2021-12-13 CSD99 School Board Meeting - LIVE EVENT

001mike davenport i am here christopher espinoza he will be joining us by phone shortly we hope if we can grab him oh okay thank you jenny hagstrom here terry pavich here joanna vazquez drexler here nancy kupka here scarlett o'hara here jade palodano here thank you we have a quorum let's stand 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 okay we're going to start with student board members questions and comments i'm saying close the stores thank you since i last updated the board many things been going on at south winter sports are in full swing we've all started our seasons so we wish all the teams good luck as they

002continue their seasons one event that i want to highlight in athletics happened this past saturday december 4th it was our evan's elves night hosted by our boys basketball program emma malo unfortunately passed away during a couple years ago in the summer so he was part of the football and basketball program to the basketball program honored his memory by collecting donations of gift cards and toys to give to local families in need during the holiday season uh this past week was full of concerts and art shows by our many students in the fine arts department so it was amazing to see all of them show their talents i would also like to congratulate the cast and crew of our winter play which was rose in the rhine it was amazing it was very unique and a

003different experience i know many of the students enjoyed seeing it and then finally i would like to congratulate the 210 d 99 students who are recognized as illinois state scholars it's an amazing accomplishment and we're all proud of them and this week all our students are gearing up for that last final push of the semester it's finals week and i know we're all looking forward to that break so just good luck to all our students as they take their final exams and we can't wait to see all that we accomplished in the new year fabulous okay so i haven't updated you all since november so it's been a while so back in november we had our veterans day event which is something that we always do at north and due to covet we did have

004to change it up a little bit but it was still awesome to be able to accommodate some veterans from our community into our school and be able to sit down with them and understand their stories i helped organize the event and it was a great opportunity it's always one of my favorite events of the year so that was great and then also our fall sports did come to an end and they all did fantastically well and i'm very proud of them and our winter sports have started up too and they are doing so well as we start this season um going into our fine arts programs our one act plays the black box chaos did very well um our cast and crew did very well in that we're very proud of them um also in

005our fine arts we got the official invitation to london's new year's day parade which is very exciting for all our fine arts the band and choir programs will be joining that event which is something that i think is such a great educational opportunity for us to be able to give our students i know the last time it was done was my freshman year and a lot of my friends did it and it was a great opportunity for them and i'm very excited that we got to do this again um last week mosaic week best week of the year in my opinion it was great yes it really was um i think within our fine arts it's so amazing to be able to see how our fine arts programs unite with between both schools to be

006able to do these concerts like i know especially our orchestras do both concerts and north and south it's a busy week but it's so worthwhile because you get to see people from our community come in to see these concerts and also just former alumni come back and support their friends and their teachers and the programs overall and i think that is something so amazing that we were able to do we also had our congressional district representative come and visit us last a couple weeks ago sean caston i got to see him speak during our fourth period it was a very educational opportunity i think it's great that our students are able to meet with our congressional representative and understand and ask questions and be informed about how everything's working within our government and i think

007that's a very valuable experience yesterday north hosted a vaccination clinic which i know our superintendent was at i saw a picture of a bunch of our superintendents locally volunteering so thank you for doing that dr thiele um also last month we did lose one of our students at dgn senior daniel figueroa era baron passed away leaving a community morning and our school culture has always shown great resilience kindness and a deep sense of empathy and that's something that i'm always thankful for so my deepest condolences go out to the fergaroa era baron family and they're in our thoughts and as scarlett also said it's our final week one more push we're just doing our finals a lot of exams it's stressful but after this it's going to be a recharge to start off next semester

008strongly and i think we got this and similarly congratulations to the 210 um d999 students recognized as illinois state scholars i know you were one of them yeah that's it nobody was surprised by that shocker i know um no i think but it shows like how much like effort our students put into our academics and i think that's something to be extremely proud of so yeah absolutely all right any questions or comments for jade or scarlet i just want to say the mosaic concert was fabulous thank you so much it was really great and i was sorry i couldn't make it to south high but i did make it to north high yes north was amazing south was so good too it's always amazing to me how much channel we have oh and how many

009students are involved i mean it's not it's the all the music students but it's the quiet it's it's displaying it's just an amazing it's the majority of our student body is really it was wonderful and it was wonderful to experience the south hike concert in the auditorium in the fine arts center instead of the gymnasium yeah so then i got to hear jade perform there as well as my my niece so it's excellent i 100 agree because i feel like in the new space in the auditorium the sound quality is just yep amazing it really is it is yeah i have to concur it was fantastic but i also want to say hearing both your reports especially during these times with is a breath of fresh air you are so uplifting and positive thank you

010i love it you're here yes absolutely thank you ladies okay we're going on to the approval of minutes we need a motion for the board of education to approve the minutes of the november 15 2021 business meeting and the november 15 2021 closed meeting so moved second terry and joanna thank you very much terry pavicich aye joanna vazquez drexler hi mike davenport aye jenny hagstrom aye nancy krepka aye the minute's carry next we'll move on to the reception of visitors the meeting agenda includes two opportunities for comments from the audience the first reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board about any agenda item on which the board will vote i believe we have the voting do we have the agenda up there next slide please next slide please the second

011reception of visitors 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 the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts and writing to the board secretary mrs nidak 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 for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and are being streamed and i reserve the right to modify these protocols as circumstances warned audience observation of these protocols is appreciated so do we have anybody who wishes to speak i don't know if anybody

012else was planning on turning in a slip we have seven so far only one checked for the first item but it isn't for an item that is listed as an action item so that'll move to the second reception of visitors otherwise we have nobody that's indicated a action item that they wish to discuss okay we'll move on to the recommendations and reports of the superintendent the 22 23 curriculum proposals all right i'll turn this over to gina thank you dr seedly so i'm excited to say that we have four courses coming to the board this year we have a science course two coming out of our cte department and an intervention course these courses we bring new courses every year to the board in december as students begin signing up for courses very soon after

013we return so the first course is environmental sustainability environmental sustainability and i have mike hines our donors grove north science department chair who will share information with you about this new course good evening board of education thank you for once again allowing us to come to present to you a course in which we uh want to expand the opportunities for students in the science area in d99 um we've been to you a few times in the past few years i would like you to if you would look at the description of what we have here where we find ourselves today with the environment and the concerns that our students present to us and that's out in the community we feel that the more that we can do to bring environmental not just topics to students

014but an opportunity for them to come up with innovative ways for solution based class in which we have healthy food healthy water clean air clean soil oftentimes when students are problem solving they're not encumbered by a lot of the baggage that we as adults come with and so they are often open-minded and come up with really neat creative ways to solve problems um please again this is rather than if you think about environmental design i don't want you to think about it on the macro scale where we're doing engineering this is more of a biotechnology course in which we're looking at electrophoresis dna extraction like that we have right now we have p glow it's a way to look at possible new ways of designing foods that grow better a way of soil cleaning um

015in which we use native plants maybe to pull out heavy metals from soils that's what we're looking at along these lines with the biotech component of this they'll design and engineer solutions for drinking water food supply and renewable energy this is a course that we would like you to think of we have a bio two right now bio2 research topics this will be replacing that course that course while it is a topic oriented course um it's not so much the uh innovative solutions that we find in the project lead the way courses and so that's really what we want to do is grab this curriculum from there as you know we already have a biomedical careers pathway on the books where we have principles of biomedical science and human body systems we've had very good

016success with our students jumping into these classes and really really enjoying these and what not just how that's presented but what the materials that they're getting really do create career pathways for students so that's really why we're really super excited about this um people say well why wouldn't they just take ap environmental science this is a non-ap level class in which students can um get in and work with students of all all ranges and levels and then again just a description of the difference as you know college board at the end of the ap course they can take an ap course to get college credit um project lead the way also offers college credit for an end of the course assessment um it's not the same as the ap college board given that credit but

017it is from a college or university that then they can transfer the credits to at the end of the course all right questions for mike questions why is it non-credit mike excuse me why is it non-credit non-credit to graduate yeah the reason that we do that is as you look at the illinois learning standards it doesn't cover all of those performance expectations that the illinois learning standards set forth for us and that's why we hold the biology and chemistry and as our core courses in which students gain credit for graduation any other questions for mike thank you thank you our next course is a cte course accelerator for entrepreneurs and with that i will turn it over to patrick fardy he is our cte department chair at south high school hi everyone thanks for uh

018thanks for having us tonight again thanks for as mike said thanks for allowing us to come in and talk about some of the classes that we want to be able to you know add for our students um the class that i want to talk about tonight the accelerator edu is based on a second year course built in after the students take the incubator edu course that we brought up last year the students right now are taking the incubator class for the first time they are loving it they've had some great ideas i'll give you a quick example i know it's south one of the groups they have an idea of trying to sync up books to movies like you like certain genres of books what movies might you like and they actually reached out and

019got in touch with netflix and netflix said yeah we'd love to talk to you so just some really good things are happening in that class so the way that accelerator works is that it's based on this idea that once a student at the end of the incubator class um they've done their pitch and they're you know sharks this is a great class they've got an opportunity to even get seed money uh potentially for their idea they accelerated the second year in the program where now they can actually during the class period they run their actual business so they're growing customers they're learning about creating an llc from this customer idea they're learning how to create contracts and agreements with their customers and they're really building up that business throughout wow so as you can see

020again the three kind of components for the curriculum is the formation of the company establishing the legal entity um customer acquisition the production of the product um and then the process that they go through with the business the market traction figure out how they're going to actually educate and connect with potential uh target customers and then obviously iterate and scale their company as needed to keep it sustainable growth uh in order to take the class the students had to have taken incubator and they also had to have received funding for at the end or they may be hired on by a team that got funny so sometimes what may happen is you may have a group that goes on but maybe two of their members were seniors and they graduated well there could be a

021junior who is in another group and really wants to take accelerator that opportunity so they can get hired on let's say by the other group enjoying to kind of be in that accelerator program still so again it's it's for juniors and seniors only and the idea that the way it's built in is that most likely it will fit within the incubator class so we're talking about a smaller group of students generally that will move on so most likely we see it as kind of that um the class within the incubator class the accelerator incubator will probably both be within the same period of students okay so and then can i use this question i know the incubator class was really popular about how many about how many students do we have in it so the

022incubator at south right now we currently have one section of it um and then which is about 24 students and then north has two sections of it well about double so and they're both pretty full from my understanding yeah yes thank you and they're they're presenting uh i think which is wednesday wednesday and thursday to the foundation i know and other groups to get funding for this so this is really exciting yeah absolutely i'm very excited my daughters all right our second cte course that's being proposed is 3d design and animation studio and with that we have melissa damewood she is our cte department chair at downers grove north high school and with that i'll turn it over to melissa thanks um so we're really excited about this class this is our 3d design and

023so when we put this together we wanted to put in a few examples so whoever the clicker if you feel like clicking on the videos we can see a little bit of that with this animation at play but if not then that's okay you know life isn't perfect let's see if it works we'll see but basically um oh see this is slow you guys oh well so anyway what we noticed is this is our capstone course in the digital media graphic animation career pathway this pathway is exploding when we looked at the data and statistics on what this career path would look like for our students we were even blown away uh and so we're really excited to offer this a little background currently at south they already are offering this as kind of a

024an independent study and so we already knew that we had a lot of students that were interested in this so we felt really good about bringing it on as a class at both schools and so you can see some of our possible areas and then i put a little quote down there on what we know is going to happen for them because we're looking at movies video games visual effects in general everything's animated all we have to do is notice that every single one person here probably has their phone all that phone has a graphic animation next slide so what we wanted to be able to show you is kind of how the progression so most students would start out at 3d design animation one on occasion we'll have a student come in with already

025a background where we might start them into but it's rare it could happen so in general they started 3d design animation one we use professional software so we're using the 3ds max software this is what every professional is using in the industry so this is a huge piece of software it takes time so then we offer a 3d design animation too where we build and then we offer 3d design studio in general our students right now who are taking this as the independent study it is where they're building their portfolio to apply to colleges and universities we're really pleased to report that our students who are doing this right now are getting into really rigorous high-end design programs at the collegiate level because they're coming in with this great portfolio of work next slide please

026so our stats so uh in general 3d design studio is eligible for grades 10 through 12 12 but i'll be honest it's typically seniors and juniors who are taking this class uh the credit is about a half credit but they can repeat it they need to have taken 3d design one and two and if need be it can be collapsed into one or two just to make sure that we're meeting every student's needs but we're still keeping our course numbers at a healthy place and i'm sorry that my animation's not working someone's pretty cool but i'll tell you what stop by and uh it could also be happening oh there we go so this is all yeah i was gonna say the kids created all of that so they have to create all those pieces

027to come together so we're really really proud of them super excited to bring on this course oh there you go it's perfect timing any questions that i could answer for us we feel pretty good all right well thank you guys so much for your time thank you cool stuff so our last course that's being proposed you may recall several years ago we proposed freshman sophomore seminar this is to complement that series advanced seminar and i have associate principal aaron ludwick who dr erin newly doctor aaron ludwig [Applause] from downers grove north high school to talk to us about it tonight good evening um so advanced seminar it would be a course that's in our intervention strands both at north and south um and as gina said it is a compliment to our freshman sophomore seminar

028strands those are really courses that are meant for students who need executive functioning support daily and need that kind of advocate and during check-in during the day so it's designed for students who have a continued need there's not a student who maybe has moments throughout the school year where they need the support ctrl s member can check in with them or we have some groups that we're running too that do executive functioning supports these would be students who have shown a need for a little bit more for a daily check-in we look at it as a flexible and continuous intervention so what i mean by that is a student could take that and then graduate out it could take one semester for those skills really to become a solid part of who they are as

029a student but there's other students who one semester is may not be enough and we need a little bit more practice and a little more support a little scaffolding to get out of the nest um and so we want students to be able to take them again if they need to because it's part of our freshman sophomore strand there could be a student who is taking seminar for a couple years um as they are at north and kind of getting that skill set set i can speak specifically at north that we found advanced seminar because we did do a pilot last school year we found it to be really really beneficial for our juniors and senior transfer students because what we were finding is that the transition of being a transfer student itself can cause

030some recalibration of your student success and like getting the lay of the land and what it means to be successful at the school but then also it was a better placement than trying to place a transfer student who was older in a freshman sophomore seminar class different skill sets different levels of maturity and so it really gave us a place to support those students who are a little bit older and like i said we pilot it in 2122. um just was talking to melissa damewood in the hallway about some of the end of semester data for her kids um we've met with the seminar teams to talk about vertical alignment we've also meant to talk about exit and entry criteria to make sure that if a student is placed in this during the day it's

031a right intervention for them it's meeting the exact need and we're also talking about how we're using that hour and maybe graduating them out so they can get an elective and so it's something that we're going to review at the end of every semester there's lots of conversations in my inbox right now about students and placement and whether or not a seminar is continued is appropriate for them um we'd also like to offer it as a pass fail option for select students you know it's an intervention course that we are recommending and so we want families and students to have the option of whether or not they want that to be a pass fail or not we don't want that to be a barrier for them considering something that we think is appropriate for them

032um so again the data so far is really good advanced seminar kids juniors and seniors who need this skill set support are very different than freshman and sophomores and so it's allowed us a grade level age appropriate intervention for them throughout the pilot so i'm happy to answer any questions about any of the interventions i think they're great thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you dr ludwig questions for gina before we trade her out for mark [Laughter] thanks gina i always like to see these new courses because it it a lot of them you'd like to take yeah i know yes you know i'm saying i think we should go to school yeah i think about them thing no i don't try to yeah do it all over again because i'll tell

033you there was nothing like this available when we were in school definitely not for me no you could take advantage of painting no advanced stuff you know metal work putting into stone oh nose and stone okay yeah yeah all right before we get to mark uh return to in-person learning uh not no official updates yet this is uh each month we've been updating the board on a number of cases last month when we talked we talked about how for the beginning of the year the average numbers that we were seeing was under 20 close contacts per week less than five cases per week you can see just as society's numbers have increased over the last month so of ours still relatively reasonable in comparison to other schools in our area so it leads me to

034believe that the combination of the high vaccine vaccination rate amongst our student body as well as our students are really following the safety protocols you know with fidelity when i walk past classrooms i see masks on i see kids distance from one another lunchrooms obviously kids are eating so masks are off right but so far you know we seem to be keeping things well under control at school you can see the numbers of our staff spiked a little bit as well so we had two in august which was a shortened month obviously then six in september four in october and then we jumped up to 11 in november so we are a segment of society we kind of mirror what's happening outside but overall i think we've done a nice job of keeping our kids

035and our staff healthy and safe throughout the school year one other thing we had a meeting with idph on friday and dr ezekie as i shared with the board there was several topics discussed one of interest is potential exclusion and quarantine guideline changes coming up sometime in the future there was no date given or even promised that that would happen but it was nice to hear that there was a discussion around many of the topics that we as superintendents have been advocating for for months so at least we know that we're our concerns are being heard by the idph we'll just see if they result in any changes moving forward so if any of those things happen in the coming weeks or months i of course will update the board in public as those things

036occur and it will cause us to reevaluate all of our practices as those things happen so any questions do the uh do the positive tests um they do they continue to be mostly centered around extracurricular sort of things or these in school uh the positive tests not necessarily the close contacts that we track at school track to either lunch settings because then you're not maintaining distancing and masking right right or extracurricular settings okay so it's rare for us to have a close contact in a classroom setting happens now and then but it it's definitely rare in comparison to the other two the lunch setting or or extracurricular setting all right another questions all right tax levy mark all right what you're heading forward to the graph yeah so this is uh been to a board

037meeting in december you've seen this and i've used it for 20 years or more so uh hopefully with new numbers yeah yeah every six years i changed the numbers no this was a tough one but uh what we know is it's it's a balance of what we don't know and what we're hoping for and what we're really estimating um on the left far left side what is known as we do know of course last year's the 2020 calendar year assessed valuations as part of the the formula here and we do know that the 21 levy tax cap that today's levy approval that i'll be looking for is locked in at one point four percent that was the consumer price index for december of 2020 and i'm sorry 21 and is the limit that affects our

038levy and it's a it's the lowest it's been since i think they're saying the 80s late 80s so it's really shockingly no number the difference is since it's starting at such a low point getting back to normal and even above even is the more recent cap and i said that that is actually the 20 calendar 2020 2020 limit the 2021 is already peaked past five percent which is a tax cap of five percent it's always the lower of the cpi or five percent and this is the first time that uh we'll have seen next year celebi go out at five percent it'll be capped at five percent um so we we one four one point four it's pretty low print in particular if you consider we're going through some uh inflation right now and a

039dollar forty doesn't buy what you know it used to buy so it's going to be difficult but the saving grace here is some things that we do know we do know that the downers grove tiff the tax and current financing district has matured this year and any new growth so when whatever the the assessed value was when they started this 23 24 years ago anything that has grown over that period of time is now comes to us as new construction and we're able to extend our levy onto that property so it's a big increase so it's really helping us in a year we can use it with a 1.4 cpi limit so we we don't know exactly we did request information for the amount what amount of assessed valuation it's increased to in the village

040and i have two different numbers one from the county clerk and one from the the uh the township assessor and it's because they measured them at different dates so i mean okay and the higher one was the assessors it was more recent and so i'm using that and i'm adding 90 to it as a cap so so i know that we're going to get all of that that we it exists and then for the other thing we get is new construction dollars just which we get every year some new construction someone puts a second story on their house does something unique to their property increases the value it gets added to the tax rolls and then eventually years or later we get to start taxing that portion and it's it's new and that's really the

041only true way someone's assessed value or tax bill can increase if they add something positive to their property now it can go up because of inflation on that house or other things but that's really the key way and sometimes the the the rate will will jump our rate has been dropping for the last decade current rate this year is 1.68 you can see upper right hand corner i expect it to be a dollar sixty-three so it should drop a little bit um the thing that that there's an inverse relationship between that rate and and home values though some that three hundred thousand dollar house which we years ago decided was about an average for our community appreciates every year and so that appreciation and a drop in our value should measure itself out and so

042by by living at the level that we have out here 87 million 777 000 most of that is to try and capture the new construction in the tiff some of it is to capture new construction that the assessors always give me new construction values for the year but they haven't gone through the final phase which is a board of review and some other things sometimes they get adjusted down but it's the best number we can get at this point in time and so we have to make some kind of judgment and that's why the stuff in yellow is not i don't think that's going to happen but it protects us to those levels what i do expect is on the right hand side and if you look at the lower right hand corner with the

043total increases on the those properties 3.4 percent two percent um is attributable to new property that's what i'm guessing would be the average the average homeowner though will have 1.4 percent increase in their values and and the cost of them net to them on a three hundred thousand house three hundred thousand dollars is twenty three dollars a year so our our 100 you know 1.4 percent is really going to keep those those tax bills down this year because all the other money that we get out of this request is is from new construction that is new property being added and it's not the average house household so it's a really good year for the taxpayers and and thank goodness for the tip it's a good year for us so this has to be approved before

044the end of the calendar year before the end of the month so we're asking for it at this point in time and then in march we'll get a notice from the county with the actual new construction values and we can put together our actual tax rate and then they will use that for the tax bills that go out in june so i just i remind the board every year at this time that it's a system that's somewhat backwards in which mark and jury have to forecast what new construction will be worth and then based on that educated guess go out and recommend a levy to the board and if they guess wrong and we under levy we never capture that property value right then all right you have one opportunity to do this so when

045mark says we're levying what his best guess is plus 90 percent that's to ensure that all of that new construction that's we can't get the real dollar amount for yet is available to us when they give us the actual number in the future it's backwards from how it should be right so mark works really hard every year to try to bring in that correct number for us and it's a really it's a good process when you think about what i mean this is the first time i've at the beginning and the end of a tif you know they go 23 24 years i'm usually seeing them mature from 20 years ago or something and we've only had a couple there's ogden tip is still available but we haven't had access to the growth that's been

046in there we assigned an agreement or agreed to the tipping put in because we knew it was good for the downtown area and that eventually it would have this as i call my seeds these seeds grew and now they're maturing so that's that's what we have here it's done and it's it's can it should be a good thing for us hopefully the downtown area is appreciated by the community because they helped pay for that a little bit with the way that the tiff is designed well it comes at the right time who knew 23 years ago that our budget would be capped by 1.4 at a time the economy is growing six plus percent 6.8 right you know so it is showing up at the right time to help us keep up with inflationary pressures

047next year so this will be an action item and we we appreciate you approving it questions for mark all right thank you very much thank you thank you all right i'm gonna bring in a team here for uh discuss the cool school not cool the school climate survey yeah tony can you advance it my clicker is not clicking we're moving super slow well i'll go ahead and get started good evening everyone this year we're continuing with our practice of issuing climate surveys just like we did last year and the purpose of these surveys again is to collect feedback and to make sure that our students have a positive experience at district 99 and like last year we're again using the third party firm called panorama to help us with this and they help us with

048create the surveys and administer them to better understand our students this year unlike last year we issued the student survey during the school day so last year everyone was remote so kind of on their own parents of course were notified ahead of time and they could opt out their student participation was voluntary we also issued teacher staff and family surveys all of which were anonymous and voluntary as well so no slides for us yet okay all right that's okay and decisions about the content were made by administrator teams so for example ed and courtney went through the the panorama bank of questions and selected those questions to ask for families and we did the same for students and staff and teachers as well okay no slides that's okay our response rates of course were higher

049for students compared to last year since we were able to carve out time during the school year so they're about 3 100 or so students who responded our response rate for families was very strong too at 668 but not as high as last fall which over 2000 families responded as you'll recall we were talking about in-person and remote learning i don't know if you remember that people had some things to say which we read every comment um and the teacher and staff response rates were very similar that they were to last year also the and i'll show you the slides um all of the response rates are all of the responses are available on our website in full from the three last year and the most recent survey so you can go in and anybody

050can pull that data and see it so scott was going to provide an analysis of the students you want to say good evening so um i'll just go through the slide if it doesn't well there we go there we go so for the student survey though first i'd like to thank our building level teams administration so at north aaron ludwig kelly zerner and david king and then at south sarah corrington karen taylor and kristin borman they were all instrumental in helping to select the questions look at the themes and kind of how we wanted to use this for the future so so you can see on the on the one slide it talked about our themes what we're really excited about is the analysis breakdown where we can take student data and look at it

051from a district perspective from each school we can go by grade level or different groupings of students of like iep eo and then obviously responding to individual student needs so what i thought i would do is just kind of walk you through kind of a thought process of how we're going to be using this data so um the next volume um so one of the questions under our emotional regulation which would be under our social emotional learning theme uh was was uh when things go wrong for you how calm are you able uh to remain and you can see the results um so our goal as we're thinking about our programming is obviously looking at how do we are there things that we can do to respond to not calm at all and do that

052more immediate than future planning but our our goal is to really move all those up to obviously quite calm and extremely calm because that's kind of our thinking as we're looking at the data and then the next slide i'll kind of walk you through our breakdown so really from a district perspective you know this was the first implementation we'll obviously have another one come coming up in the spring um so as we do this year after year in all those categories we'll be able to look at longitudinal growth data at the building level in the immediate we'll be able to start looking at our our how can we use the data for our access intervention time and also um for professional learning opportunities so to give you an example about professional learning opportunities um you

053know we have a support staff professional development team and so we're gonna present the data to them to have them look at it um and i'm on that with uh with our director of hr jeff bergholz and so we work together with our support staff association um and really we'll look at and decide what are different things that might uh surface that we can offer professional development to improve our staff looking at it from a grade level perspective you know pbis right now for muslim way and positively north we look at data each month and we look at it from a 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade looking at behaviors looking at how do we program for lessons how do we program booster lessons so this will be one great area that we can have

054a lot of data to look at and then our seo collaborative groups at both schools will also be able to look at data um and then student groups like i mentioned earlier looking at students that are in special education in uh in our el programming you know kind of looking at it from that lens we can kind of dissect and and see what kind of supports we can offer and then also through c triple s and then on the individual level we're going to look you know we look at it how do we engage students you know from a counselor's perspective social work our dean or even teachers so we're excited about um you know the first round of data coming through obviously we'll be interested in seeing the second part of it and then

055using that for even more programming for the future so any questions on the student data before perfect keep going and we can answer questions later too so we also gave a teacher survey and a staff survey and while they were two separate surveys and both anonymous so it doesn't identify the teacher or the staff member when we went through the data we saw the same themes for both and these surveys like i believe jill had said were vetted the questions were vetted with building admin so for example the teacher survey i worked with our associate principals for curriculum and instruction ryan doherty at north and georgia at south and we combed through the questions to decide what questions we wanted to ask as i said the results were similar for both and the majority of

056our teachers and our staff members reported that they do feel a sense of belonging which is really important because that has been a huge district and school focus for us this year as has been relationships for several years now most said that there was a positive working environment they were obviously very positive about their experiences here at school they have trust and believe that their school leaders really have the best interest of the school and students in mind um so we were very pleased with these results especially being that the focus on belonging and the focus on relationships came came out loud and clear through their responses so for the family survey again anonymous so we again gleaned through the data and we saw that the majority of families also reported a very positive school

057climate they believe that certainly this year their students enjoy going to school that they are engaging in lessons in the classroom that are motivating that they're learning that there is an atmosphere of respect both in the classroom and in the school as a whole so very positive learning environment for their students they also believe that the benefits of athletics and activities really help to promote that positive learning environment and that positive climate in the schools and that they really help students to grow in terms of talking about climate they believe that we should add more opportunities for students more social opportunities for students throughout the year and then in terms of communication and our resources again we put a lot of resources in place especially this year and last year as well that that our

058teachers are very caring and have high expectations and that we are putting the resources in place to help our students to be successful in terms of the value of the survey i think we would all agree that the the biggest the largest value the most important is that i identify students in need of support and as scott said at the individual level at the school level at the district level so that is a key component of the survey yes however it does also establish some baseline data for us as we continue to administer the surveys it also gives us an opportunity in data an opportunity to look through the data and to use that data to better inform our professional development whether that's for teachers or for staff scott mentioned working with support staff on

059professional development and they will be looking at the data as well as we will be sharing that data with our building admin that focus on professional development for teachers obviously we will provide that data various groups and staff members as we look at future planning and as the board knows we are working on our strategic plan and this data is just a set of data to help inform and have additional input into that strategic plan so next steps sharing information sharing the data to hopefully inform programming and interventions and to see how we can use that data to better support our students we are planning to administer the survey again in the spring specifically in april and we also see that the survey data can complement our new schedule in terms of the programming that

060we put into our access periods and into resource so we'll identify needs for us that can better inform those two times when we can work with students on some of their needs and various interventions questions future surveys would you um will you be asking the same questions again so this really does serve as a good baseline to then measure progress as we go forward excellent and then in terms of the the takeaways we say the majority of families the majority of teachers and staff would you say those are strong majorities it depends on the area but it's definitely majority and stronger in some areas we again looked at the overarching themes and the overarching takeaways um but in some questions it's very very strong and in others it's not as strong but still a majority

061b-plus when i see majority i know that that 51 would constitute a majority and and this is is greater than the 51 um sort of idea um so this isn't this isn't close to a 50 50. it's it's clearly a majority that's what i wanted to hear very good that's all for me are there takeaways that we need to work on that i mean a lot of this seems like it's fairly positive are there things that we can build on or that we need to bolster a little bit but there's certainly things that were identified from all of the surveys but for example in terms of professional development that we can work with our support staff on and work with teachers so that's just one example of how we can use the data again the

062real value for me is in that individual student data but certainly that's going to better inform lots of interventions that we have in place whether it's you know c triple s whether it's programming in our access period or resource period i think that's where the the heart of it is in students of course but we'll have the strategic planning group study this data too and then identify areas for you know areas to improve as well so i think it's like gina said just another data set that we can examine as we develop the plan i just want to say three things first of all thank you great report you had great responses i mean numbers two and this is more i think for the board members who may not be aware of this but um

063right before cove the year before covet quite fortuitously we had really beefed up on the number of social workers and counselors we had we hired several more positions at each school and then coveted so that was quite fortuitous and i'm very thankful that we that administration had the foresight to do that not the foresight of colville but not the perspective yeah expanding student needs expanding needs for mental health and i would also say if you have not had last week or the week before i don't remember now the surgeon general came out with a report where he where he identified stressors and issues related to mental health among students and schools of course were one of those one of the areas that he identified one of many areas i was not limited to schools but

064this was is consistent with some of his recommendations and some of his queries so just thank you for all your work and it just came at just an excellent time thank you any other questions i'm gonna dial chris in real quick okay we're gonna dial uh chris espinoza in real quick i would offer to do it but it's technology helps if i dial it correctly see see you should have done it without me you want me to try and i can't start yeah it's just not making the call i'll do it from here hey chris we have you on speakerphone all right um next topic is uh the school report card oh i can i can do it you could do it yes i'm sorry not a habit gina i know so tonight i'm going

065to present on the school report card and i just want to say a few things before we start the school report card and the presentation tonight's going to be a little bit different than in previous years the school report card typically we present maybe november sometimes i think it goes even into december and i talk about and sometimes they've even demonstrated you know what you see when you log in it's a public reporter so anyone can go in and see the report for really any any public school typically there's an at a glance and that's a nice kind of summary of how the school is doing in several different areas that is that is not available for this year at least not yet and i have no reason to believe that it will be available

066at any at any time however the school report card is still interactive so you can go in and actually compare years you can look at different sub groups you can look at different topics so a lot of the report card is the same but some of it is different this year and was different last year as well the report card is always evaluating so what's released for example typically right around halloween typically on october 30th or right around halloween is the report card in full right and it takes you through many many many different topics everything from test scores to mobility rates to ninth grade on track graduation rate so on and so forth this year due to covid the illinois state board of education is releasing the report card in three phases the first

067one occurred right around halloween the second one occurred last week and then there'll be a third one later in the spring so that is a change releasing it in pieces is one change one other change is that we will not have a summative designation summative designation there's four possible designations they are not calculating it this year so when you log in for example or when you go into the site it will just say no summative designation calculated and just like last year when i presented there's language all over the report card in many different areas that either says possible covid 19 impact to 2021 data or that the 2021 data is delayed due to cova 19. so to give you an example possible cova 19 impact on data we know that the data may be

068impacted by the learning models that we had by student attendance all those factors so that's the first one the second one what's actually the third one there but the first possible impact to the data right the second one relates more so to assessments so in the spring the state board of education gave schools the choice we could either give for example the high school level the sat we could either give it last spring to juniors or give it in the fall to seniors again because the juniors were supposed to take it in in the spring so schools had a choice wasn't just for that assessment it was also for the illinois science assessment and access which tests for el students we opted to give the sat in the spring to our juniors so tonight i'm

069going to present some preliminary sat data for some schools that just gave it this fall their data may not be there because they just gave the assessment a month or two ago so that's why you see two different data kind of disclaimers on the report card so the three main parts that were released in october were graduation rates which i talk about every year with the board ninth grade on track which i also talk about with the board and they made it a point to say mobility rates i'm going to talk tonight about graduation rates and 9th grade on track as i always do not really going to touch on mobility rates because even with covid our mobility rates are flat so in other words there's not a difference from previous years we typically range

070somewhere between four and six percent so not much of a change and there hasn't been we don't see huge variances so we'll talk about graduation rates and we'll talk about ninth grade on track graduation rates looking at obviously the last five years we know that last year's rates 2020 also had the covid19 disclaimer about the data and i know i presented that last year the state does a four-year five-year and a six-year graduation rate so for the four-year rate these are students who entered in the year 2017 entered school in the fall of 2017. and as you can see our graduation rate has pretty much been a little it's a little bit lower this year but it's been approximately 93 percent or within that and you'll also notice that the state went down by 2

071percent we went down by 1.4 percent when you're comparing graduation cohorts or classes of students the five-year graduation rate we typically do not focus on as much we still look at it of course we still analyze the data but it's not necessarily a focus area these are actually students who entered in 2016. so when they calculate a graduation rate for the five year they're taking the students who were kind of left that didn't graduate and did they graduate in their fifth year this also includes special education students who go on for example to t99 while the student may have completed their graduation requirements while they were at north or south high school we cannot mark a student as graduated if we want the student and if the student's family obviously wants the student to go

072to t99 because once you mark a student has graduated they're no longer your student you can't have them as a student so for some of these students clearly not all of the students will be special education students that fall in the five-year and you can see we're pretty much in the range of where we've been and i want to point out a quick weird thing with what gina just mentioned about special education students those that aren't finishing their career in four years will always show in those fifth or sixth or seventh year data set but that means that your four-year data set can never be a hundred all right well they're not backed out because they don't back that out of the numbers they're included in the larger numbers so all of these students that

073are in the fifth year weren't in the fourth year and the great majority of those students are because they never had a four-year graduation plan to begin with right so the way that the state data it looks it's kind of weird that they don't back that set of students out and show you well these are the students we expected to graduate in four years and this is how many of those students actually did it is all students knowing that because of students specific individual plans it's never going to be 100 right you know we have 13 of our students in a special education program right the great majority of them still graduate in four years but there is a subset that never intended to that isn't the plan right right so i just want to

074make sure you know as people look at that it's like oh our goal should be 100. the way the data works it'll never be 100. no do we know what like for the four-year plan do we know approximately what it is if you do back out those students we have not calculated it that way okay we we could i could go back and go student by student if you'd like me to do that i can do that we just haven't we haven't done that intuitively you know that the percentage would be higher it's going to be higher should be higher yeah but mind you some of these five year graduation rate are general education students they're not all special education students i don't want you to think that and we clearly have communicated at least

075my colleagues who deal with the state on data entry and looking at data how it would be nice if there was some way not to count those students who are going on for transitional services because we are meeting their need right and their success in most cases meeting the graduation requirements in four years but currently there is no way to do that because we cannot mark a student as graduated and then keep the student right so that's why you have that that impact and they do seven year but usually we look at four five and six year so again that's that's the sixth year and you can see actually we went up just a little bit in 2021 but again those are the students so for example these students for the sixth year would have

076entered in the fall of 2015. okay and we're talking small numbers very small so one or two students can change a percentage yeah yeah so much substantially okay but those students aren't going to tcd i mean um transition [Music] yeah so both the fit the five year graduation rate and the six year graduation rate are impacted by that by by t99 okay we typically do not have many if any general education students that remain on for a sixth year because we look at alternatives for those students right like a gt type program or something along those lines so typically we're not seeing in the sixth year not to say it couldn't happen we might have even an el student for example who stays on to meet other requirements or improve language there could be some

077reasons but that's pretty rare it's pretty rare okay so ninth grade on track ninth grade on track is something we've been looking at and the buildings have been looking at extensively ninth grade on track used to be called freshman on track so if i use that interchangeably that is that is why i got used to years of calling a freshman on track for the state to consider a ninth grader to be on track they must earn five credits their freshman year does not count they do not count summer school and they cannot fail more than one semester of a core course and the state looks at core courses basically as english reading math social studies or science so we can have a student for example that might have six six and a half credits but

078if they failed a full year of a core course they would not be considered on track that student could go to summer school get the credit and in our way of looking at it be on track for sophomore year have the credits have passed all their classes but would not be considered a ninth grader on track so as we look at our ninth grade on track numbers and and this ninth grade on track is a key indicator of high school success it's very important that we intervene early with students there's definitely a correlation between students who enter as 9th graders and are on track by either this measure or internal measures and graduation rate there is a there is a direct link so we certainly want to intervene as as soon as we can and

079as you can see our numbers went up last year in 2020 as you know we basically with covid we many students were able to pass first spring remember that first spring the state eliminated failures and made a lot of changes in a result of that first spring but that was not the case last year so you'll notice that our freshman on track number went down to 90 percent so i looked at the 1208 freshmen that counted in our freshmen on track number we may have had at any given time in the year more than 1208 freshmen but they have to be with us for a certain period of time in order to count when i looked at those students and kind of backed out those that went to summer school which is not the way

080the state calculates it it's what i wanted to look at to see if those students made up enough credits and in the right courses in order to be considered on track for sophomore year mind you that's not going to show in our data i also looked at that in part because we had more than double the students in summer school last year so we would expect that to be a correlation we found that of those students about 20 almost 25 percent made up a credit or half a credit in a course that put them at five credits and only failing one semester or in some cases no semesters obviously not a semester of a core course if we were to calculate it that way we'd actually be at 93 percent which is consistent with what

081we were in the beginning i share that with the board because the board did decide to waive summer school tuition last year and i wanted to share that at least for this small subset i know it's a small set of subset of students they were able to recoup credit enough to be on track while not by this figure it's not going to appear on the report card but clearly going into their sophomore year that is very reassuring yeah it is because and we've decided administratively we're making our own metrics for 10th grade on track 11th grade on track so that we can track this cohort of students year by year now and then future groups and be able to start to provide our own internal metrics to the board as to you know this is

082a great benchmark but how do we continue to perform through you know the entire student's career so look for that in future years so as i said the school report card was is being released in three phases the second phase was a little more than a week ago on december 2nd they were supposed to release two major data sets one was preliminary assessment data for us that would be s.a.t you may recall that the state canceled psct 8 9 and 10 last year so we didn't even have an option to give them test we had an option to move a couple of tests if we wished s.a.t which we chose not to do we wanted juniors to have an affordable score to colleges so we made the decision the administration to do that test last

083april however we did decide to move the illinois science assessment which is not for college entrance it's not a college entrance exam and we did move that and administered that this fall so for this release we do have preliminary sat data for us the state is not calculating it the state's not calculating it yet because they're still assessments out there that are being count you know that are being graded obviously so a state average is not determined yet so when i show you this data i can't show you state data because it's just not available yet they were also supposed to release college career ready which is you may recall a series of indicators includes things like gpa attendance dual credit transition math classes and then a number of other career indicators for example students

084have to have a four year plan working two consecutive summers working during the school year community service a whole list of different indicators activities athletic i mean there's a ton of different and it was a huge data set we spent i will just say hundreds of hours working on those data sets to find out that they decided after the fact not to release the data and they decided not to release the data for a couple of reasons i'll talk about in in just a minute but those were the two things that were supposed to be released only sat data was released so this data here that i'm showing is just the last few years you'll notice 2020 is missing that's not because i forgot about 2020 that is because the sat was not given in

0852020 meaning the state sponsored the state administered some students may have gone and taken the sat or the act even but it just wasn't administered as a state assessment in 2020 so that's why it is missing and while really we have to keep in mind that these are different cohorts of students okay so for example 2021 are juniors so that's the class of 2022. 2019 right juniors in 2019 class of 2020. we're not comparing how a student did on for example psa t89 to psat 10 to sat that's a comparison of growth these are different cohorts of students so we really can't compare the data however i do know that the board likes to see how our sat our students are doing excuse me on the sat but they are different groups of students this

086isn't the same group of students it's not like they went down or up at any given point so it's really not comparable data sets but i wanted to show how our students did and again that was last spring some students are going or did take the schools that decided to push s.a.t to the fall those students scores may may be higher because students are a little older perhaps learned more but i can't say that that will be the case they could be higher they could be lower they could be the same so this is just an example of how our students did this is again the average all students and this is both evidence sorry i'm sorry do not cut in but just to say what gina just said differently you're looking at the end

087here for each of these student groups you don't know where each of these groups started right and with them gina mentioned earlier with the the state series being canceled over several years of the psat eight and nine we don't even have that data to know did they did this group of students perform as expected or go backwards or there's just it's data that's lost to time right now because of covid so it's impossible to extrapolate out did we do an amazing job with these this group of students because they started out much further behind or did we not you know but it's just it's information for information sake at this point so this is the combined average of there's two parts evidence-based reading and writing and the math section so that's combined and then i

088just wanted to give you a sense of ela and math scores again for and this is district and again averages so for example in 2021 for ela 530.9 and then 532.6 for math and again different cohorts so not necessarily comparative but just trying to give you a sense of how the class of 2022 did when they took it in the spring of 2021. and then looking just at ela scores again the same idea different cohort but to kind of give you an idea of where our students are how our students in general again in district average performed i realize state of illinois is missing but that's because they haven't calculated that yet as i said just a few minutes ago and then the same for math our ela scores i'm sure you noticed were pretty

089much i should have said that i'm sorry um pretty consistent and math did go down a little bit what are you doing with this with the data yeah other than just we definitely analyze the data we definitely look at the data um i don't do a lot with it at this kind of very global level but we tend to look at data more broken down by groups of students and we certainly can use that information as we're working with interventions and working with students we don't look a lot at this really global data right even even if you go into school report card you can go in and break it down in different groups of students so a drop of 40 points doesn't give you not without knowing where they were where they started from

090right and that's what we're typically looking at is almost down student by student level or student group level as to where did they start where did they go what did we do that might have impacted that but without that i mean obviously a dip in scores it's going to be impossible to separate our instructional practices from just the world of covet right right you know so what do we know from what we're looking at here if we look at what we expect out of students generally year to year although that's not the best comparison you know that where we typically are we're slightly lower now and it's a combination of the world probably that we're in you know but i can't tell you definitively that that's the case this could have been a group of

091students that overall started lower than this group it also could have been a group that started way higher and over knocked them down even further than we would have expected right so it's just it's it's an impossibility to extrapolate out really what this means instructionally for us it's just this is how this class did when we used to use the acts it was you know we had years and years of you know that whole series of tests and um so the data i don't think is as useful now as it used to be because because you had this group coming in in ninth grade right every year you had a different group of students coming in and you could test and say okay here's where they are today and then we we we were used

092to hearing reports of you know okay see you know here's where they are here's where they got to in the 10th grade and you're all in your and you can design your interventions and helps for those those cohorts around how they're progressing so that and you can project where you think they're going to be because we knew that what the projected growth for a student should be expected to be and then where they actually ended up and then we could look and figure out where did we go wrong or where did we get it right what really worked well and then you can use that again and without the longitudinal data this is very limited limited value to us you know um hopefully we you know this year we'll get back to that yeah that

093state series and now we can start rebuilding longitudinal data i think the data sets that are more important to us now whether it's the on-track data graduation rates those kinds of things because those are true metrics that we know are for kids kids that are progressing appropriately and then hitting the ultimate goal of graduating from high school so um you know this state data doesn't factor in all of the other things that are that are in place it's just one one data again like this is a this is a group of students who've had their schedules tossed and tossed around and sure absolutely and now and live through a pandemic and back and forth at school yeah so it just seems like if you don't have that data these students are sort of left hung

094out to dry without it's like 2020 there's no date without any metrics so you're right i mean a couple good things as dr thiele said we are planning to administer and the state has said this many times eight nine for freshmen in april 10 for sophomores and then of course the s.a.t so we'll be hopefully back for good to getting that and we can start looking at some comparisons in terms of growth of cohorts of students the other thing that i think was a wise decision that we made was in october giving the psat 10 nms qt which typically just a small group of students take to qualify for national merit but we through esser funds decided to administer a tall junior so at least they'll have had a experience of taking a college board

095assessment okay so i'm hopeful i've been saying we're we're not giving final exams we're not giving hour and a half or more tests so they aren't getting these environments you know to function in until it really matters for the student and that's what's i think kind of disappointing but yeah adding in the back that adding in the testing in the fall and then the state series moving forward brings that back into place yeah i also wonder if if um you know knowing that that the s.a.t and a.c.t that there's much less emphasis on that for college admission and in some cases not even needed it becomes less of a high-stakes test and a student's motivation to take that required test at school maybe they're not putting in as much effort because it's not as a

096high stakes i mean that that could factor and i'm just i'm speculating variables here but that that would also seem to be maybe a contributing factor as well that's why getting back to the series and would really help get student by student what happened versus what was expected and have those conversations is the the true data set that's valuable to us i mean this has this just shows you how they did on that one day right during the pandemic right you know and that that's that's what it is well i really i look forward to getting that series back because you know time and time again we were you know we were exceeding the projections we knew we were you know making a real difference in these students lives because we knew where they were

097and we knew where they were projected to be and then when they ended up outperforming that you you have some you know some satisfaction that all this hard work is really paying off um so i miss not being able to see that and wondering you know because this actually could be what for all we know this is a huge success comparatively i mean we don't know that don't know we don't know and as i said mike it could be a terrible loss we don't know i mean it's just impossible to guess or it could be spot on as to what would have been predicted there's no way to possibly know you know it's just a data set that is what it is okay so as i mentioned decided not to release the data i expect

098that next year the state will be ready to release data the reasons that they and it was originally scheduled for december 2nd and it wasn't until several about a week later in fact that we found out that it was not going to be released and these were just some of the reasons that they cited that it was the first year reported that there they were very complex data sets that there could be an impact in the data in kova 19 and that the preliminary data was proving not to be reliable or valid so they decided not to release that data so really this second release was really the preliminary and they're calling them preliminary not final okay preliminary sat scores so is this a delay or just a they're not releasing at all so we're

099not going to have any until 2022 probably i mean i can only assume that they will next year um this has been something that's been years in the making so i'm hopeful that if we're submitting all this data that they will then release the data um but i i can't speak for they also found this collection that some of the assumptions just as you always do when you gather data right some of the assumptions that they made going into that data set didn't reflect what they thought it did no you know so i think you might even see some changes in that readiness formula after they've had this dry run and they've seen you know now they've seen this large data set and how schools actually collect it and what it looks like i think

100you might see a few kinds of tweaks and changes uh in the assumptions that were made they expected to see a certain type of data come that didn't come and it comes back to the assumptions that were made and how it was collected at the beginning so i think you're going to see a few changes over the course of this year just and consider that okay the state will consider that the dry run you know this has never been done before never been done before and when was it originally was this supposed to be the first this was supposed to be yeah yeah so so i just time it so i just listed some of the interventions just to show like i said about the summer school tuition that was something that the board supported

101obviously paper tutoring the number one area that we are seeing students using paper for is math we also have expanded our math programming we now have a second math specialist at south high school so we now have two math specialists one of one of whom actually works quite closely with students who are homebound for any reason if they're out of school he will actually work remotely with with the students um so that's a great support we are using the alex courseware and ppl with numerous thousands of students so i just put those up there to just kind of remind her that a lot of these are focused on math not all of them but but several are and then the final release is scheduled right now of course this is tentative but this is what

102isb is saying it will will be released on april 27th the final assessment data including the state level remember there was no bar there because we didn't have that s.a.t the isa illinois science assessment and then the dynamic learning maps which is we call it the dlm it's the alternative for those students who do not take those special needs students who do not take the sat so this is the next release that's expected in the spring and this once again won't look or correlate to anything in the past as you have groups of students like ours that we chose to give the assessment in the spring because that's what's best for kids to get that test under their belt to know if they want to take it again for a different score for any of

103those kinds of things um if we were looking out for us us as a school district we would have waited you could have just put that all off and done this here in the fall and giving kids a longer period of time to gain content get back into school get back into the flow into the mindset all of that and you would imagine that our scores just by doing that would be higher than they are right now so when we look at state average this will be a year that you can compare to no other yeah yeah yeah any other questions thank you are we going to look at summer school tuition uh yeah we look at that in january okay yep we'll have a summer school report for you at that point all right

104but good thank you gina good transition though okay we on the consent agenda tonight is a job description for a director of student experiences this is a new administrative position at the district level part of the salary for this position is being offset by transitioning our summer school coordinator into this position one of the board's long-term goals has been to expand summer school and summer school offerings we expanded it just by necessity a great deal last year so that is a key part of this position as well as a variety of things that support students throughout the day with activities athletics all kinds of support from the district level interventions and this is also the person that needs to start siphoning off gina's knowledge as she is in the retirement contract and uh we need

105to offload as much of gina's knowledge as possible before she rides off into the sunset so this uh starts creating a level of redundancy for that transition as well so if the board approves that under consent tonight probably at some point this week we'll get that job posting out before winter break so that we can get that out and start gathering interested professionals for that that opening any questions on that one no all right uh in november the board attended the joint annual conference uh this is the board meeting where traditionally board members have shared anything of interest that they took away from it i know we had a few folks in the room attend um anything that people want to be yeah i took a lot of notes notes i will share something administratively

106that came up uh one of the as the board knows this year we left the national school lunch program one of the and by all accounts students love the change in the menu and and everything that's there but one of the byproducts of that is last year when we were in the national school lunch program because of the support that's happening during kovid students were provided the opportunity to get meals for winter break and pick up a like a meal box and have that over break one of the conversations that came up at the conference was how are we supporting students with food needs over long extended breaks so as a result of that the administrative team came back and worked with chartwells our food service provider and jurie and jill put in a lot

107of work to find students that would be interested in that kind of support and then the district has provided that option for families to take advantage of this year so it you know got our wheels turning of hey last year at this time we provided this level of support should we do that again this year we decided that if we would have been in the food lunch program families would have had access to that so we we decided to offer that long term we're going to have discussions with community providers as to how we partner with you know the resources that are already here in the community and and support and promote those entities to help with uh with food over extended breaks so uh you know it's one of those things that got the

108wheels turning and we were able to pivot and and provide that kind of support to families that need it you say that was uh second general session that was the second general session yeah right i thought um so you know food insecurity for poor students being such a big issue for college students especially during their breaks and that was something that i hadn't i hadn't really thought about before you know when they tell the when they tell my kid they've got to be out by a certain date what happens if the kid doesn't have anywhere to go you know and it just it got me thinking too so [Music] i attended a session called what's race got to do with it and you know my takeaway from that was needing to understand my own personal

109experience and culture before i can really relate to others which i thought was interesting because i've never spent a lot of time thinking about my own you know culture um i attended a session on ihsa updates they talked about a 35 second clock maybe becoming maybe coming to basketball in 2022 or 2023 and there were a lot of issues around masks wearing some things that didn't make sense to me but and it seemed like some disconnection between ihsa and illinois department of public health um attended a session about tips for successful board policy committee members didn't get much out of that stuff i mostly knew another session called no week links fostering positive intra-board relationships and talking about us needing to have a strategic plan it should be a working document updated annually and he

110wrote here the rest of the meeting was just typical board role and conduct stuff that i already knew and then that third general session was entitled unconscious bias and education um and talked about unconscious bias being everywhere and being in everyone that we all inherently have some sort of unconscious bias that we're not really even aware of it just and you can't avoid it i mean everybody has it it's it's it's it's just how you were raised and the people you were around and that your life and your experience things that you haven't even thought about it just this is the way it is and then you go wait a minute that's so um they talked about she the presenter talked about um starting to say you know so what uh when you're evaluating choices

111so that um why is it a big deal you know you know if somebody somebody says something you should you should think about what's really behind that um and uh and it said here she also suggested i thought there was an interesting tip about trying to reverse your initial stereotype so like whatever your response is to something try to think about it like if my response was the exact opposite how would that make me feel about it sometimes i can change your perspective on what it is you know maybe reaching some empathy that you wouldn't have otherwise so um all in all uh it was actually a better um a better conference than i thought was going to be i have to confess i had kind of low expectations going into it because of uh

112kovid and and in those general sessions um typically um i look for something you know some really motivational stuff there and i didn't know that this would be so much but i thought it was and um and so all in all a good a good conference so i don't know if that sparked any other anybody else do you wanna see something for six months well no uh because um mike went to the same one and uh in fact i think our minds were like in a lot of the things because we we all went to some of the same presentations not planned no just working no we need to talk to each other about some of the same ones but because of where we are you know i thought a lot of it would be

113repetitious just because i i think that we're a very um uh responsive board and that we uh we communicate well and we and so some of those sessions were not necessary for what we well this board's done a lot of professional development outside of the conference you know there's a lot of sessions there that there's boards that that is their only professional development opportunity so i could see where you know some of the basic training and those kinds of things you've already received this and you know other workshops so i mean that's why you got the distinguished governance award right so all of those naturally none of you would would need to go to so you'd get funneled towards it i did go to the isha thing too and i thought it was a lot

114about football a lot of football and basketball a lot of football like you know when they're gonna start practicing and you know that kind of stuff so but uh i felt a lot of it was uh not voted on yet these were just right um things that they were bringing forward so getting ready for next year's seasons yeah yeah and uh you know how they were gonna um put schools into brackets you know because oh yes the unfairness dealing with some of the prizes you know i mean i look at my i look at my alma mater it's gone from you know three different um categories you know from you know 2a 3a 4a and so the competition is a lot different at each level and so chris and cheryl were both there as well

115so i don't know if christopher is still remote there but if he's got anything he wants to add possibly chris was there anything you wanted to add from the mental conference in student services session and i sat in on a student safety plan session sort of addressing some of the concerns that were in one of the resolutions that the iasp delegates voted on which was sort of like addressing how to creatively be prepared for situations in schools of violence especially at the time of having occurred yet but in light of everything that went on a couple weeks ago um that session was really interesting in how i think that yorkville attempted to address um active threats preemptively and sort of how they build relationships with students through some of their resource officers the whole thing

116was really interesting all right well thank you board members for attending and continuing to grow as board members we'll have a spring uh dupage uh offering and that will be at south high we'll be hosting it or north high are we at north carolina north north we'll be at northam yes yes all right employer requests uh we've had them and we're we respond to them and they're available up on the website okay we're going to move to the consent agenda but before we do ask for approval i would like to just recognize once again the district one of the elements on here is a acceptance of a donation from the district 99 education foundation grants the foundation came through once again with twelve hundred dollars for uh both both grants for south one for their

117fine arts program a guided study for program graduates and the other a crycut for the multi-needs program for special education so please share thank you again with the with the board does anybody uh else wish to pull something out of the consent agenda before we vote hearing none we need a motion for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes the personnel report transfer position classified appointments classified leave of absence classified the personnel report retirements classified resignations classified the increased substitute wages for former full-time dg 99 cmg and support staff employees the financial pages excuse me the waiving of the first reading and adoption of board policy 3.70 director of student experiences and the acceptance of the donation of the district 99 education foundation grant still moved second terry and

118mike thank you terry pavich aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza hi jenny heggstrom aye joanna vazquez drexler aye and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda carries next we'll move on to action items we need a motion for the board of education to approve the certificate of tax levy the certificate of certificate the certification of the certificate of tax levy and the certificate of compliance with the truth and taxation law is presented so moved second tyrion mike thank you gary pavich aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza benny hegstrom aye joanna vazquez drexler aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries i actually need a motion for the board of education to approve the 2022-2023 curriculum proposals is presented second joanna and terry thank you very much joanna vazquez drexler aye terry pavicich aye mike davenport aye

119christopher espinoza hi jenny heggstrom aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries moving on is the 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 the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydiak 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 is being live streamed and i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant audience observation these protocols is appreciated who do we have first

120all right we have uh seven slips at three minutes a piece we're definitely under the 30 minutes so i will just call them in the order in which they were submitted and not separate residents from non-residents so the first person up to speak is rich brennan followed by noel manley will be the next speaker i'm rich brennan of downers grove taxpayer every day resistance to mass mandates and forced vaccinations and rules that isolate children to supposedly stop that resistance is growing because medical news that opposes the anthony fauci method and policies is increasing daily for example very interesting brown university did a study that shows that there's a 23 decline in early in early childhood development under traditional social distancing and masking mandates interesting read the covet policies we follow here come from anthony fauci's

121national institute of health the same fountain who sent our tax dollars to the wuhan laboratory and successfully weaponized previously oscar bat viruses and then fauci lied about it so from the nih to the pritzker government here to district 99 there's a track for that and that explains why we don't trust a lot of the fouching pritzker followers on masking and vaccination recommendations typical the opposition literature julius rochelle from canada wrote about the snake oil salesman and the covid zerocon bait and switch he does a good job of explaining for example lockdowns mass vaccinations and mass booster shots interfere with our immune system's ability to protect us from 200 other respiratory viruses and it creates a dangerous set of circumstances that risk driving mutations that are more dangerous to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike the promise

122of vaccines is a is the exit strategy it's really an ever-ending regiment of annual booster shots to replace our natural anti-virus security updates that come from handshakes hugs and children laughing in schools our immune systems depend on these challenges to get in small doses daily to get stronger especially children and a key example to check out yourselves in new zealand they're ultra-strict regulations their ultra-strict masking and quarantines and lockdowns have resulted in hospitals full of children with non-covet viruses because the government isolation policies left them fragile thanks next is noel manley followed by carol gene davis good evening my name is noel manley and i'm from deering illinois the united states is not a racist country and district 99 is not a racist community however the woke culture promoted by the d99 administration and school

123board would have you believe otherwise here is a list of the issues brought before the board over the last seven months that have been summarily dismissed or ignored so much so the boards unlawfully surrendered its authority regarding school board meeting attendance to the superintendent number one anti-police lessons in english and social study courses a biracial student being told by her english teacher to check her white privilege at the door blindly following governor pritzker's masked mandates with no challenge at all this administration will sacrifice student mental health in the face of state funding threats the textbook used in downers grove north government class openly advocates for open borders and downplays the atrocities of the russian revolution a student recently was removed by his class by awoke teacher because the student had a political slogan on a

124shirt with which the teacher disagreed this is it was so brazen that school administration and parents had to get involved the 105 page 27 000 2020 equity audit report which attempts to promote the tired concept of institutional racism as a primary issue facing the district who needs 60 years of racial progress in academic excellence when an equity curriculum will readily promote and review that every issue stems from race in every solution is race-based and then we have a sexually graphic gender queer another example of bulk activists throwing their agenda in front of children you will note there is no graphically heterosexual equivalent in the library shows of either downers growth north or downers growth south so perhaps our woke librarians may be interested in placing copies of the kamasutra or obvious metamorphoses on the d99

125library shelves of course not placing such sexually explicit books on the on these shelves may be considered censorship so what are the results of this wool culture that 1999 is participating in and just look what's happening in the streets of dupage county carjackings are up weekly in fact there was one right down the street from downers grove north at bpm i don't go we've got gangs looting and hitting oakridge mall we have a downers grove north graduate working with chicago police officer murdered doing a routine traffic stop we have former campaign county democrat party media coordinator mary lemanski equating the waukesha christmas parade in massacre the jury verdict which we should not agree unhappily to her injury of 60 people in the murder of six including a child mr thank you the next speaker is

126carol jean davis followed by marcella cher good evening i district am and i wanted to make a comment on a climate service develop survey that was discussed tonight i am in favor of this type of survey it is very important to have data that provides a glimpse into both the working and learning environment as it is experienced by all of the players in the district the survey helps to point out deficits and can gain and can aid in targeted staff training and professional development even if it doesn't result in specific training it probably has an effect on how teachers relate to their students and hopefully all of the staff and faculty will read over the results i grew up in a dysfunctional family i remember after one particularly horrible incident i went to my high

127school guidance counselor who was incredibly incredibly uncomfortable and nervous by what i was telling him he was completely unprepared for what i unloaded on him and basically said he pretty much just helps people find colleges and i left disappointed but relieved because i finally told another adult later that day i was called back to the office and he was more helpful and he gave me some phone numbers to call which i did so to parents who are against surveys like this it gives me great cause maybe many of them just live in aussie and carry it live and have no idea how miserable some high school students are and that they need real help who knows but i will tell you this my life back then certainly needed interfering with and whether you like it

128or not teachers need to be trained and prepared to deal with all sorts of situations surveys like this help district districts prepare in a fact-based manner by identifying the biggest issues faced by staff teachers students and parents when students are upset by situations in their home life or their school life they cannot learn they cannot concentrate they are in a perpetual state of fight or flight in such a state they are at increased risk for drug and alcohol abuse and self-harming behavior they can manifest in a variety of ways schools need to know if students feel safe welcomed and valued and if they don't feel that way why don't they and students need to know that they are district parents that question this survey your input is also sought and unlike other participants you are

129afforded the opportunity to give free form responses and i hope that you take advantage of that opportunity i would also like to note that student participation in this survey is optional 1333 students responded it's clear to me that the students want to be heard and we should listen to them thank you next up marcela chervo followed by tabitha irvin my name is martella durdik cheray i'm a 26-year district resident i have children who graduated from down or south and grandchildren i hope will never set foot in this district during that time i've been labeled a conspiracy theorist though i've recently been promoted to domestic terrorists because i have the audacity to exercise my right to confront elected officials and state agencies in order to protect the rights of parents to make health decisions for their

130children it's nothing more than a desperate attempt to discredit and to humanize those of us who don't agree with overreaching policies a suppression tactic meant to dissuade citizens from participating in the democratic process the rhetoric and escalating aggression prove the covet narrative continues to collapse i will not apologize if any of you on the board or in this audience are uncomfortable or doing what i say is hateful it's not hate to speak the truth what's actually taking place is censorship it is used as a tool when lies finally lose their power schools are no longer educational institutions not by a long shot they've been hijacked by and are beholden to government basic forensic accounting and a quick perusal of the state code confirm it mandates have no place in a free society masks are a

131lie we know it you know it quarantine and lockdown without court order is false imprisonment forced and coerced vaccination is medical right breakthrough cases are not by any means a new phenomenon it's known as vaccine failure contact tracing is predatory disturbing and intrusive vaccine passports are a form of discrimination and segregation and sick until proven healthy is no less tyrannical than guilty until proven innocent it is pure cowardice to applaud these measures in the name of personal safety we should be standing in solidarity for freedom rather than bring in extra security and have reinforcements on standby as you did last month i'd suggest you commit to your safe spaces if the truth is too much for you to handle better yet step down let real americans those who value freedom and respect individual rights do

132the job of which you are clearly incapable up is tabitha irvin followed by eileen breiner okay so um hello my name is tabitha irvin and i am a junior at downers grove north and i'm here today just to briefly re reiterate what i spoke about at last month's board meeting um which is the topic of student representation and i will first once again thank jaden scarlett for their tenacity courage and commitment to representing dgn and dgs respectively and despite your amazing work i still believe that no two students can possibly and holistically represent a collective population of around 5000 students which is why i'm here today so to the board of education members thank you but i hope that you'll listen to what i say now with increased student representation many to most of your

133questions i believe can be easily answered have the new c triple s services actually made a difference in students mental health do students actually support the proposed hybrid schedule for next year and to what extent do students find sats and other standardized tests necessary for their academic success after high school and can we better analyze the results of these tests and what about the final exam schedule or lack thereof and do we find the content presented in our curriculums problematic or the books in our library offensive these the answers to these seemingly difficult questions with increased student board representation can be answered in accurate in-depth capacity after last month's board meeting i received a large amount of positive support from my speech and so in hopes of my message reaching a larger larger audience created

134a petition titled increased student representation at illinois district 99 board of education meetings which is circulating on the change.org platform it currently has 268 signatures and is still growing i personally witnessed multiple classmates on opposite sides of the political spectrum sign my petition which proves that increasing student representation at board of education meetings is not a partisan issue or one that should be subject to debate i believe that it's just common sense thank you next is eileen breiner followed by laura hoist president good evening first i'd like to express my extreme disappointment in superintendent hank feely's usurping the rights of residents by not following the open meetings act he took it upon himself to move the school board meeting to a location that allows only 20 seats for the public this district has multiple possible

135locations that are large enough to handle the citizens who want to attend this mandate was not presented to the board and voted on at a subsequent meeting i was at the november meeting i did not see violence or threats of violence this is just hyperbole from hank i'm asking for the resignation of superintendent thiele for this overreach of authority now on to what i originally planned to speak about and there is a similarity in the two scenarios by now you all know that in september the national school board association sent a letter to president biden requesting that he direct federal law enforcement to investigate parents as domestic terrorists on october 4th the u.s department of justice under mayor garland directed the fbi and u.s attorney's offices to investigate parents for harassment intimidation and threats of

136violence against school board members and school employees now 13 states including illinois have withdrawn membership from the national school board association and 13 more states have distanced themselves from the same in the years 2019 2020 and 2021 this district has paid the national school board association four thousand one hundred and sixty five dollars annually now that the illinois association of school boards have left the national school board association will this district cancel any further payments to the national school board association what did we ever get for the annual payments of four thousand one hundred and sixty five dollars the district also pays a lot of money to the illinois association of school boards in the past three years 99 has sent the illinois school board association mrs breiner your time next up is miss hoyce

137his voice will be our final speaker of the evening i'm laura sure i'm laura hoyes this board's decisions have forced students to learn remotely wear masks quarantine when they're not sick be shamed for conservative values and treated differently if they're not vaccinated these action actions violate due process and district 99's own no discrimination policies all under the guise of health and safety this is about control truly all while using covet as an excuse to take away constitutional rights and ignore the law this has caused great harm to our children since the year 2017 teachers have received training on seeking educational equity and diversity training also known as seed and white privileged guidance from gary howard we understandably want to know how this training affects our students we've asked how these culturally responsive social emotional learning

138equity changes affect curriculum you've answered very few of our questions telling us as little as possible while denying that these programs have all the tenants of critical race theory how has equity training and the national sex education standards affected what educators are being told to teach our kids in sex education and in all other classes we appreciate that you took the time to meet with us to answer our questions about what are you teaching in sex education but we walked away with no information except one sheet guidance on what the state says about sex ed but we were told that there are no sex ed books no videos no documents nothing to see here this board is aligned with the teachers unions plain and simple and you're working against the parents this board has limited

139public comment to at this meeting 20 people so it can avoid hearing parents concerns about the welfare of their children and conduct its business to satisfy the nea and the isbe public schools belong to us we the people own the schools we pay the educators to teach math and reading and merit not to indoctrinate students not to teach some you know racist far left focus on equity and sel as if it's none of our business you're not telling us how this is affecting our kids well it is our business last august district 99's anonymous complaint system which had students go to designated teachers to tell about a problem they're experiencing was replaced by a state program called safe2help illinois.com under this safe to help program students can call a trusted adult at one of several

140state agencies who offer assistance by 24 7 phone hotline on issues about bullying ms hoyce you're out of time thank you that concludes the reception of visitors thank you thank you all um okay moving on to communication announcements uh report on the legislative education network of dupage jenny there hasn't been any meeting since october uh joanna not really other than we continue to struggle with staffing and we're trying to fill those positions as soon as we can that's good yeah and we're meeting wednesday this education foundation is meeting wednesday and chris did you have anything to bring up from the iasb uh just from the the conference itself it went pretty smoothly a number of things we didn't end up voting on just because the committee decided that it wasn't worth um voting on um

141the two things that we spoke at at the two previous board meetings ago um uh resolution two and fifteen uh resolution two did not pass and resolution 15 was not voted on uh so yeah resolution two was the resolution allowing teachers to carry guns uh yes and resolution 15 15 was lowering the age of uh or raising the age of uh from 14 to 18. if you if if a student has a parent who has a gun in the home they are required to carry it or to store it in a specific way storage in the home yeah they decided it was out of our scope so we were voting on it thank you okay upcoming board meetings january 10th 2022 we will have the workshop here again at 6 30 and january 24th 2022

142we will have the regular business meeting at 6 30 in the asc yay so good to be home it is nice to hear this you know what on that i really like being able to speak with you across the this this is the aisle i feel like we're in a straight line like that i really don't think that we can conduct business the way that that we are supposed to as as a board and so i know it's inconvenient but i really think it's the wisest thing for us to carry our business on so it is nice to hear what everybody has to say yes all right we have no closed session so we can adjourn do we have a motion to adjourn so be it second terry and i'm sorry who was the second

143i think well done all those in favor aye those opposed we are adjourned thank you