csd99media Live Stream

001good evening uh let's start could you call the role mrs mydex please nancy kupka here mike davenport here shirelle fuller here dan nicholas here terry pavisic here rick pavinato here zoe boyd here sam bull here thank you we have a quorum sure i'll be not sure um joran will be joining us a little bit lately 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 let's start with a um we need a motion to approve the minutes for the february 22nd excuse me welcome i'm sorry you what she um joanna walked in and i i just hit her up there i made it okay we need a motion for approval of the february

00222 2021 business meeting and the march 1st 2021 workshop meeting minutes uh joanna and terry joanna vazquez drexler uh president i mean i thank you still i'm back there thank you aye rick pavanado aye mike davenport aye shirelle fuller aye daniel aye and nancy kafka aye the minutes are approved uh we'll move to the first 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 the second reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99. comments are limited to three minutes to provide all visitors equal opportunity to address the board if you need more

003time we'll ask you to submit your thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydiak visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone and state their full name the proceedings are being taped recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and they are being streamed live i reserve the right to modify these protocols of circumstances warns audience observations protocols is appreciated would anybody like to address the board come on up thank you good evening my name is uh kevin custer and i'm a resident here of downers grove my son attends downers grove north i said a letter to all the board members today stating my position that the school should be back full time i would like a copy of that to be submitted into the records since i'm not going to

004waste my time to read it here today in doctor's response he said that we were not going back full time i'm sorry i don't know otherwise he said that we're not going back full time because we couldn't meet lunch i'm sorry you called it lunch protocols my question is if we can't reach lunch protocols and that is the only gauge to which we are not going back full time why can't modifications be made to accommodate the six foot distancing that needs to happen in order to get kids back full time it's an absolute travesty what is happening to these children the mental health and the struggles that they're having is terrible the science dictates that this is not a super spread it's the safest place for these children to be back i cannot understand for

005the life of me how catholic and private schools can be back in session full time since the fall and district 99 cannot do that with the resources and the talent that we have available to us the fact that that has not been accomplished and continues to this day is a travesty our children are paying for this they will continue to pay for this each one of you have a fiduciary duty to these children to look out for them for their best interests that includes mental health that includes reaching and attaining social engagement goals participating interacting it is not happening the ramifications for your decisions to continue this these children will pay for it and will continue to pay for it i'm asking each and every one of you to do everything that you can and

006if you're telling me that the only thing that's preventing us from going back to school full time is six feet of separation for lunch surely we have enough talent in here and enough will to solve that problem there has to be i know you're all compassionate people i know you chose to serve because you care i do not i do not dismiss that at all we are failing we are failing as a community we need to put a stop to it can you answer me why we cannot meet the six foot protocol for lunch to get these children back full time this is a reception of visitors it's not a dialogue so we don't exchange during this time this is your opportunity to share your thoughts with the board and i'm happy to respond i

007already responded to you once today and i appreciate that be happy to follow up via email or a meeting or a phone call i would appreciate that absolutely thank you and and this is going to be covered as well in the presentation which will be a moment of the presentation tonight is on thank you is there anyone else okay hearing none we've received online comments which have been shared with the board in advance since tonight is an action item the board has had access to all of the comments that have come in we've received 29 comments the majority of those comments have been in favor of expanding the day to more more being more similar to the schedule before covid although there's a mix in the comments of questions and those that support the current

008plan but you know overall uh the overall tenor of the 29 comments would be to return back to pre-kobit type schedule all of those comments uh become part of the board minutes after the meeting tonight all right okay getting into the the key topic of the night and the information that went out to families earlier today as the board knows a little over a week ago we received well less than a week ago we received the guidelines from idph a few weeks ago we received the guidelines from the cdc that impact our planning for a full in-person return so what i'll go through tonight is kind of what got us here and what our plans are for the remainder of this school year and talk about some of our opportunities and limitations moving forward so

009that guidance that that was released we originally heard that it might be coming in january and then february and then finally was released in march just so that the the board and the public are aware no educators were privy to this information in advance we received it in the same timeline as the public so i know a lot of people are frustrated that like we should have had a plan ready already but you know we received the guidance on the ninth at the same time as everybody else and there was drastic changes in this guidance in comparison to what we had seen before the board and the public also know that we began working based on that cdc guidance including forming a task force and and bringing people in and starting to move forward however

010the idph guidance supersedes the cdc guidance and the cdc indicates that in their guidance the state and local guidance supersede the cdc guidance so there's some real key changes in here uh that are quite different from the guidance that we've been looking at all year the first one is that the community transmission metrics no longer apply for decision making at the school level the community metrics still apply for decision making at the health department level so where those community metrics could factor in is if we start to experience widespread illness at school or outbreaks at school the health department would require us or ask us one way or the other to take an adaptive pause which is typically two weeks and then after those two weeks we'd work with the health department to determine if

011it was safe to open at that point the health department may factor in community spread at that time so the tracking of week to week metrics and those kinds of things are gone and once we're back now after spring break in whatever plan that we're in then we're back unless illness indicates that we should close for an adaptive pause in the guidance there up to this point the guidance from is v and idph was that all students should be allowed to select remote the new guidance says those with illness for themselves or a family member should be allowed to choose remote so it changes that everybody can however this the state has not provided us guidelines for the pathway of how somebody would prove that or what the the indicators of illness would be for

012an individual or a family member therefore at this point it's prudent to just remain open for selection as we move through the spring and then if these same guidelines exist in the fall i would expect that we'll continue to get updated updated guidance but let's just assume that nothing changes between now and the fall in the guidance we expect that this kind of clarification and process will be coming um so our recommendation is that families still allow to cheat allow the choice through the end of the school year if they're remote or not hey hank before you move on just a quick question yep on the potential for an adaptive pause with the health department is that automated if the health department says adapt to pause that we're on a depth of pause or is

013that something that we gather together and make the decision as a board whether or not we want to apply the adaptive pause no it it would depend okay so there's no cut and dry uh if there is a outbreak at a school the health department has the authority to require us to go on an adaptive pause however they might work with us to make that determination as well so it it's a it depends so alright so they reinforce as the cdc did universal masking must continue there's no longer the guidance about if social distancing cannot be maintained because social just physical and social distancing changes here so in the guidance we received last summer the guidance said that if physical distancing cannot be maintained a plastic barrier should be utilized however that's not listed now

014so the idea of a face shield when physical distancing cannot be maintained it now moves we're recommending as part of this plan the administration is recommending that face shields become an optional piece of protective equipment so you know if a student wants to wear that if a staff member wants to wear that if they'd like to wear it during passing periods or on a bus or whatever we have no problem with somebody that chooses to but we're no longer recommending that it be required social distancing in learning settings changes from six feet down to three feet except for times when fat face masks are removed for any kind of an eating situation then six feet must be maintained the capacity limits that we saw in the past there's the arbitrary 50 per space is gone

015now and it's now determined on the ability to maintain uh physical distancing and there's different guidelines for outdoor events versus indoor events and we're processing that and making changes where appropriate uh the bus change their limit now changes to 50. so that's a change as well we believe all of our we're going through all of our routes to ensure that we'll stay under that limit so over the next couple of weeks we're making sure that that's correct and if we have to modify or change routes as a result we will finally even though the physical distancing remains the same or gets smaller contact tracing remains the same so if you remember contact tracing is within six or more feet for 15 or more minutes in a 24 hour period so this is critical as we

016build our plan moving forward because there's real potential now in a classroom for students to spend a good amount of time like an entire class period within three feet of one another or within six feet of one another down to three feet so there's a greater potential for the need for contact tracing and greater potential of students quarantining as a result of that so we could have we anticipate far more students coming back to school but we could end up with periods of time where far more students end up being remote if there's need for them to quarantine over that time so even though i expect that the number of families based on our surveys choosing fully remote to go down the number of students on a week by week basis in a remote setting

017could at times go up all right so that's this balance so we we can't just come back and assume that there will be very few students or no students in the need of remote learning settings okay and uh there's a slight change in there where a lot of the guidance that we saw before you've seen 24 hours was the timeline for contact racing that's expanded to 48 in the newest guidance another key change is symptom checking before we had symptom checking at home and if students or staff didn't symptom check at home then we needed to to check their symptoms at school that's no longer the case we encourage students to symptom check at home and they'll have that slip of paper to help them remind what they're checking for but then we have no

018requirement to check for that or follow up at school the cdc has indicated that it's more likely that somebody would actually transmit copa that way than protect somebody from it another key change and i know a lot of people are interested in this change as we head into spring break is there some recommendations on travel and they provide some recommendations of things that people should consider doing when they return from travel but the dupage county health department has told us all year it's far more essential that people follow the safety protocols when they're traveling or anywhere than worrying about these protocols when they return you would follow these protocols when you return if you didn't follow safety protocols as the health department points out there's many areas around the country with lower rates of covert

019than in dupage county it's not necessarily where you go it's what you do while you're there so if students and families travel and they follow the safety protocols they could go about returning to school just like they would going to the grocery store in their neighborhood however if they travel and do not follow those safety protocols then they recommend that students get tested upon return and quarantine for seven days or no test when they return and quarantine for 10 days we won't be mandating any of that we will be sharing with our families that the expectation is that you follow the safety protocols at all times but if you do travel and don't do that our expectations that you follow the cdc guidelines and then saliva screening will remain optional for any student even if

020they were remote and they're coming back in person and would like to participate in the screening process they may elect to do so through the rest of the school year and totally optional for those that would like to participate once again with the metrics change none of this has none of the screening protocols have any impact on metrics because there are no metrics okay questions on any of that all right so the the first thing that we did is the new guidance came out was to meet with the the task force and i'm not going to read this all to you the board has received it it's up there as a public document for everyone to see what the task force had coming out but i'm going to call out a few key ones that

021are definitely aspects we considered all of these as we built the plan we're going to share with you tonight but there's some key ones that that uh i think it deserves calling out here the first uh the first two are really key as we began working the first one designing a plan that creates opportunities for more students to return to school for more time each week while creating the best educational environment for all students so that's what we're trying to do is we did our work it's very difficult to do because right now in in the time of covid almost everybody has a different opinion as to what that is and how it works for their individual family is going to be very different than the family next door so it's challenging times to design

022programming that works for everybody it's nearly impossible to do at this point the next point was was brought up in all of the groups but students continue to bring this up this has been a theme all year from students is please make the schedule consistent that you know back and forth changing schedules from week to week is very challenging to organize to schedule things to know what they're supposed to do each day and then you can kind of read through the rest of them that are there continue concerns about lunch periods whether or not people follow safety protocols concerns with extending the school day and so making the day longer than it is right now but then no time to eat or how you know concerns with lunch not concerns with having snacks and you're

023going to see that the data i present later students shared with us that it's easier to learn concepts at school but it's easier to take tests when you're at home kind of makes sense because when you're at home you have access to all of your resources you know the concerns about socialization uh there's a lot of different reasons uh that why students are choosing to be fully remote and out of that task force came several people that didn't want anybody making assumptions from family to family as to why they were making those choices and then this is a key one the more that students return in person the more students will want to return in person so it's you know it kind of is a snowball rolling down a hill as more students come back

024more students are going to want to come back so we want to try to build a program that gets the most students through the door because that's going to encourage more students to come through the door the administration has believed all year the best spot for our kids to learn is here and we've tried to work through some challenging guidelines to make that happen and we think that we have a plan that does that can i yes uh can i ask you to go back two slides i should have interrupted you i'm sorry um the third bullet black schedules tend to allow for more time for assessments don't feel as rushed blah blah however fewer blocks in a day make it less likely for students to return consistently so they were talking about the current

025hybrid model where we only have two classes that that that made it tough for students to consistently want to come to school that they wanted to be there for a longer period of time more blocks in a day okay more classes so just having two isn't enough to come especially some students one of those is a lunch period so then you're coming for an academic class and then you have a non-academic class so then it just it doesn't make it like you want to get out and get up and come out of bed when you're coming for just one academic course all right so uh we did send out the surveys to get feedback from students family and staff just as we have all year uh to get uh the voice of all three of

026those groups you can see the total number of responses that came in over the course of last week there and this was the first question so it's just important so you understand in the structuring of the survey if a family or a student responded no i'm not coming back i don't care what plan you put forward i'm not coming back to in-person instruction they answered the next question as to why they were not coming back and then they were done with the survey other than just open response okay so when we get into preferences for in-person options remote students weren't weighing in on those in-person selections okay if they marked maybe or yes then they did they provided us feedback on the in-person options so when you take a look at this you'll see that

027when we talk to our students about 80 percent of them or or more are saying they're planning on coming back uh full uh in person and we're at like 33 percent now are currently remote correct yeah we have about thir third remote and two-thirds in person which outpaces most schools in the area for students oh i hit fewer fans more remote students or fewer we have fewer remote students than most schools in the area yeah high schools in here when we talk to families it drops down to them saying 90 percent will return and 10 will stay remote so there's a 10 swing in there between students and families now it might not necessarily be the same families responding you know it could be any number of things there right so but for our planning

028purposes based on this we are planning on eight going from two-thirds of our students here to 89 to 90 percent of our students here so we have to factor that into our planning that as we said before bringing more students back will bring more students back so as we factor this in we have to think about school with more students here on a daily basis for the students that uh are saying that they are staying fully remote there is a wide variety of responses and you can see from there what the those first ones are the ones we gave them but you can see other is a huge number there's a lot of individual reasons why students are choosing to stay fully remote and when we look at families we see the same thing that

029other column is huge so it's just a wide variety of reasons very individual from family to family why that fully remote option is being chosen so then one of the next questions that we asked about was eating at school because building a schedule with the lunch period is much different than building a schedule without a lunch period and how that works throughout the day and as we look at this you can see there's a big difference between the number of students that are comfortable eating lunch at school versus eating a snack at school lunch was defined as at least 20 minutes you go to a common lunchroom you have to six sit six feet apart from one another and then you would have a lunch and then you would return back to your classroom in

030comparison to that a snack is the idea of a five to ten minutes you'd leave your classroom and spread out the hallway where you could get six feet apart and then you go back in to your classroom so it isn't this full go to a cafeteria setting it's just step out have a quick snack that might be in a hallway that might be outside uh you know but spread out and have a quick snack far more comfort in the snack idea than the lunch idea when we look at families we see a similar trend there is there's a little more comfort in lunch but a big disparity between the idea of lunch and snacks so in the models we gave families four different models and you see this in a second to look at but

031you can see this lunch preference come through in the survey results around the model so there was four options two without a lunch so an early release or a late arrival no lunch options then there was a full day option that was block with a lunch and the final option was make no changes stay in the hybrid so when we look at just the options that were full in person options the late arrival early release are in a bucket because those are the no lunch options and then the other model is with a lunch option so when we look at just those groupings and what people responded you can see the student result now they might have been factoring in more than lunch than this but you know look let's be fair here but looking

032at it the no lunch options far outweigh the option with lunch it is much stronger though amongst families the family responses for having a school day with lunch present than any other group hank if you ask that student do you want to get out of school earlier go to school all day what do you think they're going to pick now why the one with no lunch out at 130 is the most popular one with students but parents being the parent are saying no you need to be in school all day no that's very fair rick but when we go back to the are you comfortable having lunch at school that's very clear there as well amongst both students and all our field houses or all the space we have we don't have room yeah i'll

033get to i'll get to all of that in lunch in a second just cut it like everybody eats lunch at the same time i'll get there in a second but i want to just to you know maybe throw a counter punch hit what you're offering up there i mean can i can i get there with well i would like i don't want that to sit there i mean the idea that um that kids would just naturally choose to skip lunch and come home early if they could i think is not something i'm willing to just accept outright that that's you know there may be students that do that but to but to diminish the results of this on that sort of assumption i don't think it's students all day long in the classroom environment what's

034that i said are you around students all day long in the classroom you don't need to do that you know that i'm not you know that i'm not so i'm just saying i've seen it done i've lived it and i value i value what you're saying yeah obviously okay i mean i think that there's there it's relevant all i'm saying is that it doesn't mean that this isn't still no but if you most students hey i'd like to get out of 130 and go hang out with my friends right go have lunch downtown i don't i don't know that most students would say that i don't know that you're telling me that apparently you do i would put money on it i would go to draftkins and put money on it right now all right

035put it in your bracket i get it i will say that in comparison to a regular school day right in a regular school day an hour of that school day would have been lunch and study so the difference between a regular school day and this is one hour of class time right between this model and what we would have had before because the lunch study would have taken up an hour of that time right so to move everything around and make this work you're going to see in order in order to make it work with transportation all the moving pieces that's how we end up at the one-third i'm sorry and i know you've got more to say but dan did you want to say something i was going to say about these numbers make

036sure i understand and when i look at that all right and you're showing roughly 73-ish percent prefer schedule without lunch but two of the three options were scheduled throughout launch so it's not like a statistical slam dunk that people want without lunch because two of the three choices so 67 to baseline and you're only at 72.73 so yeah there's a slight increase in people who want lunch but i don't think it's overwhelming i just kind of wanted to no that's fair right there yeah i'm just trying to represent the data as it can be and that that is a fair point it's just you look at those numbers and it's 73. yeah i'll get into like all the options here in a second so you can see how they kind of stack up against one

037another all right so once again these were the four options so late arrival early release block and the hybrid model this is how we represented it in the form so that people got a visual look at how these would kind of work right and this is where if we just go straight up top choice against all or rank choice against all of the options that were presented you can see it's different from each group but you can see how that early release shows up in the top half in all of the groups okay when we say families we're talking parents or other parent guardian guardians always so okay it's just with the the variety of labels for the adult supervision we tend to go with families to make sure we include everybody all right so

038this is how it kind of how each of the choices shakes out by the options okay [Music] so you can see for students where their top choices come then for families you can see there is a slight edge in that option with lunch but it's not far above the option so dan to your point right it's not skewed that greatly you know uh it is definitely a preferred that it's the full day with lunch but it's not that far above the other choice and then for staff if you take a look at the comments you know it's just one more change right uh so their their selection was to stay in hybrid although their uh resounding second choice was that if we needed to change the early release would be the way to go and

039if we group them all together this is kind of how they come out if everything was equal all right so as we look through all the surveys students and staff of the choices of the full in person so you take hybrid off the table the top choices for students and staff were the early release the top choice for parents was the full day with lunch however when we can expect 80 to 90 percent of students to return to in-person learning there's some things we need to recognize one that's a much higher percentage than what we're seeing to other high schools in the area so when we see other high schools in the area doing days with lunch plans those are schools with 40 50 60 of students returning not you know we're already above that

040in the hybrid with more intending to return so the logistical challenges of running a full school day with a lunch get far greater than what we see with some of our peers and we're under construction too yes and we are under construction too we saw from the survey results there are concerns there's documented concerns there amongst eating lunch at school amongst both students and families and that concern is far greater from lunch than it is from snacks and as i talked about before remote families are choosing fully remote for a variety of reasons there's no real clear reason yes because you and i have talked about this but i think mike brought it up and this gentleman brought it up because we talked about like opening up the auditorium for luncheons oh get there now

041you're getting there okay so i couldn't hear you i'm getting there i'm getting there it's about opening up the auditoriums for lunch oh okay all right all right so programmatic consideration so what we're talking about here as you all know this is uh what we release to everybody today is that we follow these safety measures that are in place and they're the proposal for the board today is to return on april 6th after spring break with a tuesday through friday full in-person schedule so everybody's invited back every day tuesday through friday at a 1 30 release to avoid the lunch period that involves a 10-minute snack break in the third block of the day wednesday and thursday afternoons we would offer virtual support so similar to the resource period we have now kind of in

042the middle of the day we move that to the end of the day two days a week and then monday we'll go into detail on that on both of these in a second monday would is a recommendation right now that all late classes would meet remotely as they are now oh that is a typo for 40 minute periods not 50 minute period [Music] then this week starting tomorrow assuming the board approves of this proposal we will send out a survey to everybody for them to let us know how they plan on returning after spring break but unlike the selections we've made in the past if somebody starts out remote and wants to come back we'll allow them to come back the goal is to get as many students back in person as we can and

043t99 because we can work out lunches it's just a much smaller setting and how that works there that we will return to a five day a week schedule in what their schedule was before kovit did that monday all eight classes remote where it says remote 50 minutes did that go out to the public this way i it did but i there's another slide where it's correct this slide is the type i'm just wondering what maybe it did it in the description it said 40. okay all right let's make sure that the students it's just the type because they're looking at this i have one at home you know the paragraph that we sent them except for it was 40. okay so i do have a question the idea for monday i know you talk about

044the lunches but being remote is that also going to take into account kind of the cleaning of the school to make sure that we keep up with the necessarily uh safety cleaning no i we our cleaning protocols were able to do even if we were back in all five days okay i was just wondering based on the fact that this covet was anything like that taken into account no we're able to do all of our cleaning okay that's not a factor in sam has hello okay uh is there a visual somewhere in this presentation that shows what the monday will look like yeah we're getting there okay so hey quick question i know we either talked about it or retreating emails i don't remember which this past week we talked about still allowing a choice

045for remote my only concern with that is if we do which is a great thing if we get 90 percent of the kids back a traditional classroom is going to have three kids two kids online and 18 in the classroom what's an experience like for the two kids by themselves at home versus requiring everybody back in the classroom i mean at 33 it's a little and now with the ab splits it's a little bit different it's a little more balanced for teaching at an 80 or 90 to i mean i'm just worried about that those remote learners are really going to struggle with that model uh and as i indicated earlier though that's the amount that are opting into that i expect that we're going to have students that between quarantining or isolating because they're

046close contacts now that they won't be choosing full remote but will need to end up there for a period of time because of contact tracing so we need to keep that program robust enough because we could have students in and out of it because of contact racing yeah i just think that that i mean it's human nature if you've got 18 kids in front of you you have two on the computer where you're going to focus your time not by any i think we're gonna have to really make a conscious effort either in those virtual support hours or somehow that we don't forget about those that have chosen to be back especially if it is a 90 10 relationship i'm just i'm a little worried about that and and we've seen that the other direction

047now because even though we have two thirds of our students back we have some classrooms with 16 students in it and some classrooms with three right so in those settings the teachers have had to make sure that the in-person students are getting the experience that they need while the majority of the students are remote it's going to be just the opposite here so it's going to be a lot for our teachers to have to juggle all this as it has been all year is there any any metrics or anything that would point us to be requiring 100 back in in person no they're without the medical exemptions well i mean essentially are there i mean at what level because ideally we're 100 in school ideally without this at what point do we say that we're

048okay enough for that 100 percent back in school so we have to deal with the 10 to 15 percent that might feel or might get left out i would say coming into next school year if we're still sitting where we are now that would be the appropriate time because by then uh both isb well isb will have their protocols for determining if somebody has a medical reason to be fully exempt and then our attorneys will have the opportunity to vet that and make sure that we're we're doing that process appropriately at this point there's no clear guidance as to what would even qualify for that so you know and you know we'd have to wait for that to be determined before we you know you're working your way closer to the end of the school

049year at this point you know and are we going to get to the point where it's three weeks four weeks left in the school year and you're going to tell everybody you have to come back no questions asked you know at that point i don't know you know if it's if it's worth it i just wanted to raise that concern i appreciate your point you know just the idea that there's probably some point at which you know there's there's so few at home you're opting for that there's there's probably a point at which you go we need to you know and hopefully this would be worked out over the summer and how to deal with all that and yeah but we've been in that flux all year like i said there are some classrooms where

050students and teachers alike have said there's not enough students here what's the point of being in person right so this could flip and be the other way it's our job to make sure that all students are getting served in in either of those settings hopefully with the increased participation though that we're it seems to be indicated here that we're we're we're starting to lean more towards into the comet more students encourages more students and i think that that's that's probably going to impact yeah it'll snowball into yeah in a given year prior to colvin what percentage did we have of students who remained homebound but still received services from a very small number very small number gonna come under two no more than two under five i i couldn't speak to it right i mean

051there is a possibility it ebbs and flows especially with when you factor in both physical and mental reasons for mental health reasons for someone to be home bound it can fluctuate greatly but there is a percentage in a non-covered year that would mean the whole year absolutely and it's not it's not a small number it's it's no it's a big it's got digits oh yeah it's double definitely double digits and they would have responded no they would have responded no on the survey that you wouldn't you know they wouldn't be coming back no matter what no it's not i'm not talking about the survey i'm just trying to get a baseline for prior to covet how many students would be home anyway and it'd be really hard to save right now rick because one of

052the big reasons that we are seeing for students wanting to stay home during covit is related to anxiety and mental health and so that's directly related to kovid being present in society so that could naturally drive those numbers higher this year because of it but yeah take cove it out there still is a number who struggle with their idea of school and and need that homebound service correct we're always providing whether they're homebound or hospitalized right you know any number of those things we're providing resources to students learning in an alternative setting than uh in every year yeah just that number i would anticipate would be higher this year even in a good year yes out covet there is a percentage right principal percentage that are not in school on a day-to-day basis because of

053situations absolutely every year actually the board has added resources over the years to make sure that we're helping those students and serving them appropriately yes yeah okay all right all right so we've been through this but i just you know i wanted to get it on one slide what were those key factors is we selected a model so we keep saying bring get as many kids back as possible we already have one of the highest in-person rates in the area and i anticipate that more will choose to return return this way lunch was a major factor in determining the schedule and i'll get into all the variables i think on the next slide on lunch but just to review lunch is much different than when we think of lunch before when we had kids talking

054about coming back to lunch periods they're envisioning the socialization time that they had in the past and that is not if you look at the guidelines what we're talking about in a lunch period okay we're talking about six feet apart we're talking about assigned seats we're talking they're all facing one direction there's limited talking because they have their masks off as i mentioned before 37 percent of students 27 of families are not comfortable with lunch at school we talked about the preferences and then other factors in this model are that feedback has strongly encouraged a consistent schedule throughout the week so you'll see this factor in a couple of ways in the upcoming slides and how monday and tuesday and friday fit together so i'm going to get into the details but i just want

055to give you these kind of overarching ideas that are going to set up these things and hank are you going to explain what lunch means yeah okay so i won't ask my question right here so the slide you've all been waiting for lunch so we have decided administratively a common lunch is not a feasible option at this time if we return in the spring or in the spring if we return in the fall under the exact same guidelines with the new commons and our outdoor eating spaces that will be achievable but right now it's not if we look at right now at south high which is our biggest building right now it has the smallest cafeteria space due to construction it also does not have an auditorium due to construction so there's very little area

056in the common lunchroom space to bring students in probably 220 230 is our maximum under those safety guidelines of six feet apart all facing one direction when you if we were returning 80 percent of 2 800 students start adding up the number of lunch periods when you take 220 at a time you start to end up with nine to 12 lunch periods depending on how many return in a regular school day we have six so it gets to be very difficult to to put students in spaces and i've heard field house gyms those kinds of things but those spaces are occupied by students returning for those curricular areas plus you have hygiene needs you need to get food there food allergies you have a whole bunch of complex moving parts for if you do those

057things i've heard people say put students in lunch in classrooms and eat then you still have the same supervision hygiene food allergy supervision pieces that go into eating in those spaces as well for the all of those reasons we're recommending for this spring that we just focus on getting students back to school all students inviting them back every day working through the logistics of lunch by removing lunch you remove you shorten the school day by one hour naturally because you remove that lunch study as i mentioned earlier that would put us at the end of the day at 2 30. however that is the exact same time that the elementary schools are releasing their students we need to do our bus runs either before or after they do so that moves us back to the

058130 point to make everything work to get in the four block classes and make that all work and make it all run without a lunch period in place um i think i covered everything in here questions about the common lunch what's what's the detriment oh i'm sorry terry was first okay um i understand that um you know we're not gonna have lunch but we're gonna have snacks uh are those snacks things that people bring into the building or are we gonna be servicing the snack ability i i guess the food service so that you know a student can buy a snack is that part of the whole no students would bring their own free or reduced lunch we would have a process to provide them to them in advance like they pick up their snacks

059for the week and then be able to bring them okay so they would bring an apple yeah correct that i'm just throwing this out okay now we can do that because our students will be in i have a slide on snacks next oh um that's all right that's right let me did i let me cover lunch and then we'll get to stack in a second did you like did you have a snack question i had a lunch question all right but my lunch question was what what do we if we're trying to weigh the pros and cons right what are the what's the negative to not having lunch i mean it may seem like a obvious sort of question the huge negative is that it shortens the school day right if we had the lunch

060period then we could stay till 320. but from an academic standpoint curricular standpoint what are we sacrificing by not having lunch i don't believe at this point that we're sacrificing much i think that what we're looking at right now with the block schedule and you're going to see in a second those are 70 minute blocks for 70 minutes we've heard consistently from students that 80 minutes is too long they'd like to see those shorter so we get the four 70-minute blocks in in a day that meets the instructional needs of students for that day plus you know then they go home and have their lunch period many school districts in illinois four seventy minute blocks plus the lunch period is a full school day all right we have an unusually s long school day for

061high schools in illinois i'm not saying it shouldn't be and i like our schedule i'm just saying that if you stack together lunch and 470 minute blocks you're matching a lot of high schools in illinois and across the country so i don't think we're missing out on anything instructionally especially when we add back in the resource time and we add back in the office hours the teachers have been offering individually to students all year i think between all of those we have all the mechanisms we need to end the school year strong academically maybe rick i don't know maybe you want to speak to this or i was going to wait till he got to the schedule and talk about the hybrid schedule i was going to wait and ask next direction okay okay i

062was just you know it's the slide 29 and it proposes the schedule got it all right well i know we've had you know we've had um uh commentary from the public uh in person and in view you know via emails and such a lot of people saying hey you know we need uh we need a normal day and uh we need you know we should be having lunch too and if that's the only thing that's you know and i'm i'm trying to weigh this uh if we're really not losing anything by not having lunch but it makes more people feel comfortable about being here then you know that seems to be the way to go tonight i think you know what we are losing is obviously uh that full day like what we used to

063have but i've heard from folks that we're losing lunch that social time the kids have each day that's not what this is that's what this is times of covid this lunch is not a social period right now it is you go to your individual assigned spot your little six foot box you consume your lunch and then you put your mask back on and go back to class it isn't lunch like we think of lunch in high school you know where it's this time where students get to be together and socialize and mix and kind of you know blow off steam together and that that's not what this would be um hank before covet what was a not counting resource period what was the lunch time because i think it was like 20 some minutes yeah

064yeah just over 20. so why can't a full schedule where you shut everybody down for 22 minutes which is 12 minutes longer than the snack period they go to their spot deep and then they go to the rest of the classes the whole day like before eight classes i don't have somewhere to put them that i can have them all sit for that for twenty two twelve minutes because when you look at i need them to be in a spot that's cleaned that is six feet apart from everywhere that make sure that there's no that it's hygienic that there's no chance of food allergies coming in contact with one another that it's ready then for instructional space afterwards it's more than 22 minutes that we're looking at to turn that space over and get it

065up and going no just have air with the snack break the school's going to shut down for 10 minutes right it's not going to be [Music] under that scenario i'll get to snacks one second questions on lunch so in the schedule that has lunch yes we still if i remember right i i don't have it in front of me you're still only talking four blocks of classes that day yes so with lunch or without lunch it's still four classes a day correct it's the same four classes same amount of time the only missing is lunch correct because as you said lunch essentially if you're talking six feet apart is like this right in order kind of what we are here with another row six feet in front of you facing this thing all facing the

066same way yeah okay so the what gets inserted in to make it a full day in order to make those we could make six lunch periods if we could make six lunch periods work we could run a full day block and in there in those six months in the middle in the third period of the day so let me go back we need to go back quite a ways oh right there see the option three yeah that's what the model would be okay so it's still four blocks in the day but in that third block of the day in order to make lunches stack up and everything work you have the combined lunch and study hall in there depending on how you move periods and times around you end up with like a let's say

067you were doing an 80-minute day you'd have an 80-minute block in your first class 10-minute passing period good morning 80-minute passing period 10-minute block and then in that long-class lunch study classes would be breaking from one another to go have lunch at different times so you might start in class and then your whole class would go off to lunch for 20 or 30 minutes right then your whole class would have to come back and be in a study hall in their own classroom to make all the times of all the classes line up because you've got to fit all of these lunch periods inside that third block and then you would return to your actual instructional time within your class so that that middle class didn't end up with 140 minutes and every other class

068is only getting 80 minutes of instruction because then as a teacher that class and planning for it as a student that class and going through it are very different than all of the other classes you're in throughout the week and going back to an eight-class day with lunch wasn't wasn't one of the options but that one i'm assuming is it feasible because of space or yeah it's the the same same concept that we've gone back to the idea of the block is that we don't have as many students mixing throughout the day so there's less chance for close contacts there's less opportunities for students to have to quarantine than to track illness and to spread illness so the idea is limiting those cohorts throughout the day in the block chair um i i talked to

069you earlier that i like the option three but um if let's say we could do option three how many uh lunch periods would be in that third block and how many students would be in each one of those um lunch periods because you know i guess i'm just thinking what if we had a tent outside that they could go for just the lunch part and then come back in for the students to have class i mean to me that makes a lot of sense to have you know a huge tent if there's 200 students that have to have lunch at every section of that i mean i'm just thinking outside the box but sure it wouldn't be something that would be in the classroom for them to have food it would be out let's say

070in the parking lot you know put a big tent you know with tables i like that but i guess you know um our weather is so predictable here well that's why you have a tent besides on it uh you know and by the time spring break gets here hopefully our weather will be moving in the better direction i don't i'm just throwing that i agree with you my school is on black option three for since i've been there so probably longer than 21 years they have four lunches that they cycle through that one period right and they consider like science either gets lunch at the beginning or lunch at the end so you don't break up the class but like math english history the kids kind of like it because it breaks up 80 minutes

071of math or 80 minutes of english they come in to come out how many periods would you need of lunch because we've got four yeah if we did six population if we did six here you're looking at 400 to 500 students per lunch period the cafeteria only here will hold about 220. so you need to put the rest of the students somewhere oh you can't eat in the food in the field though no no i mean even even on a good day because of the flooring situation or the gym hold the bleachers yeah right but there's students that are in the gym during that a lot maybe they could do it maybe for 28 days they could do something different for the weather they could be outside they could be in the football field for

07228 days that's why we're recommending this other schedule to make it to make it work well i'm just i'm just trying to get our students back as much as possible with the least amount of hassle but you know even with this block you're you're only doing half the classes anyway in option three so that's why i was asking how many students does that mean and how many lunch periods would you have to put in there to get them a lunch that's what to fit them in the space that we currently have now you need nine to twelve lunch periods depending on how much no no i mean it looks well okay i don't know it's for me this is a period of covet we're interested in getting more instructional time um i don't know what

073the great benefit is to having lunch other than maybe time that parents don't have to worry where their kids are that that to me seems like it i think that we're spending too much time talking about fitting all these um lunch periods that seems like too many lunch periods to be having i just don't think it's worth all this discussion on it i frankly think that there is no great loss not to having lunch at school i guess the point of it though is if i get what you guys are saying you're talking about getting the lunch in so you can get the school day longer is that your point yeah what's that no to to make sure that you know right now we've got four four class and i'm focusing on option three you

074you've got four class periods on uh let's say what is it uh tuesday thursday and then four of those class periods on monday and wednesday yeah you'd be odds odds and evens you get 40 minutes more of instruction time right right because the classes are 80 minutes versus 70 minutes right so you're getting you're getting a lot of class time but you've got to feed them because you know there's no student that's going to be able to go from 8 o'clock in the morning until uh 3 30 and we feel like we need to give them a snack even to go without right without without fuel i mean you know let's face it we don't want to be without fuel so they shouldn't be without well some students have a 40-minute bus ride in and

075a 40-minute bus ride out on top right so that's even more time so i guess what i'm saying is is it if we had a tent in the parking lot that would fee that would fit 200 students you know they're distancing in in one way or another couldn't we rotate those enough to get the the uh half the students that one time i i don't know i'm just we don't believe so terry that the amount of space that you would need to make that happen is not realistic at this point in time okay i i'm just and the just getting everybody to that space and back in and serving them meals and then with the requirements of how the meals must be served and all of those pieces we don't believe that the logistics for

076the number of students that we're looking at are feasible somebody said i i miss i want to be sure i understand someone said something about it gets 40 more minutes in the day what do we what who said that and what i did because the block three the classes are 80 minutes versus 70 minutes on option two so you have more in in class instruction time that's why the day goes to 320. you're picking up that 40 minutes in the class that gets cut in option two okay correct because it's the only okay it's the online supporting option too okay right so hank i'm not being confrontational here i'm just i'm trying to understand in my in my mind how do we get 10-minute lunches to work but our 10-minute snack break to work but

077a 22-minute lunch break can i get too much slide on snacks and then okay it just doesn't seem like it's that different it is it's very different before we talk stamps joanna you get a question no we're going to come back he has something to say oh i'm sorry sam oh thank you i was just going to mention that the 10 extra minutes per class period that would be happening with the third schedule i honestly think is next to worthless just in terms of extra instruction time especially if students are fully remote and also being in person too just because i think one of the principal complaints this entire year has been 80 minute periods and i just think that after about an hour 90 of students their brains are just so tired that adding

078in that extra 10 minutes of instruction time if that's a deciding factor for choosing block or schedule three over any other one i don't think that should be considered because that extra 10 minutes is nowhere near as efficient well sam i think i was going to bring this up with the schedule i've been teaching 21 years with the 80-minute class periods unfortunately we just switched over and we have not been able to provide teachers i don't think with a lot of support to help them adjust because my question when we got to the schedule was hank before covid what was the typical class period 45 minutes 42 minutes 47 what was it for before cove and all this 50. um and so there's a different strategy it's in a 50-minute period in an 80-minute period

079that the teacher has to has to sense and and you you're right you can't watch her for straight through you you kill a kid you're born to death but kill the instructor you can do other strategies to offset that and i'm fortunate because i can do a lab i can do a pre-lab post lab and the lab in 18 minutes ap i can actually do a college level lab because i've got two 80-minute periods which is 160. the math they have to do different things history has to do different things english has to do different strategies unfortunately our staff hasn't had that professional development yet because we just switched over well we've done some you know while we're in here but we've also had to switch multiple schedules and it's also different numbers of students

080showing up in person and remote so there's a lot of variables it takes years it takes a couple years to get used to teaching 80 minutes to a high school student and it does 50 minutes i i'll agree with you rick there are teachers that are just amazing at an 80-minute block but it's you've done it it's not easy it's not an easy thing to pull up figure it out and what sam is reporting is what we do continue to hear from students is short in the 80 minute block it's just too long but we're asking our teachers to teach in a format that they haven't had any experience to try correct it's their first year trying to make it work and i think they're doing a great job with what they've been faced with

081but yeah it's tough because it's it's a completely different ballgame yeah 80 versus 50 at this level yeah college this level i can imagine and i i would think we're talking about the student being exhausted i would think it's exhausting too for an instructor to go at that pace i mean that's a long time to to be on so i would just kind of piggyback on all this i think you know the point that's just been made is reinforcing the idea that um you know trying to go through herculean efforts to try to figure out a way to get lunch to work at school has very little benefit academically or quicker um and so yeah that's i'm still at the same place i don't you know i'm not i'm not hearing a great argument for

082this is this is the huge benefit to having lunch and if i heard right especially hearing from sam it doesn't because we're trying to get that extra 40 minutes in based on a longer class period we're saying that that potentially is not even it's not something we want right returning a good value because at the end of the day we should be still looking at that then yeah all right yes let's let's talk about snacks yeah that's snack yeah what'd you bring us right what have i been waiting for let's try that out all right so snack breaks are a feasible option families have responded and students have responded that there's far fewer concerns about snacks the way we described snacks was five to ten minutes stepping out into a common space spreading six feet

083apart removing your mask and having a snack we wouldn't require anybody to have a snack and that's one of the things if you build in a lunch period the student has to go to the lunchroom because you need to take all of those kids out of a classroom and send them to eat because the teacher needs to eat at the same time in this in a snack model students could choose to hang out stay in the classroom not remove their mask not participate in the snack break should they choose not to they could just stay in their classroom and students that wish to snack could step out spread out you know whether it's in a space like this a hallway step outside if they have outdoor access those kinds of things have a quick snack

084and then return right back to class you know we're trying to extend extend i said beyond but we're trying to get close to five hours okay you know beyond five hours that they're with us we're trying to get close to five hours of instructional time in a year when there isn't covid going on that's the minimum threshold we're shooting for is 300 minutes of being at school uh counts for 300 minutes of instruction counts as a full school day so you know this is the key difference right is you get the choice of whether you're participating or not you just quickly step out for that five or ten minutes you know you clean your hands we have hand sanitizer in every classroom clean your hands step out have a quick snack return back into your

085class and it would be rolling so like the first 10 minutes of the classroom would be rooms with the end in the number one and then the next room would be you know rooms that end number two right and you just kind of roll everybody out for this quick 10 minute snack and then you're right back into your classroom and picking up where you were at so it provides you know that quick snack because it is a long period of time especially kids with long bus rides but it's not the whole idea of having to go leave your classroom walk to the other side of the building perhaps find your assigned seat six feet apart from everybody facing in a certain direction eat your meal and then we clean up that space for the next

086group that comes in and then do it again time and time again for however many periods it takes to move the students through that space that we have whether that's indoors outdoors whatever all of those same protocols exist it's much bigger in a lunch period than it would be in kind of this snack model so finally i made it through the snack slime but they would be able to eat their snack in their room and they'd and it would be like you said rolling so you'd have fewer people in the hallway and then would there need to be any cleaning correct because there's no cleaning because they're not eating at a certain you know the idea is that you step out and you have your stand and have your snack wherever you're at and there

087won't be students sitting there where they are correct right the idea is that they're not eating in the classroom they're kind of stepping out into this common more larger volume space and then coming right we need some more uh trash cans yeah we'll probably need yeah receptacles and those kinds of things will probably have to walk and sweep hallways and those kinds of things you know but you know i'm sure students are responsible you ask them to clean up after themselves they do a far better job with us than they do at home so i have no concerns about that clean up in aisle six correct okay so that's the idea of the snap break all right questions on snack all right so this is that schedule now you'll see it's odds and evens like

088it is now but what we do is push you see the order is different than it's been all year because we're pushing the lunch periods to the beginning or end of the day so that students when their lunch period comes up they can either choose to stay here with us or some students have chosen a release at that point so either option would be on the table depending on what families selected also in that time from 1 20 until the end of the day we'll still continue to have our connections and access program which are students that need to stay with us for the whole day we're going to have some students that are involved in activities or athletics that can't get home and come back we would allow them to stay here have lunch

089stay through the end of the day we'll still have a good number of students that will be with us for the full day based on their needs but that smaller number of students we would be able to accommodate a lunch setting for especially with all of the students the majority of students leaving at that point then we can spread them out we can supervise them they we can have an appropriate lunch setting and those in that for the smaller number of students that are here it's just the large right student body the full student body that making a lunch period and making it work and meeting all of those guidelines just it you know to get back like we keep saying to get back that 40 minutes which students are saying we don't want that

09040 minutes you know because it hasn't been productive time because it's long for them we've heard that from them all year long it just doesn't seem like it is worth that investment for those 28 days of the school year to to pull this off this way now if we were talking this was august and we're talking about a full school year and we're talking about how this is all going to work and we have our common space here and we start putting up some outdoor eating areas and those kinds of things for the long term and and get seating and cleaning protocols and all of those kinds of things in place for the long haul absolutely i think that if we're coming back next year and it looks like that that's what we're talking about

091doing but our spaces will be completely different next fall than what we're looking at right now in the spring then we have that space to set up permanent spots for kids to spread out and and have a meal here and the lessons learned you know we're i mean no matter what we know we're going to be well and i'm bettering what we're doing later than where we are now and just i'm assuming the guidelines will continue to adapt and change and and those kinds of things when were you when when if if everything got going in a great way when were you going to implement your new schedule that we talked about i think a while ago oh the one that was being proposed last year that we've tabled because of all of this yeah

092it would have been for next school year but with everything going on and all the different schedules and not knowing what comes next that that would have been a recommendation for next school year is that still going to be tabled all through next year too that right now that's the plan yes and then what was the length of class period in that schedule that's not implemented and is being tabled there's was it 80 minutes no there's a whole range of options because we never settled on a final model so there's a whole bunch of different ones yeah there's a whole bunch of different ones that we would have surveyed everybody on and gotten feedback and so current class time right now in the model we're in today 70 minutes 860 80 80. oh it's 80.

093yeah 80 without a lot of strategy without a lot of professional right we just had to jump into it yeah yeah were you going to envision um some type of professional learning right that's why we've had to put off the new schedules that we were talking about for the future because we need time to train everybody in it to make those successful like what you've talked about so it doesn't make sense to start that next year and there's going to be a two-year window until you get the freshman coming in that this is all they've ever known correct right right where the people that have lived through half and half are you going to be against it so yeah because it's completely different now so there is a window where you're going to hear that

094input right where a freshman comes in okay this is what i've had for although i know i can't help but to believe that living through this will make whatever that next thing is easier you know so teachers will have learned a lot from these this year if you implement though you have to provide professional development i agree with that you're through you throw them into the fire well right because that's 80 minutes without what the years offered us yeah it that's that's brutal i feel bad that's bad i had an easy question so we're all going to offer bus transportation twice at the end of the day one's for early dismissal and then once for [Music] like a better time hard to hear you here i didn't hear you oh yeah the bus transportation after

095after class early dismissal because we're having to adjust the time because we have to get buses that we're also using for our elementary schools and our middle schools so we're going to have two bus rounds in the evening in the afternoon one bus run yeah 1 30. at 1 30. so if a student elects to stay later or they need to stay later they're on their own for getting home i think we're talking activity buses janice yes so for those small number of students doing a smaller bus round run but not the full comprehensive run do you run a later bus for the sport athletes like a six o'clock bus route that's that activity an activity route when's the activity route run janice so and again in theory they could then you could even have

096a longer commute than regular than the 40 minutes correct yeah depending on what the route is okay but that group would stick around and there would be a lunch period period because it'd be just fewer students that we could spread out um i actually have another question in the same boat as that so i'm assuming that the schedule was organized um in this different way with it going period four then two then eight and six and the other way around so that people that are taking lunch breaks during those times are maybe able to show up later to school or leave earlier um are there bus routes for people in that boat and are so they'd be allowed to stay but we wouldn't have a different run for those so it's just the normal runs

097in the morning and then at the 1 30 time and then just the smaller activity bus run at the end of the day okay so then they would be staying like in a cafeteria then okay yeah absolutely you know and that's part of the challenge of the lunch periods right is you know during those times you students need to be somewhere all right so here's the summary of what we've just been talking about so it'd be each day would be a four period block with that early release in the day at that one 120 end of the day on the buses by 1 30 so the buses can get back to the elementary schools by 2 30. shorter block as we've as our students have mentioned we've heard clearly from our students is a common

098request of students that 80 minutes and from our staff as well 80 minutes is long there's 10 minute passing periods you know it's gives teachers some time to wrap up and help the students that are there in person but with remote learners our teachers are setting up broadcast studios in every classroom so they need to be able to especially if they're moving classrooms get there get signed in get their camera set up get all of that ready to go and incl including taking care of any personal needs between that first class and the next class because they've been in a class for 70 minutes and then also i have that and then also students will allow to use the restrooms during passing periods again and with a 10-minute passing period that allows us you know

099to stagger you know how we can cue people up to go into restrooms so that there can be physical distancing no lockers no general lockers however students that are staying for the whole day we would open up athletic lockers for them you know because they're not going home to get their stuff and then coming back they would need somewhere to drop off their their equipment for after-school practice so they carry their coats and their backpacks with them the whole day yeah the the secret is that kids really don't wear coats oh okay well i guess i lived in there what guys what what's that what we can't hear you i'm sorry we can't hear what you're saying i said lockers have gone by the wayside right everything's in the backpack it's on them um lockers

100are not what we all lived in they have gone by the wayside they're a relic i'm glad we spent so much time putting new ones in virtual huh i haven't used my locker at all in high school even before coming and i think i am in the majority i would say yeah so he's nodding she's agreeing with you what do you i did hear you so you use your locker yeah i was saying i haven't used my locker like period before covet either so i think that that's not a huge issue four kids none of them use their lacquer athletic lockers all right and our current schedule is a feature of resource time in that middle of the day each day we want to put that time back in and kind of redesign it for

101on those last two or on the wednesday and thursday days we're going to be working with teachers over the next two weeks to design that appropriately we want some accountability for that time built in so that students are assigned there parents know that they're coming and they know if they don't come so that you know there's some accountability for the last chunk of the year here for using that time and students accessing that time but we're going to work through those procedures over the next few weeks heading back you know for when we come back with this you're going to see the monday schedule one of the things that it happens is we're extending the instructional time on monday to those 40-minute class periods which shortens the amount of time the teachers have for collaboration

102time and planning time and working together with their teams so that time gets shifted then to the tuesday afternoon and the friday afternoon so we're just pushing activities and time around in these schedules a little bit differently we've talked about the snack uh we've talked about launch schedule works with transportation and just so we're all counting it's 28 days how appropriate during the time of the pandemic 28 days of tuesday through friday days through the end of the school year you know that that transportation issue too just to highlight that you know that's a major that was a major consideration here and people asking why don't you do what we have to work with district 58 and 68 as well and and because we have a shared bus contract with them and so that definitely

103impacts you know has some bearing on what we can and can't do well in the school days of actually 58 and 68 fit together pretty nicely here would in the way that they typically would in a unit district where your big kids go to school first and then they get home first your little kids then come to school after them and get home after them this schedule is going to work just like that as if we were a unit district you know our students will get up come to school then the buses will go pick up the littles and drop them off then at 1 30 our kids will go and get dropped off and then they'll drop off the littles so it's not unlike what you would see in in any unit district okay

104um monday this is the monday schedule so we still have some collaboration professional learning time in the morning we did hear from students that they have appreciated and continued to appreciate that late start on monday that gives us our time to do some of our work and then start the day you know this is just a 40-minute straight period day and then some of the features of this uh is that all eight periods are meeting on that day so this is the one time each week that a teacher has an opportunity to see all of their kids that day all of our students have the opportunity to see all of their teachers that day you know in our survey that we asked of students in november 90 of our students said that they found those

105mondays valuable for those reasons we're increasing it to that 40-minute day that gives us 15 more minutes of instructional time per class period because they're only 25 minutes now so it makes it more like a regular class period that time helps offset those shorter class periods as we fit everything in as we've talked about on the rest of the week right now you know we're recommending for the rest of this year that that remains remote however and i'll explain kind of the back and forth we did versus remote in person on monday in a second one of the key essential things that happens on monday is all the kids get everything that's expected to happen over the course the week on that monday regardless if the next time they see is on tuesday or wednesday

106thursday or friday like that's the time where everybody gets the expectations for the week all at once all in the same setting to move from and when we look at the monday schedule there's only six mondays remaining after spring break so this was a a huge discussion and debate amongst the administrative team uh as to how the mondays should work out i've listed to you for you here some of the pros and cons we worked through in each model one of the models that we were considering was just the alternating odd and even block all right so you would just the first day back you'd be all odd period classes and the next day would be even and the next day on the next day even from there until the end of the school year

107regardless of what happened when whatever you ended on friday if you ended with odds on friday and you were coming back on monday that was evens right and you just keep going back and forth throughout the whole school year this is a model that would put students in school five days a week where the other one in person five days a week they're learning either way five days a week right the eight period remote model is what we've been doing all year we're just extending the amount of instructional time on that day in this you can see kind of the pros and cons of each you know in the remote this way teachers are seeing every week you're seeing your students and students are in person four days a week they see their teachers consistently

108three days a week in this model and it's consistent kids know what's going to happen on monday and then how tuesday works wednesday thursday friday every week so you can see i'm not going to read them all to you but then one of the key ones that i want to to point out is that last one is it offers a day when remote students are in the same setting as in-person students um so you know that's a a key time each week where everybody's kind of in the same place at the same time for all of their classes sam is there a reason besides just having longer class periods on monday why the the break went from two hours to nothing yeah the break in the middle of the day is is the only reason

109that's gone just for longer class periods yeah it was to get the longer class periods in and now that you have a 40 minute whenever your lunch period comes up you have a 40 minute break for your lunch okay makes sense so um so it looks more like a traditional monday when when you were back in in person before covet yeah so this is a little nitty-gritty but um sam and i are both students that actually don't take a lunch period so then will teachers that say have like a staggered class like me for example i take uh during a normal school year it would be half a period of choir and half a period of lunch would those teachers um be encouraged to give us at least like a 10 minute food break yeah

110absolutely yeah and you'd any any teacher that or any student that has eight class periods we'd encourage them to talk to their teachers and work out when you're going to get a break in there and how that's going to work and that's not the majority of our students but it absolutely is some of our students all right and then when we consider that alternating odds and evens students would be in person five days a week which is a huge thing right but the trade-off is is some weeks you would have your class you'd see your teachers three times you'd see your other half of your teachers two right and then the next week it would flip around the other way um there's really no day where you get to that check-in with all of your

111teachers uh and remote students are there's never a day where they're in the same setting with everybody else and this is especially concerning with the three feet of physical distance as i said earlier where we could end up because of quarantine periods with lots of students ending up in in a period of 10 to 14 days where they need to be remote and we don't we don't want to put our remote students at a disadvantage but we also don't want our in-person students that need to go remote at a disadvantage either and we feel like if there's never this check-in day it puts them at a significant disadvantage so when we factored all of those things out we ended up with this remote monday eight period day restructured to be different than it was before

112so can i just put you guys on the spot um so sam is all for um i know you don't speak for all students and rick you don't speak for all teachers but in your in your experience um seeing all of your teachers on one day and having a weekly check-in with all students on one particular day is that uh do you see that as valuable that alternating block schedule for a teacher's planning is a disaster you'd have your classes all over the place but checking in see my schedule monday and friday i see all my classes 50 minutes and then tuesday wednesday thursday i do the 80-minute block but i only see him twice in those three days so i only see my classes four times a week and so you can juggle it

113with the 50 you use the 50 minutes to is kind of like the sounding board for the week or the finishing board for the week and then in the middle is when you do your activities for me um but there is one day and i saw that in here where you don't get a plan you go eight to three non-stop because the way it works you will have one day where you don't get a planning period and i saw that in here as one of the the champions yeah if you're a teacher that teaches on all on the evens or all on the odds that we have a a group of teachers that we need it is better to see all your students especially on a monday it's working because you can kind of plan

114for the weekends you can move them forward there for the week at least if you plan by the week so i i prefer the remote on monday and then i would prefer full tuesday wednesday thursday friday but that's just thank you well good that's fine that's my opinion for this year eventually i think hank's going to go full yeah we'll figure out in the future we'll end up with something else yeah then yeah and if you'd like a student perspective um i i can say that i'd speak for both the advantages and disadvantages of that i think that it is valuable like rick was saying to see all of your teachers each day to see what the expectations of the week are and what you guys will be doing but then to that also like

115the current schedule we have right now i think that some teachers maybe don't know how to utilize the awkward amount of time that the 25 minute periods would bring which is solved in part by those longer class periods those days so i'd say good thing you get to check in with everybody odd thing is that 40 minutes to 80 minutes it's a really big difference i'd say more so for teachers and for me personally i don't always feel like i get the most out of my mondays right now with 25 minutes thank you yeah i agree basically i think that 40 minutes is probably better than 25 but the disadvantage with that is i would say just in general zoom fatigue is gonna set in after about five or six periods i think for ninety

116percent of kids but i think that there's merit in 40 minutes over 25 minutes i think that that's definitely a good trade-off while students are probably going to get more tired and more fatigued and more fed up with the 40-minute periods on mondays i think from an educational perspective it's it the um the goods outweigh the harms i would say personally i would feel a little bit fatigued 40-minute classes a piece five minutes in between but i'd also at least feel like i'm getting more out of my class each day than as opposed to what i'm doing now where i don't feel fulfilled in certain classes so it's the trade-off you make thank you all right thank you all right so we still have a lot of work to do over the next few weeks

117to prepare for coming back should this schedule be approved you know we still have the time to allow all all students to select which option they'd like to return in as i mentioned it's not a permanent choice if they start remote and would like to come back in person they could we still need to plan that wednesday and thursday afternoon support time we talked about lockers parking is a huge challenge we are you know we allowed because we could we had all the space we allowed everybody who wanted to come and drive and park to do that but now we have a lot more people used to driving and parking than what we can accommodate so the village of downers grove has been great they've been troubleshooting some options with us and we continue to

118work with them to try to come up with as many parking options as we can near the schools so there'll be information following on that and we'll reach out to students that we've issued parking passes to to let them know kind of how this is going to shake out and so that's very much in flux but we are working and of course the village downers grove as always has been great partners in trying to come up with solutions here contact racing we fully anticipate that this will become a tougher job uh with moving from six feet to three feet because you're naturally going to end up in more situations where you are less than six feet around people for 15 or more minutes we've got to work out the logistics like what we're talking about

119trash can clean up those you know scheduling of the snack break we still have some concerns with large group settings you know we talked about tents and those kinds of things our outdoor spaces we're going to need some of those spaces for our large groups to enter into because the whole band coming back you know might not fit with three feet and also like a band after a certain amount of time we need the air to exchange in that space so our outdoor spaces are already limited to some extent because of construction but now we're taking over spaces and all of these other different ways that are going on teacher schedules we still have quite a few things to work through we have several teachers with four in a day so one day is really

120heavy and the other day is very light our contract with the teachers stipulates that they're they can only teach four in a row if they agree to so we might have some different things that we need to work through with breaks and those kinds of things to make it work we're talking to each one of those teachers or reaching out to each of those teachers and having them respond to us as to you know how they would uh best like for us to interact with that then we'll figure it out and see how it works but just so we know what their preferences are to start with because if there are some teachers that are just like it's fine i'll have a heavy day and a light day and i'm good and then there's others

121you know maybe if you're diabetic you're not gonna have a hard time teaching four in a row without having an opportunity to step out and eat something or if you're a nursing mother or there's all kinds of different situations where four in a row is really not going to be feasible for one of our teachers we also have traveling teachers we we don't want to end up in any situations where because now we're flipping these periods around to move the lunch periods to the end of the day we don't want any scenario where a teacher has to go to one school go to the other one and turn around and go back uh that just not productive use of anybody's time and then part-time teachers especially with that support time you know we're putting that

122support time in the afternoon but if you're you've chosen to be a part-time teacher so that you could have your afternoon free it's hard for us to then put time when you need to work with students in the afternoon so you know there's some things that we need to work through employee wise with all of those things so our teachers have been great and flexible with us all year we'll continue to work with them on all of these and then the supervision of students that are going to stick around in the afternoon we've got to coordinate figure out how many students that is and then coordinate supervision for those students all right so this is the overview this is the recommendation to the board that we're asking for approval for under action tonight so it

123is the idea of we're returning everybody can come back after spring break monday is remote tuesday through friday is the 1 30 release four blocks with all of the aspects that we've talked about today with snot snacks and buses and everything else that we've been through all of the safety measures and then t99 because it's that on its own program different group of students different setup we would return to what their traditional schedule is coming back so that's the recommendation i'm asking the board to take action on tonight are there any revisions or changes that the board would like for us to consider as as we take action otherwise this is what i'm asking for i hear none oh go ahead though i just wanted to bring up the point um that a lot of

124students that i talked to did share some concerns about traveling over spring break i know that we talked about that a little bit and that as of now it wouldn't be mandatory to quarantine or provide proof of a negative test but i just wanted to mention and throw that out there that a lot of students would be concerned that their classmates you know traveled somewhere with very loose restrictions or weren't in compliance with you know regulations and good safety measures and that a lot of students would be more comfortable if there was something in place to ensure that people coming back didn't bring anything with them and maybe had to provide a negative test or quarantine for a few days zoe that's a great question we discussed it all year we have tried to stick

125as closely to that guidelines as possible and not add or remove additional guidelines and the guidelines as they're presented to us from the health department is exactly what i presented today it's encourage people to follow the safety guidelines as if they were at home when they travel and if they do that they're free to return and if they don't then they need to follow those additional protocols yeah sam just to be a hundred percent clear i'm sure this was implied before but in the survey that was sent out whenever it was march 8th there was a paragraph in here that said in the low to moderate level we can return full in person and that implies that we would have less than 50 per 100 000 which is nowhere near what we're at would this

126schedule be like is the action tonight putting it in place no matter what or putting it in place if this is that's a great question well done sam yeah this was the difference that happened between when the cdc guidelines came out and then the idph guidelines came out so this kind of got trapped in the middle with when the survey went out right between those those two sets of guidelines so this proposal would be to follow the idph guidelines and we would be back community metrics are not a concern of schools any longer those are the concerns of the health department yeah that was a great question though yeah very good question and to that question great question what i brought up earlier i think we've had a lot of changes in a year of

127change that nobody could ever have expected so if we're gonna go with this for the the last eight weeks of the school year i would think any change to this for any reason adaptive pause or any other reason any change to this that or any potential change to this for the rest of the year i think we need to go through i would want to go through the board i don't know as long as it's under the administrative purview i'm happy to bring any change back to the board for approval the only thing that i can't guarantee that is if the health department calls us up and says you're you're closed tomorrow that's that's totally out of my right but if anything that has any type of decision that needs to be made about changing

128the schedule i would want to make sure that that goes through those i totally agree to that with one caveat we are still waiting to hear from illinois about sat testing the week of april 16th so that week we may have have to have some kind of an alternative schedule in place depending on that's still changing almost by the day and that week depending on what happens we might have to adjust for sat testing but other than that this is what we're proposing from now until the school year ends yeah we'd like for everybody to just know that this is what's gonna happen and count on it and this is what we're doing for the rest of the year at least you know i know we're never gonna have a schedule that makes a hundred

129percent or even fifty percent of the people of people happy right now because it's just it's so difficult depending on each as we saw tonight each individual family has different needs right now and um but if we could at least offer them like you know what to expect from now until the end of the year i think that would give people some comfort well i think it's a job well done hank this is uh so many moving parts and uh to basically come up with yet a new schedule that will work and it accomplishes as much as it does i i think this is well done there's just a lot of moving parts and uh and a lot of people that provide input into this and and i really want to thank everybody too that

130you know took the time to respond to the surveys and and shared their opinion um it was a good it was a good amount of feedback i wish there had been even more because once again uh the majority actually the majority didn't respond so but i appreciate people that did this is just it's a herculean effort and there's there's no way to make everybody happy but i think this gets you know more in-person time we're so fortunate you you kind of went over kind of glossed over the idea and we've talked about it a few times more participation here than in our neighboring districts that's huge i think it speaks to the transparency of the process that we've had and and the understanding that the community has and what we've been doing that they that

131there is more people in our community there are more people in our community that feel safe about being in the school environment than most other districts around us and um i think that that's going to bode well for this going forward uh because i would love to see those numbers i'd love to see us up 90 percent you can you know the more we can get in in this in the in person the better and and this this i think is going to get it done thank you so i wanted to also say kudos to hank and the administration staff who's worked on this i know that i can personally say i cannot put the kind of time into this and i'm going to err on the side that most of our community can't either

132because they're committed to something else on a daily basis i'm certain so the time that you guys put into coming up with something that makes sense for as many people as possible and then being able to speak to the questions the different things you have to think of in order to put something like this together so looking at every aspect i know it's not an easy task i'm i am grateful that you're willing to do the work i spoke to other people in districts in the city and kind of talked about some of the things we're done we've done and they've even said wow at least your district is trying to get it right for most so i say thank you for that you're here well you're here here yeah all right i don't think

133these are things that any of us ever wanted to do or talk about or have to to work through but i think everybody's trying to do best they can for kids no matter which whether they whether somebody likes this option or hates this option i only assume that they are caring what they should caring about what they should what's best for their kids and we're trying to our challenge is we've got to put together a program for five thousand kids and sometimes it feels i know as a parent like i'm not hearing or we as a team aren't meeting their needs and i understand that um but we're trying to build the best program comprehensively for the entire district and i recognize that it's not going to check the box for everybody but you know

134know that we've considered it we've worked through every angle to try to find one that works within the guidelines keeps people safe and gets kids back i mean that has been my goal since august the board is aware of that that you know i didn't get into this job for kids not to be at school and so anything that we can do to get them back is what i want to see have happen and i think i would say that's probably most of the board's goal has been to get the kids back in school so i don't want anyone to ever think that that hasn't been the case no the board hasn't stood in the way the teachers haven't stood in the way the students haven't the families haven't it's just been a pandemic that

135has stood in the way yeah that thing all right thank you all right the next item is uh our annual staffing and curriculum overview and i believe that come on down rob is going to kick this off hey everybody so on top of figuring out school year this year we're at the point where we're starting to figure out school next year so just a quick reminder the way that we section is that students go through this process with their counselors requesting classes for next year and then we take all of that information and we start to section and then when we figure out our number of sections then we go into our staffing and we figure out our staffing so the package that we have for you tonight is all of that together the sectioning

136and the implications for staffing that we have one thing i'd like to say before we start this presentation is since we posted the documents on friday we had two changes so you'll notice in your packets that there's some documents that have changed those are related to two people uh the first one is mark collins mark has decided to retire so that makes a change on your documents in 7b you'll notice that mark's name is there now the other one is we did a final quality control check today and delilah lopez is a staff member who was covering for a leave of absence and so we don't have a spot for her next year so you'll notice that there's a change on 5b 7a and 8c related to that move so she comes off of the

137list for uh renewing for next year and she moves on to the list for uh releasing for next year uh so what i'm going to do is go through our first part here which is part one talking about this chart that's in your packet here that chart is the summary of our staffing recommendations for next year and we have two really large sections one is the top section there that we call the instructional fte that's built based on those classes that students recommend and the number of sections that we have and you can see that our staffing for next year are recommended is 323.2 fte based off the sections that broke out for student requests then the other part of our staffing is the non-instructional fte that's all the other staff that's there to support

138students that doesn't sway with course selections so those are all listed down below uh that gives us a request of 96.0 fte and that gives us total an increase of 1.8 requests for next year now packaged in that 1.8 is what we talked about at the last meeting a 1.0 for t99 and then a 0.6 spread between the two campuses for the special services social worker so that gives you a 1.6 so really we're at a positive point two if we add on top of those in terms of suctioning so that's where we are with our suctions uh i'm gonna hand it over to ryan doherty and georgia hesh who are our associate principals for curriculum instruction and they're going to talk through some highlights with the sectioning they really are the brains behind all

139of that section all that data comes in and they're the ones who crunch it together i'm just the person that they tell me who we need to have on the documents here so i'll hand it off to them and ryan is this your first time in front of the board this is um thank you uh so george and i are gonna kind of share uh we've divided by department rather than dividing by school so i'm gonna start off with cte um our enrollment is slightly up in accounting itself and our new business classes specifically incubator have been well received by students we'll be running one section of that new course at south and two sections at north we've gone uh slightly down in some of our hands-on courses and because students were choosing their making

140their course selections in december and january we feel like perhaps some of their selections may have been influenced by not being not being sure at what was going to happen for next school year so we are down a little bit in fact we're also down a little bit in our work cooperation and specifically at north a little bit down in our pltw class good evening so i'm going to talk a little bit about the english area for the first time ever really we are going to run a tv course at south which is super exciting um north as many of you know has had tv for a long time and they have some very specific equipment for that but technology has changed greatly and so there's a lot of things you can do in that

141arena where you don't necessarily need that the traditional equipment so it's of course it's been on the books forever for both schools we just haven't been able to offer it over here so we are going to offer that course and we're in the process with construction too you probably remember there's going to be part of the radio program is going to have a space in the cafeteria so we're working really hard to hopefully bring that radio enrollment up and keep increasing that we think kids will be really interested once they see that we love to highlight for you things that you have supported for us recently and just in the fall you approved a new course called black american literature and we will have two sections of that course at each building next year so

142that is exciting for us and then north also has an increased enrollment in the area of yearbook and in the area of ap literature which is always good and we have an increase in ap literature which wasn't surprising based on the numbers that were moving through the system [Music] so we can kind of foresee that i think i'm staying up here to talk about fine arts um so art stayed pretty steady from last year and what we've what our fine arts department chairs have heard in their meetings with other chairs in the area is that art managed to stay pretty steady we were worried about a lot of the electives with the pandemic situation music has taken a little bit bigger hit which probably is not surprising and most of the department chairs in the

143area have said that it has been more the pandemic situation has been more detrimental to choir than to any of the other areas so we weren't really surprised to see that happen in our numbers a little bit as well we know that some of our center schools were forced to adjust their elective offerings based on the pandemic so we're very hopeful of course that this will be a short blip in the system but we're you know we're going to be working hard as we come out of the pandemic to get the choir numbers back up and and even some of the band the band is in pretty good shape and orchestras is pretty steady but to get those back up and one other exciting thing that north will be able to offer ap art history

144again next year that's something that only happens seems like every two or three years and it hasn't happened in a while so that's really exciting um you'll hear kind of a running theme with the impacts of the pandemic and that is uh hasn't has hit our interventions this year so students as they've been out some students that have done fairly well in school before being on their own and having to organize themselves that we've started to see an increased need of executive functioning how much a student can advocate for themselves organize their classes study tips organizing their notes and so we have seen an increased need and we'll be adding sections of freshman sophomore and advanced seminar to support some of our upperclassmen as we start to roll into next year and find ways to

145support them in our feeder schools we have a sense that students may have struggled a little bit more in math we've seen a rise in our foundations math class for our incoming freshman class and you know with not having in-person access to their math teachers every single day that we sort of attribute it to that although students in some of our feeders have also accessed paper and our high school students are accessing paper and so with that online assistance we're going to hopefully see them catch up a little bit also we are still offering the virtual op option for calculus 3 with elmhurst college and our ap and honors enrollment has remained fairly consistent throughout our math sections in the area of pe driver's ed and health that one is of course required for the

146most part so we don't see a lot of swings there but you will remember that a couple years ago we started the sports officiating course and this year we had a section of that over here but next year we have two sections of that so that is exciting the personal training course is up and doing well our dance classes actually continue to rise in enrollment which is really exciting that the juniors and seniors are picking that as one of their electives and then north saw a bit of a rise in their stress management course which may go like ryan said along with everything else that we're kind of seeing that's just a sign of the times right now in science we have had several years now with project lead the way courses last year you

147guys approved human body systems and that ran this year and it's running next year as well with the higher enrollment so we're really happy about that the ap environmental science course we've been teaching that for about four or five years now just continues to grow it's up another section at south next year we'll have four sections of that ap course and we we did see a slight dip in ap physics nothing alarming but just a slight dip that we hadn't seen it's been pretty consistent for a while one area that students seem to choose more this year is social studies and if we think about the events in the world we shouldn't be that surprised that students are taking more of an interest in social studies electives government is up specifically at south and we've

148seen a significant increase in social studies elective at north whether it be sociology or multicultural studies and partly with the dip in cte with students not being sure about the hands-on nature of courses next year it's possible that some of the students decided to choose a social studies elective instead because they may have felt that it would have been a more consistent experience from what they could anticipate no matter which way the school year would look in terms of world language we are down one section in german at south and in french at north however the ap german is back up to 19 students so that had a little bit of a rebound and while we're consistent in spanish at north spanish is down a bit at south however they will be running two sections

149of heritage two for the first time we are adding english language courses for both north and south north will be running english one and bilingual support for the first time at north and south will be offering bilingual physical science and bilingual resource as well and you'll hear more about those courses from gina zaccardi thank you good evening i'll start talking about bilingual then um so we are adding to our bilingual offerings we are seeing an increase in enrollment at uh specifically at north high school in our spanish-speaking students so for the first time we will be starting a part-time bilingual program at north high school which means that we'll be adding a bilingual resource and we'll also be adding el english one so we will be able to retain our el english 1 students students

150will still have the option as they have for years if they wish to travel to south high school for the full-time bilingual program but we will have that offering at north so we're really excited about that we've also increasing or will be increasing i should say as i believe george and ryan alluded to our offerings at south high school we'll be offering for the first time a bilingual physical science course for the majority of those students came out of our bilingual biology course this year and we will also be starting our bilingual resource so we will have more offerings for bilingual spanish speaking students as well as our el students have we ever considered for as long as i can remember we've had spanish french and german you've ever considered expanding the languages offered in

151arabic or chinese or going other language offerings yes we have in fact a number of years ago i can't remember exactly when i want to say approximately eight to nine years ago we did survey students and to see what interests were and we came back to the three languages we have had requests over the years and it seems like i had more requests about seven or eight years ago and i haven't had any requests in the last in the recent five or six years but there is some new legislation that is coming forward where we where students will be required to have two years of a foreign language we have several years for that but we will definitely need to consider what courses we would like to offer and what courses our students are interested

152in taking since all students will be required to take over a language course yeah and i'm sure that has a lot to do with partnering with our our feeder districts because they have you know the the same offerings and language that we do right exactly the feeders aren't offering the german yeah they're off from the french and spain and only district 58 offers french although we do still have students that come from avery coonley in their french program as well but a small number obviously it would just seem to be a larger offering and more options is kind of would seem to be we're at that point where we should be thinking about expanding those offerings absolutely and we may attract more students by more offerings so today it's one year of language that's required

153and you said now it'll go to two did i hear that right i believe you're asking if we have a graduation requirement for world language yes we do not we do not oh many of our students do take world language but we do not have a graduation requirement students are required to take a number of electives for which world language is one of those offerings so it could be cte world language fine arts even social studies electives beyond the three years many colleges some colleges do request that's what it is i know is a requirement somewhere exactly okay so any other questions about a yell okay um so the curricular offerings georgia and ryan spoke about a lot of those you'll notice that we have a slight decrease in the number of courses that we're

154recommending for cancellation and an increase in the number of courses that we would like the board to approve and certainly offer with an enrollment of under 20. just so happens a couple of those are language courses also several of them are upper level capstone courses like in the languages as well as in some ap offerings like ap physics and our pltw courses all four of the engineering strand courses at north high school we are very excited to offer a lot of those courses that are very specialty courses with under 20 to our students many of them are programmatic in nature it allows students to go on to the next level or as i said as a capstone course thank you thank you it's fun to see them up here from behind good evening my name

155is scott wigazer and i'm going to talk to you a little bit about the special services i know we had a board meeting that we went over a little bit that and rob had a nice introduction for it so instructionally we have the 1.0 request for t99 as you know we're growing in size so that would increase us to six teachers at the transition program and then at north we have a 0.4 fte increase that's covering our instructional program and some co-teaching and then obviously we talked about the non-instructional social work there's a point to it south and then a point for social work at north all right thank you good evening good to see you all again jeff berkels returning for another meeting and i'm going to kind of just go through some of

156the highlights from the last couple of sections in the packet that you have uh particularly section four uh one of the first things you see there are a list of stu of sorry students teachers who are being honorably dismissed these are non-tenured staff who we don't have the same amount of fte for them based on all the pieces that have moved around that you heard about thus far we do have the option to bring those teachers back at a lower fte if they are willing to do so so we have that option for them there are six of those staff members that are in there as well as you'll see the resolution uh again with the exhibits that shows the names of those people who are being honorably dismissed uh the next section we start

157getting into uh 4b is we also have some staff that we are non-renewing this goes back to what rob alluded to earlier we have some staff who are covering leaves of absences and so we have staff returning we don't have ft for those staff so they're the ones that we then non-renew so they will won't be coming back unless something were to suddenly open up perhaps we asked them to come back um then we also have uh section five i guess we're moving on to there section five is uh the non-tenured teachers that we are bringing back and so that's the really long list and breaks it down year by year where everyone's at so you kind of get that full view you also see that as well on the traditional board report same list

158of names the numbers are a little bit different because one is for the current year where they're at then the other one's projecting out to next year so if you see that that doesn't align when you look at some of those that would be why so um and then the next piece that we sometimes do this time of year but it's going to wait until april for this time is getting the list of all of our staff members who will be tenured will recognize those at the april workshop meeting so that is yet to come thank you that concludes the show for this evening uh um real quick just one change that we're making this year to the process is usually this time of the year is when we bring forth the people who the

159state of illinois will be granting tenure to next year we've decided to separate those out so based on your actions tonight some people will be on that list and then we'll have them for you at the workshop meeting in april to recognize those who are going to be receiving tenure this year it gets a bit more complicated because it's not only traditional tenure it's accelerated tenure it's portable 10 years so that changes some of the years that they've been with us in which they uh they get to receive that so uh that's our section i believe next on the agenda is our public hearing and that's based off of uh the number of people that we have on the honorable dismissal list so we have to move into that thank you we have several teachers

160that are going to be fast-tracked for tenure um i'd have to look back at our list we have a few who have portable tenure so a portable tenure is when they achieved a tenure in another district and they were here uh there's a few who are accelerated that requires three years right um but yeah there's there's a few that are out there will they be delegated then or were they just going to be in the group we could break those out for you if you'd like to see that yeah in the april workshop just to say who which pathway did they use to get to tenure sure any other questions all right thank you thank you so many moving parts yeah all right mark's going to cover this one here just to have a quick

161resolution that we passed last year it's the same format if you recall we have a nine-year agreement with rexnard corporation which is in downers grove their an aeronautic engineering firm and as an incentive to move their headquarters here rather than closing down this uh one of their plants here and keep them in at downers grove we work with district 58 and the village to set up a rebate agreement that we when they build a new headquarters here about 200 000 square foot facility um and agreed to staff it at a certain level of two more than 200 employees um that we would abate some of the or pay them back some of their their increase in property taxes compared to the new facility the new facility compared to the prior facility and it was about

16256 000 was the difference the incremental difference that we got in taxes because they came in on this new construction so we we got something right out of the gate but we agreed to take off 90 percent of that and refund that back to them and then do 10 percent more or less actually refund each year so we did 90 last year we're going to do 80 this year the reason we're asking you to pass the resolution now is because we'll we won't get their assessed valuation to do the exact calculation until the end of this month and they will want that by the first end of the first week in april so we need to make a decision ahead of time so the resolution gives me authority to make that adjustment to their taxes

163and to send that to the county clerk and it'll abate their taxes any questions i said had one about the 272 employees do we have any sense of of how many of those jobs are actually in in district they don't give us the addresses but it was just to have that many agreement was to staff it at that level i know that yeah i was just curious if we had any if you know and it is down from last year so it looks like they've suffered a little bit too even though it's you know there it's not there yeah aerospace engine uh industry is hurting a bit they make replacement parts for for planes and when a plane is built you have to guarantee that you'll make that part for the next 10 years and

164that's what they do so they have a very steady business normally but could be that there's less things going on with planes apparently because of the pandemic but i don't we don't have addresses of um where they the individuals live or where if they're in their campaign but they couldn't re they couldn't report out that you know 75 they give us a listing not part of our agreement with them and they gave us a listing of the positions and the amount paid to them so we know the that the average job is you know 78 000 or whatever it is for the whole group um but it exceeds the minimum which we agreed to and we kind of got upset by the pandemic this year with with doing more creative things but um i think

165the long-term plan is for us to have some of our students go there yeah and and learn some trades there and become you know a partner with them that way too they're very open to that i support this i was at the groundbreaking i think this is great for the community i just it'd be nice to know if if a lot of those jobs were actually people living here and in the district as well so that's all all right that's up for action and approval later tonight i'll bring up jim here to talk about uh the t99 build out and the bid approvals for construction related to it good evening everyone i'm ready for my snack break in a bit okay this is for t99 good news i told you a couple weeks ago that

166we had some good bids here they are this is for the remaining 2500 square feet of the build out that work will be done this summer 10 packages 47 bidders three bidders at least in each trade so really competitive and really good numbers so our projected budget for this project was about 985 000 so these are the construction costs you add in contingencies architect and engineering fees construction management some contingency we're still going to be well under 785 we're going to save at least 200 or more so we're really in good shape all these vendors we've worked with except for one but they scoped out and understand the work that was the number 10. that's it acoustical tire ceiling so is the only better that we haven't worked with so everyone's scoped out they're all

167good to go so tonight we'll ask that you approve all 10 for 526 thousand 355 questions general trades what does that mean jim over here general trades uh cabinetry uh carpentry all all those work that's within that were there any stipulations in the bit are they allowed to stipulate that are they allowed to stipulate in any way that their cost is dependent on current lumber prices that sort of thing or is this they're they're committed to this number they're committed to this number okay i have the contracts ready to sign tomorrow morning if you guys approve tonight but quite honestly i was expecting you know yep earlier a few months ago i was telling you it was going to be under 9.85 yeah i didn't think we'd be this good so i'm very happy with

168what we yeah this is good we're coming in with and we'll be able to put some of those funds back because we're using interest from mfp back to contingencies for for the mlp yeah this is good thank you i just had a question about timing do we know when the build-out will start and complete sure we're actually going to start aggressive early we're going to do some work back there while they're still in in session so we're going to get back there and start working end of april beginning of may and then by the end of summer we're done by august 10th we're finished and because it's in the back we're not going to interfere with any of the no no returning thank you james terrific thank you yeah well done the next item is

169master facility plan progress uh as you can see last couple of weeks the last couple of months we've been tightening down the scope a little bit and keeping this one is very small increase this month but it's a slight increase because of reduction in scope right now we're spending the next couple of weeks up until spring break related to the master facility plan of outlining priorities for the last items that are on the list within the buildings and then we'll create a long-term plan for everything that we want to do that didn't get covered in the master facility plan so that we have an idea of long range uh what our continued scope of work is uh contingency remains strong heading into the summer here and you can still see there is quite a bit

170especially in phase c allowances that could roll back into the contingency should we not use it so once again as we have been we're on budget we're on schedule and all of these projects are scheduled to be completed for the return next fall any questions great to see things going as planned it's one of those things i think people haven't been paying as close attention to as they might have otherwise because of covet i mean community in general this i can't wait to get everybody back to see it all no kidding i can't it's about to say i can't wait for everyone to see it all right foia requests we had them and we continue to respond to them and we continue to get them thank you they're on our website moving on to the

171next section of the agenda is the public hearing the next agenda item is a public hearing on the proposed reduction in force of teachers this hearing is held in line with section 24-12 of the illinois school code which provides for the hearing when the greater excuse me when the number of teachers to be reduced due to economic necessity is greater than 5 or 150 percent of the average number of teachers honorably dismissed in the preceding three years whichever is more while the reductions contemplated later in this evening's agenda are not based on economic necessity we are holding the hearing with the intent of giving both the teaching staff and the public notice of layoffs and the opportunity to express their views to be clear reductions in force contemplated later in this evening's agenda will not

172impact educational programming and are not based on economic necessity rather these reductions are based on courses excuse me on course selections for the upcoming school year do we have anybody who would like to speak i'm sorry no this is regarding the production force of teachers hearing none i'll have i uh will ask for a motion to close the hearing so moved terry second joanna thank you terry pavich joanna vasquez drexler aye mike davenport aye shirelle fuller aye dan nicholas aye rick cavanado aye and nancy kupka aye the hearing is closed we're gonna move on to the uh consent agenda i have one question related to the consent agenda i apologize for not getting in earlier does any other board member have anything they want to remove before we ask the question before we call the

173agenda no i just have one question if i may about costa rica it's conceivable that we will have people who have already graduated going we've done this gina can probably speak to it better for me but i think we've done this with a couple of other tours where we've allowed students that graduated but had already paid into a trip to then come back and participate in it um just because of covid sure sure why don't we talk but they would have to they would have to observe all the same regulations as any student going correct they'd have to follow all the rules thank you cheryl did you have something answered i i just said i i thought you were talking about costa rica but i wasn't sure oh sorry how do you hear you yeah

174almost closer okay next we need emotions i didn't need you gina thank you though we need a motion for the board of education to approve the consent agenda which includes a personnel report 2021 2022 full-time renewals 2021-2022 none 10-year part-time renewals appointment certified transfer position classified appointments classified b personnel report retirements classified resignations classified c financial pages d 2021 2022 proposed amended calendar e to waive the spectator admission fees charged by district 99 for events held on the 99 campus for the 2021 school year and f rescheduling previously scheduled tour costa rica 2020. so moved i'm sorry terry johanna thank you very much aye joanna vice chris rexler aye mike davenport aye shirelle fuller aye dan nicholas aye rick cavanaugh aye nandy kupka aye the consent agenda passes now we're going to move on to

175the recommendations for action first we need a motion for the board of education to approve the 2020-2021 school year plan revision as discussed to begin april 6 2021 and continue to operate under the kova 19 reopening plan approval resolution approved on august 3rd 2020. don't move joanna yeah and shirelle thank you joanna vazquez drexler hi sherelle fuller hi dan nicholas hi terry pavich aye rick cavanado nate mike davenport aye nancy kupko aye the motion carries then we need a motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of honorable dismissal of non-tenured teachers other than final year probationary teachers and that the president and secretary would be authorized to sign same so moved terry i'm sorry damn dan second thank you terry aye dan nicholas aye rick cavanado aye joanna vazquez drexler

176aye mike davenport aye roy the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of non-renewal to non-tenure teachers other than final year probationary teachers and that the president and secretary be authorized to sign sane so move yeah joanna and i'll second terry thank you do you want a vascular explorer aye trey paversich aye rick kavanagh aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the resolution authorizing property tax abatement for the rexnord facility for the 2020 tax year so moved second mike and shiro thank you mike report aye sheryl fuller aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye aye motion carries and finally we need a motion for the board of education to approve bids in the aggregate amount

177of 526 355 for the t99 build out so moved second mike and joella thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye cheryl fuller aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick cavanado aye aye aye the motion carries uh next order of business is the policy committee uh the policy committee recently met and we discussed the policies that are listed there details are available in the board packet just a reminder to the board and to the public that this is the one month review period for everyone to review those ask questions and then they are and then we would go to the policy committee with any revisions the board would be then asked to approve this with any changes at the next board meeting the majority of the changes in here are recommended by press

178from the illinois association of school boards an administrative review of those with some slight changes except for policies 3.56 and 7.345 those are changes based on the district's legal counsel in regards to changes that are coming in laws and changes to tech in the next actually in july other than that the majority of the changes are are small in nature but you can read through and see what they actually are um i had one more thing oh and we also reviewed the policies at the last meeting that were unique to district 99 in our two-year review of those policies and found no changes that we needed to bring forward to the board so that's where we're at uh anything else that i left out there rick or sure i think that was perfect hey what

179do you know thank you all right so if you have changes please email rick sherelle and i and her concerns and we're happy to address those in advance of the next board meeting so okay so in advance of the next board reading okay anything else all right now we're going to move to the second reception of visitors 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 are limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board if you individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nidak visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone state your full name the proceedings are being

180tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and they are live streaming and i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant and we appreciate you observing these protocols did you wanna so there was a lot that was stated here today so if you'll excuse me i'm just going to have to reference my notes you all said that you wanted kids back in school but they are not back in school full time you just voted that they are not going to be back in school full time again i will restate this why is it that private schools charter schools and catholic schools can be back in school full time and have been since the fall and district 99 cannot i don't understand that and i haven't heard an answer fatigue makes

181us all tired i'm sure each and every one of you are tired you're exhausted we're all exhausted this pandemic has wreaked havoc on everyone i empathize with your fatigue we all feel it many have tragically lost loved ones i can't imagine their pain there's a lot of information and stats that have been read here tonight however i'd like to read one a couple for the record according to a national study of insurance claims since march 2020 our kids from ages 13 to 18 here are some of the effects overdoses are up 95 percent substance abuse is up 64 to 20 percent depression is up 84 percent our children are anxious you stated that i agree with you the world is anxious the world has been anxious before this pandemic life is full of challenges and

182risks there is a huge element that has been missing here in all of these discussions in these charts tonight as leaders as parents as educators we have an obligation to teach our children to lead our children we have to teach them to be resilient we have to teach them to take calculated risks we need to teach them to be courageous we need to teach them to not live in fear they're being taught over and over again to be afraid to be very afraid the scientific data says that if they catch covid they will recover they will not die i wish i could find the stats but unfortunately this building cut off my phone and i can't but the stats say they will recover they will be healthy your three minutes is expired could i have

183someone do a motion to give me two more minutes to three minutes please to complete complete this i'm the only teacher i'm the only parent here tonight that's at your discretion nancy would anybody like to make a motion i'm asking for an additional time i hope to let you go ahead and have two more minutes okay i wish more parents were here tonight they're tired we're all tired but if you look at that slide and i wish i could reference it but there was a slide that said that the teachers are speaking to you they unanimously said they wanted their children back full time your email you said that most of the teachers have been vaccinated and that's great and i wish they were here and i hope i can communicate to more of them

184but seriously what i don't understand is in the stat again correct me if i'm wrong said that most teachers don't want to be back full time and i don't understand that the teachers that i talk to say they miss the children they want to be back in class but yet the data that you shared with us tonight doesn't say that and that doesn't that doesn't ring with me i don't understand that there's always going to be challenges in life we need to show these children that we can overcome them that we can move forward instead we're arguing about snacks and lunches that can be solved small business owners and restaurateurs solved it it's called tents and heaters and air conditioning and space seating we need to show them that we can live again and we

185can move forward and we're not doing that we're instilling them with more fear i'm sorry i hate to say it like this but your words ring hollow to me when you say you want these children back full time and you're looking out for them but yet their parents are telling you they want them back in school full time and you do not listen i don't understand that anybody else like to address the board we did receive online uh eight comments from four different people um most of them are concerned well most of them from one person are concerned in how i represented the survey results and then there's a couple other just general questions so that's what was received okay we'll respond to the general questions uh yeah people who reach out to us with

186general questions we respond not not to ones that come in this way so if somebody has a general question they should email the administration okay thank you these become part of the this is messages to the board and become part of the board record and the board member the board does receive those each member the board always receives these the next day and then they become part of the minutes yeah we did receive them this morning we did receive them yeah throughout the day throughout the day today yeah okay we're gonna move on to communications and announcements uh report on lend i don't have an update uh we have a meeting friday next friday i don't know at some point we we have an upcoming meeting there's a lot going on in springfield board members

187i sent you some of that i'll send you another update probably tomorrow when i update all of the staff with the legislative ongoings in springfield so a lot of things going on right now thank you uh joanna season um actually we don't have a lot of items that relate to districts 99 however i thought i might read this one portion uh because in late all our discussion tonight these are some real problems that our cooperative school is uh contending with uh the past week we've been spending significant time reviewing any opportunities and ways to increase in-person instruction for the remainder of the year none of the items below are excuses for why something is is or not taking place for programming i am only trying to convey the substantial complexity of the issues and the

188aggravating and mitigating variables that are part of problem solving and planning to provide context to the attachment regarding program and service status parents have been surveyed again as to their preference for their child to be remote or in person there are still a significant number of families who are choosing the remote option this makes it very difficult to staff increased in-person times and provide synchronous instruction remotely we are looking at student cohort changes reassignment of staff asking part-time staff to increase to full-time looking for long-term subs and subs to fill needs we have purchased additional technology ipad and tripods to stream instruction they are still short staffed for teaching assistants advertising in local papers career builder and typical sites uh we've also sent information to parents this week to let them know that there are

189employment opportunities it's asset so parents might even come to work for them it is a circular problem in that while individuals are home with their children they are not applying and without applicants this asset is short staffed masks and social distance we have students who are not able to maintain wearing a mask and many of those children require adult support within six feet of social distance the staff and multi-knees program have had two children pass away in the past year and lost a beloved staff member in december they're understandably heightened and they're concerned for the health and safety of students and staff as many students are medically fragile and uh we also have behavioral concerns uh as students are returning from year away from school the social emotional needs the students are significant for some

190students are showing significant behavioral challenges and this is relevant to the stress safety and staffing needs within these classrooms space is also a problem while staff were remote spaces have been repurposed either by staff in the districts where we are hosted or by sasa to create spaces for therapies and intensives the issue is now the unwinding of this structure we asked district administrators on friday during the weekly meeting to review ifs asset spaces are being used by their staff and to anticipate our use of those spaces we are also looking for additional spaces within buildings for example if we return in-person students to a classroom in the afternoon the students receiving therapy or intensives in that classroom are now displaced and we have to find another location schedules another problem they're having as districts and

191asset programs are pivoting to an increase for in-person learning the schedules for related services are changing again this impacts how we can staff a classroom to return students in person it's also just another complex set of changes those are being planned for and adjusted as we become aware of the status changes and then there is staff stress and burnout times are really tough there is a lot of compassion fatigue among the administrators staff are exhausted and stressed out many are dealing with their own personal stressors both students and staff we are offering trivia games to keep staff connected providing reminders about self-care and the eap program and writing notes of encouragement to staff this unprecedented year is taking an unprecedented toll on all of the staff so they're going to encourage us all to take

192a little time off on our spring break and step away from the work and refresh i just thought i'd share that with we have problems here but sasa does too and they're cooperative thank you tara all right um the foundation where we are uh working on what we're going to do for teacher appreciation week which is i believe it's the first week in may so we're going to be doing something special for our teachers and staff and the deadline for uh teacher grants is april 15th so if any of the teachers need to get some things going for the next year be sure and turn in some uh teacher grants and then um i wanted to thank everyone who participated in uh pizza wars this year uh it it um it did better than we

193thought i don't want to give you any numbers right now because there's still things coming in and uh and that but uh next month i will let you know what we did but it it was different i hope you all participated and and purchased some pizza from some of our vendors and there were coupons and all kinds of things and then a lot of you donated to the foundation we really appreciate that because it turns around in these teacher grants that we're going to be granting uh it it pays for those so and uh what we're going to do for the teachers and staff for appreciation week we really thank everyone thank you thank you thank you so that's all i have thanks terry mike the dupage divisions spring meetings virtual this saturday at 10

194a.m i won't be able to attend though i'm going to be otherwise detained okay other than that we have two upcoming board meetings april 12th you'll have a workshop meeting at 6 30 p.m and april 19th a regular business meeting also at 6 30 pm did you have something you want to say oh i'm sorry hey with that we need to call for a motion to adjourn so moved second terry and mike all those in favor aye aye aye all those opposed we stand adjourned thank you thank you