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001all right ready yeah okay call to order the november second workshop meeting the board of education camera roll call please mike davenport here shirelle fuller here dan nicholas here terry pavich here joanna vazquez drexler here and zoe boyd all right sounds like we have a quorum let's stand for the pledge of allegiance see we have the flag that's good 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 thank you and as usual at our workshop meeting we have student perspectives i guess tonight we're hearing from the students at north high is that correct yes north high students wonderful here as hello tonight my um is rachel bender i'm a senior group north and

002i've been a captain on color guard for the last two years so at its core color guard is a visual representation of music using choreography of dance flags rifles and sabers you may have seen us performing with the band at halftime during football games i'm just going to tell you a little about the roles of color guard so we have captains which are chosen by our lovely coaches and our the rest of our team we create our own choreography and teach it to our teammates and we get selected through um just who our teammates and our coaches think would be best fit for the role we also have a big and little sister program mentor program where our older more experienced members get paired with our younger less experienced members and not only does this

003show or not only does this help our newer members learn our beginning tricks and everything but also helps our older members get new leadership skills that they might not have otherwise had it's also a good a very good way for our new members to make friends going into the school year a lot of freshmen may have worries about going into school without knowing anybody but with the mentor program that we have they go in knowing they have a whole family behind them and so a little bit about the differences between color guard and winter guard color guard we are performing with the band during halftime or performing during homecoming this is when our training season really is we take our new members here and really build up their skills and help our new captains too

004to build up their new skills that they might not have had before and our winter guard season is when we have one routine that we critique and finesse throughout the entire season through judges tapes and we compete with this routine for the whole season this is when we really hone in on our skills and become more of a bonded team we watch other teams compete and support them and we really bond through like our longer practices and everything like that thank you thank you hello my name is alyssa miller i am a senior at denver's grove north and i'm going to talk to you about the time commitment what kind of a competition looks like during winter guard season and some of the awards that we've won in the past and this year so color

005guard is about two days a week about practices and we have friday night football games we also have the assemblies the parades the homecoming performances and then we also have this thing called band days which is where we go to a university we perform at a stadium with a bunch of stadium or a bunch of other teams and it's really good experience to have and then wide guard is about two to three days a week we have weekend competitions and there's different types of competitions so we have the circuit which is basically people in our group like we compete against south a bunch of other people under schools in our area and then we also compete at wgi which is winterguard international which is basically a bunch of teams from around the country overseas they

006come to one spot and they compete and that's also really fun experience to see people from different places compete so competition days we have a very early call time about five or six we do like this thing called like a pre-practice we run through the show we work out all the nicks and crannies that we have and just make sure it looks perfect and then it's kind of once we get to the competition and we start performing it's like our hard work is being shown to the judges like what we've worked hard on we've put a lot of hours in it's a really nice experience to have it's really gratifying um and even if we don't really have the best run we have a really supportive team really good bonding that we have um and

007the community just is very supportive no matter what like we'll cheer on other teams no matter what it's a really good community and then we also have this thing called a kumbaya circle it's one of my favorite traditions so we sit in a circle we play our show music for winter guard and we kind of just do a mental run through what's going to happen and it just kind of really prepares you and there's a bunch of rules that go on with winter guard we have like time and space limits and we have like regulation equipment how long we can hold equipment and stuff like that um but color guard is a little different we don't really have rules we just kind of follow what the band does we do a bunch of songs with

008the band and all that um some awards so last season even though it got cut short we were top two all season which is really exciting and it was our first time performing in wgi and we made finals and placed second which is very very exciting um and then even though we did have our abrupt and in our circuit division last year we did win first place thank you guys so much [Applause] hi my name is clara i'm a sophomore this is my second year on the team and i'm going to be talking about how we've adapted with kovid and some of the benefits of being on the team so since kovid we started completely virtual we had our captain leadership auditions online and we had our team auditions online as well as we started

009all of our practices online then we went and transferred to in-person groups of 10 or less with masks and social distancing and now i'm happy to say we have full team social distancing with masks and that's really nice because it's really nice to have the opportunity to see my teammates again in a safe way now that our season has cut shorter because of kovid we've been using this opportunity in great weather for spin clinics this gives our captains a great opportunity to choreograph some great new pieces for us and teach the rest of the team some really new skills fun and new skills it creates a really fun atmosphere at these clinics because we don't have to perform these pieces we're just learning these for fun and to learn new skills looking ahead at our

010winter guard season our coaches asked us how we wanted this to look which was really nice to have the team input as well we're looking at doing a music video type show instead of competing but our circuit is also offering solo contests small group contests and master classes that we can choose to participate in this is really nice because it's low pressure and we can really focus this year on technique and improving our new people and then some of the benefits of guard what's really nice is there's no experience required i went in and i had no dance experience and no previous guard experience and our captains and teammates and our coaches are there every step of the way to help you even over covid i was learning new tricks and sending videos to my

011coaches and captains asking for help and they were always there with like constructive criticism and critiques and helping me um and we i me met some of my best friends through guard and it really gives you a good support system and stress relief i look forward to going to guard every um tuesday and thursday and there's been times where we've been all been really stressed and our captains do a great job at picking that up and we all just talk about it there's been times like before finals week we're all really stressed and we've sat in a circle and talked about what's stressing us out and one thing we're looking forward to and it's just nice to know we're all helping each other and we're all there for each other so that's all we have

012prepared does anyone have any questions i have a quick question how many um students are there in the color guard all together do you have uh jv and do you have varsity or how does that part work yes so we have one team or well we have two teams so you can choose to participate in either and um our fall team is typically bigger it ranges from 20 to 24 about and um about the same for winter guard season it's one team we don't have a jv varsity team yeah has has covert affected the number of uh students that go out for it um from my understanding this year we have like a bunch of great new people as well and they're really doing well with the um like challenges with it and i think

013we've had the same number of people um audition this year oh okay oh good good yeah is there anything else how did how did you get interested in um in joining uh well the um my fellow all three of you yeah yeah teammates can come up as well um i personally um was interested in my older cousin did it and i would go to her competitions and i just saw the support from the other teams like we're even though we're competing against each other we're all rooting for each other and clapping when we see something really cool and i just thought it seemed like a really good community to join in and she was just telling me about all the positive things and the positive effects on her life so that's what got me to

014join my story is a little different so i moved here sophomore year and i met some friends who were on the team and i always stopped before the football games and i was like oh that's that's something i could do something i'm interested in yeah um and then junior year captain and her one of her best friends convinced me to audition for the team and it really it was it's something that surprisingly i really just got determined and really wanted to get on the team and then now it's something that i love and very passionate about and i'm really happy i did it for me i went into high school wanting to really join the dance team i had previous dance experience and then i got the flyer at their um little show and it

015seemed very intense and one of my other friends had seen the color guard performing they were like this is very similar and they also need no prior experience so after looking further into that we realized that it was such a great community and really in realizing how talented and tight-knit the group was i decided it was the perfect group for me to join and i've been so amazingly happy with this team for the four years that i've been able to be in it okay that's really nice yeah who um how do you put together your uh your choreography who's who does that do you do it yourself or with the coach or for our color guard season our coaches let the captains especially have so much creative freedom we usually have three songs during our

016halftime performance and usually the captains get to choreograph one of those three songs so it's a really good bonding experience for the captains to create a really good team feeling usually the coaches choreograph the winter guard shows but the captains and the team also gets to put input on what the show will look like and what type of theme or even song that we're going to go with so there's a lot of creative freedom between the coaches the captains and the whole team in general excellent i've i don't know about any of you i this is the first i've ever really learned about color guard you know we see it at the at the games and and uh you just wonder how you know what goes into it and and how someone gets interested in

017doing that so thanks for coming and sharing with us today thank you so much for having us you bet thank you thanks [Applause] what do we have next our workshop right return to in-person learning student board member reporter oh sorry i i saw students and thought we just had the students hey zoe uh oh there it is there you go hi nice to see everybody again um so i'm just gonna give you a brief rundown of what's happening at school what what the atmosphere is like right about now i'm so in our sports um all of our fall sports are ending right about now and our winter sports are getting started the boys and girls golf teams and the girls tennis team and girl swimming's all had really successful seasons some highlights were the boys

018golf team went undefeated in the wsc gold tournament and we also had three school records broken in girl swim by madeleine padovic and audrey mahoney which was really cool and girls and boys cross country had their sectionals this past weekend and i heard that the boys did really well and the girls placed fifth in sectionals in our arts program the choir program had our first virtual concert last week i can tell you firsthand that there was a lot of work that went into that and it was really exciting to see the payoff and it's still up online if you want to check it out but yeah it went really well and we also had 25 students in our music program earn placements in the ilmea district 1 music festival and we will see later on

019how far they advance in activities it's senior week this week which is really exciting everybody's going to be ordering their caps and gowns students can also send in their vote photos and videos and those can maybe be featured on the activities twitter and instagram page and there's also a raffle this week which is exciting uh and then just a few more things tomorrow the students have off for election day and i'm sure you've heard it over and over again but i will take any chance i can to plug vote if you didn't check at that yeah absolutely um i can give you first-hand personal experience i've been working as an election judge for early voting the past few weeks and we've seen a really good turnout so far but i can assure you that we

020need more people tomorrow so i'm sure you're all excited to do your part too but any chance i can to plug and then finally just some feedback about how hybrid went the past couple weeks i know we started on october 19th with the whole school coming back in and there was some really good positive feedback and some constructive feedback that i got from both students and teachers so first for the positives across the board students and teachers really appreciated the socialization aspect of coming back to school i'm i mean my choir teacher miss belt told me that it brought her to tears to see everybody back together and just be able to be one with one another so that was very much appreciated by everyone and the second most important thing that i heard from

021both students and teachers was that everybody really appreciates the patience and flexibility that all of you guys and everyone in the d99 community has right now like because we're all going through our own struggles right about now and i i also value everybody's empathy right now from my teachers and fellow students and everybody's been really patient which we need that right now so it's definitely a big positive in the atmosphere right now and um i know that we did have to discontinue hybrid the hybrid schedule or suspend it for now because of the metrics going on but there were some constructive pieces of feedback that we could use in the future when we hopefully do return to hybrid the the biggest two were just the attention divide between the remote students and the in-person students

022i'm sure you might have heard a little bit about that on the teacher's part and the students part they felt that it was a bit hard to allocate the proper amount of tension attention to the remote students and take care of the students in person so i'm sure that'll also come with you know more time and practice but that's something we can look into and a lot of teachers have said that they appreciate all of the efforts that the administration has been doing to give them the resources that they need to do the best that they can in class and then the only other thing was technology of course it's both a blessing and it can be the bane of our existence in class um honestly the the biggest thing with that was just that

023teachers are really appreciative of all of the resources that they have right now but when we look into the future for no matter where we are in remote or hybrid scheduling finding ways to simplify like what types of software we use and how we use it like how across the school we all use google classroom or how most classes are using zoom like it's great that we have all these resources but teachers would also like to find more ways to make it easier like the flow in class to simplify it and make it easier to understand for both students and teachers but yeah in general the the atmosphere right now in school is that everybody's obviously going through tough times and we all understand that but i think that people coming back to school for

024hybrid kind of ignited a little bit of a passion in school for a lot of students and teachers so it's looking optimistic thanks all right and thank you zoey sam sent in his report is unable to be here and janice is going to just read it on his behalf he wants to make sure that he fulfilled his duty so i'm going to actually um start with what zoe ended with with the remote learning and the report from north high is very similar sam shares that the general consensus is is that students were really excited to be back at school and everyone really loved seeing the people that they haven't been able to talk to for months and the students enjoyed meeting their uh teachers in person there are some mixed feelings about ppe especially the

025face shields um and so we've been talking about that a little bit actually at the administrative level too and but the students understand that they need to wear everything and they overall feel like it's the perfect amount of protection there are some students who want to be in school more than the two half days per week but they also understand why that's not possible right now due to scheduling and safety conflicts and sam shared this report earlier today and in there there was a general concern about returning to fully remote which of course has come to fruition since he shared this but um he did say that it's not what anyone wants to do but it seems like that most students would understand that that's the decision that might be made and in fact was

026made in terms of student activities at north high we also had many students from our music program who were selected to participate in the all-district band choir orchestra jazz band vocal jazz ensemble we had 50 students or almost 50 students at north high so that was really exciting um what was different this year is that they had to audition by video and so that was an additional challenge for them and that event is on november 21st and based on their performance they could get all-state honors in terms of clubs sam also was putting a plug for voting our government club created a voter forum presentation for educating eligible student voters and that he said that the club is doing a great job of educating people for voting and encouraging students to use their voices our

027sports teams also came to a close uh fall season is is now finished our boys cross country team took first place at sectionals and the girls took third place at sectionals both teams would have qualified for state had they had a state swim and dive took second place and again several of the athletes would have competed at state and we had one boys golfer who would have gone to state so it was a successful season um and the sam reports that all the athletes that he talked to were very thankful to have a season at all and thought that things went remarkably well relative to the coven 19. and then in terms of just you know other miscellaneous student comments and stuff again there was some questions about um the face shields and whether or

028not they're effective and one of the things that we needed to kind of explain to the students is that the reports that say the face shield is not effective is when you are wearing it in lieu of a mask not in addition to a mask so that is one of the things that i think is a a common misconception among our students that we're gonna we're clearing up and then um just questions about you know when we're going remote which we are so that's sam's report okay thank you thanks janice and thank you sam yes thank you sam all right uh just a quick update on where we're at uh with return to school as zoe mentioned earlier we're moving our direction for a couple of weeks here so just to provide the board and

029the public a little explanation of how we ended up where we are today this is the updated dupage county dashboard or it's actually not their dashboard it's their metrics report for schools there's six metrics on here which we've been monitoring since they gave them to us in middle september and if you take a look these have steadily gone downhill and quickly over the last couple of weeks you can see that everyone except for one of the metrics is insubstantial you can see some of the key factors that we look at cases per hundred thousand are now above 200 the next one that really stands out right now is weekly youth cases they increased a week ago by 31 and then by another 62 percent this week last week that increase was mostly among ages the

030younger kids so three weeks ago it was the older kids and kind of the younger kids caught up in their numbers and now it's just all youth moving forward um so that's not good positivity rate in the county is up above eight percent and our region is in tier one mitigation and might be in tier two mitigation by the end of the week so those aren't good community metrics and then we've added our own metrics to go alongside these they can be found on the 2021 page on the district website under resources and there you'll go to a page that looks like that graphic on the left hand side on that is three sections the first section at the bottom looks at the community factors the second one there is the one we just talked

031about dupage county school metrics the top is the idph county metrics they they're both constellation values but don't all look at the exact same variables so this gives you kind of a broader perspective of looking at all of the things that factor in so not one single thing is going to cause us to move from in person to fully remote but you can see the trend going up is means the metric the numbers are going up in cases right so up arrow is bad and we've moved from to all four arrows pointing upwards in the wrong direction then we also to just break out our own district 99 community have included the positivity rate for just the district 99 zip codes that is still in moderate but has gone up i think more than two

032points in the last week and our cases per hundred thousand are slightly less than the county but still above 200. the next thing we look at is our actual metrics within the school and uh this week we have four positive cases among students three from staff those are challenging to follow up on if it's somebody who came to school for in person and then any student that's reporting a close contact or symptoms we're following up with as well to make sure that they're following the protocols and not coming to school and doing all of the things that they're supposed to do you can see overall our numbers of students and staff with positive tests or diagnoses have not fluctuated drastically over the course of the school year but the number that's continued to grow is

033the number of people that are asymptomatic or are close contacts so you can see that number continues to grow which is a key indicator of an increasing amount of illness covet-like illness in our community and these would be the precursors of us seeing it kind of in the community but starting to make it in the building we don't want to reach the point where we have a lot of students in the building at the same time that we have a lot of covid-like illness in the building and that we're trying to find that threshold of when it's time to kind of pause and when it's time to push forward last week it was a time to push forward this week it's a time to pause what we don't want to have happen is these metrics

034these internal factors start to flip from green to red because that would be a key indicator that now covet has made it inside of our walls right it is actively either coming in at a large amount while we have in-person learning going on or we're starting to see things like transmission actually happening within the school programs whether they be curricular or extracurricular or we're not able to keep up on our safety procedures which could mean just wearing the the safety the ppe while at school and following the safety protocols or the things like we need to do following up with close contacts or people that are displaying symptoms or those kinds of things in a timely fashion the more cases that are being reported to us the more difficult it is for us to follow

035up and do our safety protocols in a timely manner so that's why we start to reach this point where it's just so pervasive in the community that it makes sense to take a a pause for a couple of weeks and hope that the numbers point back down in the correct direction and that we could resume uh our in-person learning opportunities so that being said we're in what's defined as an adaptive pause this document was shared with everybody in the community uh just before this is the document that came out just before the school year started that caused us to re-look at all of our metrics and how we do things and it outlined this process for an adaptive pause a short period of time where we take a step back and watch the metrics continue

036to watch them as closely as we have been but ask everybody in our community to do their part to help drive those metrics in the correct direction if that happens uh this week we were always as zoe said always sending uh intended to be fully remote as we hear the feedback and make changes in the program and get ready to bring students back for another round of in-person modified hybrid learning however now that we have the adaptive pause we're going to watch the metrics this week and through next week and we ask everybody in the school community and the overall community to do their part to follow all of the safety protocols and drive those numbers back the other direction so that we could return the week of november 16th and we would just keep

037the schedule this is the schedule for the rest of the year so we would come back for week two of uh the modified hybrid so the afternoon courses on september 16th so everybody can do their part and try to get the numbers going in the right direction for us and then hopefully we're back in a couple of weeks here so that's the quick overview any questions on any of that all right i'm going to invite jackie forward [Music] hey hi everyone hi hello okay great i'm gonna try to take advantage of and the clicker is there ready to go off because they're just gonna fog the whole time okay i got my clicker great awesome um thank you guys so much for having me i was just saying to gina that this is really exciting

038for me we you become a school lawyer because you like to be in schools you know helping and i haven't been in a school since march so it's really really nice to be here with you i'm jackie warrens i am an attorney with franzik and i have been spending a lot of my time thinking about title ix for the past few months mostly on zoom so again it's really cool to be here today um this is a board-focused training on the changes in the new title ix regulations it is not the significant lengthy training that your administrators have gone through that really prepares them to be in the trenches working on title ix cases there are specific training requirements that the department of education has said that people have to go through in order to

039do that this isn't that this is intended to give you kind of an overview it may feel a little um overwhelming because there's a lot of information but i do want you to kind of have a flavor of what the the major changes the terminology and all of that are but that said if you have questions at any point please don't hesitate to stop me and i'm happy to try to clarify because my goal is to try to demystify a lot of this for you all right so with that let's jump in so um i do this is the goal here is that this is an hour so um hopefully i will be able to deliver on that for you so why are we here so the um main reason is that as i mentioned

040there are new um title ix regulations so if you think about just like the board of education you have your policies and then there's the administrative procedures that your administrators create to give more guidance on how to implement your policies the federal government has the same thing they have the law which in this case is title nine of the education amendments of 1972 and then they now they have regulations and um the main reason we're here again is because those regulations were amended they came out they were proposed in november of 2018. it took almost two years a year and a half for the regulations to be to be finalized there were over 125 000 comments and the department of education which issues the regulations had to painstakingly go through and respond to every one

041of those so that took about 18 months and then the department of education gave us gave you and your administrators a couple of months to come into compliance with the new regs when they were issued in may so they came out on may 6th and they went into effect on august 14th even though it was right in the middle of the pandemic there's some really great language in the commentary to the regulations which is about 2 000 pages of commentary that says you know you guys have known about this for a long time it's not like you've got anything else going on you can figure this out um so there we are but they they do require training but also just a lot of changes that i want you guys to be aware of why

042is this so important i know this is probably not something that i necessarily need to cover here but i do find even for seasoned board members educators that it's it's a good reminder of the sort of stark statistics when it comes to sexual harassment which includes um sexual assault and sexual violence in schools one in four women report experiencing sexual assault before the age of 18. 10 of children are say that they have been the target of educator sexual misconduct before high school graduation almost 50 percent of u.s students say that they have been subjected to some type of sexual harassment in school before graduating from high school and then we know that this has moved online so even a decade ago we saw 30 percent of all students in grades 7 through 12 saying

043that they had experienced online sexual harassment we know that numbers only skyrocketed in the time since now with that said for those of you who um are law and order fans like i am um i always am embarrassed to admit that yes i did actually want to go to law school because i liked law and order which i know is embarrassing but if you watch it you know that not many sexual assaults and other sexual harassment matters end up making their way to the police so this is a 2017 statistic 23 of sexual assaults are reported to the police and we know that the reason for that is because they're really really hard to prove so you might think that that means that students are are going to their schools for help when they've experienced

044these vast numbers of sexual harassment and assault um but that isn't true so um 79 of public schools reported not even one incident of sexual harassment in the most recent um data collection issued by the department of education so this is to me really shocking because this is for the 2015-2016 school year and this was under the obama administration when there was a version of title ix that was in effect that many people said was extremely favorable toward complainants individuals who were reporting so you would think that you would see higher numbers than this of students reporting but even under that very robust regime that many felt was you know almost swung too far in the direction of being protective of complainants we still saw you know 79 of schools reporting not even one incident

045of sexual harassment so one of the things that i really want to get across to you that i think is important for you as board members to understand is you know there's a lot there there is a lot of anxiety on the part of members of the communities in school communities about what these new regulations are gonna look like for them if i have a complaint what is this gonna what am i gonna have to go through in order to have my complaint addressed and so we expect to see these numbers drop um under these current regulations for me my hope is that when you leave here today you will feel that okay even though yes we are going to be dealing with a system that requires a lot more as far as what the

046procedures look like that there are ways for you as the leaders of this district to communicate to your community members that this is still able to be a fair process it's still able to be a protective process for both parties and in fact that is what the the intent of it was was to make it fair for all parties involved and to be able to implement these rules with fidelity so that you're not making it any harder as a district for the parties then it has to be under these new rules and i'm hopeful that with that mentality that we won't see these numbers dropping because there really are still a lot of really robust protections for both parties under these new rules we know that if harassment isn't dealt with in the school environment

047that it can have very long lasting detrimental effects on victims one thing to note is that these regulations they now say if an employee has a complaint of sexual harassment against another employee that this will be covered under title ix and historically that's just really not what we were doing we were handling them under another federal law title seven your hr department was handling it and title ix was really being dealt with usually by student services because usually it was involving complaints by a student against another student or by a student against an employee now these new title ix regulations explicitly have to apply to employee on employee conduct so when we talk about these long lasting effects we're not just talking about the effects on students we're also talking about the effects on employees

048as well we also know that unfair processes can have long lasting detrimental effects on the parties and specifically on the accused a lot of people when i've done board trainings people have asked me you know what's behind this change and i would say that the biggest thing is that um many felt that the rules that were put in place between 2010 and 2016 15 were really unfair for individuals who were accused of sexual sexual harassment so many felt that if you were accused you were basically guilty under the the ways that schools were handling these processes and to be fair this was not something that was attributable to schools this was the mandates of what was coming down from the department of education and i actually worked at the department of education under both the

049obama administration and the trump administration in the agency that uh implements these rules that deals with complaints that schools haven't followed these rules and i mean there were many many complaints that were coming up at the end of the obama administration from mostly male students who were saying we really feel that this process doesn't give us the sufficient due process rights so it's extremely important to the department under these new rules that the due process rights of the accused be protected now again i don't think i mean having had the benefit of been on being on both sides i've represented i was started at franzik in 2009 i worked there for a long time made partner left to go be a civil rights attorney at the department of education for a few years came back

050so i've seen it on both sides i've seen i've defended schools in these types of matters i've also investigated schools in these types of matters the reality is is that you can get people can get a fair shake under these rules um i don't know how long they'll stick around i guess we'll see what happens this week even if there is a change in the administration it's not clear that these rules will immediately go away because they did go through the very lengthy rule-making process and we would expect that they would have to go through that same process again in order to go back to what we were using before so these are here to stay and again i think that it's most important for people in your shoes to to know that there this

051is a we can implement this fairly we can implement these rules in a way that strike the right balance and obviously we'll be working hand-in-hand with you guys to make sure that that happens so that we don't have these negative effects on the parties by by ineffectually implementing these these new requirements oh i can't even read that that's so tiny oh i'm sorry no that's not no it's not you i actually was really nervous coming here with this powerpoint hank because i know it's not it's not a it's not a piece of art like like you would be giving but okay legal risk so the um one of the things obviously that we care about is attorneys for the district is keeping you out of legal trouble so it is required under these new regulations

052that you implement these rules that you respond adequately to complaints of title 9 sexual harassment and we we want to make sure that you don't have a complaint either with the office for civil rights or in the courts we're already seeing lawsuits about under these rules where people are saying that schools aren't implementing them correctly so again really hoping that um we will avoid getting pulled into that here so that's kind of the why that's why we think this is important so let's talk about the what so i always ask people when we do the more interactive trainings the longer trainings what is the first word that you think of when you think of title ix and the most common responses are sports and athletics and that makes sense because when the law was passed

053in 1972 there's no question that it was passed with sports in mind but if you look at the language of the law which is probably going to be not legible yeah sorry um but if you look at the language of the law it's much broader and it says that no person in the united states shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in denied the benefits of or subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance very broad doesn't say anything about sports and so almost immediately the courts and ocr's predecessor and then ocr started interpreting it to apply to a lot lot more and i have here for you just the litany of things that are covered by title ix you will notice that sex-based harassment is only

054one of them it's one of the many many things that are covered by title ix we are going to be talking about almost entirely sex-based harassment today and that's because these new regulations they don't really make any changes with respect to how you have to address these other types of title ix sex discrimination or retaliation in the case of the the final one there so discriminatory discipline if someone says i'm a male student i feel like i've been disciplined more harshly than a female student for the same thing that would still be handled under your current uniform grievance procedure policy 2260 nothing's changed there same thing with same-sex education if you have a program that's sex-based um or even a school in some cases people offer that would still be covered under your 2-260 uniform

055grievance procedure athletics still covered there pregnant parenting students retaliation if someone exercises their rights under title ix but then they feel like they were treated poorly in response by someone at the district all of that's still going to be covered under your uniform grievance procedure and i do not want you to think that because i'm not talking about it that it's gone away it hasn't but we are really talking about sex-based harassment today and that's because these new regulations as of august 14th 2020 made significant changes to how we have to handle sexual harassment complaints and so what does it do what are the changes first of all when thinking about the question when must a school district respond to sexual harassment i give my cute lawyerly answer which is it depends it depends on

056which law you ask because we're talking about title ix here but for employment we also have to think about the illinois human rights act we have to think about title vii for students we have illinois sex equity regulations from isb and we also have the illinois human rights act so when you are required to respond as a district to sexual harassment is different under these laws and the real takeaway for you is that title ix is narrower so you will have almost every type of conduct that constitutes title ix sexual harassment or that requires response under title ix would also require a response under these other laws but just because the answer to the question do we have to respond to this under title ix is no doesn't mean that your analysis is done you

057still are almost certainly going to have to move forward under your uniform grievance procedure to address these other laws so that's my my lawyerly disclaimer but with that in mind when must you as a district respond under these new regulations to title ix sexual harassment well first of all you have to give an option for people to report title ix sexual harassment and really any sex discrimination by mail by telephone by email to your title ix coordinator to gina or by any means that results in the title ix coordinator receiving the person's report and these have to be allowed to be taken at any time of the day they frankly could come to you um and and you know you'd you would be if it was considered to be something that was a means that

058results in the title ix coordinator receiving it is very very broad but i think more importantly in addition to this you have to allow this formal report is that under these new regulations they give us a standard where any employee who has actual knowledge of title ix sexual harassment brings you on the hook as a district to responding under these new regulations so this isn't a huge change it's something that's been a reality under all of those laws that i listed for quite some time but it is a good reminder to you that you need to make sure that employees here are very well trained to understand that they need to be reporting if they hear of something that is sex-based it needs to be reported preferably the title ix coordinator so the decision can

059be made whether or not a response has to be given under title ix but um it really to me the question what i tell people is this initial question of do you have actual knowledge it's sort of an academic question it's a question that we as lawyers are going to argue on your behalf if you get a complaint before ocr if you get a lawsuit we're going to argue that you didn't have actual knowledge but if you have if you're asking whether or not you have actual knowledge about something you almost certainly have it and again it's very broad it's knowledge by any employee of the district what is actual knowledge it's really notice it's either you sense it you see it you hear it you perceive it you observe it or it's reported either

060directly or indirectly to that employee and at that point you're on the hook unless the only person who knows about it is the alleged perpetrator so if you have an employee who is the alleged perpetrator and they are the only one that knows about it that is not going to bring the district on the hook but otherwise this is extremely broad and so again i want you to be aware of it i want you to be aware of this that's in the law but it's not as a practical matter going to be something that people are deliberating about on the ground because you need to respond if if you have knowledge of of this type of conduct so with respect to board members the language about officials with authority whose knowledge whose actual knowledge brings

061the district on the hook it says employees so we don't think board members are going to if a board member were to know about sexual harassment under title ix and not report it we think we would have a very good legal argument that the district wasn't on the hook to respond under title ix but again this is really academic illinois law requires board members to at the very least report things that are reported to them sex-based conduct that's abuse or neglect to report it as mandated reporters under illinois law also just as a practical matter i don't really want to have to make this argument so i always tell boards if you if you hear about anything that is sex based just report it just just let you know somebody know at the district level

062but as far as again you guys have like the best lawyers in the world and we will defend you you know if there's a report a complaint that something wasn't wasn't there wasn't a notice of it by by a board member we'll have lots of arguments but just um i just say report it it's easier all right so what are you reporting what is it that you need to be on the lookout for um well again it depends on which law you ask so again it's the same thing as when you have to report what it is that you're looking for it's narrower under title ix than it is under these other laws so under these other laws the illinois human rights act title vii you're going to be dealing with a much greater universe

063of conduct than what is going to be covered by these new title ix regulations that's actually a blessing in some ways because we don't you're going to hear about this crazy process that i'm going to zoom through just so you're aware of it this is a very onerous process for both the parties and for the district for the administration so we don't want to use it for anything that we don't have to but again i just this is an important reminder because just because something isn't sexual harassment under title ix doesn't mean that the district is going to ignore it and that's one of those things where i think the messaging is so important to community members that you know people hear these stories about this new law and they say it's exclusive it has

064a narrower definition of sexual harassment than the old title ix did it's true um it doesn't cover as much it has more geographical limitation it's true but it doesn't mean that just because something gets kicked out of title ix that we're just going to say oh well sorry that happened to you as a district you're still very much bound by state law and in the case of employees by federal law under title vii to respond so that message i think is extremely important to make sure that members of the community are aware of um because honestly the coverage of these rules has been scary i think to people who are in the community who think all of a sudden my children are going to be subject to predators in the school building because title ix

065has been narrowed and that is just not true it's just we're not going to use this process to address those complaints we're going to use 2 260 uniform grievance procedure to address those complaints all right but now that i give you the lawyerly answer i'm going to give you the real answer now as to what is actually sexual harassment under title ix um well we had an old definition and then we have the new definition so the new definition is unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that a reasonable person would find to be so severe pervasive and objectively offensive that it effectively denies equal access to the recipients to the school's education program or activity plus quid pro quo on the basis of sex by an employee and a couple of four types of

066sexual harassment as defined by two federal laws the violence against women act and the clery act that apply to higher education institutions super simple definition right very confusing but that was our old definition our new definition i'm sorry that was our new definition our old definition we didn't have these carve outs for what i call the title ix big five which are the quid pro quo by employee and then the vowel and cleary act big four which is sexual assault domestic violence dating violence and stalking so those four plus quid pro quo by an employee those are the title nine big five for everything else we use this what we call a hostile environment standard of so severe pervasive and objectively offensive that it effectively denies our old definition we didn't have the title ix

067big five for everything we asked was it severe pervasive or persistent so that ore is the big difference here and and it only had to interfere with or limit access it didn't have to effectively deny equal access so i'm not going to get into this like in great detail with you but i do think you could just see from this language it's narrower right than what the old definition was and the reason we have the title nine big five is because they narrowed the definition by saying that conduct has to be severe and pervasive and objectively offensive if you had one instance of extremely severe conduct like rape but it wasn't pervasive it didn't happen frequently it wasn't widespread it was only one time it would not fall under this hostile environment definition so they

068put it down here in this catch-all big five things where they said okay those those are gonna be under title nine even if they don't meet this definition same thing with employee quid pro quo if it only happened once that a teacher told a student i'll give you a good grade if you have unwanted sexual activity with me that wouldn't be pervasive so it wouldn't fall under the new narrower hostile environment definition and so that's why they put it down here so again i mean yes there will be things that don't fall under this definition um i think the biggest ones are like joking they the department really wanted to get rid of like if someone is saying you know obnoxious jokes dirty jokes in a in a locker room they didn't want that to

069be something that where you would have a title 9 case brought against you but i still think a lot of things are going to fall under this that we used to think of as being title ix do you have a question i did i'm sorry specifically about objectively offensive who determines what's objectively offensive it's a very good question i can tell you it is not um a cisgender you know middle-aged white male it is um it is it's a reasonable person in the same situation so if for instance you had a five-year-old kid and they were being subjected to some kind of verbal harassment you would ask whether that would be object whether that would be offensive to a reasonable five-year-old kid in the same circumstances with the same relationships with all the other people

070who were involved you look at it they say it's a constellation of circumstances and you look at kind of all of the factors so if it were for instance harassment based on transgender status you would ask what a reasonable transgender person would feel in that circumstance not a cisgender person so it's very tailored but the department really wants us to be focused on what is reasonable you know and i i tell in the trainings i tell the story about how when i was a kid my grandfather could not tell my mom and me apart on the phone and he told really really dirty jokes so he would call and i was like eight years old and he would think i was my mom and before i could say no he would launch into these jokes

071so i am not the reasonable person when it comes to tolerance for dirty jokes i was raised to have a very high tolerance for them what the department wants us to do is look at the person who's kind of the more normal person who wasn't you know uh influenced by their grandfather's jokes so it's that person it's not and really the way they're looking at it it's the opposite direction they they don't want this administration does not want hypersensitivity to lead to title ix consequences i don't think we saw that all that much before but we certainly need to be careful of it now and they're also very concerned about the first amendment so if it's speech which a lot of time this stuff is i think we're going to have to be really careful

072in applying this standard to make sure you know that we're only using title ix for conduct that really meets this definition of severe pervasive and objectively offensive and our training that we've done with your team it really gets into like a lot of examples of these so we really are trying to give an opportunity to kind of think through these um but it isn't it's new and it's going to be different and it might be narrower but remember just because it isn't in title nine doesn't mean we're going to ignore it it's going to get kicked into um another policy all right i just kind of went through all these so i'm going to do these very quickly the title nine quid pro quo which is part of that title nine big five it's only

073employees um so if you have the student newspaper editor who says to the student photographer i'll publish your article if you do this or publish your picture if you do this for me we're going to consider that under the hostile environment prong not under this catch-all but they wanted to catch all if it's an employee of the of the school conditioning an aid service or benefit on an individual's participation in unwanted sexual conduct they want that under title ix end of analysis um as long as it's in a program or activity and in the united states which we'll talk about in a minute these are the vow of big four um sexual assault domestic violence dating violence and stalking um they have definitions for these the department of education they did not come out in

074the rule they did not come out in the commentary they came out a blog post on october 7th the day after we at franzik did a whole webinar on the big four they gave us the definitions the next day that's great but they weren't that different so that's good it's still useful but um but there are definitions and they're part of your administrative procedures so i keep telling people you don't have to memorize these things use your common sense if somebody tells you something and it sounds like sexual assault domestic violence dating violence or stalking and then the final one is that hostile environment that's a hustle environment it you know it's just unwelcome conduct a reasonable person so severe and pervasive and objectively offensive that it effectively denies equal access that equal access thing

075is another one of those things that we lawyers are going to argue about and that people on the ground aren't really going to be thinking much about we're going to argue if you get pulled into court that there wasn't a denial of equal access but if someone has presented something to you that seems so severe pervasive and objectively offensive you know usually we're going to just want to move forward with the title ix investigation and not get too hung up on this equal access the equal access thing really important it doesn't have to be actual um impact so if you have a student who is subjected to sexual assault by an employee but they just are amazing and they just you know keep going to school making straight a's you know still doing everything because

076they're just really strong that's not going to be an argument that it's not a denial of equal access because if a normal you know again that reasonable person we're looking at that not on the actual impact so in addition to being having him fit into these definitions this definition of title ix sexual harassment conduct also has to be in a program or activity to fall under these new title ix sexual harassment regulations what that means is that the school has to have it has to occur in a location event or circumstance over which you as a school and as a district have substantial control over both the context of the harassment and also over the alleged harasser at the time that the conduct occurred this is another narrowing and this is one that got a

077lot of um it got a lot of play in the press that this was you know gonna be really limiting it was gonna mean that you couldn't deal with off campus online misconduct you know cyber bullying things like that it doesn't go that far i mean we know that conduct that occurs on your technology for instance like if you're if you've got kids out on on remote learning and something happens during the school day while they're supposed to be in remote learning i would say that you have substantial control over the context and over the alleged harasser in that circumstance if they're using your technology to do it i don't care when it happens you've got that control but the reality is that this is going to exclude conduct that we used to pull under

078under title ix in schools we used to say if there was off-campus conduct but it had an on-campus effect that we would still consider it under title ix we're not going to do that anymore this is a different standard with discipline you're probably aware we talk about was there a nexus and a substantial disruption that's not the standard even if there's a nexus and a substantial disruption if there's not substantial control over the context we won't use title ix for it but again this does not mean that we're going to just all of a sudden stop caring about off-campus misconduct of a sexual nature because the illinois human rights act still has a much much broader reach we just aren't going to use our title ix sexual harassment procedures to address this conduct the conduct

079also has to be in the united states not as huge of an issue for k-12 school districts but for higher education this was a big change we used to say even if it happened on study abroad or spring break abroad if it had on-campus effects back at home it would be covered by title ix that is not the case anymore if it happens abroad if the conduct happens abroad it's not title ix but again i sound like a broken record just because it doesn't fall under title nine doesn't mean we're going to ignore it we're going to address it under the illinois law under your your uniform grievance procedure because it's still going to be covered by that law you can see why i mean there are states that don't have as robust of a

080state law as we do in illinois and you can see that this is a massive change for them for us it's just not because we're basically now we just have to deal with the headache the administrative headache of having two extremely different procedures that we use but we're still gonna address all of this conduct it just is gonna depend on you know what we use to respond all right so what do we use to respond how do you respond again it depends right on which law you ask you're going to do different things under different laws but let's talk about under title nine so again i i'm just i'm so sorry for this teeny tiny little powerpoint and i gave it to you in a handout with three on a page it's like torture um

081but i will send you a bigger copy of it so that you can have it for your reference you don't have to use a magnifying glass um okay um i'm just showing you that without my glasses which which i can't keep from fogging up i i can't see anything all right it could have been my fault too when i moved it over to google's no it is yours absolutely not but um no i i um the points here though which is that you have really you have three options the first option is if it's title ix sexual harassment in a program or activity in the united states you are going to use your new policy and its related administrative procedures the administrative procedures are actually really important for this one because we at franzik we

082worked with press we were we made up the majority of the team on press to write the policies we felt really strongly that we wanted the policies to just include what the policies had to include and we put everything else in administrative procedure because they keep changing stuff we would have had to keep coming back to you to redo your policies so the administrative procedures are really important here they're posted on your website so that people have access to see what they are but that's why they're there that's why a lot of the information is there and not your policies so that's option one if it's not title ix sexual harassment in a program or activity in the united states then you're going to go to usually option two which is 2260 your uniform grievance

083procedure and that covers any other violation of law or board policy including other types of sexual harassment and then even if it's not either of those there might be other things that you're going to use you know even if conduct doesn't rise to the level of sexual harassment it might still be bullying we have a pretty strong bullying law in illinois that doesn't require showing that it meets the definition of sexual harassment um it might be assault conduct might be assault or fighting or you know there's all sorts of things so i don't mean to suggest you can't use those but if we're talking about sexual harassment it's gonna fall into one of option one or option two and that's really the change again we're dealing with now just the administrative headache of dealing with

084these these policies all right this looks great on zoom but here so i do try to give this in a visual because i feel like it does help i think of this new title ix regulation as giving us an off ramp we have our same old road that we've always been riding on when we're dealing with this kind of stuff we're still gonna address everything that we used to address under title ix it's just if it meets the definition of title ix sexual harassment in a program or activity in the u.s we're going to take an exit ramp and we're going to go down and use 2-2-6-5 otherwise we're going to use 2-2-60 and we're always going to keep in mind that we can use another non-sexual harassment policy or procedure to address it so

085i'll give you an example of an allegation you have a student comes in says i was sexually assaulted in the bathroom at the school by another student that is sexual assault it's part of the title ix big five in a programmer activity in the u.s so it is going to go down two two six five for that reason let's say that that student says yeah this happened to me and the respondent the perpetrator they use the knife and your sro goes down the hall pulls that kid out of class and guess what that kid has a knife in school guess what that violates our rules doesn't matter if that kid used it to engage in sexual assault we can punish that student for the that's up in the middle here for the knife having a

086knife on school grounds without having to go through two two six five but let's say the sr doesn't find a knife and the only evidence of the knife is the exact same evidence that would support or not support a title ix sexual assault then we're going to do everything under 2-2-6-5 and at the end we're going to look at what evidence we have and if we have evidence of a knife we'll discipline for that if we have evidence of sexual assault we'll discipline for that if they said the sexual assault happened down the street at mcdonald's in the bathroom outside of school hours that's not in a program or activity so we're not going to use 2-2-6-5 but we're not going to ignore it we're going to go down to 260 and address that under

087illinois law so you can see it's just it's like an off-ramp that we have to address in the limited circumstance where this these deaths title ix sexual harassment in a program or activity in the united states under your title ix procedure you can't address it you can't do anything about it and so the department rightfully recognized that we may have some circumstances where somebody comes and reports my teacher sexually assaulted me in the building and they've done it to other students and then they say i don't want to file a complaint i've heard about this new title ix stuff i'm not going through that well as a district you are not going to say okay we'll pretend like that we've never heard that you have to you're not going to let that teacher just continue

088when you've got this allegation so the department has given you this method by which the title ix coordinator can say this is so serious that we can't ignore it we have to do an investigation but what you can't do is say oh well they didn't want to file a title 9 complaint so we're going to go use 2 260 now because it's easier you can't do that so if a formal complaint is either filed or by the complainant or signed by the title ix coordinator then you do these additional steps which we'll talk about very briefly again the formal complaint it's it is a document that is either signed by the title ix complainant or sorry filed by the title ix complainant or signed by the title ix coordinator and that's what's going to trigger

089the vast majority of the response under these new rules all right we just talked about this so this is what's required in the just for your reference what's required in that initial meeting that we just talked about um by the title ix coordinator one really interesting note about these new regulations is that we have to respect the confidentiality of the complainant up until the point when a complaint is either filed or signed and at that point we must give the name of the alleged victim or victims to the alleged perpetrator this is a big change and again this is the one where i don't really have a great answer of how we make this softer in some cases for complainants you know we might have had some situations in the past where people reported something

090because they felt like they might be able to have their anonymity maintained and now we can't do it well what about the there being a minor mm-hmm um i thought we kept those names confidential because of their age yeah i mean we we often would really bend over backwards to try to protect the name of a minor in these circumstances under these new regulations we can't i mean um i should say that the rights of the yeah it's it's definitely um wow this is one that i think is going to be that's a really bad yeah this is this is one now again the reason i'll tell you the reason why in the 2000 pages of preamble to these rules the department said that they wanted to do this is they said well if you're

091a person who's been accused of such serious conduct that it meets the level of title ix sexual harassment you have the right to know who's accused you you have the right to confront your accuser now in k-12 that confrontation is at least a less significant as it is in higher ed under these new rules but it is still a confrontation and it will still be very hard for some complainants to you know let's face it they know who the person is right i mean it's not going to be a mystery but to me the uh john q public right maybe maybe shouldn't be involved in that and it so that's where we're gonna put we've started coming up with all sorts of creative things to try to help with that issue of like for instance

092we have to share this information but if the complainant i'm sorry the respondent if the the alleged perpetrator were to go out and share that information generally out in the public we could take a response to that right um i i think we have some ideas of how i mean we have to we have to share a lot more than just their names um we'll talk about in a second we have to share a lot but we have come up with some ideas where we could put water marks on pages where at least if somebody were to release something to the public we would know it came from the respondent because it would have a watermark on the page that said respond it so we have been trying to think really creatively of how to

093limit this but the reality is is that you know it's we have to tell them at this point if it's under title ix now again this is why you know everybody's up in arms about the fact that all of this stuff isn't going to fall under title ix anymore but it's actually in some ways it's better for the complainant if it doesn't fall under title ix because if it doesn't fall under title ix we can still look at some of the law that we have in place like to try to protect the the confidentiality of a reporting party but yeah this is a big big change so once a formal complaint and this is true even if the complainant doesn't want to file a complaint but we feel that we must do an investigation that

094the title ix coordinator must sign an investigation we still have to give out the name to the respondent so that's why this this responsibility of whether or not to sign a complaint it's going to be a really heavy one for the title ix coordinator to to decide um whether or not to do it because once they decide to do it you have to notify of the name i have the definitions for you of supportive measures and not supportive measures the big thing to know about the difference between supportive measures and interim measures we used to do things like remove student from the classroom so we would we would remove the respondent during an investigation take them out of the class transfer them to a different class we can't do that anymore we used to take

095kids off of athletic teams while we were doing an investigation we can't do that anymore unless it meets the definition of an immediate emergence emergency removal under the regulations which is very narrow it's only where there is an individualized safety and risk analysis and it is determined that there is a an immediate threat to physical health or safety so you could think of the absolute worst sex-based verbal harassment to the point where it led someone to want to commit suicide that would almost certainly not be an immediate threat to physical health or safety so this is this is actually the thing that worries me the most because i think when you combine this with illinois law if you don't do an emergency removal of a student i don't know how we would eventually be able

096to expel that student or even have them be eligible for expulsion because under illinois law you have to show that there's no reasonable alternative and if the kid has been sitting in class with no incident for 60 to 90 days while an investigation goes on we won't be able to establish that so it's definitely something we'll have to think about from the beginning is this conduct the type of conduct for which we might want to have a student be eligible for expulsion because if it is we're going to need to think about if we can do an emergency removal and also one of the things that drove me crazy when i was at ocr is that i was the only person there who had ever practiced state law like representing schools they don't know anything

097about state law and they don't think about the fact that they're giving the title ix coordinator authority to remove a student from school for 60 to 90 days while an investigation goes on who has the right to remove students from school for more than 10 days not the title ix coordinator you so we are going to have to come up with a way to have these emergency removals come into you as expulsions pending the outcome of the title ix investigation it is going to be completely convoluted hopefully we won't have that many of these but it's going to be a real mess when we do it's going to have to come to you at the front end because i can't a title ix coordinator can't understand a bill 100 send a kid home even remove

098a kid and put them on a you know a virtual option or something it would still be considered an expulsion same thing with idea there are going to be things where the title ix coordinator doesn't have the authority to effectuate a change in placement for a student under section 504 idea the team is going to have to be involved in that so there's just a lot of intersections that the department of education did not think about but we're thinking about them we're coming up with options but it's it's definitely a mess the really great news that i have for you is that they did reasonably say if you are allowed to put an employee on paid or unpaid administrative leave during an investigation you can still do it under title ix thank goodness because that

099made me really nervous if we would have to have a teacher in the classroom while we were doing investigation that that teacher engaged in sexual assault of a suit of a student we don't have to do that we can put them on leave which is which is very good i've just got here that summary of only the board can expel under state law and the idea whereas under the emergency removal it's by the title ix coordinator there's no formal hearing required it can lead to a removal for more than 10 days not very well thought out thought out all right so then if there is a formal complaint that's filed or signed then you move into these additional steps the first of them is that you are allowed to offer informal resolution and this is

100essentially it's a it's a mediation it's you know restorative justice it's an option for the parties to try to work things out in a way that is less adjudicatory that is less this really serious almost judicial process i think this is going to be our friend in this in this new world we're living in it has to be voluntary the parties have to agree to it they have to sign in writing that they agree to it once they reach an agreement the title ix case is gone it's resolved so even if there's a later violation of that agreement they can't come back and say to the school we want you to reopen this title 9 investigation it's over at that point but at any point before they make an agreement they have to be both

101parties have to be allowed to withdraw and you can't use this for employee on student you can use it for everything else um and i think this again i think it will be good if it doesn't work or it's not appropriate if informal resolution doesn't happen then you move into the investigation and there are just a ton of specific very very specific steps that are required for the investigation it this is a huge shift when i was at ocr what we used to do is we would look at your policy and we would say did you follow it and if you did you were good now you must do the things that they tell you to do in the investigation we don't recommend that the investigator be the title ix coordinator it's not prohibited but

102we're worried about some conflicts of interest there and there is a requirement for the investigators to have gone through training for them to not have an actual perceived conflict of interest i'm doing an investigation right now for a board where one of the um parties had a grandparent who was like a you know huge figure in the district for centuries no not centuries a long time and they said we can't do this investigate nobody in this district can do this investigation because the respondent is going to say we're all too biased toward this person who is sort of this foundational leader in our district so in some cases that may be an issue but there has to be a presumption that the respondent is not responsible so again that's getting back to this fairness thing

103that the department is really concerned about um i don't know why that slide doesn't have any words on it it's just because i'm recognizing that i didn't want to give you the long laundry this is usually my slide that has the long laundry list of all of the things it's on there okay it's like a long laundry list of all the things that must be part of an investigation i will send you a better copy of this so that you can have it look back on it but really the most important thing for you to understand is that one of the biggest things about these investigations is that your investigator is going to have to share all directly related evidence that is gathered during the investigation they must share that not a summary of it

104all of the evidence collected with both parties giving them 10 days to give a written response before the investigator writes an investigative report and then the investigator has to give them the investigative report and give them 10 days to respond to that before any decision is reached so again lots of rights here and getting back to the point about we don't want to share the name now we have to share every text message that's collected every email communication every note that is taken is being shared with those parties but that's where i'm you know we're coming up with these methods to share where at least we're going to watermark this so that if somebody leaks it will hopefully be able to know who it is but it does not make me happy that we have

105to do this i think it's going to be i think it's going to be a hard process and also just think about the time we're talking about here 10 days to do this 10 days to do that i mean i think that these investigations are going to take 90 days which is a lot longer than what we usually aim for we're usually aiming for 30 days but i don't think we're gonna get there after the investigation there's been a decision making process with a separate decision maker so this is a different person than the title ix coordinator a different person in the investigator and that person has to oversee a what what we're calling a written cross examination so this is if you have a teacher who is alleged to have sexually assaulted a student

106that teacher gets to ask relevant written questions to the student that the student has to answer in writing and send back through the decision maker to the teacher if you have two students they get to ask each other written questions cross-examination questions there are some limits on it again that's what i'm going to be focusing on with with um talking to complainants and respondents about this and why they shouldn't be too nervous so terribly nervous about it because there are limitations we can put in place we can make sure that they're appropriate they're not going to be able to ask questions about past sexual history of the complainant medical records privileged information there's a lot of protections but again number one this is going to take a long time number two if i'm a parent

107am i going to want my kid to have to answer these questions i don't know and again i think it's important for us to make sure that that they understand that we are going to do everything in our power to protect them but i think we're going to lose some people in this at this point in the process what are the requirements on both parties to actually participate and answer the questions so very good question in higher ed there's a really big one under these rules in k12 there's not the decision maker can um exclude all others prior statements of the person if they don't participate but they don't have to now if i'm a respondent and the complainant doesn't answer questions and the decision maker considers them i'm going to file a complaint and

108say that this was unfair process so i think you know the risk to the complainant is that we can dismiss a complaint if the complainant doesn't cooperate the risk to the respondent is that if they don't cooperate and answer the questions then there's unrebutted evidence against them that they did something so if i'm the decision maker i'm going to take the evidence that i have and if it's unrebutted because they didn't answer the questions i'm probably going to find out against them so again as the team member who's working on this you get sort of crafty in the way that you describe these things to the witnesses is there any perjury type of situation if they don't answer honestly either side so there is as part of these regulations there is we are required to

109tell parties about any rule that we have that allows them to be disciplined for not for providing false information or false evidence so if we were able to prove that it was false we would be able to discipline them for it the problem is that it's usually very hard to prove that things are false i mean when i say when i do trainings i'm like false reports of sexual harassment and assault are actually exceedingly rare what's much more common when you do these a lot like i do is that you see that two people experience the same thing and they have a completely different experience and your responsibility as the investigator or the decision maker is to figure out what the evidence supports not who's telling the truth not who's right or wrong so i

110think it'll be very rare that we're actually able to establish that someone's not telling the truth but if we could we could discipline them at some point within the district i i'm assuming this is all within the district that is doing the investigating do um either side bring in um attorneys to uh mitigate for them they can and does that create even more of a problem for us to investigate properly because they've hired that one so when we do investigator training we spend a fair bit of time talking about what do you do when you have an unruly attorney who's in there like interrupting everything and there are things that you can do and there are guidelines that you can set up for behavior and expectations in fact we can tell attorneys that they can't

111and advisors that they can't speak i usually let them speak at some point usually at the very end because i actually do think sometimes i value whatever they're able to elicit from the witness for me as a decision maker but i'm very strict about it when i do these things i say you know you you get two minutes at the end to ask you know three questions and that's it but it it is an issue um we are lucky again though because in higher ed the school has to provide an advisor to the students to do live cross-examination in a live hearing and we are really lucky in k-12 that that didn't happen to us it was originally proposed so i feel very grateful that all i have to think about is you know hopefully

112dealing with an unruly attorney because before we were going to have to deal with an attorney cross-examining a an alleged victim on the stand in a hearing and luckily we don't have to do that um but it will be an issue to to keep advisors in check and that's one of the things that's on my slide that didn't have any words on it is that the parties have to be given they have to have be allowed to have an advisor of choice with them at every meeting or other proceeding that's part of this process there's a written determination that the decision maker completes at the end and that's really where it's decided is there evidence to support this complaint and if so what remedies are we recommending in a perfect world we would have you

113all serving as the decision makers it's the most logical thing you're the ones that typically decide you know what discipline to impose on in these types of things these rules are far from a perfect world and there's really not a way to do that because you would have to have someone over you that was appealing it and who who are we appealing to and then who's doing the senate bill 100 hearing if the student gets expelled or suspended who's doing the 24 12 proceedings if it's a tenured teacher so we need the board to be doing those things the board is going to be brought in on the most serious issues but this is a decision maker at the administrative level here and the way that we're phrasing it is that they're recommending action with

114the recognition that they don't have the right in a lot of cases to implement that action without your involvement so you will be brought in to do that when it when it happens this is just the written cross-examination we talked about the rape shield and treatment records and privileged information that get protected we're using a preponderance of the evidence standard here which is the same standard you use in all of your uniform grievance but i call it 50 and a feather it's just a tiny bit more than 50 for one side or the other and that's that's all they need to show at this point in the decision-making process is when you can impose disciplinary actions on the perpetrator you can't do it before after you have to go through this whole process you can't

115do anything punitive or disciplinary other than emergency removal and then after the decision-making process both parties have to be given the right to to an appeal and again this is an administrative appeal and so it has to be offered to both parties there are three bases for it um so it is limited in some ways and the party must be able to show that whatever was wrong whether it was a procedural issue new evidence that wasn't available at the time the decision was made or bias or conflict of interest they have to show that it actually impacted the outcome so this is a pretty high standard for appeal and both parties do have to be given the opportunity to submit a written statement either in support of or challenging the appeal and then they both

116get a copy of the appeal at the end the appellate decision maker is a different person than the title ix coordinator it's a different person than the investigator it's a different person than the decision maker there is a requirement in these new rules that all members of the title ix team must be free of bias conflicts of interest and not prejudge any matters that are before them um they don't really say a whole lot more than that but it is a requirement and part of that is that you'll see that there's going to be trainings posted to your website we have to post um all of the training materials that that are used to train your title 19 members on your website so that members of your community can review them and and determine that

117they're not biased and there's a significant amount of record keeping that's a part of this too luckily for you guys it's not really your problem um but there's a lot all right i went a little bit over but um i'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has any after dumping all of that information on you all right well thank you all and helpful yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you i'm glad and and you know it's very informative we're always here if you if you have any questions along the way and thank you so much for having me it's great to see you all in person thank you covered a lot of information i would like to recognize jackie and gina for the amount of work they've done training you know our

118entire team it's it's been a lot of hours of training a lot a lot of good informative stuff and and it's nice to see jackie in person we've had a lot of zoom calls over the last several months but i i believe that jackie will probably back us up on the fact that our district is probably at the front end of this in comparison to our peers and have taken this very seriously uh and have gone through you know all of the proper training and protocols that we should have done it's very true that you guys were the first district to finish all of your training hey what's up so we get an abs for that nice all right and gina is amazing gina we agree hopefully we agree hopefully we won't need it correct

119i hope so too and honestly we haven't had a flood of these complaints since but we haven't had a flood of these complaints since they came out so thank you so much for having me thank you have a great night all right next item is uh iasb resolutions so you just a quick word you all got a copy of this i participated in discussion last week about the resolutions and would invite you to read through them and let me know if you have any any comments concerns that sort of thing um i after reading through them i'm in agreement with the recommendations i'm having a hard time hearing you sorry after reading through them i'm in agreement with all the recommendations either to adopt or to not adopt okay so if if after you've read

120through them you don't agree then please let me know because we'll need to have some discussion at the next meeting so that i can vote appropriately at the delegate assembly have you ever six months before i have yeah they're they're posted up online yeah and all the you know all of the representatives across the state from the you know all the boards have been participating so they had one last week we have one coming up this week um which i'm not going to do because it duplicates the one that i just did but uh the since everything's on zoom this year they thought that uh it'd be better to have a couple of sessions online via zoom for people to participate and have discussions about these resolutions in advance of us actually then having our

121our vote are there any that uh you want us to specifically read yeah you know um uh resolution number two was uh garnered quite a bit of discussion yeah and and um there seems to be pretty strong feelings both ways on it um it has to do with uh gun storage and private residences and um yeah so take take a look at it but number two did it wasn't gun storage in schools no and overall has to do with with guns being stored in homes where a student you know someone under 18 year old 18 years old lives and whether or not those those guns should be stored in a locked cabinet or not and whether or not we as a state association should be you know taking a position on this legislation and instructing

122our association to lobby on behalf of the of the association one way or the other right so the resolutions committee recommended not adopting so and i agreed with that because i think we i don't think we need to get involved in gun laws in the state of illinois right now but uh we've got enough going on as well there are other other there's other legislation that's being considered you know and they seem to be getting out of their lane what's that it seems like if yeah i think if isbe supported that one in particular kind of getting out of his lane of focusing on in-district rules and district laws correct that was that's a mainstream issue exactly i mean you basically you had you know people uh you know questioning how you would even enforce

123you know how the legislation could even be enforced um uh that there's actually more stringent legislation than another bill in the house that's already being discussed so you know uh best net you know and then you know it's best not for the iasb to get uh involved in legislation regulating things in someone's home um supporters see a direct linkage to the student's welfare and so you can re you know the as usual in the report is a pretty good um description of of uh who's making the resolution why you know what the reasons are and then the committee's logic in terms of why they are not supporting it so you can read all that and just let me know if there's something that we need to discuss more okay and i'm sorry timeline you need

124to we need to know i think we i think this coming yeah if you could let me know this week because uh if if we're going to have some actual discussion about some of these then i think we need to get it on the agenda but if everybody is in agreement with the recommendations then i don't see the need for us to spend any more time on it all so well thank you for printing these yeah reading these they're tough to read electronically yeah well this is this came from isb and yeah so i didn't have this either today i just had i had gone online so mike you can take credit for it what's that you can take okay you're welcome thank you for caring i guess i care that much um so uh

125the last thing on the agenda this evening since nancy is letting me run through the whole thing uh our reception of visitors right and it looks like we don't have anybody here has anybody noticed anything no comments online so with that said i will accept a motion for adjournment so moved is there a second joanna seconded all those in favor all those in favor aye aye those opposed meeting adjourned thank you you