001again let's call our workshop meeting to order christopher espinoza uh here cheryl fuller here nancy kupka thank you jenny hagstrom here terry pavich here going to vasquez drexler here mike davenport here sounds good o'hara here and jade teledonal here thank you i think we have a quorum let's stand for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right and we're going to flip up the uh flip around the student perspectives tonight and start with our student board member questions and comments so scarlett and jade take it take it away you like to go first would you like me to go first okay so hello everybody welcome back to
002second semester so exciting so all of you um in front of you have a northwind literary calendar it's very exciting we're starting off 2022. um with this i was created by northwind which is our magazine at north which is very exciting i know the kids put in a lot of effort for it i have mine at home and i think it came out very nice it includes art and literary pieces from our students student submissions which is very exciting so beautiful that's right as we start off second semester we do have course selection coming up a lot of students got the recommendations back in december so now in the next couple weeks they'll start choosing their classes for the upcoming school year which is very exciting although scarlet and i won't go through that process
003this year many will so that's very exciting with that our winter sports are continuing they are doing great i'm very proud of everybody and along with that we do have senior nights going on which is very exciting and going along with that we do have our orchesis dance company having their showcase later this week on friday and saturday i will be attending because i'm very proud of all their effort that they put in it's very exciting and their theme is unity which i think is a great theme for this school year everything going on in general i think it's very fitting last week we had our jazz cafe and it was in the commons which was very exciting uh using the new spaces to host that uh the sound impeccable the lighting how it worked
004it looked so cool i know they put in a lot of effort for that so it's very exciting we also had the allstate musical which is the most competitive musical in the state a lot of north high students participated in that in this by audition and it's very selective and they did amazing and i'm very proud of them and then north is hosting the 99th annual scholastic art show later this month which is the most prestigious art show competition that we have for student artists which is very exciting i'm so excited for artists to be able to showcase their art see other people's arts get critique and be able to grow because that i think is the point of anything be able to learn and grow from any experience we also have ilmua allstate coming
005up in the next few weeks for our student musicians which is very exciting they will be getting work class uh work work classes master classes i forgot the word which is very exciting for them to be able to showcase their abilities grow perform together with different people in the area which i'm very excited for them they'll have a great time done in peoria in the next few weeks we have the coral festival also happening next week which is our north high choirs with middle school choirs from the area which is very exciting because they'll be able to practice with them they're going to perform that same night which is very exciting because i think it really creates this sense of community that district 99 has been able to offer in its culture to be able
006to be inclusive and make sure everybody including the incoming classes feel welcome feel accepted feel like they have a place in our schools which is always the best case and going off of that with the sense of community uh north high will be offering a student organized blood drive at the end of this month which is very exciting because i think it's so important for us to be able to give back to our community because we are so thankful for them and i think it really is more than just a blood drive it's realizing that you're impacting not just people's lives that you're saving but everyone that they have in their lives is impacting beyond just that and finally at the end of the month we will be having our class of 2026 open house
007so we may be leaving soon but we have an incoming class my younger sister will be in that class so it's very exciting i'm very excited for her so yeah 2022 is going to be a great year i'm very excited yes yes and to scarlet yeah thank you jade okay so i don't mind won't be as long as jade's very detail-oriented but um there is there's a couple things i like to highlight so our second semester is off to a great start you know we're excited to see what the new semester holds brand new start teachers students we're all back happy to be back in the building our first week back was forum world language week so we celebrated by having bingo we learned some new words in german french and spanish and then there
008were prizes for people who won unfortunately i did not i don't have that luck but you know winter sports are back in full swing we can't wait to see how all the teams finish girls basketball will be hosting a fundraiser this saturday for savers so we'll be collecting clothes from 9 to 11 at the west events entrance and then those will be then donated to people in need and i also want to highlight wednesday will be our special olympics pack the place begins at 5 45 it's blackout theme so if you like to come you know the kids and the teams and the coaches they would all very much appreciate it girls basketball will all be there so i will be there with them and then our as jade said course selection is now going
009on so juniors sophomores and then our incoming freshman class 2026 will be having it on the 24th and the 29th so they'll have like orientation for a couple hours 6 to 9 on the 24th and then they will select their courses on the 29th so we're excited to see the impact that the class of 2026 has on the community in south i also want to give a shout out to our nine all-state musicians and singers for all their accomplishments i could never do that so it's amazing to see them perform and they're all they're all wonderful artists thank you all right thank you very good so i think we're going to hear from our north high students now correct all right i'll bring courtney forward thank you good evening everyone i am really really excited
010to introduce our student perspectives tonight from north high school we have with us uh this evening mr andrew heims one of our cte teachers and our students from our incubator class our very first incubator class and we have i think about eight students here i'm going to let them introduce themselves because they're going to present a little bit today but i will tell you i was really really lucky at the end of first semester back in december which feels like a million years ago already that i got to go in to see their final pitches for the semester and what i saw was absolutely incredible and it was really fun i mean not only are these kids talking to business leaders in our community but they're talking to lawyers they're talking to people with patents
011and learning about all of these really unique features of building their own product and building their business and so i thought it would be perfect for you guys to hear that tonight so i'm going to invite them to come forward so we have again drew heims here tonight and i'll let the students introduce themselves okay hi everybody um yeah a little bit you heard a little bit about the class um and i did bring some uh a couple of groups here with us uh they'll introduce themselves here in uh just a second but the the class itself again is just this authentic entrepreneurship opportunity that these kids get um it's real learning it's not role playing it's not out of a textbook um it's not quizzes and tests it's real applicable learning in which these
012kids are figuring out answers uh they're figuring out what works what doesn't work they're figuring out how to fail and how to pivot and continue moving forward so so far this year we're halfway through and the kids just got done before holiday break doing their mvp pitches in front of some of our volunteers from the 99 foundation board so we do appreciate their help with this but they're there to help act as the bank to help us if we need finances to make better prototypes marketing efforts moving forward whatever it is to try to get these businesses developed so we have two groups here for you i'm gonna let them introduce themselves tell you a little bit about their businesses so far what they've what they're working on um yeah all right my first group
013um yeah we got to be official so the people at home can hear us uh my name is hamza ahmed i'm kyle peters uh my name is me here shot uh i'm josh david okay so we're not just uh presenting our idea we kind of made this little pitch for you guys so yeah you want the clicker no no we don't um it's 2022 we're already here in the second week time really does fly sometimes you wish you could just go back almost teleport back to those fun and happy moments the good old days unfortunately that's not possible so how can we take those fast memories the ones no one prepares for the ones that no one poses for how can we take those and give them the same nostalgic feel we get when we
014look at a photo album yeah we can pull out our phones look at the photos and videos but it just isn't the same because the people in those memories aren't there with you and it's not organized that's where look back comes in look back is a way to look over memories and videos and photos with family and friends josh you're so unoriginal social me is already a thing i wasn't done me here um we're trying to create an app where how our generation thinks dude photo albums are so cool well only because they have the nostalgic feel to them when was the last time you guys seen a teenager print a photo and put in an album book you know what he might be right there oh sorry let me explain this idea to you
015so pretty much what our plan is is to create an app called look back and look back we'll pretty much have group chat so i'm gonna give an example just to explain how this app works so let's say you and your friends at the beginning of the summer create this look back which is essentially a group chat without the chatting okay and you'll send these photos and videos to that look back but the catch is that you won't be able to open it you'll set a date for it to open so let's say the end of the summer so at the end of the summer you and your friends will get together and look over those memories that you put into that look back over the summer and uh that look-back concept doesn't just apply
016to groups it also has a personal aspect to it so let's say for me example for example i'm on my weight loss journey so what i would do is on january 1st i'd create my look back okay and every day i'd put a video in i put a photo in or a video and i'd be able to add a little text to that too and the next year i'll set it to open on january 1st the next year and what i'd be able to do is look over the progress i've made in an organized manner which doesn't which really isn't there with the normal photo albums that they use um a lot of people are probably thinking this is just a photo album right the catch is once you put your photos and videos into
017we kind of think of it as a virtual time capsule you cannot look at them until the opening date to build the nostalgic feeling thank you all so much for your time that is our idea [Applause] we're also willing to take any questions does anyone has about that maybe someone have any questions no questions i i i love it yeah i really love what you guys are doing so where's it going next what's you know so then the plan is to uh pretty much uh get free downloads we're gonna we're gonna make a video we've already made a video but it's like a prototype we're gonna make another video which will be on a website which will and also that website will have something where you can pre-download this app and we're gonna get a
018bunch of free downloads see how many people would actually like you know like this idea and then hopefully we'll get into the process of developing it we're already talking to people who can develop apps and stuff we're currently talking with several different app developers trying to figure out an exact price point for how much it's going to cost to develop and a time frame for how long but right now like you said we're working on interviewing people in person asking what type of things they'd like to see if they would use our app and then we're creating a website right now where you can pre-download our app so when it launches you will automatically have it on your phone thank you for your time thank you great job great job that's impressive yeah very cool
019now the girls he's so smart of course [Music] so this is our company the pet so i'm jana rattery and so taking a look at these avocados you probably wouldn't want to eat the one that is brown and over ripened and since you don't want to eat this one you'd tend to throw it away thus wasting the money you spent on it so since it's unfortunate that we have to plan our schedules around these types of fruits and especially when they're expensive and you can't put a price on the health benefits they have so it's really just a waste of time and money and the problem that we face is that they're wasting their money and the food that um and their food due to the natural over ripening of these fruits so we found
020that the biggest complaint for consumers when it comes to buying fruit is either it's ripening too fast or not fast enough you never can find that sweet spot it seems so how did we fix this well let me tell you we came up with the idea of having a kitchen appliance that would ripen and preserve fruits and we learned from research that it's the same process for all fruits such as what's on the board and at first it seemed really unrealistic but then we dived into the natural process that occurs and whereas in fact it's very possible to mimic through science we went on a trip to mission produce which is a fruit distribution company which is doing a similar process to us but on a much larger scale ripening premature fruits and distributing them
021on a level two of a ripening scale of five which would be ready to consume and eat our goal is basically to bring that ripening process to people's homes speeding up the natural process of fruits so consumers can eat them when they're ready not when the fruit is alrighty hello my name is jocelyn and then on the screen if you go ahead and take a look you're actually able to see our first prototype that we began began to work on and it's a very similar concept to a air fryer where you put the food in the drawer and then you close it and then with our product since we're trying to preserve or speed up the ripening crosses of the fruit we actually um have the compartment in the back if you can see on
022the on the picture on the lower left it has a little opening and that's actually where the catalyst will be which will then be exposed to the fruit allowing it to be ripened or preserved with the change of cartridges for our next steps we're going to be continue working working with our intellectual property lawyer and also working on attaining patents and also since we learned that the process is available to all fruits we want to change our name from the pit to the ripe life which is more inclusive to all fruits we are also going to continue working with univar which is a global food ripening company with chemicals and we will better understand the ripening process by working with the chemists they have at that company it has been an honor to work with
023the various departments at school and it made this class cross-curricular for us i like to thank mr himes mrs dameswood mr dillard mr hines our mentor and all the teachers who have given an interest in our idea thank you i'll blew my socks off so i [Music] yeah so you guys can see from in one class we have somebody who's talking to uh programmers and developers and then we also have a group that's working with chemists taking field trips on their own meeting with different types of people you heard ip lawyers right we have lawyers coming into the classroom there's stuff that they can't disclose to me about their ripening process that i'm not allowed to understand how it works so that i can't take it very common question as the teacher like are you
024able to take their ideas and run with it when they graduate well the answer is no because i don't know how to do everything but it also makes my life as a teacher a lot easier because one i would tell you that the kids from top to bottom every single group of these kids have invested in this and every single one of them has grown throughout this process every group has hit a wall has hit you know some type of failure and they're learning how to pivot they're learning how to figure out things on their own myself as a teacher i i don't have to do a whole lot especially with the groups that you saw here today because they're doing it um you know so it's a it's been a wonderful experience i i
025can't tell you how proud i am of every single group of kids uh that we have i can't wait until may uh if you guys are interested may is gonna be the big pitch night um yeah where these kids are gonna go out and actually present these ideas for investment competition style shark tank style um you know and and we we couldn't be more excited so if you are interested investing i welcome you to come out and mate okay so thank you very much for listening to us tonight thank you to dr dement and the administration for all your guys support and uh you guys have a good night [Applause] i like those ideas it's not going to get any better than that so this is our entrepreneurship class we put into place what was
026it it could be an incubator yeah yeah yeah it was pretty recent so and then this last board meeting you approved the next level of that course so yeah these ones that are going to advance to a year two of this are the programs that could continue to advance so just a quick question i guess i could have asked when we talk about the ip um attorneys and different things how are we managing that or do we have people that because this is the type of thing that people that's where like drew undersold himself because that's what our teacher like he's saying he's not doing the work yeah i mean the kids are doing the work but he is helping them blaze their trail through and bring in the resources and make the connections that
027they need to make so that they figure out how to lead it from an idea to an actual you know product that people want to invest in right so his job of helping them guide go the right path to get them past those spots where they stop to be their cheerleader like those are all connect them with the right types of in you know professionals that's his job right and uh that's not an easy job i know he makes it he undersells himself yeah this is where um people would it would volunteer you know that are ip um and that's what they are that's what they're yeah my daughter's in it and so that's what's happening yeah so that he facilitates and kind of helps them with some connections and if they you know seem
028to be heading in the right direction or if so that's cool yeah he's kind of a guy who shepherded them down their path right so and there are a lot of people that volunteer or you know have offered to volunteer that they've asked to volunteer too so it's good yeah it's quite a it's a pretty cool like community outreach type thing too so very nice you can definitely see how it would take the entire student experience and bundle it up into one package right impressive and and and the community experience you're talking about i mean i can remember when i first came on the board just one of the things i was thinking about 10 years ago was all of the intellectual capital we have in our community you know and we got argon just
029down the street and i mean so the more we can engage all those resources with our students i mean the whole community benefits people if you take a look at the courses that the board has approved over the last couple of years like this course our internship course all of those are leveraging yep you know those community resources and building connections between our students and hopefully a future career yeah i think companies really like like to see it too yeah i think the students seem like they're having fun with it too right and i'm so excited we're taking full advantage of bringing the community in and all the resources because that's important yeah absolutely good stuff all right so we're going to move on to our first reception of visitors there are no forms no
030forms okay so sure we can move past the future i don't have to read this whole oh wonderful so let's go right into the board workshop and return to in-person learning right all right i still got to keep moving here all right return to in-person learning this is me all right uh good evening everybody uh as you can see from our this is up on our website our dashboard uh just as the rest of society saw spikes in coveted numbers we did as well i think we might have had more positive tests uh this last week then maybe all of the weeks combined uh we're pretty close to it coming back from break i'd like to take a moment to thank everybody on our staff that has been working hard to process all of these
031and support families and explain everything i know with all of the changing guidelines it's very frustrating for everybody to get one of those calls or to have to be working through it and to process what am i supposed to do how's it supposed to work how is my my kid going to get help all of those things were working through and trying to support everybody as as much as we can it's a large amount of work for the school staff the district staff has been pitching in as well to to try to lighten the load in the buildings but it is a heavy lift this week although we believe strongly believe as the board has heard from me for the last two years that having kids at school in person is the best thing that
032we can be doing hey can i just say to over break we had staff members having to to do a lot of work yeah yeah this the numbers that came in over break yeah the you know they're not reported here because we just report the weeks when we're in session but we had if i'm correct i had more cases that first week of break than we had all of november right last week before the break started and the first week of break we had nearly double what we had in our revenue yeah and same thing in north high right when i know that our staff had to do uh a lot of work yeah we had and we and we worked really hard and we had we we did what we could to keep things
033going with uh extracurriculars and that sort of thing so make some changes thank you too ed and courtney put in a lot of hours over break to make sure that things could keep running at school so and their teams did as well coaches were very flexible in changing practice plans and how things worked so we could try to keep things safe and keep things moving the the numbers are reflected in our staff cases as well you can see we had more cases in the last week than we had in the first four months of the school year amongst our staff this has also taken a lot of of lifting by our entire school community our teachers have been working almost non-stop they're either teaching their classes or covering for somebody else or helping another staff
034member out the the group that pieces together subs and coverage and and finding everything from that has been working you know non-stop hr department you know this has been uh a large amount of work to try to keep everybody in there has been several points the board knows where we were on a tipping point between would we be able to staff classrooms or not the administration including our principals have been subbing in classrooms this week district administrators have been in buildings so we're doing everything we can to try to piece this together and keep it moving forward but i need the board and for the public to understand that this is on a razor's edge as to how this goes hopefully we've seen the peak of this and it starts dipping back down but it's
035taken a lot of teamwork and effort and then finally i want to just point out that our students have been incredibly helpful and patient throughout this last week as well you know they've seen a lot of different teachers come through a lot of different adults come through and we've had no student issues that i've heard of students have stepped up they've been respectful they've worked with the subs that have been in there they're they're working just like all of our adults are to kind of make it through this crazy time and then hopefully we see it kind of go back the numbers go back down to what we were seeing before this this piece so a huge thanks to everybody involved our students our parents that are dealing with sick kids at home you know
036our staff our administration everybody that's working to make school continue in person as best as we possibly can right now so um some good confusing updates as usual from the health officials um i have said many times to the board how incredibly frustrated i am with our state and our state leadership and the fact that we cannot get timely clear decisive information from the state level i'm going to say it here again publicly the cdc came out with guidance i think two weeks ago on changing quarantine practices it took a little time for the cdc to clarify that yes that they intended schools to be included in that i don't know why that was a question because i would think if schools were excluded they would have clearly said schools were excluded from it but
037it took us a while for the agencies to say yes schools are covered by this then once they did we've been in a holding pattern at the state level for the five-day quarantine change within schools on friday we received an email in the morning saying it's coming soon we're sitting here monday night and we're still waiting for clarification so i hope you can sense the frustration that i'm experiencing once again that having to lead a district with all kinds of different changing and conflicting information from multiple levels of government ultimately the governor's executive order and idph have not provided updates for schools on five-day quarantine this is the cdc guidance that we expect to be coming there's a couple of key changes in here students that have received two doses are considered to be fully
038vaccinated under the new guidance they do not receive need to receive the booster but it's recommended that they do after five months staff it changes that fully vaccinated means both doses and a booster or the single dose of j and j and a booster or as it has been anybody who has tested positive using a viral test is in the clear for 90 days right so the first bullet it's really what it has been the second bullet is a key change for us because up to this point any staff that had received their two doses of the equivalent were not eligible for contact tracing couldn't be a close contact well they were eligible they would be contact traced but couldn't be identified as a close contact under this a staff member that hasn't yet received
039their booster could end up as a close contact so in a time where we're seeing spiking numbers we could run into more staffing issues if staff don't get get the booster we've encouraged i sent out a message to all staff last friday letting them know we think this this isn't in place yet but we anticipate that some version of it will be soon from idph that's what they tell us and then once that's in place then we will move to that next one so it'll be essential that our staff that have chosen to get vaccinated also choose to receive the booster to know to be out of that close contact range all right so we're holding on communicating this out to you know this is out there this is what the cdc guidance is but
040we haven't sent anything out to families yet because we're waiting with idph to see if they make any tweaks or changes in this guidance so that's close contacts questions on any of that then the change i'm sure you've seen this out there as well is the change between if you're a close contact or your confirmed case and you need to isolate or exclude um it's been changed to five days after the onset of symptoms or from the test date and then if five days have gone by and you have no symptoms you can return and then it gets into the details of how we count up those days underneath there's a you know there's just so much out there that sort of you know we have to call every family talk to every staff member
041to kind of work through and there's a lot of questions that come with everyone like everybody's obviously concerned and trying to understand the rules and it's just it causes a lot of time and frustration amongst everybody that you know the rules keep changing and it's hard to keep track of everything the fact that it's different in school versus everybody else i understand you know how how difficult that is we're doing our best to support everybody as we move through it the last final change is if they if somebody's out for those five days when they come back they need to wear masks as we always do through day 10 but the challenge will be when a student or staff member returns for days six through ten if they can't maintain maintain six feet of distancing
042they can't remove their mask right so we end up in spots like primarily lunch band and some high risk extracurricular activities like swimming well you can't wear it in the pool um gymnastics wrestling where uh they are they're supposed to take off their mask for safety reasons but they can't and maintain the six feet of distance so we're gonna have to maneuver through this for that kind of four day window right so uh we're working through this in the buildings as to where we already have some locations where students are uncomfortable removing their masks and eating in close proximity to one another that they can spread out we might need to come up with a couple of other spaces depending on how many students yeah are able to take advantage of this so we'll we'll
043work through that in the buildings to identify some some additional physically distanced eating areas so uh still waiting we have an email ready to go out to everybody assuming uh that this as we've told soon and imminent is in place plus whatever things illinois adds to it so that's kind of where we're at right now so do you have a ballpark of how many like just a percentage of how many teachers or students are vaccinated i don't have for students because there's there's a lot of things in collecting it we have some that we've collected so we've been using the county wide number which is about 70 percent across the county is just we're going to be somewhere around that right staff we're at 96 fully vaccinated under the old definition i don't know under
044the new definition with the booster where we're at are we seeing do you know if we're seeing a lot of breakthrough cases or are we really seeing a lot of the unvaccinated terms of the staff getting getting covered just like we see in society there is a larger percentage of unvaccinated individuals that end up with cova than those that are vaccinated yeah we're you know what you see in we're just a cross-section of society right so what you see out in the public is what we see here at school except it does seem to be that cases at school are not spreading at the same rate as in public right because we're all massed we have good ventilation we have you know but we were probably more mindful of the mitigation strategies in a school
045setting than just the general public sure yeah does it in parents best interest to update the schools with their kids vaccinations it helps us with the rate at which contact tracing happens because then it's right there and you know we don't have to look at it the parents can always email the nurses that information but if we don't have it we still follow up with every family to be sure all right any other questions on those the drama of covid continues and yeah ever changing moving forward just keep moving forward right so we're all here we're all learning that's what's important all right hybrid block schedule right all right i'll bring gina forward good evening i'm going to give a real quick update on where we're at in terms of our solve force as you
046may recall we have adopted the hybrid block schedule i just put this in as a reminder where monday tuesday and friday or eight period days and then the black days are wednesday and thursday we have several committees and those are those salvors that we've talked about before three of the committees met in december the part-time and traveling teacher schedule committee met in december i'm met with them and we looked at potential schedules there were several teachers there who are part-time teachers and so we worked to kind of map out what some of those schedules might look like and we gathered feedback from them concerns ideas it was really a great opportunity to see what is a priority for them we have a professional development committee that also met in december they created a draft schedule
047to determine what the priorities are and how different professional development activities will look in terms of the calendar of the year because as you may recall we will be doing professional development inside of the school day during what would be the teacher's lunch period just like students teachers have a lunch period either period four five or six and so a little bit different schedule for it but certainly mapping out what that could look like the department course team time i'm also leading that committee with one of our department chairs we met in december we looked at potential solutions we mapped out what the priorities are and tried to pair those solutions with the priorities and our group will come back together our small planning group will come back together and look at those options we
048have two other committees that will meet soon they have not started meeting yet we were very deliberate in which committees would meet first based on the volume of work the committee needs to do the fact that as you heard from our students our student board members we have students going down for registration appointments very soon and so scheduling is a big issue and that's why we kind of mapped out the part-time traveling teachers some of the department course team time and then the largest committee which i'm leading with a teacher is our act source and resource period committee and the access is built into those two days and that committee is about 50 people so it's a large committee we've met twice we met on december 1st we met on the 14th and i'll be
049sending out an email to the group either later tonight or tomorrow for our third meeting at our first meeting dr silly joined us and really set the vision what is the goal of the access and the resource periods and we started talking about programming what it could look like our second meeting we certainly addressed questions revisiting what we had discussed the previous meeting we looked at some possible structures for access period we actually looked at two options that we brought to the team and then we asked the team if they had ideas and two other ideas came forward we put out a google form to ask for individuals to be on like a subcommittee to work just on access and then we looked at a calendar for potential resource resource being those lunch periods periods
050four five and six different large group activities for students that it could occur on their lunch period because remember their lunch is built in in all students and all teachers into periods seven and eight so they'll have that additional time this committee as i said i'll be sending out an email very soon um at that meeting we're going to map out the access calendar work on our subgroup and you know who's going to be on what planning phases of it we are still brainstorming activities for resource and then we're also looking at our policies practices terms of attendance expectations for students and i anticipate this committee continuing to meet some of the other committees may meet once or twice like our part time and traveling teacher committee that's not going to be an ongoing all
051semester committee but this committee i do anticipate will be and then just a reminder of our task force timeline this is just one of the updates on the sal force and what we've done since we presented last time any questions just a general question what's your sense for your confidence level and that we we're actually going i mean these softwares are going to be solved after this work yeah i definitely feel like we have the right people on the committees and they are committed to the work so i feel confident that we will be able to solve some of the questions and concerns um and and just issues that will arise with a new schedule certainly there's a lot of work to be done but i do believe we have the right people especially on
052the access resource committee because that's one of our ongoing committees unlike some of the others might meet you know a couple of times this is going to be ongoing and i anticipate the work related to access and resource will continue into the summer and next year okay right it's new there's a lot of programming of course that we need to plan for um but i'm very pleased and and when you think about we have 50 people who have volunteered or have been asked and agreed to be part of this committee and i think that speaks to our teachers and administrators and their professionalism and commitment you mentioned some ideas are already being generated and and so coming up when's the next meeting we are hoping to schedule the next meeting for january 20th but i
053haven't sent that email out yet so some people might be listening and they're going to have a trailer on that yeah right you've made emphasis that uh you know progress is going to be reported back to the board right for the reign of the year so we'll be this will be an ongoing regularly scheduled event hearing from gina so all right so we are still looking to implement this in the fall yes absolutely in august we're fine tuning right yep we're fine-tuning all the concerns nancy do you have something oh yeah i know this is the direction we're heading but it's not we said we would know by i want to say with your eyebrows you would know for sure if we were going forward with this for the next semester based on the file
054force so i'm curious as to how we're going to approach scheduling different models yeah it's the schedule itself is either way is built around the same eighth period day so scheduling outside of part-time teachers and traveling teachers which we think we've resolved in our last couple of meetings are really the only key impactful pieces that we needed to make sure that we could work through before scheduling started otherwise we're fine to schedule with this model moving forward and get ready for next year in the new model and then if we run into a solve for which i would expect that by now if there was something that gina or i were strongly believing that we couldn't solve for over the next couple of months we'd be coming to you at this point to say oh
055we need some more time i think we're well on our pathway to having this all of our solved floors resolved and be ready for uh our next school year but you know we still have work to do so you know i still want to reserve the right where if something comes up or you know something develops along the way here and also we're living in very uncertain times right now that if something should change that i would come back to the board and say hold on we need to put a pause on it but i would i am in the very high percentage i don't want to give you a number but because i can't give you a real one but i feel very strongly that this will be the schedule that we'll be moving
056to next year but we should assume that this is where we're going unless i pull the emergency brake for some reason in terms of what they need and what they want what they desire so okay thank you yes we'll go go about course scheduling as we always have which is the first priority is making sure that as many students as possible get the courses that they want to get any other questions next thank you thank you gina i have uh rob coming forward for summer school nice to think about summer 10 degree day yeah let's think about 85 yeah all right good evening everybody i can't hear myself yeah this is on uh so i'm here to talk about summer school i actually have christy toth here with me she's going to talk about this
057past summer school but before christy takes the microphone i'd like to spend a little time bragging about her because she deserves to be bragged about the 2020-21 school year was an incredibly stressful school year especially for our teachers at the same time we had a vacancy for our summer school director because our previous director now has summer commitments so he can't be around during the summer so in a time when teachers were ready to just take a break during the summer we had a whole court whole cohort of teachers who signed up to be teachers in summer school and we also had christy who raised her hand and said i'd like to continue working and then work during summer and it also happened to be the largest summer school that we have ever had so
058christy joined us christy found many ways of doing things better for our students during summer school and led the largest summer school that we've ever had so she's going to come up and talk through this past summer's summer school and then i'll talk through some plans that we have going forward for this upcoming summer all right so since we've been talking about cobin things i have to share that we had the largest summer school by almost double serving over 500 and we had zero covered cases in summer school so we did something right over that period of time um because that was the first time that we were actually fully in person before that we had done remote for a period of time we had done hybrid but we hadn't actually been fully in person
059and so we had to do a lot of brainstorming and this took so many staff members to make it work we were actually even more restricted than we are in schools now as far as having dots the kids had to sit on at lunch we had to move kids classrooms three different times throughout summer school and our cmg team just absolutely rocked they worked the entire summer for our kids our secretaries and support staff our nursing staff to do any contact tracing or checking in on what was going on in our admin at both campuses and at the asc to really make this happen so as we mentioned it was the largest summer school by over double the amount of kids that we typically have and one of the reasons that was able to happen
060is because gina zaccardi worked her magic to be able to find ways to use those sr funds to be able to offer summer school for free for all of our students so no student in district paid for summer school this past year and additionally they had free breakfasts and lunches provided every day and so not only did they do that they got hot hot lunches or cold lunches i mean the everything was just coming together by the people that wanted to do work to get kids in the building because it was so energizing at that time um so really cool things that kind of happened i did mention i wanted to mention that 99 of our students that enrolled were in-district students and that was free for all of them and then only one percent
061of those students were out of district and they were charged at that time um but overall we have four main programs we have our academic programs we have enrichment programs driver's ed and then online credit recovery i'll touch on each of those really briefly and then we can take time later for some questions so in our academic programs which is probably what you consider typical summer school we had 518 students that were able to earn credits at the end so that's just not kids that enrolled it's the kids that actually earned credits in the end and stuck all the way through summer school we had all of our typical core classes running and then we also were able to offer global connections for the first time in years years years and a full section of
062consumer education which typically is on and off as to whether or not we could run based on how many kids need that so that was one of those courses that a lot of kids were able to take to make their schedule the next year a little bit prettier we were able to get paraprofessionals which are like teacher aides that really support student learning to lower our teacher to student ratio in every math class and that was a lot of math classes in semester two alone we had seven math classes running typically we would have three to four in a school year we ran a section of foundations of math one which is not always occurring either based on the number of kids that need to be there and we also ran biology and two sections
063of ap chemistry prep ap chemistry prep is more of an enrichment course but it's preparing the kids that are going to be an ap chem the next year and both of those were able to run in a really unique format of like a hybrid blended type class but those teachers have been doing that before hybrid and blended got cool before covet hit that was like a thing that we were practicing that was going to be a good practice one day and i still think will be a good practice and so they very effectively ran that program for enrichment we have freshman bridge so we check out the students who may be targeted to struggle a little bit more if we just look at the data because they struggle in reading or in math and we're
064able to support them to bridge them better into high school we offered like i said the two ap chemistry preps and typically we only have one of those and it's not completely full keys to academic success which is all of the executive functioning skills so like how do i note take how do i ask questions of teachers how do i text mark and i got multiple emails i just got another one last week from a parent that said i just can't get over this i need to tell you how awesome that class was for my student and that class is open to any student no matter what your ability you can be an ap student you could be an incoming freshman and so that was a course that was really successful this year as well
065and then we have el enrichment so for english language learners it's giving them another chance to bridge their language and practice it over the summer driver's ed initially was not going to run so i actually just started for this next year driver's ed stuff like right now like it usually starts pretty early to get things running initially we did not think it could run and the reason was because we were so far behind on catching up on hours from when kovit was going on we couldn't drive with kids but gina zaccardi and adam peterson are two people that made it work and came together and we were able to get it to get 50 kids their licenses over the summer i lied it's 49 i'm sorry um but we got 49 kids their licenses over
066the summer which was super successful in a really unique crazy schedule and those teachers worked hard to make it work so that was exciting credit recovery that's an online model and typically we wouldn't offer that unless a kid was already in a summer school program so this year we did that same thing let's say that they failed a few classes or they wanted to catch up on a few classes in greater place if they were already in the in-person model because we needed all students to be in person at this point there wasn't really the option then they could add on another class online also for some of our seniors who had really gotten behind and wanted to graduate we gave them multiple classes as options and for people in very unique life circumstances we
067were able to get them those classes and we had 130 students like i said complete 100 classes and six students graduate high school that wouldn't have otherwise um there was i will be completely honest when you guys look at the report there's a part that says the reason for attending summer school we usually ask that on like the bubbled form that the parents used to fill out when they were enrolling for summer school we went digital this year and that question was not something that i wrote out so next year you'll have that data back again to see did they want to be enriched what wanted to happen i could make up that data right now assuming based on looking at kids grades but i feel like it's one we could skip a year and
068we'll come right back to on that um and last i just wanted to share i feel like these numbers can be a little bit boring but this district really prides itself on its stories that's something that we consistently hear as staff members is to share the stories so by being able to run this summer school little stories about kids i know i had one student who earned two a's two full semesters in summer school after two full semesters of f's so they were remote f in every class effort in every class without exception went into summer school two a's and the student came back and said i cannot wait to come back to school next year i still see that student in the halls and he's still beaming ear to ear and still a really
069big success story we had a student that built such a strong relationship with a teacher that they went from last year working with selective mutism and really not speaking at all in class wouldn't talk to any teacher any peer anyone and they actively engage when i was watching that class in really deep and meaningful discussion they were talking about things that i couldn't even believe i could hear that voice coming out so that was an example of someone going above and beyond building that connection we had a teacher that was home for a period of time um due to fmla leaves and other things going on and they couldn't wait to be back in the building and on the first day back when they were teaching they came into my office and they had tears
070in their eyes and they just thank you for hiring me i like i love working with kids this is filling my heart so i wanted to share that story too as a little narrative and then finally we had multiple students who had anxiety about coming back to school this was the first time they were going to be forced back in yeah one girl in specific our policy is really tight i believe you guys know in summer school it's after two absences you can't come back because we only have 11 days total in the semester and it makes up a large percent so this girl had missed day one and then we go into day two she wasn't there and so we called and said hey hon like what's going on and found out she was
071really anxious and so we said can you just come to school we don't want you to walk to the class we're just going to see do you want to come up to north high doors and we're going to say hello to you we did we said hello and eventually she's like yeah this isn't so bad i said do you want to walk up to the class but we're not going to go into the class we're just going to go look at the class we're going to see what goes on eventually we got to do you want to meet your teacher but we're not going to ask about the subject we're not going to talk about like the stuff you have to do or what you've missed yes and then eventually the student said can i
072come back tomorrow and do the work like can i ask the teacher what missing work i have to do that student ended with an a in both semesters of summer school and is still beaming in the halls when i see her now so i think that i wanted to share those stories because it's bigger than just the numbers thank you guys for supporting summer school because it was a really successful summer [Applause] wow christy is amazing you'll notice when you exit you'll see her photo on the wall over there is one of our national board certified teachers she's awesome in her job as a teacher and she did a really great job last summer as our summer school director so going forward to next summer i was reviewing i know this sounds pretty lame but
073i was reviewing our old board uh meetings the youtube videos to figure out how long ago it was that we committed that we were going to expand summer school it was december of 2019 and at that point we said after construction we'll have a plan ready and then covet hit a few months later right so it's obviously slowed us down a little bit but we do have ambitions of making summer school more than just the credit recovery model that we have right now one thing that we've learned as we've processed this is that we need an administrator whose focus on expanding summer school is there year round so our current model has hiring an individual to be the person who runs summer school but we really need somebody who has that focus year round in
074our administrative meetings to talk about how to expand summer learning opportunities so as you know we are in the process of selecting a new administrator a director of student experiences that person will have a primarily responsibility of uh helping us to envision how to expand summer school now the challenge is that person starts july 1 of this year we want to try to make some steps towards that this upcoming summer so gina and i have meetings with our department chairs and our apis to talk about how can we start to offer some some options during the summer for students to accelerate through their core sequences and then we're also reaching out to our peers in other districts to see how they're doing it one thing you'll notice in the request that i have for you
075is i'd like to do something unique with that director stipend because just like our previous summer school director christy now has commitments that prevent her from being on-site during the month of june for summer school but she does an amazing job as the director so um what i'd like to do is split that stipend in half and then christy is our priest summer school director and then depending on how we hire for that director position it could be that that person comes in early and is our on-site summer school director or we have to troubleshoot it and figure out how to have an on-site director for this upcoming summer but that's still a solve for and tbd once we get through the hiring process so you'll see in the the report the recommendations that i
076have typically we do this every year we increase the teacher stipend with cpi cpi was 1.4 percent increased the director stipend by the 1.4 percent also we'd like to hold the tuition cost at the 210 dollars per semester for in district and 420 for out of district it was a few years ago that we did a five percent increase we don't feel that there's an increase that's needed right now one thing that christy did mention is last summer through a combination of us feeling that it was really important to remove as many barriers as possible for students because of last school year in addition to the asser funds that we had we were able to find ways to make summer school no cost to all of our students except for the driver's ed students we
077feel that this year is a much more normal academic year and we don't have as much of a need to offer that we also have the assert funds allocated other areas but keep in mind that our fee waiver students always for you know always get it no fee associated with them so we'd like to get back to a normal model where our students are paying their tuition for their summer school because we feel like the need that we have last year is not there this summer to subsidize it through the user funds uh and then we have the calendar uh that we'd like to recommend for summer school for this year starting on june 7th going through june 23rd having the fridays off uh and then july 4th falls on a monday so we would
078have that monday off in second semester but second semester would run from the 27th of june to the 14th of july i have a question yeah oh i'm sorry go ahead i think that's it okay do we generally subsidize the the summer school for students that may not i know we offered it for free last year but for students who aren't able to pay for it yes yeah yeah i was thinking we did but i wanted to be sure yeah and then their whatever form it kind of somewhere on there tells them if you can't afford to pay for it you could yeah there's a way for them to indicate it and they're also a way for us to check our records from the previous school year to confirm all right would the fee include
079food again well i believe because we moved out of that program we don't have that available any longer right no that's not an available option any longer i mean students that aren't on free lunch yes we would still provide but all other students would we'd have lunch options available for them to purchase you said because we don't have that program anymore how do we i i don't recall last year was a long time ago i don't recall how we um how we were able to get that program yeah that was all federal money that came in and even throughout the school year we were providing meals yeah i remember that yeah and then we just continued that throughout the summertime yeah we don't have that flowing anymore part of the federal national food lunch program
080which this year we chose to leave uh to provide students a better meal experience quality of this school year yeah okay so that all went together yep yep okay yeah no i'm only asking because it sounds like um it was successful summer school it also was so much going on um you know more kids could be interested in it another thing i i took away from it probably the intimacy of summer school meaning it's not as many students where some of the kids opened up and with so much going on were able to to enjoy it so this was thinking there's also a different structure of the day right because you're with the same teacher for almost a whole day for the equivalent of a semester right it's a as a high intensive it's like
081a j term in a college experience right yeah so it gives teachers and students this different opportunity to build relationships and get to know each other different and you know and for some students it's maybe their second time through the content so you know it's just different it's a very different i used to love to teach summer school just because of that you know just a different way of running school for a period of time um so it's just hard to compare one to the other but they both have their place and no certain and that's certainly on the things you mentioned that's kind of what i meant about the intimacy of it because you are with the the teacher piece and the subject matter being where you don't have ten of your classes or
082how many other students may have at one time so lots of things going to it so i just was asking about it because it could be positive again as far as a bunch of students but i mean we opted out of the grant so we just wouldn't have the free component of it well and part of the funding this year this past year was those additional federal coveted funds though i wonder yeah it's just unless they give us another round of funding which is which is possible uh you know those funds have been allocated in different places right yeah any comments questions sorry kind of a parallel um to what cheryl was talking about we saw we had more than twice the number of students participate this last summer so it begs the question right
083is it was was that a a factor uh is it the fact that it didn't cost anything was that a factor was was it a fact you know covet going on and the need to kind of the desire to get back or the need to you know catch up so to speak with was that a factor i think the answer to both those questions probably yes so um uh it'll be interesting to see what happens this coming summer um and getting back to the the point why why are you taking you know the the summer class um uh will be good information that we gather then this summer to to analyze that i do i do get concerned about the funds right i mean i i can picture students um in a family where technically
084you know they're able to afford summer school but mom and dad say no or mom says no our dad says no or they're even afraid to ask or what you know and um removing that barrier um is something maybe we can talk even more about as we go along or at least to minimize that and we work with any family that needs us to work with them right we can work out payment options and everything else for anybody that needs them they just need to let us know when do you start to get a sense of how many you're going to have for summer school yeah yeah so um yeah exactly pretty much we kind of have an idea based off of grades from first semester but really even though second semester grades it's a
085fast turnaround from when the grades are issued to when the student signs up ready set go but leading into it you know our counselors have a have a good idea of we're not so sure if this student's going to pass this class so let's get everything prepped for them to take it but ultimately it's up to the student to sign up for it okay are the are the teachers encouraging students to to look at that as an option is that something actively that's going on yep teachers and colleges and counselors yeah very good anything else i guess we're moving so proposed summer school that was in the report okay left an extra slide there got it um so recommendation for action right so uh we have a personnel report today that is our one action
086item uh i am excited within that action item is the appointment of our next principal at south high who has joined us today uh miss arwin pokorny lip who is a very experienced educator who i think you will come to find over the next few years pending board approval this evening that she is a very student-centered experienced principal that nobody can fill ed shoes except maybe ed um but you know you always get concerned especially in these times that you're going to bring in a leader of a building and go backwards and i'm very confident that uh with arwen's leadership there that south high will continue to excel and continue to move the district forward irwin's very familiar with our school district she has served as courtney's mentor this year so you can imagine she
087would know if this wasn't a place that she wanted to be and obviously is excited to be a partner with courtney here working together moving forward but also she is a resident of the community and we have two future mustangs here in the room with us as well [Music] so i am very confident and the hiring team is very confident in selecting irwin as the next principal of south high and we hope that the board approves this here with our next action item afterwards assuming that the board approves we'll bring arwen up and introduce her super so how about we get through the business right and then we get the phone stuff so i need a motion for the board of education to approve the personnel report leave of absence classified and appointment administration so
088moved second all right so we've been moved and seconded there we go joanna thank you so much terry pavicich aye joanna vazquez drexler aye nancy kupko hi christopher espinoza hi cherelle fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye mike davenport hi sounds like we've approved all right so i will bring irwin forward to introduce herself congratulations little fun bit of trivia as well arwen is the seventh principal of south high so only the seven and the first female principal of south thank you so much i just um i wanted to say first my thank you to each and every one of you and to dr thiele i could not be more honored and more humbled to assume this position so just my sincerest thanks for this opportunity i know that south high and district 99 have such a
089long tradition of rich stories and fun traditions and i'm excited to be a part of that as well as working with our students to create new ones one thing i wanted to share that came up often throughout the interview process was my desire to work with students to create systems that amplify and empower their voices to continue the work that ed is leading to make sure that south high is the most inclusive place it can be so that every student can show up every day at school as their authentic self so that's the goal and at the same time i'll be building collaborative positive relationships with staff and fostering those individual connections with families so i could not be so more excited to get started and just thank you again all right all right thank
090you yeah so i have um on the phone um my tommy lip who is currently a seventh grader at jefferson junior high in woodridge and he was at a ba individualized baseball practice tonight then i have aj lip he's a fifth grader at sipley school in woodridge aj actually swims here um twice a week alternating between here and donners north with hornet swim club then brody is a third grader at sipley and brody um assuming i'll go as planned brodie will graduate from south high in 2031. that's right brody are you ready [Laughter] thank you oh and my husband um [Laughter] there's this guy over here holding the phone who's the man with the phone my husband tom is a donor's north graduate he graduated class of 1990 and so we are just excited to
091kind of immerse um our family life with my professional life with the boys schooling experience and we're all just so excited so thank you again thank you all right uh next is reception of visitors and i have not seen any forms come in so we have no reception of visitors all we have left is to adjourn so moved second here's joanna i think it was joanna buy a hair you can have it okay all right all in favor aye those opposed don't you dare motion proof meeting is adjourned thank you everybody you