance. That's a pretty significant number think because when teachers are giving that guidance, they're mostly talking about what class they think is the next in the sequence for that student. But beyond that, they also report um 75 75% of them chose a four or five in indicating that they're also talking to them about their secondary plans and interests and courses that they have. Um as far as alignment, uh students and families report at a higher rate that they choose courses that align and build
137upon courses that they've already taken. We are actually working on developing career pathway documents. So that helps students and families as they're choosing that if they're thinking of a career or a major in mind that will have documents that will help them build those courses more consistently. um and our staff asking them are their courses vertically aligned so that an intro course will uh align and refine the skills when they're getting into more advanced courses. About 59% of the staff report that um whether or not that's because of tied to their post-secary goals or if it's just refining skills for the next course, that's something for us to dig into as we continue to look at the data. So growth of student ownership and agency the activities supports I've already talked about. However, attendance is
138going to be again one of the big uh stress points um in the survey data. So um beyond the activity and athletic data, we asked about interventions and supports and uh how aware are families about them and specifically uh is there something that you wish to see in order to help improve the communication of them? Uh and so email communication improvements was the top one. Um counselor communication also came up but only at 7% of the responses. So for 700 families that responded um that have the fact that more families did not choose counselor communication just goes to show how strong of a connection our counselors have with our students for regular attendance. However, you can start to see some pretty significant stress points. The lowest um indicator for positive responses from the staff is
139attendance. So school provides adequate support um for students uh attendance and so that's at 11%. Earlier you saw consequences at 15%. Those two as you heard from Jill and as you heard from Hank earlier those are some of our touch points that we need to work on. And if you look at what students say 56% of the students feel motivated to attend class regularly. Um, and so that does support our staff's concerns about attendance. Um, and then also, uh, finding benefits to attending class every day. That while that's higher, 71% of the students who responded, we would like to see that much higher than that. Our families do um talk about understanding the expectations and feeling the support and know how to support um, their students with their attendance. So we know that the families
140don't feel that barrier. So that is something that we'll be working on and looking at internally for our recruitment for um highly qualified staff. Staff feel equipped to um teach their courses. They find that they have enough resources. Um but PD still comes up as something that has become a concern. Last year we saw um stronger numbers with our personalized professional learning and because of that that question didn't necessarily need to come up. The staff overwhelmingly said last year that personalized professional learning wasn't their concern. It was uh building level PD and that does come up again this year. So, uh, some of our highest, um, numbers from the staff, um, 83% and 81% respectively talking about the skills and resources that they need to effectively perform their job responsibilities to making impact uh, meaningful
141impact on their student work. So, the staff is feeling good about the work in the classroom that they're doing. But when they're looking at professional development, we ask them a couple of different things. one um how uh they feel about the professional development in their building. And then the the lower uh positively r rated response was in the last six months did you have a professional development opportunity that made a meaningful impact on your work? Um 24% of the staff responded positively to that. Um and so that does show an area of growth. We also asked them what are future PD topics. Again, you can see attendance. So, um strategies for getting students to come to class. That is one of the top ones. Infinite campus. Yes, absolutely. And um accountability, you'll see once again,
142um comes up. We did also ask them when they like to have their professional development. Um that on a regular day, that becomes one of our lower um positively responded comments. But institute day you can see is that large part of the pie. For general feedback uh we asked students what could what would you feel the school could do better to help you in your learning judy uh learning journey. Um 25% of the kids wrote nothing or IDK um something like that. Um that reduced workload um does tend to come up. uh engaging teaching methods. Se several students also talked about having a shorter day or even later start. Um a large percentage of the students either also did not have anything. If it was left blank, it is different than nothing. Um and also
143if it was a nonschool appropriate response um I left that in the blank category. So, we also asked how likely you're re you are to recommend your school district to your friends as a place to work or as a place to send your students. Um, if a respondent answers a zero through six, they're categorized as a detractor. That's a business term. Often that times that's where where are we going to put our advertising dollars? Um, if someone's asking about our product, how likely are they to promote us? um if uh if they answered a nine or a 10, they're categorized as a promoter, which means they're more likely to say yes and to talk up um the district or as their to send their students or a place to work. As we know from all
144of the different bystander training we do with students, most people are considered passive, right? That they're they're more willing to smile and be silent. So, how do we get our passive um families or employees to become a promoter? Or if they're a detractor um where they're more likely to say something negative, how do we get them into passive or promoter? Personally, I I prepare kids for testing either whether it's the ACT or the AC uh SAT. And I always say, I'm not trying to get you from an 18 to a 36. I'm trying to get you in an 18 to a 21 or a 24 to a 27. And so our goal really is to how can we choose something that's going to impact staff, students, and families uh to move them from one category
145to another, whether that's from an eight to a nine or a six to a seven. So this is the data that they gave me. Um you can see that 26% of the staff indicates that they're a promoter. So they chose a nine or a 10. Um and 39% of the staff saw themselves as a detractor. Well, not saw themselves a detractor, chose zero through six, which six, which categorized them as a detractor. That's very different from our families. 62% of the families chose a nine or a 10, whereas only 10% chose a zero through six. I'm a data person at heart. I don't know if there's any other data people in the room. Anybody? Anybody? Okay. a while. I wanted to dig into it a little bit more um because I feel like this sort
146of like glosses over what the real number is. And so because I had access to that data, I did want to uh I made a commitment that I wouldn't change their slides. This is what they gave me. So I added this. Um so this is these are the numbers of staff who voted zero or one or two or three. Um, and you can see that for DGN families and DGS families. So you can get a sort of a larger picture of where we are. If our goal is to move our fives and sixes to sevens and eights among our staff, it's about 58 people that we're looking at trying to move up. Obviously, we would love to eliminate the zeros through fours um and to help them move up as well, but we're also equally
147as interested in making sure that the 102 people that are sitting in the sevens and eights, what is it that we can do with a singular focus that will help move them into nines and tens? You can see that there's also families who um are in zero through six range. Um but there are larger numbers um that you'll see in um eights, nines, and tens with our families. Also, uh we asked what were the recommend recommended action from the staff. The process for the um consultants was to look at a comment and then take a step back. sort of that 30,000 view 30,000 foot view that Hank mentions and say okay what is the theme that comes out of this question. So you can see the number of responses um including blank responses will equal
148the number of participants and it also gives that percentage breakdown. Now for me I feel like when you look at data in large batches like that it's also good to mine it so that you can see is it really telling this true story. So this is the same data except broken down into number of mentions. The reason is is that if I have a comment that the question was asking one thing to improve your school. Many of the responses said, "I know you asked for one thing, but here are three things." Um, and so in doing it this way, all three of them get counted rather than going into the larger theme of that connection. So in doing that breakdown, student accountability in one was mentioned it just over 140 times in all of the
149different comments. Student consequences just over 120 times, cell phone policy, and then attendance and commons management and oversight just over a hundred times. This becomes thematic because the staff it's all combined together, right? Student accountability to get to class consequences that are consistent that students feel that pressure to come to class not only for their learning but because it's expected. um if the student is in the comments, how are we getting them there and that while we have a cell phone policy that having a stricter one because that is a concern um for staff. So um we broke it down to make sure that you knew where the amount of comments there were within the larger responses. Also, I thought it was important to see in general like what's the summary of what that means.
150And so, increased student accountability um comes up that is around behavior. It's about attendance. Um students having uh academic effort while they're there, respecting school rules. Um but then also the the second one about ensuring consistent enforcement of consequences. um skipping class, tardiness, all of those are still attendance related. Um but it starts to go into then that tripping into general misconduct. Um wandering and lingering in the commons. Those are quotes. I put quotes around them because that came up several times. Um and really helping uh helping students find a productive use of free time. And if we can't, how do we make sure that they are supervised during that free time? Um comes up from staff as well. So um this is sort of a summary of the count breakdowns of the larger categories.
151I tried to keep the header the same so you can see the through line there. Um but uh that is the result of the district 99 survey. Hey everybody. I'm here to give a uh a quick update on our uh morale survey that we have with our partner firm EAB. Um for those of you who are new, two years ago we decided to partner with this research firm EAB uh because they have a framework that helps us to quickly identify and diagnose what's going on with morale uh for our staff and then get right to work on improving it. So one thing that they do for us is through their research is they broke this nebulous term of morale down into six different categories. Uh and they tell us that uh the goal of the
152process is to go through the survey. Uh we did focus groups last year and identify one of these categories and get straight to work on trying to improve that with the goal being that every year we improve one of those and then uh hold the line on each of those and the following year we improve another one until we have all of them uh improved. So this is where uh we were um similar to the other surveys that you saw. It's a one through five scale. Five uh is ranked as very satisfied. One is ranked as very dissatisfied. uh we administered the survey in October 2023. So with this survey now we have longitudinal data with the same questions to uh measure our progress. So in October of 2023 we had 392 of our staff
153members take the survey. Uh their average responses were put together in these uh six categories plus our last one around measurement and progress. Um and you can see where they ranked. So a majority of them were ranked at neutral right in the middle of the responses. our two categories around personal safety and belonging and time and resources. They were ranked positively at a four uh with five being the highest. So with that we went through a whole process with our district leadership team with our teachers and the focus groups uh and identified the category that we wanted to focus on this year to improve and that category was the ownership and input uh category. So, our goal was to move it from a three at a neutral uh up to a four or a five,
154a satisfied or a very uh very satisfied. So, of those six, we were targeting ownership and input across all uh of our staff. Uh and this is where we're at. So, we administered it again in April of 2025. We had more staff participated in in this time, so 412. Uh unfortunately we didn't do enough uh to move that needle to make it up to the four. So we're still at a neutral there for our ownership and input. Um but an average number like that across uh everything doesn't really tell the full story. Um so what I did is I broke it up by our uh employee groups. So the category of ownership and input really comes down to four questions out of our 26 questions on the survey. Those questions you can see on the
155left side. uh the question of I have ownership and control over my professional practice and my work environment. Uh I I drag that across to our different employee groups. So some differences of what you can see year-over-year is that our DGA group on average went from a neutral up to a uh agree or satisfied. Um and then our support staff group went from a four down to a three. So those sort of canceled each other out on that one. Uh my opinions are heard and valued by district leaders. Uh you can see our CMG group went from a three to a two on that. Um stayed neut uh stayed at the two for our DGA group. Our exempt group went from a three to a two. And then with our SSA group that stayed the
156same. Everything stayed the same for question number four, which is my opinions are heard and valued by school leaders. Uh and then our last question. In my current role, I get to do what I do best every day. The only change that we had was that our CMG group moved from a four up to a five. So that's the highest rating that we had on any of those. Um so that that category that we targeted for improvement came down to these four questions. And you can see how we progressed uh on those four questions for that category. Uh I went through and uh similar to what Ryan was talking about uh the fours and fives uh positivity ratings. So of those four questions, I went through and uh showed us how the positivity changed uh
157for each of those. So on our first question, we had a 7.9% increase in the positivity on that response. On our second question, we went backwards a little bit. So we had a negative one uh% on our positivity for that question. For our third question, uh we had a 2% increase in the positivity. And then in our fourth question, we had a 5.8% increase in the positivity. So some moves within the questions uh that impact that category of ownership and input. Um so again uh we didn't meet the goal uh but there are still some successes for us to to celebrate this uh school year. I put this in our last slide here. uh in your report I have every question and how the change in positivity uh happened uh between the two administrations. Um
158but these were the questions that we had the uh the top five with the highest positivity increase. So um you can see our very top one that's the one I want to point out to you a 10.3% increase in the positivity rating on there. Um, I want to point that one out because that's the one question that really gets at the heart of uh the staff and their relationships with each other. Um, and it's a testament to uh the work that they're doing. Uh, we have this positive psychology orange frog workshop that our teachers lead. Um, and I just, you know, I was meeting with them today. They're doing a part two of their training in this room tomorrow. And I just showed them the data to see that they are having an impact on
159the relationships that staff have uh with each other. So, uh, overall that's the presentation. We did have some increases. Um, and then for our one goal for this year for ownership and input, unfortunately, we didn't we didn't make that goal. Thank you, Rob. All right. So, what do we do with all of this information that we just shared with you? You remember at the beginning I talked about uh triangulating our work for the next year and making sure that we are You just saw morale in the district is around ownership and input. So it's really taking all of this input and feedback that you just heard and putting it into action in what we do next year. Uh so just to review, uh board and DT collectively identified improving attendance and those were those critical
160areas. You saw in Jill's feedback, climate and culture are overall positive across the district. uh and the staff have identified similar critical concerns as the leadership team across the district. So the good news is that the leaders and the staff are in lock step together as to what they believe needs to be improved across the district. So this is the proposed statement of work. This is what I'm going to ask every staff member in the district tomorrow to give me like a thumbs up. Yes, thumb sideways. Yeah, I agree. But I have some concerns or thumbs down. I don't think this is what we should be doing next year. And I will come back to you on May 19th with what the consensus is across the team and what the themes were in their feedback.
161Uh but this is what I am proposing and I will be asking maybe with some modifications on this based on staff feedback uh on May 19th for the board to approve as our focus, our singular most important focus for next year. So you can read it up there. Primary focus will be improvement in the areas of attendance. Improvement will be driven by increased accountability and consistency and consequences paired with appropriate interventions and support. Please note that that was the board's top priority, interventions and supports. Through this work, we believe that student academic performance will increase along with staff morale and what you just heard. This will be demonstrated through these indicators and measures that we've been reporting out on. Um it it is somewhat unfortunate that one of our pillars in this around ownership and
162input feeds into the statement of work and isn't gathered after we share the statement of work with the staff. I strongly believe that once the staff sees this, they will see that they had ownership and input into our work for next year. Timeline and next steps uh this consensus over the next week, I will request the board to approve uh either this statement of work or a revised statement of work based on staff feedback. And then this will guide all of our planning for next year. Uh we anticipate based on all of this feedback that attendance will be uh our primary focus as I have here in the statement of work. Rob mentioned EAB is uh our research and thought partner in morale but they are overall uh there as a resource to provide us
163information in all areas of improvement. We have a full administrative team uh meeting planned for the morning of the 20th with EAB to come in and present on. They've done a great amount of research on what makes a difference in attendance uh in improving attendance post pandemic. We will hear from them the morning of May 20th. As we plan our work coming back on May 29th to start digging into our statement of work, we will plan on bringing you uh detailed work plans at our board meeting in June. in response to this questions on you've gotten a lot there, but the big 30,000 foot takeway is really this, right? All of that leads to this. Um, happy to address anything in here or meet with anybody outside of this. Uh, Ryan, Rob, Jill can answer
164any specific questions or we can follow up based on this as well. So, the floor is yours board for any questions you may have. So I have a question on how do the indicators feed into the statement of work. Yeah. So just since we've now baselined most of them, right? So is there I'd say your through lines are that board and administration identified attendance and you see in Jill's presentation uh around climate that norms and rules and consequences all rise up in the climate area. You also see that there's low rankings there in the belief that we as an administrative team have a plan to address this. trying to demonstrate that to everybody. By the time they hit middle of June, they'll see what the plan is for next year. Right? You see in Ryan's
165feedback, the lowest indicators for uh staff were around the area of attendance. The mid indicators for students were around seeing value in having good attendance. Um so that's a through line that pulls there. And if you look at what Rob presented, uh clearly uh district leadership and the faith in that is the lowest of all of those indicators, right? So uh this is our good faith effort to show that we have heard that feedback. We are addressing it. We have a plan. We have heard their concerns. And now our administrative team members as Ryan mentioned from department chairs to uh each of our uh teams on the indicators will be sitting down with Ryan to dig into that data around what was that specific feedback and what will move the detractors to passives the passives
166to promoters and what do we need to do to keep the promoters where they're at. We'll look at that by department. We'll look at that by indicator and that will shape our work, you know, from the district level all the way to each department. So, um that's kind of how it all ties together and feathers together uh to both shape this work but then determine what the actionable things are as a result of that. How will you measure success um after focusing on attendance? I mean, is it is it merely um we have a higher attendance rate or are you will you also be measuring um through survey results that our staff feel as though we are now addressing and and and appropriately consequences and holding students accountable because all I've heard since the pandemic
167is that this is a nationwide problem and um sometimes attendance is out of our control. You know, parents just calling in students uh calling them out for reasons that may not be necessarily appropriate. Um is that out of our control? And and if if we don't see an improvement in attendance with our students, are we are we still are we going to be seeing this as a as as a failure? and and I just I' I'd just like to hear from you as to um besides not just setting what our mission is for next year, what are our goals and and in and if we can set some goals, um I'd like to be able to come back a year from now and assess whether or not we reach those goals. Yeah. I the first
168overarching one is the one that's our indicator and measure that shows up both on our strategic plan indicators and in the school report card, which is chronic absenteeism. Right? That is that overarching key measure that we will be looking at between this year and next year. The team that is our attendance team over this next month will be indic will be after the meeting with EAB looking at the feedback from our staff. We'll be identifying some sub measures underneath that uh that we know are lead indicators of uh chronic absenteeism. Uh we're not prepared to present on those yet at this point. That's going to be the work, you know, over the next kind of six weeks and then again over the summer. But you could expect that when you're sitting here in the fall
169and through the next school year, you're going to hear a lot about attendance and metrics and measurables and what we're looking at inside of there. A lot of that based on this presentation that we'll hear from EAB about what are those things that the research indicates you should focus on to move the needle on those. But we also have a wealth of data from what you just saw presented from our own experts on on team what our teachers and our families and our students believe that we should be doing inside of those and those could also lead to measures in the fall. We'll also need to have a conversation with all of you as to what should next year's survey look like. Should it be as comprehensive as this? Should it be smaller and focus
170on key measures? Are there certain questions that you believe we should should we do the same thing every year so we can look longitudinally across every question? Or is there certain sets of questions that should be asked every year, every two years, every three years? Uh are there questions that shouldn't be asked at all um that could go by the wayside? These are all things that we need to determine as we determine the next year set. of questions that we're going to ask. We're still going to have CSCI because that's a statemandated requirement in the culture survey. The morale survey, it'll be up to the the board to decide upon the recommendation of that team that leads it of do we do that morale survey more often, less often? Um are we going to just
171ask the questions around ownership and input next year as we continue to work on that? These are all things that need to be determined and that's the work inside of and underneath this statement of work. Inside this statement, I see attendance obviously. Yep. But I also see holding students accountable and I also can see staff. No, you see increased accountability and consistences and consequences. That isn't just students. That's all of us. Okay. That's students, that's staff, that's administration. There's a lot of pieces in there. We know that like staff absenteeism is a lead indicator of student absenteeism. We know that we need to prop up some structures and infinite campus is going to h help us in that in taking student attendance, tracking student attendance, uh passes, student passes outside of the class period. There
172are there are things there at all levels that we need consistency and consequences and accountability around whether that be student behavior or staff behaviors that are connected to improving areas of attendance. So accountability consistent and consistency and uh qu and consequences also interventions and supports staff that aren't doing what's expected we need to help prop them up. You heard it through staff development like better understanding what those options are, how to use them appropriately, what are the best things to do, you know, what is the best way to create an engaging learning environment. You saw that in the student feedback uh that was up there. So there there's a lot inside of this that will get built out over the next six weeks and over the next year. Yeah. And what I was going to
173say is that and I also see a morale component of this as well. And and so I guess back to my question, what I was kind of trying to get at is um if we come back a year from now and we don't see a market improvement in our attendance, I don't think that that means it's necessarily a failure because there may be opportunities from these other things that we're we're we we survey our staff. We survey our families and our students and we see that that that marketked focus on accountability is is bringing up our morale of our staff there. There could be um supplemental or subordinate, you know, improvements along with that. So, I guess I would just say as as as your team is developing this and and assuming we we ultimately
174approve this and May 19th that this summer as you build it out, I'd like to see your team build out how what kind of goals you want to set for next year and how we're going to measure those and how we're going to define whether or not we were successful in implementing these as our primary statement of work. You will see some of that but the the change in this is the number one measurable is chronic absenteeism right that is the number one measurable that we expect to see move. You will see other data points underneath that. And what all of the research on high performing schools will tell us is if we move that one and the underlying attendance ones underneath it, the 11 other measures that the board has identified as metrics will
175all move in a positive direction. uh in Ryan's presentation on slide 89 when it talks about the the list of things that were uh listed out uh top student accountability consistent consequences and then the fourth uh attendance and commons management oversight all kind of encompass the same sort of u lack of accountability to to a certain extent. And on the next slide when it talks about uh addressing um attendance issues and unstructured time u when are the students what is that unstructured like time when are they lingering like and where are they usually in the conversations that I've had in drop in sessions this year and in talking with staff and in the other feedback that we see uh there's great concern about a student being in the building but not being in their assigned
176location. right that they're especially with the new uh spaces with uh access resource those kinds of time uh a lunch period uh we have great spaces that kids are drawn to right so how do we make sure that kids are where they're at that's part of what you'll see in that plan with Infinite Campus and uh our attendance software and procedures next year immediately changing and being able to be ramped up because the tools will allow us to do that Our current grade book doesn't allow us great ways to look at attendance, to gather attendance, for families to see attendance. All of those pieces are lacking in our current system. And our next next iteration with a new tool next year, as students come in the front door, they're going to scan in so we
177know that they've arrived in the building. Then from there, each space that they go into, we're that's why we're buying back Chromebooks from from kids. And then Phil and his team have put together scanners that'll be in every location throughout the building. So as a student goes into that space, they'll scan into that space. Then the bell will ring and we'll be able to do an audit period by period what kids are where they're supposed to be and what kids aren't. And then we know they're in the building. We know they haven't arrived in their right spot. It's super easy for our security team and our administrative team at that point to make a, you know, this is who we're looking for. You know, go go into the commons, go through the hallways, go looking
178go, let's go look uh for this group of students that we know are in the building, but we know they aren't where they're supposed to be right now. Or we might know where they are, right? They went they scanned in into the library, but they're supposed to be in class right now. Well, let's go to the library and get them back to class, right? So, uh we will have better tools next year to help us in this goal as well. It's it's interesting because um on the when it talks about um changes to the hybrid block schedule, that was only 5% of responses. And some of this unstructured time probably occurs during like that access period and then and other things. Uh when it was brought up initially, there was this idea that it was
179going to promote student executive functioning in this time so that they were going to be able to uh take responsibility and we trusted them enough to not have um in this unstructured time to be productive and do the things. Is there any fear that it's not working? That that there is some lack of executive functioning that hasn't been developed? I mean, granted, like, you know, we're talking about um attention spans that are that are rough, you know, with social media and other things. Is there any concern that there is too much unstructured time uh in their schedules among some? Absolutely. I also think that there is um different desires of what to do in that unstructured time. Like if you talk to a student about how they're using that unstructured time, I bet you many
180I'm sure I've talked to them, many students believe that that is exactly what they need it to be. But it's really frustrated frustrating to a teacher that's been working hard with the student on late work or missing work or you know things that they should be getting accomplished and they walk through the commons and see that student socializing or not engaged in their classroom work, right? That would be frustrating to me as a teacher as well. But then it's also coming to terms with students are making choices of how to use their time. That resource time used to be the late start time on Monday mornings. Students weren't at school during that time. Staff members never saw what students were doing during late start on Monday morning. So it wasn't a point of frustration. It
181wasn't a a perception that students should be using that time productively. It was just the late start time. Right? So the fact is they're in the building. They have the opportunity to make choices of how to use their time. They also have opportunities to take opportunity of the wealth of resources we have for them at that time where previously during the late starts they had no access they weren't allowed on campus right they had no access to anything. So there's the ideal desire that students are really absolutely productive in that area, especially students that are struggling and the reality that they might be struggling because they aren't totally using that time productively. And over time, as we grow and continue to grow in this schedule, we'll continue. We're already this year supporting kids a little
182bit differently, especially struggling kids in that space. And these are things that you continue to grow and evolve into. But um you know the goal at the beginning was just don't have them at home in their pajamas with their Lucky Charms during that block of time. Have them on campus and have access to us and their resources during that time. We've accomplish that first step. Now how do we continue to involve in there to help students make better choices? Um, you know, but at the same time, we're the adults deciding if that's a good choice or a bad choice. Like you heard tonight about all of our athletes that are super scheduled or kids in activities after school. If that 78 minutes once a week is their like downtime, then that's their choice to make
183during that time. It's about are they making an intentional choice during that time? Are we helping them make that choice? If it's a a student that uh has a rough time outside of school and they don't have a lot of safe spaces to be in and they don't have a lot of access to food and those resources and for that 78 minute they have a safe warm space where they can get food and socialize with their friends. Well, we have to respect for that kid that might be that right choice for 78 minutes. Me as a teacher that might be really frustrating because I'm really working hard to get that student to succeed. I think the greater frustration comes from kids that are supposed to be in a space and are choosing to go into
184that spot instead of that is where the greatest level of frustration I hear is from our our teachers is that they're able to some students at times are able to cut school in school and if we can eliminate that level of frustration that's like lowhanging fruit. If we can get that out, I think you'll see a lot of this take a jump. And then it's just, you know, just keep chipping away at those concerns that you see in there. Make sure the cons consequences are consistent, communication is consistent, that we help teachers understand what strategies they can use uh in the classroom to help reinforce that. These are all things you see in that that feedback that we need to build into our work plan uh as we go into the next school year. So,
185is that a big push for the ID scans with the classroom then? Mhm. Um, I know we had talked about it at the parent advisory meeting and I just had some questions around could that be a potential of cell phones back in the hand because we had talked about well how would they scan if they don't have their ID if they're not mandated to wear a lanyard where all of a sudden what we were hoping we could maybe get it out oh well we could have them scan their ID from their phone we're whether through the state or through our own internal plans, then there'll be a step once they get into the classroom to give teachers options for how they handle that device once it comes into their space. Right? And we're waiting to
186see what happens and I've shared that with the staff as well as to what happens at the state level with leg uh legislative changes in cell phone use and management in the classroom level. uh once we know what that is or that it's not going to be a thing, then we can determine what our next steps will be internally to help teachers respond to that. But I I imagine whether it's through our own work or the state uh laws that are being proposed, some kind of what they call secure storage in the in the legislative action would be an option for every teacher, right? that kids come in, they scan in with either their ID or their phone. And then if the teacher then chooses, we would provide every classroom a location for to dock
187that device or to put that device at home base or however whatever language you want to use. So that if a teacher then chooses to have that that we we allow that. We were on pace to announce that as the returning board members know like back in January we worked with the DGA to figure out what some options are that our teachers were looking for but then we kind of called time out while we waited for this to process through at the state level. We didn't want to roll out a plan that then or a solution that didn't align with whatever the state chooses and they have to back it up and move forward again. So, we kind of called a timeout and then we'll kind of see what comes of that work and then
188we'll have options for our teachers going into the next school year. So, that's another one though that you in clearly in the concerns there with cell phones, right, and options for that. So, we do have a plan to respond to that feedback as well. Any other questions? I know it's getting late. All right, it's a lot to take in. Like I said, as as questions come up, uh feel free to reach out to me. Uh as board members, uh you have my cell phone number, shoot me a text, tell me you want to talk. We're happy to talk through any of this with you and and dig in as deep as you want to go. Or if this is enough for you, that's that's fine, too. Um, but really it's setting this uh the statement
189of work at our next meeting to guide all of the work we'll do as a leadership team and uh all the planning we'll do heading into the next school year. All right. Thank you to everybody on my team for helping present. All right. Uh is the consolidated district plan. Gina, I don't have a survey, sorry, but I do have the consolidated district. And this is our seventh year. So, seven years ago, the state of Illinois um in accordance with uh grant requirements from the federal government started to require school districts to have a consolidated district plan. And what that plan does is it basically asks us a series of questions that we need to respond to around some key areas. It encompasses title one which is uh low income specifically addressing um student achievement and
190improving our programming. Only South is a title one school. Title two, which is funds that we receive from the federal government that flow through the Illinois State Board of Education for professional development for for teacher professional development, for staff professional development, mentoring, those kinds of things. Our title three grants, we have two of them, language um they're for EL learners, they're both around language acquisition. Our first one um is one that we receive every year which is our LE grant which is language instruction education program grant. There's another title three grant which we receive some years not every year. It's based on an increase in students um who are under three years in the country and new to our schools. And that's the immigrant education program grant and solid plan also encompasses title four which
191is my favorite grant of any of these um and one that we don't get a lot of funding u for but we are able to use for all kinds of academic enrichment and then IDA which is our special education grant which um Scott manages. So, the consolidated district plan focuses on all of the grants I mentioned. It asks a series of questions that focus on these themes. And while we've been doing this for seven years, this is our seventh um consolidated district plan that we will submit, it has changed a little bit over the years, but these main topics have remained pretty much the same. And the first one is student achievement and timely graduation. And a lot of this is not necessarily new. What is new or newer to the plan I put in
192red font. Please note, it doesn't mean that it's newer to district 99. It means that in the focus groups that we've looked at, the groups of parents we've talked to, teachers we've talked to, staff members we've talked to, new things came out and we decided to include those in the plan. In some cases, they may be brand new, but in some cases, they're not necessarily new, but they're new to the plan. So, that's why they're in red font. So, student achievement and timely graduation is a large part of this plan. And that that makes some sense, right? Especially since our rating, and you heard Jill talk about our rating being commendable. So, schools receive a summitive rating each year right around Halloween. 50% of that rating is based on graduation rates for high schools. And
193so it makes sense that that's a huge component in the plan. And we have to answer a series of questions that get to some of the bulleted points here. For example, you know, our coursework. What kind of courses do we offer? Do we offer different opportunities for students like AP and dual credit? And actually, this is not completely accurate. As of 12:50 PM today, we now have 18 dual credit courses because we just had one approved today. Um, but I will update that before the board meeting. Um, but dual credit, transition English and math, we have had transition math in our district for several years. And what that means is that students take a math class with us, fourthyear math class, and based on success in that class and our alliance would work with COOD
194as well as portability throughout the state, they metriculate into college bearing courses if they go on to COOD or another um community college in the state. TCD, EL supports, these are all parts of that timely graduation and student achievement. Another part of that section talks about how do we assess students? How do we determine if students are meeting the state's academic standards? What multiple measures do we use to identify at risk students, students who need additional support? And there are a plethora of different tests that we use internally, but some of the the big ones now are the ACT suite. So now we give preac. This was the first year obviously preac for ninth and tth graders, ACT for our juniors. We also use MAP, STAR, and I Ready scores that we receive either internally
195or for our sender districts. So, we can look at data um as students metriculate to north or south. Our EL students all take the access test. Matter of fact, in order to graduate or to exit out of EL services, you have to have a requisite score on the access test. And then in our reading classes, we also use various tests. We also look at grades, teacher input, and all kinds of factors as to how we're going to assess whether or not students are at risk and are in need of some sort of support. The plan also asks us to look at different interventions that are either pro programmatic or individualized to certain groups of students. And I did add just a few this time. Um, for the first year, and Ryan left, I believe, but
196a shout out to Ryan who oversees our summer school program. For the first year, we will be actually offering EL English courses for our students. And that is huge. And it's used for a couple of reasons. one, we see more and more students coming to us later in the school year. So, for example, a student comes in March, a student who who already is in an English language learner already has a lot to learn in terms of language proficiency, English proficiency, and to make up an entire year of English when they just come to us in March is next to impossible. And so we see oftentimes because as we look at this data, we deagregate it by different groups of students. For example, EL students, economically disadvantaged students, we look at it by race, gender,
197ethnicity, all kinds of different ways that we look at the data. A lot of times when our EL students are not graduating on time, it's because they cannot get their four credits of English in. And so for the first time this summer and we have seen enrollment significant enrollment um because we were a little unsure of how many students we would actually see enrolling in the courses. We'll be offering e um summer school classes. We also have looked at some other alternative learning programs and those are very individualized for students. One other thing that I added to the list and a lot of these have been on here for years as I said was teacher office hours. We never included that in the plan even though we've had teacher office hours for years. So that's
198an example of something that's new in the plan and how we're meeting student needs but not necessarily new to the district. Another section of the plan is about professional development. And you heard a lot about professional development tonight in terms of uh personalized professional learning. We also several years ago started rolling out EEL professional learning for all teachers and that's been a huge focus for us. Um but in more recent years we've seen more with restorative practices. So we had for example groups of um staff members going out to different conferences this year working on how to build restorative practices into um into our instruction and into the way and work we work with student behavior. In terms of IDEIDA, this is an area of the consolidated plan that Scott works primarily on. Um, but
199we need to talk about how we support students who have an IEP or students with a disability. And we do that in a variety of different ways. Youth and care is an area of the plan that has kind of morphed over time. Used to be called our foster care transportation plan and then it became a youth and care stability plan. and it still involves transportation, but it really is about making sure that school districts are meeting the needs of students who are uh considered youth and care or foster students. And we do that in a variety of different ways, including transportation, but oftentimes it is very dependent on that individualized student and what that individualized students need might be. Another section is about safe learning environment. And you also heard a little bit, I believe
200it was Ryan who mentioned our bystander training. We do a lot with anti-bullying and harassment programs um to ensure not just that our students feel safe, but that the environment is conducive to learning. We also have our PBIS programs positively north and must stay away. College and career readiness is another key area and certainly you heard a little bit about our four-year plan that is part of it. While not necessarily listed on the sheet, another thing to point out that you heard about earlier in the fall and we had various presentations on our movement from Navian to school links where students are able to see a lot more and do a lot more in the program to better prepare them um for college and careers. And then post-secary four-year planning is a specific part of
201the plan. This is an area I think that we have done uh incredibly well and continue to improve on as we move towards ensuring that we're not just preparing students for college but for whatever comes next for them whether that is could be community college whether that could be military whether that could be the world of work. Um and we're doing that in a variety of different ways. Couple things that um also in this area that come out is we've seen increases in our number of students earning like the seal of bi literacy which can allow students who demonstrate proficiency both in English and a foreign language the opportunity to earn credit if they go to an Illinois um college or university. Another part of the pro the plan, excuse me, is title one programming.
202And a lot of the programs that we support with title one, and remember I said only South is a title one school. Um, a lot of those programs we have supported for years. For example, we have a reading program which is a very intensive structured reading program called Read 180 for our lowest level readers. That is a program we've had in place for probably 15 years or so. So, a lot of the programs are longstanding. But one thing I'm really excited about for next year, and this is all dependent on federal funding and the amount of federal funding we receive, which we have not gotten notice of yet. Trust me, I check every day and checked a couple hours before this meeting. Um but uh we are hoping to hire another math specialist, but this
203time have that math specialist specifically working with science classes as well. Those classes that are more in science obviously, but more math intensive. Um we currently have two math specialists, one that for the most part is full-time with us in the fall was part-time math specialist, part-time AVID tutor, and part-time working um outside of district 99. this semester is working in AVID as a tutor and also as a math specialist. But we are hoping to bring on assuming that funding is similar to it to where it is today, where it was this year, hoping to bring on a third. Um the other one that we have working is very part-time in that area. And then the bilingual service plan, because remember I said this relates also to our two EL grants, our LIE language instruction
204education program grant and our title three immigrant education grant. um is the bilingual service plan and that is where we are ensuring that we are meeting all the state requirements in terms of meeting the needs of our e our English language learners as well as our bilingual students. We have a bilingual program in district 99 for our Spanishspeaking students. So students when whenever a school has more than 20 20 or more students of the same language, we are required by Illinois law to have a bilingual program where those students can take they can take Yale classes, sure, but they also have the opportunity to take bilingual classes where part of the instruction is in the language. So part in this case in Spanish. Um so that bilingual service plan includes professional development. We have to
205ensure that we are providing PD not only to EL teachers but to all teachers which we do through a variety of different ways and that we're incorporating different aspects of the program like our bilingual parent advisory which is required to meet four times a year we far exceed that and our BPAC has done quite well this year in terms of meeting the needs of um our families. So those are the very believe it or not very high level key points summarizing points of the consolidated district plan which we will bring back to the board at the meeting later this month for approval and then submit to the staff approved. Will we know the funding by the time we vote or that is a great question. Um so in meetings I had a few weeks ago
206with um basically the state they were at that point two to four weeks behind getting any notification from the federal government and that was a couple of weeks ago. So now we're probably looking at what four to six weeks at least behind from the when the state receives the allocation is when they determine how it's going to be dispersed to the districts. That is about a two week span. So once they get notice from the feds, give or take two weeks before we get notice in the individual districts. So it's it's hard. It it is challenging in some ways to write this plan this year not knowing it because typically at this point we would have a pretty good sense. Our first the first notice we get by the way is always an estimate and
207it's typically lower than what we actually end up with. Not by it's not a huge difference. Um but we do not even have an estimate at this point. So we vote and if you don't get enough then you come back and we decide what we prioritize or it depends or we find other Yeah. We have to turn in we have to turn in the consolidation plan before we can even spend any grant money even if it's awarded even when I submit the grants and even if they're approved. So, we have to move forward with with the consolidated district plan. As uh Jiren knows and Hank knows, I've got about four different ideas. You know, like a plan A is we get the grants like we do right now and we do this and plan B
208as well. If we have to sacrifice something, we might sacrifice this or that or find a different funding source for it. Um we have a little bit of flexibility in terms of like Title 4 and how we use some of that. So we might be able to co-und. We call it braiding or blending when you take different grants to fund things. So we've been talking about different ways, but some of these things in my opinion we will have to locally fund. We have students for example registered next year for read 180. That is a program that is funded not just through title one but is also locally funded. We fund parts of it through local dollars. If we do not receive title one funding or do not receive a significant amount, unfortunately I will be
209knocking on Jury's door begging to figure out how we're going to fund the remainder of that. So I know that's not a great answer, but at this point that's where we stand. I'm hopeful. I'm anticipating that we will get the same or a very similar amount as we have in past years, but at this time I do not know. What is what does title one funding represent as a total percentage of our revenues roughly? I don't All federal funds 2%. All federal. All federal. And is title one 50% of that? Oh. 400,000. 400,000. Okay. Probably the largest of those grants, I believe, would be Scots IDA. And IDA is a subset of Title One or No, it's it's separate education. And how much is that a percentage of our total budget jury? IDA. Oh, IDA
210would probably be about 1%. 1%. So half of all federal fun. So like $10 million is what you're telling me, maybe more. We get about 2 2% of all of our funding is from federal 6% is roughly state and the rest is the new property taxes and then some local money. So but of the 2% 1%'s roughly IDA. Yeah, about half a little over federal funding is it's a little over. Oh, yeah. You're right. You're you're right. I don't I don't know why I said 10 million. Sorry. Sorry. It's late. It is. Some of these You've sat through two board meetings so far. Some of these grants are really small amounts like Title 4, my favorite grant. I mean, I think this year we had maybe 36,000 38,000 um title three IEP grant, immigrant ad,
211I shouldn't say IP because that gets confusing. Um I think we're at about 10,700 maybe 30,000 for LIP. So they're they're not huge grants in light of the entire budget, but they are targeted for certain populations. In the meetings that I was in in Springfield last week, um these funds have already been allocated federally. They just haven't been dispersed. The belief, you know, and this is just reading tea leaves, right? Is because the funds have already been allocated and planned for distribution that they're coming this year. There's greater concerns about next year. So, we'll see. We'll see on both fronts, but that's that's where the greater concern is is a year from now and not so so much now. Okay. I just want to really quickly say that I think it's super great that you're
212hiring another math specialist. I think sometimes they can be a little bit undervalued how much they help, but it's super beneficial. The one at South is super awesome and sometimes they can actually teach the math better than the actual teacher. So, it's just great. Thank you for sharing that. Math specialist. That is something near and dear to my heart. So, I really appreciate you saying that. Can I just ask something real quick? As a newbie, um I've heard the acronym AVID twice tonight. What is AVID? AVID is a college readiness program or students who fall kind of in that middle band of test scores that um are willing to put in the work, that are determined um to really take the highest level courses. So when you're in the AVID program and we have it
213for all four years. So we have freshman class, sophomore, junior and senior at both campuses. Um the expectation is that those students are going to take accelerated classes. These are students who maybe without AVID might not take those accelerated classes, but there's support built into the program for that. And so for example, I mentioned like our math specialist is also an AVID tutor. Tutorials are done two days a week. They are studentled tutorials and they really are um in my opinion the heart of the program. So it's really about students taking ownership for their learning, accelerating their learning and being prepared for to go on to a four-year college experience. That's great. Any other questions, comments? This will come back next month uh as a report in advance of the board taking action on it.
214So, if there's anything else as you dig into the report, you have other things that you'd like Gina to comment on at the next point, uh feel free to reach out to me and Gina and I will make sure that that shows up uh before you are asked to take action uh in two weeks. Thank you. Thanks, Jenna. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, J. Uh, all right. Uh, the next one is great news and, uh, relatively quick. Um, so, energy conservation update. Uh, Travis is at a conference and is unable to be here to present this to you, so I get the joy of doing it. And this is some great news. Uh, uh, energy conservation has been a long-term goal of this board for as long as I have been here. Uh Travis has
215really dug into this and you can see the list of projects that he's looking at here for the next school year. Total costs of the these projects about $1.4 million in costs. Uh some really cool stuff on there including getting electric vehicles and driver's ed. Though anybody who's driven an electric vehicle knows that it's a little different than uh a regular combustion engine to drive. So we want our students to have both experiences. Um we have in our budget right now uh between our fund 90 that was remember our leftover life safety funds. Uh previous board members will remember that uh some commed rebates for the solar improvements and lighting improvements. And then we had budgeted $60,000 for some new driver's ed vehicles. That's, you know, 742,000 that we already had set aside or that
216we have coming through other locations. And then Travis worked really hard with some of our state uh legislators and state representative and stava Murray has secured half a million dollars for the solar projects and Senator Rachel Ventura has submitted for an additional $300,000 for the LED stadium lighting and electric vehicle charger installation. Uh both of these are part of the state budget or expected to be allocated, but you know, you have to work through Springfield, right? But uh so when you take in those additional fundings that Travis has secured by writing these grants and proposals, you're zeroed out in the cost of this for next year. So incredible, excellent work from Travis to get uh these projects secured and funded. So, putting it all together, this is all that you're getting. And then these projects
217also secure additional uh incentives and rebates both at the state and from the the power company. Uh those add up to at least the our lowest conservative number over that next five years, a total of about a little over $600,000. Dur also says that there is potential for depending on what happens with the federal government, additional federal incentives and rebates that could go along with that that could be substantial. So, uh, Travis not only is paying for these projects, but has created projects that also pay us back. Um, that doesn't even include savings in just electrical costs. So, uh, this is the first presentation tonight. This also comes back, uh, in a couple of weeks for approval, uh, from the board. Uh, any questions? Is that one charging station per campus? Uh, that'll be Is
218that what it is? Yeah. and primarily to be used by the instructional vehicles by the instructional vehicles only to go with what we're looking that we're looking at those chargers can only limited restricted to only that vehicle no other all right teachers can't no community or anybody else yeah or board members who come to nope off the list. Okay. All right. Uh at this point, I'm going to invite our students. Uh the next part is just for the board because it's the introduction into the board software. There's no reason for you guys to continue sticking around. Thanks for hanging in for a long evening, but I'm sure uh you guys have some work to do probably still tonight. So, uh thank you Jason Raha for your time this evening. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thank you.
219Have a good night. You too. You too. All right. Uh the last item is the new board uh packet software. We're moving from board docs to diligent. Julie has put in a ton of work on this uh in the past year sitting through many webinars and getting caught up to speed. Actually tonight's board meetings too that as you've seen are not actually short. She built in both products uh over the last week. So, she pretty much prepared for four board meetings uh this week. Uh so, she's been very busy. Um but she wanted to show you some of the features. Then we'll go into closed, but we'll come out, adjourn, and then uh we'll stick around just to make sure you can all get logged in. Okay. So, uh J. Okay. Um this is what
220the landing page is going to look like um for the public. So when you click on the link that is in the district website, there's a link in the district website on one of the board meet the board meeting page for board meeting agendas. Hit the wrong button. That's what you that's what you'll see. And then the top right corner, it's very tiny, but you can see the word sign in. So, if you go in directly from the district website, you can sign in with your ID, which you're going to set up tonight and get into the board docs for or excuse me, I keep saying board docs, diligent community for the board members. And on your Chromebook when you open it up, there's going to be actually uh in the bookmarks, there'll be a
221bookmark for diligence. So, when you go come to board meetings, you can get into it very quickly. Okay. Next. Okay. When you first open the new software, it's going to look like this. You're going to click on where it says boards and government governance, excuse me. And then it says community, that's where you're going to click. When you click there, this is what you're going to see. All the meetings that are upcoming. There's also a previous meetings tab. So, you can also look at previous meetings. If you look on there, the May 19th meeting shows up. that is not accessible to the public yet, but at some point I make them access to accessible to the members of the group and so you can see the May 19th board meeting kind of being built and
222see what things are in it or not. You don't have to but just if you open it up and go what is this? It's not out there in the public's eye but you can kind of see it coming up and being built. Um that's next one please. Okay. So when you open when you clicked on a meeting. So this is if we clicked on tonight's meeting um where you see on the right hand side where it says briefing notes. Those are all notes that only board members can see. And you notice there's a little tiny padlock. I don't know it's kind of hard to see but there's a little tiny padlock. Anything that has a little tiny padlock that means that only Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Get the point. That only board members
223can see it. If there's a padlock on it, only board members can see it. So, if you look at the agenda outline on the left, that's pretty much what the public is seeing. But on the right, you can see where there's different notes that we may have shared, Dr. Cely may have shared regarding the different agenda items on the meeting. Um, any of the blue where it means there's a link, you can click on either link. So, if you would go to like the um we'll do that one second. Dr. Dr. and I are the only people in addition to the board that can actually see those notes FYI because we put them in there. Just um and then for like next month or excuse me for the May 19th meeting you'll have to approve
224the minutes from the two meetings this evening. So the minutes the draft minutes will be in that little box with the links. You can look at those minutes and review them prior to voting on approval of them. But if you click on um next slide, I'm sorry, go to the next slide, please. If you like there's your oath of office. If you had clicked on oath of office, it would open up right there, but you'd still be able to see the flow of the agenda. So, you wouldn't it wouldn't take over the whole screen. You'd still be able to see what's going on. Okay. If you go to the next one, please. Okay. Um up in the upper right, Jeff, if you want to point up in the upper right, those A's. See those A's?
225Thank you. The A with the white background is highlighting. So I kind of highlighted pledge of allegiance just for fun. So you personally can kind of personalize your agenda copy. Um there has the A with the underline is you can underline. It shows oath of office is underlined and then you can freehand. As you can tell I do really really bad freehand. I drew a circle around election of officers. Um, but you can kind of make your own notes if there's something you want to ask a question about or whatever. Gives you the ability to do that. Now, if you take a look and we're go next, but on the left hand side of the screen, Scott, point to those right next to those those icons. Now, we're going to go talk about what those
226are. Um, if you see the house, it takes you back to that very first screen, the list of board meetings. So, if you get lost or whatever, the next one is goals. District 99 is not using that icon because information on district strategic plan and goals can be found on the district's website. That cute little one that looks like a picture, that takes you to the district's landing page, the one we saw with the pictures and the kids and all that happy stuff. Um, the library, the district 99 is not using this feature because we put all our documents right into the agendas to make it easier to find. And then the scales, this icon takes you to board policies. Um, this we're adding soon. Um, and policies will be keyword searchable, which is pretty
227darn nifty because right now you just kind of have to read every single policy to find what you wanted. So, that's the quick down and dirty. Welcome to Diligent Community. All right. So, we'll get you signed in tonight. If you have questions, you could reach out to Julie or me directly. Reach out to Julie. But yeah, but because I'll just have to ask her if you ask me. She's the expert. And uh I think you're going to like some of those tools and the formatting that's in there, especially returning board members. It it's much easier to use. It's very crisp and clean. And on the landing page, some of the things like if you notice in like the current agenda where we have that information at the top, like the board protocols can be found
228here if you want to access this live via YouTube and all those things. All those things are just on the front public facing page. So it's not appearing on the top of every single agenda and has all that I don't want to say clutter but now we can just have that universally stated on the landing page for the software about board meetings. All right. Are we moving to this like effective immediately? Yes. Yes. May 19th we will be on this um it is brought to you by the people who brought you board docs and we're basically kind of required to transition. They're phasing out board docs. So it seemed like when the new board was being seated, it seemed like a good time to just move everyone in that direction at the same time. So
229you're getting your own copy to make notes on and to document, but is it alive? So as edits might be made those you're not editing not actual agenda but at your scribbles but if you're if if there were edits to be made on your end we in a sense we can't edit it because the board agenda has to go public within a certain number of hours stay as it is. So, anything the board is taking action on, we cannot edit once it's officially published because the community or constituents need to know what we're going to be taking action on, what the board's going to be discussing. Another discussion item could be brought up that we're going to take no action on something if it wasn't published in advance. Okay? So, no surprises. And I'll message
230you and tell you when the document has been finalized. So, you can Yeah. After that point, you can do whatever you want to. All right. Thank you, Julie, for all your work on this. and uh look forward to using it here. All right. Item nine. Um Julie, do we have any uh visitors? No, sir. We do not have any reception visitors. And item number 10, uh, can I get a motion from the board of education to go into close session for a, the appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or dismissal of specific employees, specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in a park, recreational, or educational setting, or specific volunteers of the public body or legal counsel for the public body, including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee, a specific individual who serves
231as as an independent contractor in a park, recreational, or educational setting or a volunteer of the public body or against legal counsel for the public body to determine its validity. However, a meeting to consider an increase in compensation to a specific employee of a public body that is subject to the local government wage increase transparency act may not be closed and shall be open to the public and posted and held in accordance with this act. and B, collective negotiating matters between the public body and its employees or their representatives or deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees. So moved. So good. Chris moves 10 seconds. Chris Espinosa. I end. Don Rener. Hi. Mike Risky. I casten I Courtney I. All right. Um motion uh passes. We are in close session just
232for the members of the public. The only action the board will be taking when it comes out of close session is to adjourn. Let's uh let's break for just a brief moment and we'll be back in close session. Finish up.