2022-03-21 CSD99 School Board Meeting - LIVE EVENT

001stand for the pledge 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 and struggle okay our first order of business tonight is seeking approval of the minutes for the february 28 2022 business meeting and the march 7th 2022 workshop meeting chris and terry thank you christopher mike davenport aye jerome ford aye jenny heggstrom aye and nancy kupka aye the minutes are approved next we move on to the first reception of visitors public comment this meeting agenda includes two opportunities for comments from the audience this first reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board about any agenda item on which the board will vote the second reception of visitors is

002intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydiak visitors addressing the board need to submit a comment slip to the board secretary and will be invited to the microphone prior to addressing the board audience members should state their full name the proceedings are being tape recorded and live streamed for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and informing the public and i reserve the right to modify these protocols as circumstances warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated i i don't believe we received any slips for the first reception of visitors okay

003moving on return to inpatient in-person learning getting there all right uh as the board can see our numbers have continued to be low uh since the omicron surge returned uh since we've made our changes in uh protocols we haven't seen any uh drastic uptick or or change so that's the end of my report any questions that's good all right at this point we're going to turn it over for a strategic plan update i'm going to bring jill hi everybody how's everybody doing good good good um i'm happy to introduce to you and you've already met her virtually but this is susan bratt she's from cso communications and she conducted interviews with you for the strategic plan and she's here today from minneapolis traveling she's been with cso for two years since 2020 i think yes

004thank you 2020 and previously she worked in school communications for 20 years so she's familiar with my job and has been facilitating all the engagement sessions and has been doing a great job and i'm so happy that members of the group are here today um our core planning team so you're going to hear from them a little bit but um susan is first going to give an overview of where we are today that's great oh sorry the magic usually hank does so okay he really pushed control i'm surprised okay thank you so um thank you so much for having us uh madam president superintendent the alien board um we are happy to be here with the corps planning team and again i'm just going to be here to talk a little bit about process and

005then we're going to turn it over to members of the core planning team because that's really members of your community and they should be the ones speaking about some strategic directions that they have come up with so a lot of what we're going to go through i'll go through really kind of quickly but first we want to talk a little bit about the different elements that we do when we do strategic planning and so um hank had a really kind of nice analogy recently about talking about you know the strategic directions and the mission and vision and value so we have a mission vision values that we're also working on updating that's kind of a parallel process involving different members of leadership and some of the members of the core planning team actually we met

006today again so again for first time sorry i forget which times are me again but um so those are really those big public-facing kinds of pieces and elements that we want to make sure that really speak to who district 99 is and then the strategic directions are the core work that the court planning team has been working on taking all of that input from last fall and really kind of creating some directions based on the community representation and bringing it to you the board and you will be voting on it later this spring um and that's the direction that then you give to the superintendent and the leadership who then kind of underneath in the iceberg we have you know all of those action plans and tasks and timelines and things like that but that's

007where the meat of that really kind of sits but it doesn't necessarily everybody always sees it so that's the how that it gets done so just a little bit of what we're working through there this is the strategic planning timeline so you can see we started last fall with uh engagements we like i said we are as jill already mentioned i had the opportunity to interview each of you in by phone i think or some on zoom and then i had an interview with the superintendent as well we did some then i was here in november we did some in-person engagements and we had some wonderful input especially from students at the high school both high schools we met during lunch and had lots and lots of paper on the wall so it was it

008was really wonderful to get that i know jill's already talked to you a lot about that we also did some focus groups and some different open forum sessions and then in uh february we were going to do it in january but covid kind of reared its head a little bit so we pushed it to february we had a two day retreat with the core planning team where we really dug in and we'll talk a little bit about that process there but we really went through a number of different pieces then we came back just a couple of weeks the tenth like not even two weeks ago we were back to meet again to sort of refine some of those strategic directions and then so that's kind of where we're at right now just looking ahead

009uh we'll be doing some more we did some community input already we'll be getting some more information about um strategic directions from you all tonight taking any notes from that and jill and i and we'll kind of take that back and reformat it and then hopefully you will be voting on that later this spring when the full thing comes together so engagement we'll go through this really quickly because i think jill has already presented this to you but again we did personal interviews focus groups and open sessions we had great input from all of those groups just again those are some of the key themes that you already saw in the engagement report but a lot of a lot of overlap with a lot of them talking about social emotional learning talking about life skills

010talking about student voice really being in mental health really being things that came up a lot and that certainly came up in our discussions uh with the core planning team so as we think about that again you you saw already that we had a number of community applicants there was an open call and we really tried to make sure that we had good representation and so uh originally had 12 i think we went down to 11 because one meeting one person wasn't able to make the switch from the january to the february sessions and so we were able to meet and i think everybody and i think one of the most powerful things uh in our two day workshop in february which both days were supposed to be in person the second day ended up

011being virtual because of supposed snowstorm that never really came but it came later in the day yes but we met over zoom and it was still a good workshop and uh one of the things we started off with was you know just really what did you think about day one and to hear people say that they felt heard in particular our students said that they felt heard which i think is a really powerful statement so so what did we do on those first couple days those first couple days we did an environmental scan uh really uh just sort of saying what's what's our current reality what what are we hoping for what are the trends that are happening in education kind of just looking at a bunch of different stuff there we looked at the

012practical vision sort of what do we want to see happen in three to five years we looked at maybe what's getting in the way and then we came up with some strategic directions all around that that main district that question about how can district 99 best leverage internal and external resources to better prepare students for college career and life so and this is all information that you can see later but in the environmental scan we really looked at what are the basic facts and data so anything from demographics to situational uh circumstances about that are specific to district 99 what are some of the recent accomplishments and what are some of those challenges we need to be addressing obviously pandemic being a very large one some trends looking at that and then also some advantages

013so what are some of the benefits and strengths that really give confidence to the future of district 99 the practical vision was a fun kind of exercise i think to really get people dreaming about what do we want to see i mean we even started with a visualization to kind of say what does it look and feel like in five years you know what do you see what do you hear and so we really they ended up in three big buckets kind of focusing on the beyond the walls of district 99 so what does that mean outside of the school day beyond academics and then obviously active and engaged learning so those were coming the big areas that we wanted to keep in mind as we work through some of the other processes the blacks

014is a challenging one not to be to use that word i guess it's kind of strange to use that word but it was uh that they were kind of like so now that we know what our vision is what are some of those things that might prevent us from getting there what are some of the things that are getting in the way and the reason we do that let's address what's getting in the way right away so that we don't come up with directions and then find out that we might have some blocks or barriers or challenges so we we worked through some of those and so some of the blocks that came up um was some things about liability and just knowing that we have this responsibility in a school district to to make

015sure that we're doing right by the students and families and staff um kind of capacity and balance and that really was significant obviously over the last couple of years of the pandemic and how how our staff relating to that how our families relating how are students relating to that the readiness for change knowing that any sort of strategic planning effort is about change and so getting that readiness for it even though there are some great things happening here what could we maybe enhance or improve upon and then really thinking about that emotional intelligence and and attitudes and just sort of mental state and then what other kind of external pressures might there be so we went through we won't spend a lot of time but this is the draft directions that went out to the

016community and these were very very draft they were never meant to be final uh but just was sort of a here's our first guess at what we can do so what are those innovative substantial actions that'll move us toward vision and so we did that with the community as well that's fine we worked that we got feedback from the community we got feedback from the leadership team and anybody could participate in that so i'm going to move to the more fun part um and have you stop listening to me and listen to members of art and i only know i can only remember their first name so i apologize i'm going to ask them to introduce themselves as well we do have somebody the three in the front are going to be presenting today actually

017and one back there and then cara is also here from from the core planning team as well so i know others wanted to be here but scheduling just didn't allow it so we're going to start with i believe it is meda is it not i think mayna is up first oh i'm sorry i will go through this uh so here are the strategic directions my bad um so in order to focus the district's efforts and better prepare students for college career and life and again we want to remember that these are draft we want to get some more feedback from you but we really are thinking about what will district 99 ensure and that was a word that really came across strongly from the superintendent and others about it's not just enough to create the

018conditions and hope that it gets there it's like what are we doing as a district to make sure that these things happen so we were talking about a equitable and supportive environment we're talking about recruitment retention support of high quality teachers i can't read that over there so i'm going to read it here we have growth of student ownership and agency and then also increased student engagement in post-secondary planning so now i will welcome maida i believe is our first representative so if you just want to introduce yourself hi i'm mera kuzminskas i'm a student at dgs and i'm obviously a part of the core planning team um one of the things that we did discuss is like as seen on the board an equitable and supportive environment i feel like as a student especially

019i really want to kind of i don't know stress the fact that i want to be in a school environment that i think is not only safe but supportive for me not just academically but also socially and just between like relationships between teachers and just how i can get the most out of my academic experience in school and so like one of the main points is like ensuring safe and sustainable opportunities that's just kind of like um kind of like a broad like subject i guess but like one of this like safe and sub safe and sustainable opportunities for all students is the fact that i get to be able to kind of really orientate my learning into my like future and career goals and i think that also other students should be able to

020do this individually as well and so it's just talking about how each of us should have as many opportunities as we can to really kind of further not only our education but our job experience and under the second bullet point it's developing and communicating common expectations for students and staff one of the main things that like us and the core planning team have really fought over is just kind of what is the student expectation and what is the student supposed to do to kind of reach that expectation and so a lot of the talking was just about how um there's this like really broad gap between students who don't really do their work at all and don't go to classes and students who feel like they're being really overworked and so we're trying to kind

021of bridge the gap between the two and try to talk about how we can kind of let all students be able to kind of manage their expectations and have teachers and the school itself be able to give students these good expectations and expectations that can kind of fit to everyone individually and then building a community is kind of what it is we want a greater community among students and students and between students and teachers and staff too i feel like as a student right now there is pretty like a pretty nice community between students and each other but i feel like we can really work better on creating a better community between teachers and students if there is one like that's good already but i think furthering improving the community will help really kind of

022build the strength of the school in general embedding social and emotional learning and equitable inclusive practices this just kind of includes how we can start really teaching kids outside of the classroom and outside of just doing lots of projects or essays i think we can really kind of broaden the horizon of how we've been able to teach students into something that's a lot more kind of communicative and a lot more like orientated towards individual students and less as this kind of grade based system and then prioritize prioritizing open two-way communication again it's kind of reiterated in like the previous bullet points this is the fact that we really want teachers and staff that actually care and are empathetic towards students and this like two-way communication is really important just kind of opening communication between students

023and staff will really kind of further improve the students learning experience as well thank you and i think just to emphasize a little bit more yes [Applause] [Music] a lot of the the original work under this umbrella we kind of merged it with another one and so we wanted to make sure also that this is both an equitable supportive environment yes you know obviously first and foremost for our students but also for staff and so how are staff able to have communication with each other with administration and so it really is going throughout the organization and not role dependent so while there's a lot of conversation about students in here obviously because we are a school district and that is our mission um see i'm already saying hour we i'm just gonna move here but

024it is also you know we want to make sure that all members of the organization feel that supported and equitable access and then i also want to make sure because i know this was a big point for meda and a couple of the other students and it's just that access to students and so to access to opportunities and programs so there's different things that you know i don't have access because of transportation or because of this or that and wanting to make sure that there is that equitable access for all students to to participate so thank you can i ask you a question yes it was a great presentation thank you thanks she's just talking i know but but you said something about um and i'm putting spot here i apologize but um you said

025something about you know uh having supports to when you when because you know what you think you want to do and you want some some choices about getting there and i i know i know i'm just asking this question so you know off the top of your head what kind of supports do you think for for people for a lot of younger people who don't know what they want to do i mean certainly some people are self-directed they say i'm going to do this i'm going to do that but i would think most people are like i'm not really sure so what kind of supports do you think would would be most effective in that way yeah i'm one of those people that have no idea what they're going to do so i'm a lot

026older than you i still don't know either yeah i think one of the like main things is just having like a lot of more options available and like i think in my school currently there's lots of presentations for like different colleges and we do have a college and career center specifically but you have to actively like ask for meetings or you know you have to always kind of check the agenda to make sure to see if they have any other like open nights for colleges and i feel like i want something more broad than just going to college or going straight to a job i kind of want to have that like better like first-hand experience for any kind of like job opportunities that might have or like you know kind of having schooling that's

027outside of the traditional college experience i feel like there's not much kind of information or experience about colleges geared towards maybe the arts and even the arts maybe just like um having instead of going to college going to like any internships or like anything abroad i feel like i just want more kind of just like more talk or more information about things beyond college and things beyond just kind of that whole like college university or just like college job experience thank you so much thank you i was going to say i actually oh go ahead i was going to say i actually like what you're saying because when you talk about college and the cost and that kind of thing having that i think it's also almost being referred to as gap just to figure

028out what that next step would be before you invest kind of money and time and not completely certain of what it is that thing you want to do so yeah thanks for that do you think it would be helpful to have employers come yeah honestly i think maybe a little bit more about that i think it would uh i definitely want to know what it feels like to be working in the places or jobs that i think i want to go in and i think that extra like help from people who have experienced that might help and i think it's just important to kind of not only get people who have been in college and jobs but just get like kind of people from everywhere like people who want to actually share their information towards

029students i think would help and i know that certainly came out as somebody from the outside when we did the focus groups last fall and there was a focus group of a lot of business people and chamber and different people from the community and they were you know sad because they had done some of that before but then pandemic stops some of that so they're very people are very excited to see some of that coming back i think so yeah thank you and also just making sure that within the equitable and supportive environment was a lot of discussion about mental health and how do we support the mental health of students in particular but also the mental health and stress that's going on with our staff as well so next we'll have kim introduce yourself

030about growth of student affairs hi i'm kim vanzan um i'm the parent of a sophomore here at south and i also have a seventh grader over at o'neill so uh the goal i'm presenting or the strategic direction sorry that i'm presenting is the growth of student ownership and agency um and i'll let you have some ownership and agency and actually reading the bullet points [Laughter] and i'll just hit some of the high points that i i think that um some of the work the big word is uh growth that um we're not talking about um really even an end goal we're talking about a continuum and that growth is going to start where the student is and it's going to go in the direction the student goes right so it's it's that it kind of

031individualized um i also want to emphasize i think it's in there somewhere is this the one that has the culture of resiliency um the idea of being accountable and having that culture of resiliency is part of what will will help a student grow and really give them that ownership even the ownership of the successes as well as sort of the stumbles i think i want to also emphasize that these strategic directions are not all going in separate directions right this is really a web of directions and and this this direction supports other directions that you see there and those other directions will support this one one of those particularly i guess would be the mental health aspect that that we aren't expecting them to do this without our support that is the whole idea of

032helping them yeah um yeah and i think um you know and really thinking about that context and purpose of you know not just what am i learning but why am i learning it and i think that's a really important thing for all of us you know how do you apply what you're learning and you know as someone who majored in math it was like when am i ever going to use calculus or something but you know there are there are skills that you're learning and so understanding the why behind it um and i also not to put kim on the spot but this is one that challenged kim a little bit because while she is all about growth you know i would say she's all about growth she's also understanding that there's differences and we

033need to be age appropriate when we're talking about these things so what's what's age appropriate for ownership and agency of a 14 year old might be different than the 17-18 well and also just where the student is absolutely that every you know every 16 year old is not the same they're all coming from a different place they all need to grow they all deserve to grow but that may look different yeah so i think that was a key part of the discussions was that it is about growth and i love the way that kim said it just now about how you know where are they at and where they need to go and how do we help them do that so but every student getting that growth in agency so any questions for kim yeah

034so um was it the feeling of the group that we don't currently have a culture of resiliency no i i don't believe that that is something that we really stumbled with in in the meetings was trying to say we aren't saying this doesn't exist here what we're saying is that it may exist maybe as a byproduct of something else we really want to make it a direction we're going we want it to be a goal something that's in our view that we're intentionally making that happen not just oh and by the way making it part of the culture absolutely right i like that anything else next we have mary to talk about increased student engagement in post-secondary planning hello my name is mary martin and i'm a parent of a student who's currently at downers

035grove south but i'm i've also been in in this district uh for almost a decade because i've got older kids who've come through so this is something very near and dear to my heart which is trying to support the student and the parents or family and the community in increasing the engagement of the post-secondary planning so the group that everyone i mean it even dovetails with uh with what you were saying one of the very important things that have been laid bare by the pandemic is that uh college enrollments are going down costs are going up and there's something called a silver tsunami of retirements and there's actually quite a bit of need in the community intense recruitment for students both for colleges because the overall enrollment is down and also to they're going to

036be the you know people are needing uh college graduates or at least people who can take over from this tsunami of retirees who and this was already um happening before the pandemic it's accelerated through the pandemic so um this particular so so how we addressed it was three-pronged we want to support the students to see beyond you know that graduation day and also get them engaged actively already there's many things that have already been put in place recently like i think starting next year the students have to do the fafsa in order to graduate so that's the sort of thing that okay here's something extremely practical yeah everyone should do it so that sort of thing also engage and support the roles the role of the parents families maybe even siblings older siblings in in

037that post-secondary planning yes and and then of course extremely importantly increase student awareness of and exposure to a variety of options for after high school not just college as we know many different opportunities and the people out there the businesses out there are just clamoring for this sort of support because they're looking at already needing well they're looking ahead and seeing that there might not be the qualified people to take over in the midst of this silver tsunami of retirement so um now there's we did discuss a little bit about you know possibility of you know where do we how do we how do we go about that well you know collaborations with schools who are already participating in programs and of course prior to the pandemic there were quite a few things offered in

038district 99 dual enrollment classes in other high schools in nursing web design skilled trades co-ops technical apprenticeships so lots of lots of possibilities um and i think yeah so and then of course most importantly this this strategic direction is is being driven by the need in the community and also by the students because not every if if we only say there's you know here there's college you know some some students just are not willing to embark down that road of student loans and all the rest of it and there are employers out there who are desperate to hire qualified workers so basically this is very much i think what we thought was what you know directing driven basically driven by the students i think one of the the key things that a couple of things

039when we first started talking about this in february i have a memory of one of the students on the on the team she's not here tonight but she was talking about um some research that she had done in one of her classes that they had studied through uh you know just looking at state data about those who go to college but who actually complete college and you know the fact that she was bringing this in and saying what are we doing and how are we preparing students for that i think was a really sort of it sparked a conversation in the group for quite a bit and then also that second bullet about engaging and supporting the role of families in post-secondary planning understanding that not all families have experience with this so you know

040how do we help some of those families who this is new to them as well so how do we support our families with that so i have a question so i i get the silver tsunami and i get why a lot of people probably did look at what was going on and say i'm going to exit the workforce but i am curious i didn't realize that college enrollment was down as a result of you know did they have any statistics on what's happening there i mean there are some things i could think of like the expense of course but are there any things that they talked about why other than expense and well it was already going down before yeah and one can only imagine the expense and um i mean it's also the return

041on that investment i mean i think that there's also people saying are there other ways things that do i need a four-year degree to do x y and z um and just looking differently at what's what life is like and knowing that you know many of us if we went to college um you know i was i was all bent on being an orthopedic surgeon and clearly that didn't work out so i've been to orthopedic surgeons but you know but so i mean just thinking about you know do you always know what you want to do when you're 18. and so trying to make sure that we're preparing students for it's okay to ask questions it's okay what are the skills that are going to help you be nimble and adaptive and to be able

042to navigate that i think part of this also is high schools have done a better job of informing students that there isn't one pathway and that there's multiple ways of going and impressing on students that okay for the rest of your life you're going to have to do two things to keep yourself gainfully employed work and learn right and those two things don't it don't always occur in in the order of learn than work you know and they can happen at the same time and it might be you know you work for a while and your employer then sends you back to learn right so there's a lot of different ways and you know armed forces play into that and gap years play into and there's all of these different pathways and i i know

043the board has seen us through attainable futures in a lot of different ways show students that there is no one way for any person to go everybody's path is unique and you're kind of seeing the work in high schools across the country talking about that for the last decade and you're also seeing a huge impact of the pandemic on that as well our tcd enrollment it's going up skyrocketing is growing up right yes as a reminder um how how many of our students go on to college as a percentage thereabouts i don't know i don't know i don't know that's the top of my head what it is 50 over under oh over 50. i'm trying to figure out if it's over 75 or not but the key mic is is how many completed i

044think it's also worth noting that this is kind of exciting you know it has sort of trickled down at these you know into high schools this this these decisions are happening for students when they're 16 17 you know their colleges are kind of encouraging you know direct admits to this school to that school what do you want to do you know do you want to go to business school do you want to go into engineering do you want to end so and i think we're offering definitely more sophisticated courses you know than them certainly when i was in high school and so you know they they're making these decisions earlier you know there was a time when you know you'd go to college and you'd be undecided yeah well we started planning and you know

045yeah right it's great right you're doing career interest surveys it's unique in that like the second that you get there you're already like i'm looking at the next step you know and so it's yeah it's definitely you know they're they're faced with much more sophisticated choices and these pressures the framework i guess to kind of navigate that i would offer that we have um you know pretty broad spectrum of classes that get offered i mean the opportunities for students to explore those interests are far more than when i was in school for sure so and i think the the key that we really came back to is just increasing that student engagement in it i mean yes we know that they're you know you can get emails every day about which colleges are here or

046you know come to this event or something but it's really just kind of getting a more intentional engagement i think even as mado was speaking before it's like how do we how do we develop some of those skills to know that i can go and seek that out so they all kind of work together i'm excited to see this this one frame framed this way too i mean this is something that's near and dear to me too i have three in college right now okay so i i definitely get it and i i did an awful lot of work helping my children plan and identify what to do and where to go and and how to navigate that whole process and i wish i wish all students had the benefit that my children had and

047you know i've tried to help some of my my my students friends with this but um it'd be great if the school could do more than what we're doing and i mentioned before we have more counselors than most schools i mean we we're we're already this is already something that we've been working on and and to see this as one of the four targets is great thank you i i wanted to just tell you cheryl that in my research which is very limited 15 to 20 percent less enrollment in in colleges so pretty dramatic and and hence you know the colleges are after you know pretty intensively recruiting i'm not a democrat any demographer how do you yeah that's the right word uh but i believe that there's a there's a there's some some sort

048of dip in the population too that's causing that that particular age group um this was something that was forecast to kind of happen um so i think that there's i think there's a number of factors that are playing into this i've heard that there are even fewer males going okay interesting college yeah [Applause] the fourth one but this is in no way we purposely did them i'm sorry michelle i purposely did them as a wheel because we didn't want it to be like one was more important than the other and so um and i think it's very important that we also pay attention to the recruitment retention support of high quality that's supposed to say staff not students that is my typo that is not jill's type oh yeah we're not looking to teach you

049to retain students after the four years high quality unless they're returning as teachers so that should say staff i apologize for the typo um but michelle we have one of our staff members here yes i'm michelle davis i'm an english teacher at downers grove south um i have some notes with me in case i forget um so i will try not to look at them and i will also not read the bullet points but um when we were talking about the strategic directions and we were talking about the equitable and supportive environment we kept coming back to teachers as a bullet point and as we got more community feedback and even as we continued talking it was very clear that this needed to be it's needed to stand on its own um and i think

050talking about things that were a problem before the pandemic that have only worsened after the pandemic teachers leaving the profession at an alarming rate so um not in district 99 but it's a fear that's there and it's also something that i'm constantly hearing from my colleagues and it's being talked about this feeling at just this this need for more support and what does that actually look like and how can we can we do that for teachers and staff and so i really want to highlight the bottom bullet point which is nurturing a culture of support and collaboration among all staff and looking at the comments from the community and talking to as many teachers as i possibly could between the different you know um meeting days that we had because i am just one voice

051it's very very clear that two things kept coming back over and over and that was time and voice and i think that time has really become so minimal for us that it's really hard to have a work-life balance and to to kind of add on to that that helps with this equitable and supportive environment for students because i also think we need support in providing a good school life balance for students so it's kind of everyone's feeling this where we don't have enough time to get everything that we need done where do we build in that time i know the new schedule is you know fluctuating time in certain ways how can we build in more time for teachers to collaborate and plan and even grade sometimes i'm grading on saturdays and sundays and not

052able to spend time with my own kids so it can be really difficult to maintain that work life balance without feeling like this guilt and not being there for your students because we also had extensive conversations about meeting the needs of the whole student and so also the bullet about um adapting staff roles i think a lot of things that we talked about were how can we streamline certain processes that both teachers and counselors are doing how can we just find one go-to person to do this so that we can cut back on some of that time that we're doing you know repetitive things and i think the most important thing is teacher voice so i want to say i appreciate even being a part of this strategic planning team because i felt like i

053did have a voice to speak on behalf of other teachers but we're the ones in the classroom day to day with these kids and we see things that sometimes people outside the classroom don't see and so being able to i apologize i'm pregnant i'm out of breath talking breathing really heavily i'm like so excited um but just being able to just let us tell you what we're seeing so that we can make the necessary changes because sometimes it's like but this keeps happening and nothing seems to be getting done about it but it's also how can something be done if we don't know what's happening so just being able to maybe just pull the teachers on what's the biggest issue that you're seeing right now because i do think that there is a balance between

054supporting the mental health of students and creating student ownership and that's something that's falling on the teachers a lot too where we're like we need support in how to do this because it's something that's really really increased this year and added more onto an already very time-consuming um career path so that's sort of kind of what we talked about sorry if i talked fast no no and i think that um and and michelle has has noted you know she said the district does a really good job of providing professional learning and coaching but it's just how do we continue that and how do we keep doing that in ways that are like what are the new needs that we need some help and support on so we wanted that professional learning piece in there not

055because it's not happening and again a lot of the stuff that is in the stuff a lot of the pieces that are in the strategic directions they're not necessarily new but they're like okay let's really focus and let's you know try to make a priority out of this or something so that we're trying to do that but i think that that was clear you know michelle's she wasn't saying that she wasn't getting any she just wants to make sure that the support is there with all the other stuff that's going on so yep well i was gonna say and i'm sure we'll discuss it too but gina was saying that one of the things we're trying to incorporate or get out of this hybrid block schedule is teaching certain things like on mass to the

056whole you know resume whether it's a resume workshop or some other you know executive functioning skills and maybe you know can't think of something that maybe only was covered in a social studies class you know might now you know be able to be taught to you know the school um in some of those larger study actions you're stealing my thunder for that schedule but yeah you know to try to take what michelle said is really important is that it all the staff knows that all of the students are getting this right so it isn't does the student have this skill or not it's we know all students have this set of skills or have at least been exposed to this set of skills and it isn't like in one corner of the building this is

057happening and then the same thing's happening somewhere else and then it's happening with the counselor we talk about getting time back that's one of the aspects of getting time back is just i know my students have these skills i don't have to reteach them i don't have to dedicate time to it and you hear from students like i did this in my english class and now i'm doing it again in this class and i like i i've done this so many times i wish my teacher just knew i knew how to do this and it's like well how are they going to know right we want it to be input put it into their brain so that they can let them know they have it so you know that that speaks to you know what

058we talked about last week or two weeks ago about this happening and i even think collaboration um we don't really have a lot of time to collaborate with other content areas and i think that's really important with the common experience we're doing a lot like we have the district policies but then it's content specific so i think it would benefit to be able to collaborate expectations on grading behavior um you know all of those things across content areas because what i'm finding is an imbalance in some of the priorities for students on because this class does accept late work and this one doesn't and so i also think that this collaboration among all staff is really important so that it's equitable across all classes and you know then i'm not scrambling trying to get students

059to complete late work because i accept labor um or that our department does so i think that was another thing too is just collaboration in that way and behavioral expectations as well cell phones things like that everyone's got their own policy and sometimes it's hard to be the person that's like put your phone away but so and so let's have it out you know things like that where it's like some of these things that can really steal a lot of time and become very distracting in the classroom that's something else that was talked about that i didn't mention and that's definitely what we tried to work that into the equitable and supportive environments like how do we have consistent expectations and how do we you know so that it's not you're not pitting teachers against

060each other and you're not pitting students and students don't have to prioritize well i have to do math because this one this teacher won't let me do that but i can put off doing my english homework or something so we want to make sure that students really have consistent expectations and staff feel supported in that questions for michelle thank you so as you can see they as they have said it better than i they really are a web of directions they're not you know distinct things that they're going to go off and so depending on any feedback that you might have or questions that you might have we are happy to entertain them otherwise uh you'll see this back in probably may did you decide i think yeah when we would bring back the mission

061and vision and values hopefully as well so and i just want to again thank the core planning team for giving up two and a half days of that time i was so proud to be part of it and just it was a very positive experience it was very energizing so thank you guys thank you absolutely very exciting i haven't done this in other districts the enthusiasm and the passion that you have in your community members is really exciting so it was it's been fun to to work with them all right that's great thank you thank you thank you thank you this would be hard to top that no now staffing gina is like don't give me the remote sorry we have a small cast change here i'm waiting for the costume change all yeah begin

062okay uh good evening everyone we're here to talk to you about the large package of the 2022-23 staffing and curriculum overview um just a reminder how all of this starts is that early in the calendar year students sign up for classes that they want to take next year that goes into the brilliant minds of georgia and ryan here and their teams and they throw that into spreadsheets and they figure out how to run all the classes most of those classes it shakes out pretty easily and we run those classes and then it comes down to some difficult decisions about some classes that have fewer students who signed up for it than what we anticipated and so we have to make decisions about are we going to run those classes are we not going to run

063those classes so when i'm finished giving you the overview gina will talk through those a little bit and then georgia and ryan will talk about some highlights from those classes that we are going to run after they're finished scott is going to talk through the special services staffing and then once all of that is done then it goes to jeff and then jeff looks at the staffing and what that means in terms of who's returning next year who's not returning next year so then you'll see on jeff's reports names specifically about teachers and those cases and then you'll see that also in consent agenda and then in the resolutions so a quick overview in my memo and the charts to you you can see that through that sectioning process we are down 4.1 fte uh

064most of that is due to a lower enrollment so there's fewer course requests so therefore there's fewer sections of classes to run but we did have some ads so we added a social worker at t99 that scott will talk about a little bit we did end up decreasing a 0.2 department share department share release is calculated based on the number of teachers who are teaching in that department so occasionally uh the sectioning process causes there to be uh fewer teachers in a department or more teachers in the department and that causes that calculation through their contract to add or take away some release time for them we released a 0.2 data at north which is a teacher fte that we use to run data reports with us that brings us in line north and south

065now have the same which is a 0.2 and that reflects our usage of those and the last thing is to remember we talked about the student success coordinator those were actually in last year's numbers because we added those but those are grant funded so the only difference how that plays into this year is we're using local funds so down 3.5 fte staff overall but there is an increase of 2.0 because now we're locally funding the student success coordinators so that's the general overview of our staffing i'm going to hand it to gina gina is going to talk through some of those difficult decisions that had to be made about courses so each year we come forward with courses that enrollment was less than 20. some of those courses we suggest canceling we want to move

066to cancel based primarily on enrollment and other courses we would like to run as you may note from the courses that were submitted we actually do have a decrease in the number of courses that we're recommending canceling which is a good sign nearly half and just a slight increase in courses that have an enrollment of less than 20 but we would like to run next year a lot of decisions are made based on not just the courses and the number of students but what opportunities those afford our students whether they're in a pathway whether they're programmatic or part of a program and those are really difficult decisions that ryan and georgia really work through to support our students so we see in on the one hand a decrease in the number that we are recommending

067for cancellation and a slight increase in those that we're recommending for approval all right so here we go uh so you know it's funny that the student was talking a lot about uh career opportunities in high school um and that's what we're kicking off with uh so um i wanted i think the student left but i wanna uh connect with her so we can talk to her about internship uh so internship is a course where students uh go they have a workplace um and they're working to check out a career i was fortunate enough able to go with larry baca one of our internship people to on-site and on the way there he was talking about a student who wanted to become a doctor and then went through internship realized i do not want to

068become a doctor and started um and i think he went into like videography slash where it meets up with uh like marketing um which he never would have known um before going into internship and you know saving the family like lots of career changes and all that kind of stuff um and the cost of that in college but i will i will find that student later um so we are running an additional section of intro to teaching itself um so um they're moving up from two sections or from one section of two sections that's a dual credit class and it's also a part of our educational pathway um at both north and south we're running an additional section of business incubator hopefully we'll see everyone at the pitch later this year and on top of

069that we're stacking accelerator that's the follow-up class to incubator and so in each of one of the sections accelerator will also run and we're excited at north our intro to culinary classes has increased 175 students that's not just a hundred and sixty-five that's on top of the 200 that we normally have in that class um and so um we are finding creative ways on having 16 sections of intro to culinary but you know the students are excited it's right outside the cafeteria the facility looks beautiful um and so kids are excited and again like i mentioned before internship we've increased a section at north i think we're wondering about the impact of the master facility [Laughter] we're also running environmental sustainability it's a new course that was approved this fall we're running on both campuses

070and so as we're looking at careers in cte we're also increasing our classes for careers in science and human body systems is running on both sides of town and the prerequisite for that course of principles of biomedical science is also very popular on both sides of town and at north we rebounded our ap physics c numbers last year during covet i think students were concerned about taking an overload in that environment so our numbers dropped in half last year and they've rebounded to where they were prior to the pandemic so we're excited about that in the area of english just a couple of things we are up in um ap language that course kind of michelle davis who was just speaking with you is one of the teachers of ap language um and ap lang

071and ap lit kind of ebb and flow a little bit and but next year ap lang is going back up it's always been really healthy on both sides of town we run for the senior english experience a lot of electives so the freshman sophomore juniors they pretty much take english one two three or the honors track with ap lang but then at the senior level they get a lot of choices and they get to pick two semesters for the most part um and so sometimes they pull off of each other and we have to cancel one or two but next year at north for the first time in a while we're actually running all of the senior english electives which is a really nice opportunity to be able to give to students another outgrowth probably

072of the master facility plan is that on both sides of town in the area of fine arts both jewelry and ceramics have jumped significantly for next year obviously all of those spaces are new and especially the jewelry area is is much more developed i guess i would say than it was before and so both of those programs are doing really well and at north actually they're needing to add some staff part of their addition is in the area of visual arts we had gone up a little bit in previous years and so ours is sustaining at the same rate but they're going up and then we will be running music theory for the first time ap in a while and that's one of the things that was on the under 20 list but i just

073was meeting with that teacher today so she's gearing up for her ap workshop and stuff to to get back into that so that's exciting and earlier uh support for students also came up and so just to highlight some things that we're doing to support students specifically for our language learners we are adding um an el math one for our language learners at north and with that outgrowth this will be the next year will be the first year that we're supporting all of our language learners in every graduation requirement at north um so we are excited about that um and then also in special services uh we've been working on making sure that as students grow and they're learning their skills that we appropriately decrease the supports that they're getting in class because that's our goal

074um not for them to become dependent on supports but to become more independent as they go through school um and so um through the work on both sides of town we've actually reduced the number of students who need supports in our self-contained class which will then shows a slight growth in our less restrictive environment in our co-taught sections so and then finally in world language at south we're up a section of french and french remains you know it stayed really healthy and going back several years pre-pandemic we had some different cuts in some of our languages at the middle school and junior high level so you always have to keep an eye on those languages especially other than spanish and so we're really excited that that's gone up we are running ap german next year

075on the under 20. that's one of the courses that i probably come every two or three years and that happens to be on the under 20 and then it'll jump back up a little bit we don't have feeder program at all anymore for germans so they all start with in the buildings so that means that it's a little bit harder to get those numbers up but because we obviously do not want to stop students from finishing that fourth year of the sequence because a lot of them use the four-year sequence to not pay for language courses in college we want to give them the chance to finish that sequence and then you'll probably some of you remember that a couple years ago we kind of got our heritage speaker class spanish class back up and

076running and next year we'll continue to be able to run both levels of that course on at south um it i think it's one of those courses that's going to ebb and flow at north it ran this year and probably the first year you always run a little bit more because all the grades can kind of funnel in and then once they have the chance to take it um then you have kind of a lull sometimes for a year but we're excited that that's continuing to do well all right that's all right um you've heard most of it already with the t-99 social worker um is a 1.0 and our student success coordinators but um the memo that i had kind of breaks down uh north has the 0.2 increase like ryan was mentioning both

077schools are working on moving students into more inclusive and mainstream environment south just due to enrollment the number went down 1.6 fte and then obviously the 299 increase for social work we've always had a little bit of social work support our student population has grown a lot in the last few years but we've never increased social work there so that's why we're you know asking for the 1.0 but overall in special services for we're down a 0.4 fte and then in c triple s is where we've put the student success coordinators both at north and south if you recall they were paid this year on the grant and we'll use local funds to cover them for this coming school year all right good evening everybody and i'll be chatting a little bit with you about

078the dismissals and uh renewals for next year uh the first part of the our example or um article i should say that i share with you has uh the honorable dismissals and that's eight teachers across the district this year those are all teachers in current part-time fte positions who we will not have equivalent fte for them next year but we do have uh intentions to bring them back uh at a different fte next year so that's why their honorable missiles are planning to return them next year next group is for just just dismissals those are teachers that are in situations where they took over later in the year typically for leaves of absences and so someone else is returning next year to take back over the position that they maybe had vacated so those individuals

079then we don't have a place for them for next year so i believe there's uh seriously four of those individuals for next year um then there's a very lengthy list of names broken down by year that follows that part of my uh report and that includes all these teachers in various years here of their non-tenure status who are being recommended for renewal and upon your approval of that i'll be visiting with those teachers later on to have them sign their contracts which i'm sure they will be very excited about that and then in addition to the articles there as well are the exhibits and the resolutions related to those actions so the copies of letters those staff members will receive as well as just some formal documents that you know make the process rounded out

080and official for everyone so thank you okay that's all of it what questions do you have well i have one question um okay about the curriculum um of course is recommended for cancellation we're getting rid of managerial accounting honors at north and we're adding managerial accounting non-honors at south is there any thought in the future if we have enough students who are interested where we would somehow like even if one side of one side of town remoted in for the class so that we could offer more yeah yeah i mean we we do talk about that especially i think more so now than we ever used to in the past now that we've done more things online and um it's just a little bit more complicated than it sounds we used to when i was

081world language chair you know i don't remember 15 16 years ago for several years that's how we would run french five and spanish five we had what we call the digital learning room in each building they had these giant tvs and kids would sit in there and the kids at the other school would be up on the screen and the teacher would be in one building and we would pony papers back and forth then you know because that's what we did literally it came in the pony and um but you still have to have an adult in there supervising the students who are in there there's like a lot of logistical pieces and um kids i think you know back then they it was something totally strange to them to do so getting kids to

082really buy in and get you know engage in it was sometimes difficult much more difficult and more difficult for the teachers i think we would be it might be something worth trying down the road i think this year anytime you mention anything virtual or online kids are like oh no no no but i think that's a really valid question and we talk every year about that option about traveling about you know different things like that the traveling's really hard because you have to have the transportation and you have to give up an extra period of your day but we gina and ryan and i regularly talk about those types of options and whether or not we should try to offer them for various things so i think it's it's a good question thank you thank

083you thank you thank you all right uh so over the course of this year when we you know we talk about you just heard about strategic planning and goal setting one of the things that we talked about in our administrative goal planning for this year was coming off of the pandemic and knowing that there was an increase of failures was responding to those but also continuing down our pathway of just trying to eliminate as many failures as possible not by lowering standards but by increasing support and georgia and ryan kind of were tasked with it not kind of we're tasked with this this year so i thought it'd be appropriate at this point as we're talking about both strategic planning and our staffing and everything else at this point of the year for them to

084share uh some of what we've done this year all right um so let let me begin on the behalf of both ryan and i by saying this we're here representing 400 people in the building that actually did the heavy lifting on this um so yes we are going to talk about what how we tried to lead some of the process but really is the department chairs and the classroom teachers that have really done the lion's share of the work to make this happen so we feel like you know the other 400 people are represented here with us tonight so every year we get data um on what we call freshmen on track so the state shares with us how what percent of our freshmen are on track and the state defines that as you earned

085as a freshman you earned at least five credits and you basically passed all of your core classes you could fail one semester of a core but that's it so if you happen to fail freshman math the whole year or global connections or english etc then you're not on track even if you if you pass i you can't pass all the cores i don't think without earning five credits it would be tough but you still you have to have five credits as well so um district 99 both schools historically have a high rate of freshmen being on track but we know how important the freshman year is so any freshman who's not on track is something that we want to be concerned with and it will come as no surprise to most of you probably that

086after last year when we got our numbers they they had gone down we did not have as high of numbers of freshmen on track so as hank said we started looking at that ryan and i broke down some of the data we took gina's office gets all of that specific information from the state so we took that um and we looked at it we shared it with our leadership teams in an effort to really try to make that a focus of our work this year so on this slide you'll see some information from both buildings and when the state sent us our information at south last year we're on the right there we had 76 freshmen who were considered not on track at the end of the 2021 school year so by the time school

087started in the fall of 2021 we were at 64. and there's a combination of reasons one is summer school and the other is kids leave kids come and go especially in the summer and so a combination of kids possibly moving and then kids regaining credits in summer school put us at 64 um kids and then at the end of first semester we were at 60 at south which does not sound like a huge change but one thing that's really important there's a couple things that are really important one is that um it takes a long time if you especially if you fail multiple classes it takes a long time to get back on track because summer you can only there's two semesters so you can regain one credit in the summer and then we don't

088hold kids back per se the next year so if you're a sophomore you're going to take us history there are some things you can't just jump ahead but for the most part you're going to take english 2 you're going to take u.s history you're going to take a sophomore course load and then you might have one or two less electives in order to try to make up some of what you didn't pass but it takes time and because of the situation last year there were more kids that seemed to have more failures so it wasn't like i just failed one semester of math we had some kids that failed multiple classes so it takes some time but there's some really good news there which is looking at at the end of semester one half of

089the 64 that we started the year with passed everything first semester and i've been through all of those transcripts multiple times and actually a lot of them didn't just pass they did really well in their classes so it's clear that being back in a much more normal year face-to-face with the teachers and the supports really really helped um and then the last number there is there are 12 kids that if they if they pass what they're in right now what they're trying to recover this semester will then be back on track by the end of this semester too so we're definitely making some progress there yeah north's numbers are very similar in that we started with 42 we went down to 32 we had uh uh some students that were outplayed some students that have

090moved um and then by the uh fall uh we were at 30 um we had eight students who regained their credits from through summer school so um that helped the state doesn't recognize that right away um so you know officially our number doesn't change till later but like internal tracking we know that that was where we're at also we had 20 of our 30 students who did not receive a drnf in any of their courses first semester um which is exciting and um we'll have eight more that will be back on track right now some of them are doubled up in science and in social studies um we have a young person who's doubled up in english and science and social studies and is passing all of them which is great so um but as

091we talked about earlier we want students to be able to also you know pursue their passions and find you know careers so um you know we're hoping to help them make sure that they're not making those um the have those struggles again later um so that they can uh continue to take some courses that they want to take not the ones that they have uh if we move to the next slide we'll just talk a little bit about what we've been doing um and so um maybe hank has told you that at his opening he talked about carrying the load right that many hands make light work and that when we look at students who are struggling in school it is not just the teacher it is not just the chair it's not just the

092building administration it's it's everyone it's families it's students it's district administrators we all have to work together and so everyone kind of took some of their frustration wrote it down on a slip of paper we all threw it into the aisles and we collected it and could probably go to his office and pull out the suitcase as a reminder that he is helping us carry our load um and so when we looked at the freshman not on track data george and i did a lot of thinking about how can we put a face to the students right it's easy to think about the students as just data like that prior slide um so um you know we did it slightly different at both campuses but trying to put the face to it um at north

093we did an activity where you know we had counselors write down some things beyond like what are their dreams like what do they want to do for a living um what are some hobbies that they had south did while doing a different activity to something similar how do we make sure that before we look at the data we know that these are kids who struggled last year not just numbers that we're trying to correct um so that helped kind of frame our larger larger talk about students who struggled and then we started talking with the staff about how do we create partnerships right with calling home it's not just letting parents know that a student's failing your class but how do you have conversations that you build those partnerships they did a lot of work

094in their course teams under their department chairs to talk about like how do we support as a team what are the tier one classroom interventions for academics that we do as a team we also try to promote the awareness of the interventions that are that we already have built in our system office hours that while students were reluctant to go to office hours and be in the waiting room online you can go to office hours and you see a lot of students at both schools uh going before school for or after school for office hours we also have academic resource we have paper and we can give you stats on paper sometimes whole classes will go they turn their paper into paper.com and they get feedback from a teacher we also have a lot of

095use of that for students you know really late at night um in math and science um and then also our strive program and our nhs tutors have continued um and so as we talk about interventions it's not just uh about you know sending a note to see triple s but what are we doing in the classroom academically how are we communicating and also how are we teaching those um those soft skills whether or not it's organization or self-advocacy and making sure that kids are reflecting on what they're doing to make sure that they're staying on track um a few of the other interventions you've heard the student success coordinator mentioned a couple times tonight that's been a really really helpful position um obviously last year they were working a lot with families when kids were

096at home and not and whatnot but now that kids are with us they're still constantly working with families with kids with some of our interventionists in the building to really support kids also over the past few years you've probably heard about our common experience work so that work is really moving down the road and we're getting closer to the to the end i say that's not a great word for it because there's really never an end but of that work and so as a part of that work eliminating zeroes from the grade books designing and implementing reassessment policies late work policies putting limitations on homework weighting all of those things make a difference when you look at grading and assessment practices as well and then finally we had a great tool that ryan's going to

097show in a second developed by jim strzok here at the asc and keith devorkin one of our teachers that has time to work with data that has really allowed us in a whole new way to drill and in our department chairs and teachers to drill down on student data and look at trends and see across courses and and teachers can see for themselves their own data how kids are doing across the board in classes so if you go to the next slide we just um have a graphic of what the tool looks like i blocked out the student data that's that big square there but when i was talking with keith and jim one of the things that we talked about was the reason that schools don't use data to track interventions as regular as

098they need to is because it's hard to digest not everyone is a data person how do i draw the data how do i manage the data how do i ask the questions that lead to the questions that answer the questions that i need to know about the data and so um george and i brainstormed some things that we wanted to have sort of at our department chairs fingertips not as a sort of gotcha like look check each teacher and see how many f's there are in that class it's it's more so like are we seeing any trends do we see anything across the sophomore class is there something across a department is there something at a time of year um and so we had him jim and keith kind of break down this tool and

099you can see that you know we can divide it by building i can do it by course we can do it by federal race and ethnicity score we can look at whether or not they have an iep whether the free inducer at lunch and so we can do any kind of combination that we want as we're asking the questions we can just look at the latest report we can look at trends of a class over days we could pull up athletes um and also as we started using it people started asking for more drop downs which was great because then they were asking questions that they wanted to know the answer to so we did add in gender i think we added in counselor because the counselors wanted to be able to pull up their

100own data we added our el students and so we've had a lot of success with department chairs then being able to look at trends with their teams and taking some of the um the gotcha feeling that might come out of it and have a more supportive conversation of what are we doing together to make sure all students are being successful so as a result of that on the next slide you can see the reduction in the failure data from our freshman class so in the fall of 2020 uh there were 39 students at north that comprised uh 93 f's which is about seven and a half percent of the freshman class um and surprisingly um i you know you'd think that the first semester there would be more um struggle in getting used to that

101environment it actually wasn't it was second semester when we were actually going back and forth between the hybrid um and uh remote uh setting um and so we had 51 students with 109 apps which is about 9.8 percent of the class and that those datas that is why um our freshman not on track data went up but exciting um in one semester with the work we went down to 17 students that comprised of 34 fs in the freshman class which is a 3.2 percent um and again that is the staff working together and looking at numbers not just a feeling of what might be happening and so we're really proud of the work that the staff did to reduce that number and on the south side i will comment a couple things my my colleague

102who retired last year dr walsh rock some of you probably know him he started keeping freshman failure rates at south by semester back in 2002 2003 so 20 years ago i have data that goes back um and at that point we were running around 15 to 19 percent a semester um and so we began doing some targeted after we had a few years worth of data we started doing some targeted work back then i couldn't even remember all that it was i was a department chair at the time um but we brought those numbers down and in the 9 10 school year we happened to see a major drop and that year we got down to eight percent which was by far the lowest we had ever been and that was the only time we

103had eight percent and since that time it's always hovered around 9 10 11 12. never got back up where it was in the early 2000s until the pandemic so you can see there that same story as north first semester which was almost all remote was actually turned out to be a little bit lower than second semester so first semester we had 112 students um accumulate 274 fs which put us back up at 16 percent and then we were at 17 the second semester but this fall we were down to 57 students with 91 f's and at 9 which is the lowest we've ever been except for that one year in 9 10. so um obviously there's room for improvement but it's pretty exciting to drop that number almost in half so so that's where we're

104at right now all right so questions for georgia or ryan all right thank you for all of your work and thank you for the work of everybody you lead all right hybrid block schedule as the board knows this is an action item later this evening uh we had a 90-minute discussion on this two weeks ago so i i was hoping not to replicate that the whole conversation with the board but i did want to knowing that you were going to hear about the strategic plan this evening i did want to take an opportunity to point out some crossovers and how important this new block schedule is to accomplishing the directions that are in the strategic plan one of the things you saw in that strategic plan tonight are some core themes that ran through it

105was ensuring that things happen not leaving it to chance right being intentional about what we do and that there's tier one supports that every student gets a same basic baseline set of skills the schedule that we're producing through that access period and through that resource period are where we create time to do those things my grandfather always used to tell me you show what is important to you by where you spend your time because the one thing in your life you can never get more of is time that's it so never call up grandpa and tell him you didn't have time to call him but one of the things the essential thing that we're doing in this schedule is creating space and time for all of these things that you heard about tonight to actually

106occur and not leave it to chance that they occur but program them in as gina discussed with you at our last meeting all of the different things that fit in there um so some key pieces that you heard tonight actively asking for information beyond college these are all things that are built into this access and resource period pathways internships meeting with employers businesses in the community the idea of a growth continuum that we're building in lessons and are being intentional about student accountability and resiliency and building in time for social emotional supports that there's post-secondary planning occurring during this time and that we can help our students see beyond graduation to post-secondary and life kind of opportunities that are going to be there and that students engage actively in that rather than being invited to

107come during that time we're building it in they're going to do this right we're not leaving it to chance that we talk about school life balance and how to manage their time and executive functioning and those kinds of things how to better live in harmony between your responsibilities and the things that are are driving your time that we are creating time for students to work together and to know one another and for adults to know what they're doing and want to do the idea of you're going to stack year after year with that same teacher in access that will get this opportunity to see you grow over time and to help shape that growth and really trying to build those opportunities so students know for the rest of their life that they're both going to

108be learning and they're both going to be working and it doesn't matter what order those things occur in but they're going to be doing those right that's the goal of making it through high school and going on in your life all right so uh we talked a lot last uh time about this um i do gene and i didn't bring any other greater presentation than that just we're here to answer any of your last minute questions that you have before we ask the question later on in the board meeting um i'll just open the floor up for are there any last minute things that gina and i can answer for you i just worry that there's too much down time it just having a senior next year she's already expressed you know that she's gonna

109aim for a sixth period lunch in an eighth period study hall and she can leave at 1 30 on wednesdays and thursdays yeah i don't know if that opportunity is going to present itself i understand but i mean that's that's her that's her vision of you know what this what this looks like i think it's a misconception that there's going to be a lot of downtime because we talked about it last time that monday tuesday friday are just like they are now except that really with you know like that's the 20 starting at 8 20 instead of eight o'clock is sort of you know like if you looked at it as right now they lose an hour and 20 minutes or whatever of instruction on mondays because they come in late um that offsets that

110offset correct but the so on the blockchain of the resource right remember on the block day that lunch period that falls in seventh and eighth period is a shorter lunch period the lunch what they did but the resources correct but that's where they get that so there's two shorter lunch periods in one longer resource period of which we're taking half of it right so it's a shorter lunch period then you get some of that time back in the resource period it it's close to how it averages out it's a restructuring of that time now and yes it's re-blocked in different ways but it's not necessarily an aggregate significant change it's a it's a structural change could i'm sorry let me interrupt could you just finish your thought because conversation i kind of like lost track

111of what you were trying to say well let's just say so also let's say the lunch is you're like in thirds and that so you might have the first sort of segment the second or the third so let's say you have the third and then you have resource sure like then you're done but you're not because you would have your lunch period then you would go to the instructional activity for the first half of resource then the second half of resource you would have time so there's gonna juniors and seniors are gonna be held to having to go to an instructional activity and not just leave well it'll be a mix it'll be a mix there'll be some days where they could just leave but there's going to be days where there's going to be

112required instructional activities as well and it's not every senior right seniors in good standing yeah with parental permission with transportation with all of those things which students can do right now every eighth period of the day right it's just restructured into how it falls over the the flow of the week but right now we have seniors that can leave eighth period and we've always had that right yeah and or come in after correct or come in late so it's just i guess it sort of falls maybe to the student that you certainly i you know i sort of feel like what if the elective is a study hall or is that for sure oh it could happen yeah so then you you i mean it happens now though but you look at it over the

113course of the week rather than a single day right so yes you'll have two days with longer blocks of time and those if a student doesn't have something scheduled into that time that's a longer chunk of time where that occurs but when you look at the other way now this is only happening four days a week rather than five days a week so it's a restructuring of similar times is it pretty you know is it 50 50 that they might have some i mean i guess it's like every student's schedule is unique yeah but i mean what if they have i mean you're planning like what if what if that opportunity is only once or twice a month or you know i mean is the objective to speak to keep them there or we're still

114working on resource in terms of the actual schedule um whether or not we'll have opportunities every single week probably not but we're not looking at something that's once a month okay right so um and we have a lot of different suggestions it's one of the same issues we're running into with access which is everything's important which it is and much of it needs to occur in the beginning of the school year so a lot of it's a little bit of balancing are you following a model that we could look at like you know this school does this go see what they're you know because i i know a lot of schools that do a formal block schedule you know like the a and the b and you can you know take a class in a

115semester a year class and a semester and that's not what we're talking about no but i have not had i have not heard of a lot of schools yes we've talked to other schools that have similar programming so for example the main schools island park deerfield evanston naperville has a similar access program so yeah we've talked to other schools in the area that have done similar type programming you know and it's not about the struct we understand how the structure is right now it's now to genus sorting out what do we put in there and what do we eliminate because the list of things as you heard tonight during strategic planning the list of things that we would love to do in that is much greater than a number of spaces that we have plus

116we hear from students as students talk about their time that they would like some time to catch up and to get help and you know sometimes it is to decompress you know and that uh that we offer opportunities for those things that students are at that we hear their voice and we provide some of those opportunities over the course of a semester as well that they can go make up a test during that amount of time rather than before school or after school right so it's a balancing of all of these competing demands to put it's not for a lack of things to put in this space it's narrowing down the field and making sure that the right things are scheduled in there over the course of the year so can i just build on

117your question for a moment so to jenny's point i know what i've read in the literature which is i've not done an exhaustive review of the literature but i've read multiple articles about this but from our neighboring schools what have been the biggest hurdles roadblocks negative um consequences of going to this kind of schedule do we have a sense from them yeah the biggest thing is making the change without having a plan where the students are going to go is what we've heard so part of the planning for access as we shared with you last time is that students will all have a landing spot where they start from and that is something that we've heard from the other schools that if you just leave it to chance and you just hope that kids are

118gonna go to the right places that you know they might just choose to go hang out in the commons instead right that were intentional and that was one of the words i used about making sure that uh students go get help or invited in to get help or learn how to advocate to go get the help that they need during that time and it's structured appropriately that if a student can't structure it we help them structure it right and that's really what we've heard you know is the the downside from other class other schools the other thing was just releasing students into it without any prep work leading up to it and in the plan that they're putting together like the first three or four access periods maybe even more than that for six are

119all built around navigating this new schedule and this new structure making sure that students are set up to be successful in the new schedule not leaving it to chance that they'll figure it out right that we teach them the expectations and how to pull the levers of it to help them be successful in the new schedule well don't you think that this is an opportunity for let's say a student is having problems in math for that teacher and that teacher knows the kids that are having problems and say you know either send them a note or ask them in class hey you know what i've got my access period at um thursday at eighth period well they're all free at the same time all right well all students and teachers are free at access right

120but you know maybe he maybe they have other students coming um on wednesday and say thursday why don't you come see me at you know this amount of time and we can go over it a little bit and help you and so it's an opportunity not for the kids always to ask for help but also for teachers to ask for them to come and see them and and work with them and i think that that's what's really a big advantage and and that doesn't mean you know just the kids that need help but all all of the kids can come and and talk to their teachers right so in the last teachers contract we really pushed hard for student support right so you see a combination of things here with office hours which you heard

121about tonight and us taking advantage of that and sending students to those office hours right part of that is access part of that is resource right they're all of these things it's putting the late starts back in the day to give students more time to start their day every day that's part of a tier one a support that goes to all students because we know that that makes a difference for high school kids right so this schedule is really built around getting students what they need in both just general tier one supports things that every student should get and then the specific supports that each individual student needs this is how we take district 99 from an environment that has conditions in which students can succeed to an environment in which we ensure that every

122student has been set up to succeed how do we take this next step in that strategic plan it's this type of a schedule that allows us to do that without that you're asking for district 99 to ramp up and go to the next level in education and not providing us the time or resources or structure to make those changes right and the schedule we're under is the same schedule that students in the 70s went to school schools changed a little bit since the 70s right so we need a schedule that allows us to catch up with the expectations of teaching and learning that have developed over the last 40 50 years right yeah i mean it's the it is we've updated our facilities we've updated our programming our curriculum our supports the last thing that

123we really need to update is our schedule to take advantage of all of these things that we've put in as a school district to support our kids and i think it's important for our students to learn how to do that you know some of them might be shy and and you know nervous about going to see their teacher but if their teachers communicate with them and talk to them about things they're much more open to come and and get the help that they need and i think that's really important and the final thing i will add is a reminder that we are starting with program evaluation in mind right that there will be a third party evaluator evaluating this for the next two years providing feedback to the administration the board and the public about

124are we being successful in this and if not then you should expect the administration to be responding to the gaps that we're finding in that but we're not going to it's not going to be like wait a year and then find out if it worked you're going to find out all along how we're doing and assuming the board approves it later tonight we have our kickoff meeting for that program evaluation on friday of this week so you know we'll you we will get underway with that immediately and i i kind of want to go off something jenny said something joanna said last time and that is the kids who fall through the cracks who's accountable to make sure that the children who the the students who struggle with this or the teachers who struggle with

125this are are getting what they need we're getting all of us but you helped by helped us with resources with adding ryan as uh directors that we've added you've added student success coordinators tonight that help with that interventionist the board has added social additional social work support and the all the counseling and support services additions over the last five years the board has built the team of resources to be here to make sure that students yes there will be students that fall through the crack but we catch them and we intervene rather than once again leaving it up to chance the things will happen you saw that's why i thought it was essential tonight for you to see that strategic response to failures that's not letting kids slip through the cracks right i think you

126know all the things that you're planning to put into place all these supports there will be kids who fall through the cracks it's inevitable and um i just i i it's i can see all the benefits of this a little bit the timing is bothering me and i know how you feel about you and now is the best time but the reality is the kids who are seniors right are going to be seniors have gone through some really stressful stuff they've been through covet and coming back and going back forth and i go is this the appropriate time to do it um i know yes the appropriate time to do it would have been four years ago before the pandemics showed up right but i do feel like those kids they you know we said

127the last time we shouldn't do it we shouldn't have had them bear the bronte covid we shouldn't have done it and i feel like we might be doing it on the backs of these seniors i here i i understand that it's a change first of all a student's schedule in high school you know changes every year it does right and if we would have had this schedule in place before the pandemic this year would have gone better right the the the things that ryan and georgia showed up to talk about that we had to fit these supports and you know take a structure of a schedule that's not built to necessarily be adaptive and support kids they talked about how they had to change kids schedules and summer school and they didn't even talk about

128virtual options that they did with kids and all of all of those things don't fit into the schedules we have it now where next year schedule is built for that it's built to take that on so when we talk about supporting kids we're still supporting kids the pandemic's still going on kids are still responding to it or still stressed or still coming back from it this is the schedule that helps us finish that comeback where the current schedule we have now doesn't create any more space to do things that much differently than what we do now i might offer too that the 75 of the students that go on to college those those seniors instead of going from what we're doing right now to all of a sudden getting thrown into college where every day

129every semester changes completely this is this is a a transition for them this is so instead of instead of going from a place where everything is just so regimented and structured to now they figure it all out this is a way for them to gain a little bit more the world of work has changed we all know as well and students uh workers when we talk with our employers in the community they talk about they need to know how to manage their time they need to know how to advocate for themselves they need to know how to work with others that like it's this whole list of skills that's not any different than what students that go to college need to be able to do for themselves either right so i i like joanna i

130am concerned about the the timing the second thing is the argument is in one breath for exam is to get them ready for the world but actually when we first talked about this we talked about it being to lessen some stress where it would be an opportunity for them to get kind of some almost to slow things down a little bit to give them a time to study to give them a time to take a breath but the opposite argument of that is that is not how the world looks right so you just get in there you you have to you know kind of make it happen so i guess my my i am concerned about the timing of this the the other thing is and i know i've seen some data but i just

131don't feel like i've seen and i know the administration makes the decisions but just the support of the teachers and what are the students as a whole feeling how are they feeling about something like this do we feel like we have majority buy-in from both perspectives the the staff administration the staff negotiated as part of their contract the last time so the the teachers agreed to it as part of their contract negotiations so the staff as a group has voted to support this change students it's mixed and part of it is mixed because they lived through a pandemic and a lot of students when i meet with them one-on-one think that this will feel like it did to some extent when they were in the pandemic and i can't change that until they live it

132right and i it's hard for students to understand it until they've lived through it but in talking to schools from other districts that have recently made this change it's positive in all kinds of ways like what you talked about in stress levels for students in anxiety levels and getting the support that they need and just because we lower stress doesn't mean you eliminate stress at school there's a healthy amount of stress within schools but you need to provide time and space for students to deal with that and to get support through it and right now we leave that way too much on the student shoulders to advocate for themselves and not creating time in the day to address those concerns so when you say in the contract help me walk through that they agreed to

133it is it one of those things where to be in the contract you have to agree to it or they had an option to agree or disagree to it they voted on a contract which included a change to a hybrid schedule okay i just want to be sure i understand when we say that language because i'm you know did i understand what that means okay because of the ch but it was because of the changes in time for professional development and some of the changes for it wasn't that they said they saw this and said oh yes i agreed to this it was because of tweaking of time correct it's a change in working conditions so it wasn't that they saw this and it was a done deal no it was down there with a

134whole bunch of stuff that they had to make a decision oh this happened to be in there okay on the on the concerns over the timing um so you would be less concerned if we waited a year yeah why is that kind of what i said about senior class the the upcoming senior class has been through two years of this covenant hybrid and all that and it's been stressful and we said at that meeting well we don't want to you know put it on the back of those kids this whole burden so why are we adding this traditional if you stay in the eighth period day you're putting it on the back of kids because you're not creating the time to give them what they need right this this schedule takes it off the back

135of kids and makes us more actively involved and supportive and giving kids what they need and don't think that going back to school next year is not a change right it's no masks it's the pandemic is changing the world is changing like next year will not be you know 2019 right next year will be 2022 2023 and it's gonna be a new year one way or another but it's it's going back to what we were more familiar with as a as a you know community at school no math no pandemic it's going back what we were familiar with those students lived it for two-thirds of a school year they've never they will never next year seniors every year will have been different for them they had they left school on march 13 2019 their freshman

136year again right and then they had last year which was a mess and then they had this year which is uncertainty with kovid for the whole year and masks and different activities and all of those kinds of things next year regardless of what we go back to will be a change from the last three years this is a change for the better change for the past is a change for the past it's a change next year regardless this is how we support our kids coming back next year not by going back to what we did in 2018 the world was very different in 2018 this is the schedule that we need to support kids in 2022. yeah because you've got mon you've got five days of monday tuesday friday so you've got no opportunity for

137the kids to really accept dirt maybe during their lunch hours or lunch hours well that's a fallacy but during their lunch to go get resource or to get assistance i mean that's not much time because they still have to eat and and we want them to eat because i think they're better students when they eat but this at least gives them the opportunities to get help of resources or you know maybe maybe work on their fafsa you know i just i just worry that it's not it's not something they need every week but this builds in a consistent flow when we talk about the stress and consistency i know people are like oh it changes now on wednesday and thursday they're different what you're looking at is a consistent flow from week to week we

138have less modified weeks because things like pbis lessons and all of those things that happen over the course of the week are now built in or the course you know week by week where you end up with all these different schedules you start to build in some consistency you know monday is monday tuesday is tuesday you know and you start to get into a flow of this as a student that there really is some huge benefits that come because of that when we look at lessons learned from the pandemic you know i look at this as a res as a response to that and we've we've definitely learned a lot about what students needs are and you know i think that this is one of the way that we that we address that and we're

139talking two days of the week right you're talking about modifying one class period right for each class right i i'd like to kind of hear from our students and see what they love them i'm glad it was fun it was right now can i just say that i struggled with the timing myself i was like so much so much but if it doesn't happen this year it's going to happen next year and those kids have had a different they'll have had a different year every year because they'll have had changes and then if we if we're really gonna if we if we don't in order to not really impact anybody who's lived through covet we would have to wait four years to institute now you'd probably have to wait 12. i think that's something you

140know i think the benefit this the ben the benefit i see in this is the longevity of it and so in my mind it's it is those kids that are in this for a year that are kind of going to be the pig you know let's see if it works again this is that same class you know i may or may not have a kid in that class but you're never going to get it we're going to go this way but i you know i feel that um i feel like you know it's inevitable that some kids are going to fall through cracks anyway and we're using all these words we're going to assure assure that these kids are going to get those self-advocacy skills and be taken care of themselves well i think we're

141ensuring that they get the opportunity the opportunity yes and we're going to be unable to remove a lot of the constraints that they have that are outside the school which are often even more affect these students performance i mean it's wonderful when kids have parents that are totally supportive and encourage them to get grades and are they don't have all those outside constraints but when you have a student like that this is going to be really difficult for them even more what do you do about the unmotivated i don't know but that's i mean that's why it's built this way this is why you have the same access teacher year after year this is why the programming is developed by grade level right so that the students are getting the appropriate material for the you

142know at least at the grade level they're at they're now with a teacher that has a small number of students that's keeping an eye out for them that's reminding them what the next day is that reminds them what access is the next time when they come back that's communicating and with them that way so that there's less of a chance for a student to fall through a crap right if you're in this small group of 10 to 15 students with an access teacher that's with you for four years and that access teacher is accountable as a student for not succeeding right they're with they're working with those students year after year that that's who's gonna see if a student that's another set of eyes not the only set of eyes but it's another set of

143eyes to catch if they're falling through the track cracks but we have all of these other supports going on as well like you saw that tonight with the response to failures there's just one example of all of the other pieces that are there you like i said the board has added c triple s support so the counselor doesn't have to look at as many students right now you're building the tier one interventions into the club so now you're not duplicating resources so hopefully there you know there's more in time there to monitor students you will go back to you've added all of the resources as a school district to make sure that this is successful now is the time to act and take that next step and i know it's change and change is hard

144and there's never a good time for change the good time for this change would have been four years ago before a pandemic showed up but none of us knew that was coming and all of our resources weren't here our facilities weren't really and our facilities couldn't support it at that time so you know as i've said before if our district could have made this change 20 years ago it would have there was plans back 20 years ago before i think mark's the only one at the table that was around at that time but there were committees looking to make this change two decades ago and the facilities and the sports weren't there to do it every everything you have done as a board for a decade to get to this point has led to here

145not making this change stop short of all of that work and is a disservice to our students that's how i feel about this i feel um too the easy thing to do would have been to not even explore this right if you're just going through the motion i mean who's going to criticize you for just doing what you've been doing everyone else is doing that right that's the way we've done it right but hank when previous board hired you now a couple of us were part of that you know we we wanted a superintendent who was going to not maintain status quo but look at how we do things and how can we do things better and how can we improve and this is exactly the kind of thing that i hoped for and expected

146from your leadership and you know quite frankly this is something that we you know with the master facility plan this was something that we this was we knew we were going to be able to do this with that and the discussions about this started quite a while ago so for anybody anybody suggesting that this is a last minute thing or you know we haven't been fully transparent they just haven't been following along certainly covid caused us to delay what we wanted to do right because the the schedule was this year was going to start this was that was the hope that was the plan yeah or long-range planning and we had to we had to pull off that in order to you know deal with the matter at hand and we at least had an

147experience that we could learn some things from to help inform this to make it even more hopefully successful you can't do something new without there being any risk at all right so we we accept that things may not be wonderful yeah i've heard a lot of literature and the abundance of it really does point to this that this is the way that we should go but i still am concerned about that for me it's the timing and i don't know if i'm gonna i'm always this last minute i'm thinking of my vote but but you know i i still can't you know help but not think about some children are this is not going to be the best thing for them but i do know that in the long run this is going to be

148better for more students that's what makes you a great school board member there's a lot of students right now that our current schedule isn't serving oh i know that right i think this will serve more of our students well than our current schedule this is a thoughtful board i mean i mean we're thinking about all the possibilities right oh yeah [Music] of accepting the fact that there are always students who are going to fall through the cracks what i'm hearing and it's not just hank that's working on us it's gina in hundreds and hundreds of other people are working on that you just represent that correct not not just but you know what i mean is that this acceptance that there are always going to be students that fall through the crack is is is

149i don't think is a good thing for us to embrace and i'm not accepting that yes and so this is an attempt that's my point is this is an attempt to identify students who heretofore would have fallen through the cracks and not let them fall through the cracks which is what we've been yeah saying for a very long time can we ask you of course i'm sorry is there anything you'd like to offer yeah absolutely open that can of worms i think you're concerned about the timing it's very fair and like you're basing off the senior class which as seniors this year definitely consider it but there's always going to be that next senior class that you don't want to mess with absolutely if you're pushing it back this year because of next year seniors

150well what about next year's juniors then it's gonna be messed up their senior year so i don't really think you can base it off of the class i know looking at it i was a little bit iffy at first you know my learning style i didn't know if it would best suit me but being a senior who's going to college next year you know visiting the colleges and hearing about their schedules this closely resembles that they don't have eight period days you have to learn how to manage your time and you have longer classes so i think the block days and having that mix is definitely the best of both worlds and you're getting your students ready for what comes next if they do choose to go to college and of course not like dr

151philly said one schedule isn't gonna work for everyone but again this is the best of both worlds so i definitely think it'll work and having that access period to do those like mustang way and positively north lessons instead of taking time away from your core classes i know personally math gets shortened and then you have all your other classes are shortened so just having that built-in time so you still have your same length of classes is definitely going to be beneficial for the students okay i think scarlet said it really well and i think that i think it's like with a lot of situations you're never going to make everybody happy right i think that's something that we need to understand and i think that as i've said on the board i've gotten to understand

152the schedule more fully than our actual students so i think that i i would look at this and i would be like i don't know what that means necessarily but i do and i think that i know you're not going to leave them up to their own defenses once it is in place like i know gina and dr thiele you were saying how those first few access like sections will be like talking them through and making sure they can understand and process how this new schedule will work and i think it's going to be beneficial i think it'll be less stress but i also do understand sherelle and joanna your guys's concern i was talking to a junior today and she comes up to me and she says i don't like the schedule i don't

153think i know anybody that likes it and these these are the reasons why and that was the like main reason she was like we've had so many schedule changes and next year we're going to start with a completely new one and it just doesn't seem fair and i don't have to think about that i'm leaving um but i did that did stop me in my tracks and i'm like i i get that like it's it's not fair to you guys but like scarlett said like there's always going to be something different there's always going to be change and it's not fair if we say that for the next senior class but then we're going to mess with the juniors and the sophomores i wasn't planning that i just thought that the seniors the upcoming seniors

154would have had just a whole four years of messed up schedule the rest of them you know okay you're getting some normalcy and i think you two would land on your feet no matter what kind of schedule it was but you know and so i i guess i felt that just i need to speak for those people who i think might not do anything it's definitely gonna fall a lot like on the students and what they choose to do with this extra time but i think with all like the extra support systems i know personally south councillors see triple s all our social workers they're all there to help if you need it so i think no student like students are obviously going to probably fall through the cracks but there's going to be someone

155there to help them get back on their feet and you know it's just going to be making the most of it and figuring out what's best for yourself as a student just learning how to advocate i'm taking your opinions and those are important lessons for life yes you know there's not going to be that person to just walk you through everything like you know next year when you go post-secondary you don't have your parents there every step of the way you don't have exactly i hope you don't personally my parents won't be going to college i think yeah i tried i don't know some people don't have that now anyway right and those that have i have are very fortunate yes but yeah it's yeah yeah so right now so the reality is there is

156that i mean there are students that aren't don't require that level of help every week and in the model like this could be done after social studies on thursday what do you mean by that i mean they could they'll work to do that they could have they have work to do every student has a full week's worth of work to do yeah there is work to be done in that time i guess well but that does reflect the world right the world is more about getting your stuff done not necessarily where and when you do it right in many workplaces like you take vacation when you want to take vacation just get your work done right part of this is it's changing expectations and flexibility in the world of work just as much as the

157world of school right it's about productivity and okay so if a student doesn't need that time there and they use that to do something else they still got to get their work done yeah maybe they would uh if they're in the robotics uh let's say club maybe they would want to work on their robot during that time so they don't have to take time maybe from their job after school in order to to work on that on that project or or they might we're just doing work or whatever yeah yeah but i'm just saying if they're caught up at some point they they might have another activity that would keep them occupied i mean you know we're we don't want them out running the streets i mean that's we don't that's right that's not the

158plan no that is not the plan pardon we do have to let him go at the end of the day darn but so i have two things to add and then i'm going to stop talking about this for tonight and uh one is some of the same things that we're hearing about seniors not wanting their last year messed up we heard about when we put the master facility plan in place right was wait a year to do the master facility plan because i don't want the hallways torn up for my senior year we heard some of those same things i don't want the school messed up for my my last year for my three years of school or you know there's never the perfect time to make any change as i've been working through this

159this year i heard a quote i believe it's from john maxwell who talks a lot about leadership and uh the quote is the future belongs to those who see it before it's obvious and this board has done a good job of that historically of making that change before it's obvious before everybody's doing it right you did it with technology you did it with facilities asking you to do it now with schedule if it was we would like everybody would be doing and just be okay that's what everybody's doing some some year down the road a school with this enough resources like we do and enough staff and the right facilities and all the right things combined this will be the obvious change for them what makes us leaders in the field is that we do

160it before it's obvious we do it when it's right for our kids and right for our community my time is now and waiting doesn't serve anybody better than what we're doing right now so this is an action item later on tonight i appreciate getting the board's direction whatever it is later on does anybody else have any the comments about it before we move in okay all right a few other items for this evening capital improvement projects i'll invite jim up good evening everyone it was really nice to hear those spaces from the mfp are being so utilized i i mean those numbers are unbelievable that is so so good to hear and speaking of the mfp and just these last beds we really did that at the right time i am so glad that we

161did that three years ago instead of going into it now while the numbers are just so much higher the market is so difficult right now so we made some good decisions uh on the mfp well we knew it right yeah we did it we're all geniuses yeah you know that was all you know par for the course for us yeah no i mean it's we got we got very fortunate i couldn't agree with we would have spent a lot more money it's crazy and we did so i'm very happy that we're completed uh so this is for capital uh for this summer uh we have uh three projects the physical education office at north social studies office these are renovations and the varsity softball field of dugouts that will be uh demolished and replaced we

162packaged all that wishes that was three minutes yes my friends just talked about it like the softball team needs to be excited there's actual holes there if you drive by there you can see them so it's it's really do um we packaged these together together to save some money uh so we had nine packages uh 21 uh bidders so we we've seen some movement with the bettors come in and some good competition but they came came in higher than we expected it with our budget so we are adding a 100 000 to our 1 million dollar budget so at 1.1 million for capital uh so we're compensating we want to get these projects done uh we reviewed the nine vendors and uh all the scope and the bid requirements were met so tonight we'll ask

163the board to approve uh that list of vendors for 359 808.41 i'll answer any questions if anyone has them request is it is it possible to see a pdf of the improvements the drawing work sure get those too thank you um okay i'm going to ask a terrible question go ahead is there any way to put any of this off that can wait until maybe some of the prices will go down well my gut's telling me that we're going to see this for a while that's okay we're going to have to write it out you know talking with white and talking with other school districts i'm part of dupage county with all the billing grounds people actually we sell less than what they're seeing so and we all believe that this is going to continue

164for another year unfortunately and mr davenport could probably attest to that as well he's probably hearing the same thing i'm hearing um we can always push projects we can always save the money but as we push projects the five-year list then becomes gets bigger and bigger and then there's more money in in future years that we might not have so we like trying to keep on schedule that's why we get that five-year plan going so we can get these done each year um but certainly if the board decides us for us to push the project off i'm just asking because i figured that it's a lot like anything else that goes up and then comes back down and then goes back up you know right now the forecast is not saying that i'm not seeing

165that like furniture and yeah yeah furniture's terrible the timeline and the expense of furniture it's it's truly unbelievable i've never seen anything like in my career it's it's so high yeah five-month lead times on windows um it's it's insane and and even if even if uh uh theoretically prices would come down a little bit inflation's just gonna keep pushing it up yeah i so yeah you know as supply chain things straighten out some i'm just i'm just asking because i know i wouldn't want to tell those girls over at south that those dugouts yeah there could be a mutiny on the bounty no i'll let that to somebody else okay that's not scarlet she lives pretty close to you i could send her over yeah yeah that's okay i think there's a lot of people

166who know where i live it's frightening so i just had to ask absolutely fair question very fair all right uh this is up as an action item later on this evening thank you jim thank you thank you uh food service agreement renewal yes i think this is jury has got this one this is this is cool good evening yeah yeah well i think you all remember that last year we entered into a one-year agreement with chartwells to pilot a food service program that provides larger portions a better offering of menu items and it operates outside the usda meal programs so we don't have to deal with all their restrictions and so within the first few weeks of school we were able to tell that this was a very successful program because if you went to

167the cafeterias you would see the long lines of students so that was one problem we had to solve but the students and staff have been very happy we have the new coffee stations at both buildings that are they're really a hot item there's lines that's out there all the time the students can go there from the commons and pick up snacks during their study hall and that so it's been really really successful so chartwells has submitted a three-year proposal to the district and this proposal includes a couple of items here i just want to go over so it includes a six point five percent return on revenue schedule for all three years and then in years two and three that return would be six point seven five percent for all sales that exceed two million

168two million dollars there's also an inflation clause in there to protect both chartwells and the district in the event that inflation rises above 2.5 percent the two parties would kind of share the cost of that burden and then the other item i that i'd like to point out is that there's a mutual agreement upon the number of free and reduced price meals that chartwells will provide on a daily basis at no cost to the district and the number that's in this agreement is higher than the daily average number of meals that they've been providing this year so it's a safe number so we we recommend that the board approve this three-year proposal i think it's by doing so chartwells will invest more in our kitchens um add to the program and i just think it'll

169be a comprehensive food service program for students i'm just really glad that our students are happy with it and that they're they're purchasing more more food and we're not throwing away garbage cans full of apples and oranges what did you see the change yeah it was reported in there yeah i mean wow right it's huge i mean double i can tell you i've put more money on that card there's nothing i hate more than making lunches so again i'm happy to pay for it thank you thank you we appreciate it job well done then yeah yeah i mean if you look at what they vote with you know just doubling that that's what i was saying same year yeah yeah um and this has been a goal for years how do we get how do

170we get the students to start participating more because it's just been a steady decline ever since we've been on the board leave the national program you could do things a lot more creatively with food which chartwells has shown yeah right i'm glad we did and our students are healthier because of it even though well because they're actually eating eating and that's what i mean i mean and they can think better when they're when they're not hungry you know and that's not eating potato chips you said it's there's a 2.5 percent expectation for rising costs is that what you is that when you're reporting it goes above 2.5 percent there's i don't know if you've in the the agreement that was attached there there's an example that says if revenues returned to the client are one

171hundred thousand dollars but the cpi for the most recent december to december period was 4.5 okay then the re revenues returned to the client would be reduced by 2 000 so it's not a significant amount of money whatsoever but at least there's a little safeguard in there got it that helps them cover the cost of food yeah i was concerned i didn't want to see them cut back on staffing so what can we do in partnership so it's just kind of sharing the cost well job well done thank you yeah yeah fabulous all right jury had the exciting one with food mark drew the short straw with copiers and printers everybody had this one circled on the agenda let's go we have we had a five year lease with uh kanika minolta and um we

172replaced a large number of machines with that in the back end four or five years ago now we're having to start to replace some of the machines and we've also increased a usage that one of the one of the biggest things that east campus has been wanting to do is get more access for students right now a student has to download from their their chromebook into a computer and into the library or they don't have one in the comments yet and it takes time then you have to wait then you can print it what they're going to do is get what they call a smart queue or a basement base it's called base something search student facing software so um they'll be able to upload it just like we do if we have it and

173then they can just go and it'll be floating around and then go to one of those two printers once in a four digit pin and it'll print they don't have to load it and go through that extra exercise and that'll give more students access to the printers that you know in a quicker format so we're real excited about that and right now the plan is to have one in commons and one in the library and what we do is we for this one we like to try and keep the cost in alignment with the year rather than paying for five years worth and paying nothing before four years because the dollars for this are incorporated into the per capita cost for individual buildings in this case the bigger the cost is about um uh i

174mean 70 percent of it is for a large heavy-duty printer at the south campus and so we'll we'd like we like to keep it by building in five by a year so we do it in a lease which you know it's relatively low um we've used wintrust before they have bought our bonds in the past right we have a good relationship with them we asked them to give us a quote because they have a capital division which actually works with the retirement of the machines and we can get different services at that level if we want um and it's a few you know a few thousand less to do it with wind trust so we think it's the right thing to do so we're asking for approval of the lease um with them in the

175amount of uh 220 316 that'll be the action side of the meeting told you riveting special education i thought it was great well done [Music] special education transportation you've seen from all that we use a lot of different carriers or several careers we have one with sunrise company llc that serves about 100 kids and we are in a communal agreement with sas and we share costs with them and it's it facilitates them being able to take the kids from their home school to one location so it's good to get you know these are usually pretty far away maybe 20 15 20 miles away where special needs kids are getting special services and tuition programs and so it's better if we can you know combine the kids and all in one ride out to everything having

176five five different vehicles go out there thirteen percent increase is just kind of the number that's been buzzing around all transportation this year when i drive past the bus to the bus web that they have in westmont for students they have it on the the board always always hiring 5 000 bonuses you know so it's it's going to be expensive for for transportation the good thing about it is typically this has been reimbursed at a fairly high rate by the state especially transportation so even though we're going to be paying more hopefully they'll have dollars to offset it for us so that'll be an action item to extend the agreement with sunrise with our special ed program all right questions for mark one year extension again yeah because we did put a penalty sign into

177this so that if it's if they don't serve aside up at 100 don't we knock a percent off right away for that month billing so we we did it for a long time there was three of us that were working with them on behalf of saseb and that was the big thing we wanted to have a penalty if they don't perform so this is a big you know okay down to 10 thank you sure riveting again yeah well done it's up for action later on this evening all right fire requests we've received them we filled them you can see them on our website by clicking on fulfilled foyer requests okay we'll move on then to the public hearing section of our agenda for the honorable dismissal of teachers this this next agenda item is a

178public hearing on the proposed reduction in force of teachers this hearing is held in line with section 24-12 of the illinois school code which provides for the hearing when the greater of teachers to be reduced excuse me hearing when the number of teachers to be reduced due to economic necessity is greater than five or 150 percent of the average number of teachers honorably dismissed in the preceding three years whichever is more while the reductions contemplated later in this evening's agenda are not based on economic necessity we are holding the hearing with the intent of giving both the teaching staff and the public notice of layoffs and the opportunity to express their views to be clear the reduction in forces contemplated later in this evening's agenda will not impact educational programming and are not based on

179economic necessity rather these reductions are based on course selections for the upcoming school year do we have any discussion no this would be an opportunity if anybody in the public wish to address the reductions directly had the opportunity to as well the reductions i think you read it i was just making sure it's based on just the courses no longer being available the course the courses that students have selected so we're again the reduction goes along with the lack of course being needed or wanted by the students it's not a specific course it's like students put all their requests and then it takes out it tells us how many sections we need how many you know how many english ones we need to run in english dues and when all of that kind of folds

180together our enrollment is down slightly so the number of classes is down slightly and then these reductions are to reflect the fact that we we don't have as many courses to run in aggregate as we had last year but if we have an increase say a lot of students register over the summer and now we fill those these are the first people we usually call back correct and many of these are part-time staff that is coming back at a lesser amount or we're going to hope hopefully we'll come back at a lesser amount and stay with us in hopes that that does happen and it does sometimes over the summer okay okay anybody else anybody wish to address hearing may have a motion to close the hearing second mike and terry no it wasn't me

181oh i'm sorry chris chris my apologies christopher espinoza hi derek aye joanna vazquez drexler hi mike davenport aye fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye nancy kupko aye the public hearing is closed thank you next we'll move on to the consent agenda before we do is there any item that anybody wishes to to take out just talk more about before we do i would just like to thank joanna once again for being volunteering to be our assassin representative it's an important important role on the board so we need a motion for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes the personnel report 2022 2023 full-time renewals 2022 2023 non-10-year part-time renewals transition of position classified appointment classified the personnel report retirements classified resignation certified resignations classified the financial pages the assassin board

182of control governor governing board appointment the 2022-2023 proposed amended calendar the 2023-2024 proposed calendar and illinois high school association ihsa membership so moved second terry joanna jerry pavisic aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza aye shirelle fuller hi jenny hagstrom aye and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda curies next we'll move to the recommendation excuse me the recommendations for action the first is a motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of honorable dismissal of non-tenured teachers other than final year probationary teachers and the president and secretary be authorized to say to sign same so moved second mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mr respinoza aye cheryl fuller aye jenny hagstrom aye terry pavich aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries

183next is the motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of non-renewal to non-tenured teachers other than final year probationary teachers and that the president and secretary be authorized to sign same so moved second mike and chris thank you very much mike davenport hi mr espinoza aye shirelle fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye terry pavich aye joanna vazquez drexler hi and nancy kovka aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the hybrid block bell schedule beginning the two beginning the 2022-2023 school year so moved mike and terry do i get an opportunity to make it yeah okay the one thing i wanted to point out and i don't know if this is a amendment because it's already there this is for 20 22 and

18423 school year so next year we would approve this the next school year again this will go into effect for the next school year and that's what we would have going forward nope i get that for that so maybe i should say 23 24. is that the way to say it because it's saying out here it's beginning the 20 22 23 right here let me say what i'm trying in perpetuity until we change it that's correct so what i want to say and i know i'm going to probably goof this up for in a minute i want it to be looked at again based on the metrics that we talked about in that next school year to be sure that we feel like this was the right move for the school so i don't know

185how i meant that because i'm going to goof that up mike and terry would have to retract their emotion i i don't want it amended i think that the board has the authority to come back if we wanted to next we're going to be we're going to be getting the reports back right front where we have an independent group looking at what's going on we're going to be analyzing if at any point along the line so you as a board member wanted to make a motion to to take an action to make a change we always have that that authority to do that here's the good news not that i think that this will be a train wreck right i obviously believe i hope not very successful i'm somewhat staking my career i don't like

186the mention of no no i mean i'm i'm literally staking like this goes down i'm standing right there by you however let's say let's say the worst possible thing happened or the world changes in some way and we decide between now and september like whoa we need to pump the brakes sure the schedule's built on any period day right it would take something tragic right but we have scheduled and built around an eight period day i'm not even recommending that we should do this i'm just saying there is there's always there's an escape hatching this isn't like you're going to the block schedule like like a 4x4 block or whatever you're you're going to two days a week you're modifying what that schedule is we it's not a drastic change in the whole scheme of

187things so shirelle you know if it should look just terrible or the world should change drastically in some way there is an escape clause i wouldn't pull that cord unless we were plummeting to earth but um i mean that just shows you how much of a drastic change this is and is not at the same time right okay so but we've had but we've had an update every meeting every meeting this whole year we've talked about continue i think was it we will continue to have an update and then not only will we have updates as we if and when we launch this but we do have as you said an independent third party who's doing evaluation so we'll have periodic and update from them so i think to you would it address your concern

188to just say this we'll keep this on the agenda for the foreseeable future going forward every month as we have been doing that okay yeah i like that as well oh absolutely that means i mean we did it with the master facility plan we did it with the pandemic like constantly updating the board on a major change is kind of my job so uh we will keep that up and we want success right yeah i mean that's why we're doing this i mean if we're not getting it then you're going to know it right away because you're going to hear it we've had success so that's the point we want to continue to be successful we are not in an unsuccessful model now so that's the point i understood yeah all right okay so does

189that address your yeah if we can keep it um um monthly status checks are you make a good point dr feeling like we did for the master facility plan yeah this will be a standing agenda item get used to it like returned in person and master facility plan and you know any other major change we make we report on it regularly to the board and that will that trend will continue any other comments before we call the vote julie mike davenport hi trey pavisic aye joanna vazquez drexler aye christopher espinoza no shirelle fuller hi jenny heggstrom aye nancy koepka aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve contracts for summer capital projects to the vendors presented in the aggregate amount of three hundred fifty nine thousand eight

190hundred eight dollars and forty one cents so moved i'll second chris and mike thank you christopher espinoza aye mike davenport aye jerome fuller hi jenny hagstrom aye jerry the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the three-year food service agreement with chartwells so moved second terry and mike this one's personal it is terry favis aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza aye shirelle fuller aye jenny hagstrom aye joanna vazquez drexler hi i'm nancy kupko aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to authorize the district administration to execute all documents required to secure a lease with wind trust capital for the 2022-23 school year multi-function printers and copiers enthusiastically i move i do this second second enthusiastically mike and then joanna thank you

191mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye christopher espinoza aye cheryl fuller hi jenny heggstrom aye aye papasich aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries and finally we need a motion for the board of education to approve the amendment to special education student transportation services and transportation contract with sunrise southwest llc for the 2022-23 fiscal year and authorized the administration to execute all necessary documents to continue this contract so joanna and terry i think so yeah aye the motion curies okay we'll now move on to the second reception of visitors public comment this is the second reception of visitors which is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address

192the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts and writing to the board secretary mrs nadak visitors addressing the board need to submit a comment slip to the board secretary will be invited to the microphone prior to addressing the board audience members should state their full name the proceedings are being tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and are being live streamed i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant and audience observation of these protocols is appreciated all right we have two slips uh one is for eileen briner but i think she might have had to leave yeah okay and then the second one is for kevin custer i believe he's here there we go mr custer kevin custer my son is a senior at downers grove north

193in my last email to you hank and nancy you stated that you're not teaching crt however your response revealed your true objectives and i quote from your email district 99 remains committed to embedding social and emotional learning equitable includes inclusive practices and restorative practices into all learning environments i find the use of the word embedding in the email in the slides tonight very illuminating i looked up in the webster's dictionary embedding means to implant an idea or feeling within something or someone so it becomes ingrained or essential characteristic of that person these words reveal you're trying to indoctrinate my son and these students you want them to see people as oppressed and oppressors based on skin color race and gender based upon the video of intersectionality that all students were required to watch you're creating

194two classes oppressed and oppressors true equality is achieved by maximizing the ability of people to become self-sufficient not by dividing based upon race sex or gender this board should focus on people's ability to become self-sufficient not by dividing by race sex or gender resilience and excellence are common standards that challenge people from all backgrounds to achieve their greatest potential on the scale of desirable ends resilience excellence beats equity and restorative practices every time throughout history this board can no longer use linguistic shell games to hide your desires to indoctrinate these students history just isn't about people doing bad things most of the time the story is about people doing things they think are good but are rooted in division and destructive concepts leaders who abuse power through deceit linguistic manipulation and dissenting uh voices are

195always on the wrong side of history thank you mr custer okay we'll move on to communications and announcements uh lend jenny anything done okay you're on i'm on i'll try to keep it short so um we had a meeting on friday march 18th um a week earlier because of spring break we had a guest speaker representative tara costa she's on the house elementary and secondary appropriations committee um she's sort of just she's not doesn't represent a little sliver yeah a little sliver okay yeah so uh she sort of just gave kind of an overview um you know as the esther funds in the last couple of years have pretty much put most districts especially in dupage county in a pretty good place she's continuing to look at how to deal with arpa funds i had

196to look that up but she's also you know constantly looking at revenue streams for the long term she'd like to see some of the ebf evidence-based funding move to an above the line item which allows school districts for better long-term planning and less fluctuation of money from year to year overall she reiterated that in general we're in a pretty good economic place and then we sort of shifted she said there's been no talk of a property tax freeze um there has been some continued discussion as to the evidence-based funding and i think they're at a point of a five-year review she said the reviews look too you know one thing they did mention is trying to keep chicago public schools as a tier one school district and she said if that's the case you know

197she'd like to make sure they're held to the same standards as the other districts then we sort of shifted to our meeting agenda a lot of the bills that we would have interest in have kind of been held until the summer there is a continued review of the cte bill which is the career in technical education they adopted some opt-out language they pushed back the effective date it was noted during the meeting has indicated full support of the cte bill there are some e-learning accommodations that will expire at the end of this term but they are likely to be reviewed and revisited to allow for remote learning plans one issue that they touched on surrounding this potential legislation is that districts would be required to provide full payment to support staff anytime a remote or

198e-learning day is used and then we sort of we're running out of time after the speaker so short after that next month in april we'll begin to look at the budgets for next year thank you joanna no report the report uh 99 foundation we didn't meet chris anything on isb uh well uh in light with uh just the amount of teachers that are dropping off uh there have been a couple of bills have been introduced into committee that have attempted to allow for substitute teachers they instead of teaching up to 90 days in a school year it's 120 or we is the proposed change and then there's another that's i think substitute teachers are only currently allowed to sub for five days consecutively that would change to from five to fifteen again just trying to

199curb some of that um covered loss but yeah thanks chris and a reminder that the iasb division meeting will be at north high on april 6th uh the now north high team is going to do a little tour for other school board members to come walk and see the the projects at north um i would i think julie still got a couple of calls out i won't put you on the spot but if you haven't told julie you're coming yet please tonight let her know so we can get you registered for it um it's a you know you've been to these before but it's nice to to be the host no because they've been virtual yeah well this will be your first ones hopefully um but it you know it's a great opportunity to hear

200some speakers get some professional development as board members and to show off our new digs yes aren't the students i i rsvp'd i believe but what time is it we'll have uh yeah i think the tour is five three two or five actually chartwells is who we're partnering with to cater the event for us so nice to reward them with some business from dupage iasb um who pays for the event we don't you know there's no cost for us we just uh we we just host thanks man and it's really a great opportunity to network with other uh boards and and that and so um i encourage everybody to go and especially because it's it's in our backyard it's in our yard not even our backyard there you go it's a new yard and i

201will recognize that julie has done an incredible amount of work on this uh so is the north high team especially ken and michelle and all of them thank you thank you thank you upcoming board meetings we will have our next meeting on april 11th a workshop meeting at 6 30 here and then on april 18th we will have our regular business meeting at 6 30 again here then we'll just ask for a motion to adjourn so move second chris and cherelle all those in favor all those opposed we are adjourned really no opposition