csd99media Live Stream

001good evening let's call the order and have a roll call nancy kupka here mike davenport here dan nicholas here terry pavisage here rick coming out here joanna vazquez drexler here zoey boy here sam thank you let's stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all the first element of business is the approval of minutes i need a motion to approve the minutes from august 17th 2020 business meeting september 14th 2020 workshop meeting and september 14th 2024's meeting hi mike davenport hi dan nicholas hi rick kavanagh hi nancy pepco aye motion carries uh we move on then to the first reception of visitors the meeting agenda includes two opportunities from comments from the audience this

002first reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board with about any agenda item on which the board will vote and i think you're going to post those items we're voting on tonight the second reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors with equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs snyder visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone and state their full name the proceedings are being taped recorded for the purpose of producing the accurate meeting minutes the board's presiding officer myself i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances

003warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated does anybody wish to address the board on any topic on which we're voting tonight hearing none we'll move on to the recommendations and reports of this different time all right so we'll start out with our two new student board members uh seated on the other side of the room here and what we're going to do is just allow them to introduce themselves so we'll start with sam yeah let's use the mic they're saying yeah okay uh my name is sam bull and i the most notable things about me are that i'm the editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper the dj omega and i play soccer for the high school and my local club team i'm the captain of both and i'm just very very excited to be here

004a little bit nervous but also very excited because [Music] since i've entered high school i've been interested in impacting my community in any way that i can and this is kind of i see this as a grassroots government position and i think that the things i can do here can help impact and help the student body and the community in a positive way so i'm very excited and thank you so much for having me here thank you welcome st zoe hi there i'm zoe i'm a senior here at south and something about me is i really love music and art i do speech and i'm the president of the mask and gamble club here at south and yeah same as sam i'm really excited to be here and it's been nice meeting some of you

005hopefully i'll get to know all of you welcome thank you for joining us we're always happy to have our student board members and we really appreciate all the information you can give us so welcome welcome welcome welcome yes welcome aboard all right uh the next item that we have is the 2021 school plan updated the continual work on trying to return students to in-person learning my remote doesn't like to work on the first flip from here so as we've started each of the meetings just review of how we've gotten here i know the board is seen the slide many times but to just review a lot of work over the summer and since we met the last time this is all of the guidance that has come in since the school year started and since

006we met last week we've received updated guidance from the cdc on school metrics and i'll explain kind of how that fits into the larger picture later on this evening all right so just a quick update on the changes in the school guidance no it's just has trouble making it all the way from here so i've provided this to the board and you've been able to see how the crosswalk works through this we went through all of this last week as to how there's kind of the three categories of the state level substantial is the lowest possibility of bringing all students back then moderate would be in the middle obviously and then minimal is what we kind of designed our plan towards not knowing it because these didn't exist in the summer to bring students back

007so what we're trying to do tonight is to present a pathway to bring students to school in moderate or minimal the guidelines that came out from the cdc this week just put these up here this is just to help you understand how this continues to develop this is similar to guidance that we received at the state level but not exactly the same as we've seen all along the guidance from the three different uh organizations don't always match up between the cdc the ibph and the dupage county health department this just helped it's another piece of data to help us and another set of guidelines especially as we move towards substantial as we start trying to make the decision when we would no longer be able to bring students in you know in the future it's

008just another another set of information as we sit down and talk with the dupage county health department about what we should do next to help shape our decisions we will rely more on the illinois department of public health and the dupage county health department education in the united states is driven first by the state level in almost all other cases so that's we're going to look at illinois department of public health as our number one metric but these will help influence us since the way that it works in the state ultimately they have left it up to the superintendent to determine if schools are open or not and how that works so you know we'll work on the state level first with if i advice from the county level the leaders at the health leaders

009at the county level are factoring in the cdc information as well this is the slide that i brought you last week and we've continued to work on it and develop it really uh what it comes down to and the the key uh take away that folks should have from this is that really as long as we're in moderate or minimal we're striving to build a schedule that allows students to come back in in those ranges as soon as we move into substantial we're going to have to have some serious conversations with the health department if it's appropriate to continue to bring all students back to school for a hybrid model and if it's appropriate to continue doing things like activities athletics and those kinds of things however for our students that are most at risk

010we are continuing to try to build programming so that as long as we are in phase four or higher that those students can continue to come in and receive services on a regular basis so hank before we leave this page where are we at if you had to put a star or a dot on this chart it's where we are at today where are we at we are right in the middle of moderate right okay okay right in the middle of the issue right so that's where uh the current dupage county health department metrics are as of today and in comparison when we were here a week ago the numbers have actually improved in the last week they've gone in the correct direction and we greatly appreciate the community doing their part to keep those

011metrics going in the right direction that's the best the best way that the community can help us get students to school and keep them here at school is to wear a mask wash their hands keep their six feet of social distance and do all those things that the health professionals are saying to do so if if we go back dan at all times not just in school at all times at all times uh so we'd be right in between the low and high moderate right now i i would have said a week ago we were starting to trend towards high moderate and now we're starting to trend back the other way so we're definitely in the space where bringing students back to school is something we should be considering doing all right i'm going to

012have somebody else click this in all right so what does this mean for our schedule coming back and what we're trying to do here so let's go back to what we talked about this summer and as we looked at a hybrid schedule this summer these were our three top priorities obviously following the safety health and safety guidelines trying to come up with schedule where every student has the opportunity to see every teacher each week and that we were scheduling remote learning experiences separate from in-person learning from those two experiences we administratively we're scheduling those times separate from one another as we've looked at the health guidelines and have tried to figure out how to do this in minimal and moderate transmission levels our our priorities have changed a little bit here obviously following the safety

013guidelines social distancing but a new factor that was introduced under these new set of guidelines is limiting the mixing of groups so in our old schedule students changed their class periods four times each day that they were here so that's four times that the groups mix uh you're going to see on the new schedule we've cut that number down to meet this new requirement that's in there this new guideline we in order to do that we have to you're not going to see as many teachers as frequently so we can't see every teacher every week but we still want a regular cycle of where you see each teacher and then we want to simplify the schedule that's a major piece of feedback that we've heard about the old hybrid schedule versus coming back now that

014it was too complex too many moving parts so that has become more of a priority than separating in-person remote learning structurally it has become simplifying the schedule has kind of risen up as a greater priority okay all right so hybrid is what we talked about over the summer and you can see those priorities and now you can see how they compare and the modifi modified hybrid so this just allows you to see them side by side what i just told you you know good teaching tell them and then tell them again okay so what we're going to have in this modified hybrid is this combination class period this combination of in-person and remote learning happening in the same time frame so the first class of the day will have students attending in person and we'll

015have some time in that class period where students are attending remotely so group a will be there in person on some days while group b is still interacting with that class period in in that class in that time but from home okay and our remote learners are always learning from home right so uh they're combined in the same time but work in different spaces in that time there's going to be a combination of interactive and independent work just like there is in a regular class period there's times where the teacher is directly interacting with a student or a group of students and there is time when they're working on their own independently that will be mixed within a class period so that the teachers spending time with the students that are there in person but

016also spending time with students working remotely there's also possibilities in this model for a student that's in the classroom to be paired up with a remote student and them to be working at the same time so if that pair needs help the in-person student could call the teacher over and and ask the question and work that way the idea is that there are going to be learning activities for all students every class period that that class is meeting what it looks like could be different from class to class we'll always take attendance for all learners at the beginning of each class period and then at the end of each class period we wrap up that class and move on to the next class i have a question yeah can i ask you yeah so i

017know that we're going to look at a sample schedule from the teacher's perspective of how they're going to lay this out for their day but what kind of activities are we doing for professional development for our teachers because i'm sure there are some that are not they're comfortable doing this and there are others that frankly are so yeah you're stealing my thunderbolt we will definitely put that development yeah yeah absolutely we'll get there all right so here's the big concepts for this new schedule right that we were able to do when transmission levels are in minimal or moderate um that we have always six feet of distancing between people right we're building that into the planning that we have all the health and safety protocols in place that we are going to follow the remote

018learning schedule is kind of our base okay we're going to build off of that if you remember that is a schedule that was designed with the committee of teachers over the summer after the hybrid was debuted when we pulled together a group of teachers to work on fully remote so we're going to try to stick to that schedule as close as we can and i'll explain some of the factors that play into that in a little bit um one of the things that this allows is that students would initially come in for half days in that half day meeting there'd be two class periods so when remember last week we started talking about a student's cohort and a staff member's cohort we want to limit the number of people in somebody's environment throughout the course

019of a day right we're trying to keep that number under 50. it just limits the number of opportunities you have to come in contact with somebody that may have kovit so the idea of a single passing period then has one time each day where all students mix that period of time is five minutes or less because that's the length of a passing period during that time we will not have all of the students in the building we'd have half and then we have all of the safety measures in place the face coverings the face shield encouraging people to have social distancing no congregating in hallways no use of the washroom during passing periods no lockers right students go from point a to point b so it should be far less than five minutes that anybody

020would be mixing with the larger group of students in the conversations with walking these models through with the dupage county health department they felt that that was absolutely appropriate in the moderate and minimal transmission levels then the other two times where they could come in contact with student just large groups of students would be upon arrival that's always staggered and remember as part of the plan students come in and go directly to their classroom there's no gathering in the hallways there's nothing in the cafeterias students come in go directly to their first class for that day and go to their their seat then at the end of the day we would release students similar to how we do for assemblies and those kinds of things which is could be by floor it could be by

021floor even in odd classrooms those kinds of things so that not every student is coming out of the classroom at the exact same time right to make it easier for people to maintain their social distancing as they leave the building at the end of that day in the model you're about to see students coming into school for two days a week for half days this is initially right we get this in place hopefully metrics continue to improve and we're able to expand that over time over a two-week period they will meet in all of their classes and see all of their teachers and we will continue to run specific programs or activities so tcd the way that it's running activities athletics and t99 okay so we will continue those additional opportunities for our students so

022in this model if you are a there we go an in-person learner trying to keep all my screens lined up here um it's very important that students and families know that we are very serious about following all of those safety guidelines and the only way that a student can continue to come to school is to follow those safety guidelines wearing the ppe wearing the shield during the hallways and on the buses so social distancing hand hygiene cleaning and disinfecting the symptom checks before they come to school those are all of the things that must happen for a student to continue to attend school in person while they're here we want to maximize their learning experience as much as possible and try to tailor in the things that really can only happen while they're here at

023school and then there's a lot of remote learning time as well in this we'll talk about what happens in that that time in a second but if you remember last week when we talked uh one of the challenges is when we come back to in person a reduction in the amount of time right because right now all students are virtual they have the entire class period all to the teacher once we move to this model and we can only bring in half the students at a time so you're going to have some students learning remotely and some students learning in person there's naturally going to be a reduction in the effectiveness of the minutes during that time everything is trade-offs right so for the time the students are here though we want to maximize that

024time and have experiences that would be very difficult to have remotely while they're in person and then shift the things that do work remotely to the remote sessions the idea here obviously is about relationships and strengthening those with the teacher with other students actually with the building itself and the community and and those kinds of things uh during this time it's also it's very difficult to do quick formative assessments check-ins and those kinds of things in in a remote fashion some of them that you need them to do so especially performance based so some of those will shift back into the in-person time as i said earlier our in-person students might be collaborating with other students that are there in person but they might also be collaborating with someone that's remotely in some ways it's

025easier to social distance if you're collaborating with a remote learner if you're an in-person learner um yeah bubbles or remote learners still have i mean there will be office hours in that so remote controllers can still we'll still have the resource periods we'll still have the office hours yep students are going to have to then bring their chromebook and headphones and microphone to class because they could be participating with a remote learner while they're there and this is also one of the great challenges we have right now is getting materials to students and getting materials back this naturally then creates a cycle where that can occur for remote learners remember in this model nearly everybody is a remote learner for some of the time and an in-person learner for some of the time except for

026families that have chosen to be fully remote if you're a remote if you're remote learning in either of those ways as the hybrid going back and forth or a fully remote learner you'll be participating in direct instruction learning activities in the same class period as the in-person learners so you remember the model from this summer those two were separate now they're brought into the same space and it our teachers will be deciding how that time and space flows and i'll show you some examples of how that might work in a second the structure types and timings of activity is going to differ from subject area to subject area from teacher to teacher class to class depending on what that individual class needs both based on their curriculum and based on the students that are in

027there and remember we're going to have some classes where more students might be fully remote because they choose to do that and some might be slightly more in person and the teacher is going to have to adjust for those variables as well students and teachers are responsible for meeting the instructional goals when remote learning just like when they are in person learning and then are fully reno remote learners so those that aren't coming back for in-person will have an opportunity to participate within with that in-person group they'll sign in just like everybody else is and then activities will be structured for them and it it might make sense in one class for that remote learner to be a remote in-person learner that day like participating with the in-person class and doing the same activities that

028the in-person students are doing or a modification of those on one day it might make sense that they're not with the in-person learners that day and they're participating with the remote learners that day it's very dependent on what's happening in the class which is why we're we're not administratively carving out separate times for remote learners in in person we're turning it over to the professional in the classroom to determine how that should flow within that class period all right so a reminder that's what the fully remote learning schedule looks like now okay so two periods in one half of the day the other two periods in the other half of the day rotating through odd and even number class periods monday is fully remote and that's the one day a week where uh in the

029moving forward in the hybrid model that was the one day a week where a teacher got to see all of their kids at one time just dedicated to them in the same format right all fully remote so in the propose in this proposed modified hybrid in week one group a would come in on tuesday and wednesday and go through half of their courses over those two days they would see their cohort of people that they would be coming in contact with would consist of whoever they went to school with transportation wise walking riding the bus in a car any of those kinds of things plus the students in two of their classes that are cut in half and is the number of students that are there while they're in those classes they'll be participating with

030the rest of the students in that same class in different shapes and format during that same time period can um i'm sorry yeah can you just remind me because it's going to be two periods and two periods period zero is is uh our zero hour period which um it's like the early bird class there's not a lot of students that are involved in that but we have a few a couple handfuls or yeah okay it's a very small number of zero hour classes then the next week group a would come once again tuesday and wednesday so their days of the week stay the same remember we're trying to keep things as consistent as possible in a world full of inconsistencies so their day remains it's tuesday and wednesday but in the second week they come

031in the afternoons and do their afternoon courses if you're in group b it's the same kind of experience except you come in on tuesday or thursday and friday week one and do your morning classes and then you come back the next week on thursday and friday in the afternoons and do your afternoon classes and that's kind of the field now we've presented this using the times that are on the remote learning schedule and we hope to stick as close to those as possible however as i'll explain later one of our major challenges is transportation and folding our transportation in with 68 and 58 may cause us to have to that break in the middle kind of push those minutes around between those two class periods so that buses will run and match up with the

032other two school districts so some examples of how this might work in the flow of a class period so here's the first example and up here i i've put for you what's occurring for the in-person learners and the remote learners and a sample duration right just to get a feel for how this might actually work so the beginning of every class is all of the students there in person and remotely so attendance can be taken expectations can be set for the class period everybody knows when they're coming and going and what the schedule is for that class then in this example we start with the remote learners getting some individual practice maybe they already got the learning before they're coming in they're getting to work and getting help from the teachers they work through whatever

033they're doing you know they can call for the teacher to come over at certain points while the teacher is doing direct instruction you might think how does that work well it might be that the the teacher is teaching this remote group and then they have a time where the students practice there now they can go check on their other in-person students in that middle period of time and then we flip those two groups where one is doing the practice and the other is getting direct instruction then we get a little break in the middle of it one of the things that we've heard is that these 80 minute periods teachers really need to try to build in a time for getting up stretching taking a break those kinds of things so trying to build that

034into their scheduling and planning and then in this model it just flips back the other way for the other half of the class period so this is a very simple example of trading off instruction and practice they could get more complex than that you know here's an example of an activity going on with the in-person learners so we start off the class period and then the in-person learners are getting their materials together they're going and doing that whatever hands-on activity that they're working on while the teacher is working with the remote learners okay so obviously they've set up the activity the kids are ready to go and they just go and work over on the side now during that direct teacher instruction the teacher might have to take a break and go check on all

035the students right might have to pause those kinds of things and then after that activity is done now we're going to work with the in-person group to do a little class discussion about the experience and while they're doing that the remote learners are working on some independent activities right and they get their break in that time and now the the teachers back working with the in-person students and then at the end we now turn it back over the in-person students are working on their individual wrap up from that activity their own individual assignments while the teacher goes back and checks in on the remote learners and maybe provides a demonstration of the activity that just happened with the in-person students then we wrap everything up and that's the end of a class period so hopefully

036you're seeing kind of how there's could be these trade-offs back and forth but in the final example here but even in a room students are not working they're not sharing materials if they're working in small groups if they're sharing materials that wipe down between each student and those kinds of things yeah yeah uh here's another example of trading back and forth but it i'm giving you three kind of examples so you can kind of see the trade-offs but at any point you could blend those and combine those uh activities so maybe in this one you can see how they trade back and forth homework check video instruction while they do homework check it might be appropriate in another day to do uh all the homework check for all the students at the same time right

037we're just going to go over homework with the kids that are in class and the kids that are remote and then we're going to go into some direct instruction and me as the teacher i'm going to teach the students that are in person and the students that are remote at the same time i might choose to do it that way or i might choose to do it this way where i break the groups up either way it's going to be up to me to determine as the classroom teacher what the appropriate flow and breakup of the groups and an activity is throughout that course of the class period which is i mean very different from how we do it during normal school but it's also very similar in the fact that the teacher has the

038autonomy in every class period to figure out how they're working with different groups of students what activities are going on how the structure works in any class period so what we're looking at is this schedule for the remainder of the semester so what you're going to see is a flow here of once we get up and going of a remote week followed by week one followed by week two and then a remote week week one week two remote week week one week two then a remote week to end out the semester there's some logic as to why this is happening the first thing is we're we're trying for the rest of the semester here to balance out minutes is one of the reasons right and in the fully remote as we said before students get

039the most minutes of content in the fully remote because every student's getting the same thing in that same time and space once we start getting into hybrid now we're trading off groups right in many of the classrooms so the uh the experience is very different the direct minutes that you're getting from a teacher are very different so by combining the two of having some periods of remote learning and some periods of hybrid learning we try to bolster the amount of time available for a teacher over and a student over the course of the rest of the semester some of the other things in play here are we also want some time to adjust so after we go through a two week rotation then we have an adjustment period and then we have a two week

040rotation and we have an adjustment period those other remote weeks are also weeks in which the schedule is abnormal to begin with so october 12th is the week of monday is off tuesday we're in session wednesday is sat testing for seniors thursday we're back in session but some of our seniors have accommodations and have extended time for testing so that day will be altered for some of our students and then friday is parent-teacher conferences thursday night and friday during the day or parent-teacher conferences so that that's a week that's already uh challenging so we didn't want to get into the full cycle until we had a chance to do back-to-back weeks just so the teachers can consistently plan between all of their classes kids can have a common experience so as we look at that

041that makes october 19th our first opportunity to get a normal cycle back to back of week one week two what we're starting to talk about and you know first we're planning for all students and now we're backing up to that first week of october we would like to try to do a dry run that week of week one and potentially bring in ninth grade only for that week and i i can't promise that we're going to make that happen yet we still have a lot of logistics some which i'll explain to you in a second to work through but that's our goal is to bring students in in that fashion that would allow us to test transportation and to see how it all works and learn from it before we bring all of our students

042back but i'll get into the limiting factors that we have to work through critically before that that's able to occur once we're up and going beginning october 19th we plan on following this all the way up to winter break in this rotation cycle we want families to know this is the plan as long as we are out not in substantial this is how we will continue to work for the rest of the semester we'll evaluate as this is going on to see if we can modify change improve going into second semester but we just want everybody to be able to have it on their calendar they know when they're coming to school teachers know what to plan for like everybody we heard from our students last week the unpredictability the uncertainty that like they want

043our students want to know what's coming next i'm sure our families do as well and i know our teachers do this provides a pathway forward for the rest of the semester for how that could work all right so a lot of planning and logistics between now and when that happens the first is making sure that all of our classrooms we can maintain social distance again as we've explained over the summer we have many classrooms across the district that are relatively small and we put smaller classes in them but even so when half of our students could potentially show up in one of those classrooms they won't fit and maintain six feet of social distancing so one of the things we did this summer by asking families to commit to remote learning was to then lower

044the number of students in classrooms because of fully remote learners and some of those classroom classes then fit other ones still didn't fit but then we were able to swap other classrooms around so that every student every class had a classroom where students could maintain social distancing well we got to restart that again because we don't know who's going to now that they see this plan and how it works and they know where we are in the world and everything else something that somebody committed to in august they might think differently about now so we need to recycle through that process and give families the opportunity to decide are they coming back for the hybrid model here for the rest of the semester or would like they like to stay or or be in a

045fully remote learning model we're going to send that form out tomorrow and ask families to commit to one model to fully remote learning or coming back in person by friday so that we can start all of that scheduling process over the next week to try to set everything up for students to come back that is a lot of work to do in just a couple of weeks here so the idea of bringing back 9th graders on the week of october 5th if we can get through all of that everybody responds the more people that respond to the form that goes out tomorrow the faster this will go because if somebody doesn't respond then we have to follow up with each student and and find out if they're coming or not so the a lot of

046this depends on the responsiveness of our school community in helping us get the information that we need we already sent out information about busing last week so that we can start to work on our transportation because we have to make sure our routes can maintain as much social distancing as possible we also have to coordinate those routes with our partner elementary district so all of this trying to get freshmen back on the fifth is a lot of it depends if we get all of the information we need in a timely fashion and we can make all of the puzzle pieces fit together in enough time so that families know who's coming in when how the buses are working everything's in place and we have to make sure that that fits together with the elementary schools

047with all of our timing and our routes and everything else so there is a lot of work left to do over the next couple of weeks at the same time to go back to your question earlier nancy we have a lot of professional development planning and supports to put in place for our teachers obviously now they have a new schedule for the remainder of the semester they have curriculum that they have built out to right now be working in fully remote learning that needs to now be restructured to work in this they also now have this new responsibility to plan for classes where learning is happening in person and also happening remotely that there might be some interactive learning in that time period with in-person learners and remote learners but there's also going to be

048independent time built into that space so teachers need time to to lesson plan and put that all together and we we want to avoid this dip that we talked about last week where if we make this happen too quickly teachers aren't going to have enough time to plan to learn to be effective in this new model and then we see a dip in the the progress we don't we want students to come back to teachers that are prepared for this new learning model we also want to make sure we have opportunity to do some professional development on trauma sensitive professional learning some professional learning on trauma sensitivity as we know that students are going to come back in very different spots with the way that the world is right now and we want to be

049able to respond to student needs we also have some technology that we're putting in place every teacher is going to be issued their own voice amplification device so it's a little headset and a speaker that sits on their hip that amplifies their voice like this microphone is doing for me now because we know hearing people with a mask on is a challenge and then also if you're trying teachers that might try to do work with both groups at the same time that would be even more challenging if their voice wasn't amplified so those are arriving right now and are coming in as you can imagine there's a lot of demand for that kind of technology so we placed orders for that weeks ago when they're arriving now so that expands the possibilities of students being

050able to understand what's going on in the classroom both in person and remotely and then we started to look at today the possibility of earbuds and microphones for all students we know that some students are just working from their speakers and their microphone on their chromebook at home without that additional technology we're we're trying to find out if we can get a deal to just make sure that every student has that that supply as they come through the door so that's something that we started talking about today and hope to know more about that but it's something that we're trying to see if we can investigate and figure out as you can imagine there's been a great run on earbuds and microphones as well so uh that's actually in bulk a difficult piece of technology

051to get a hold of so a lot to work through as we try to get good students back all right so that's where we're at questions from the board so and then the last piece for the professional development is there going to be the department chairs do we have certain teachers have already been identified as examples how's that it'll be a combination of instruction that we provide a professional development that we provide for all teachers at the same time as well as the other things that we have in place with instructional coaches lunch and learns drop-in sessions one-on-one coaching so it'll be the full breadth of what we offer you know it's a tough balance with teachers because teachers also are going to want that time that they have to plan and prepare and get

052everything in order if we're making them all attend professional development that some teachers need and others may not then we're actually wasting teacher time for some people right so it's a balance of determining what professional learning do all teachers need in this new model versus what are the ones that people need to self-select and go to you know and it's a difficult balance to know exactly what that is but you know this district has dedicated a lot of resources to instructional coaching uh our librarians that don't have students back yet have been doing a lot of student support virtually but they've also been doing a lot of staff support uh for you know virtually and in person uh working as coaches as well um and we have a lot of staff resources to help teachers

053learn i i just have a couple of quick questions um jack could you use your microphone oh i'm sorry before i thought i was too loud but um are we putting um groups of students together so that let's say freshmen you know that they're going to be in you know english math and and social studies and having them kind of together so that if there is students that come with covered that we can kind of quarantine a group together yeah so uh no because that would require us to completely rebuild the schedule which yeah i mean that that's a three to six month process to build student schedules instead that's the whole idea of this schedule model is to limit the number of students that somebody could come in contact with on a daily basis

054and to design the format so that close contact doesn't happen right that social distance is maintained and as long as somebody is not within six feet of a person that has coveted for 15 minutes or more it's considered low risk of them of them picking it up from somebody who has it so we're trying to build the conditions so that close contacts don't happen and then my other thing is uh you said that uh they weren't going to be using the bathrooms during during passing periods so what if they want to wash their hands and use the facilities so in every that's a great question in every class classroom we have hand sanitizer so we've put a hand sanitizer dispenser this summer in every classroom in the building so they can at least do hand

055hygiene as they move from place to place and then that's the idea of teachers building in somewhere in that class period a break time so that students can either also you know they can allow students to freely go during a period of time or you know they'd have to individually dismiss students to go during the class period but the idea then is that students are in you know fewer students are pressuring the washrooms at the exact same time and it's less likely that they're in that same space with a lot of people at the same time okay and then my last question is um i know that you're in contact with 58 and 68 because of the bus schedules and all of that um any idea when they can firm up whether or not they're

056going to be using yeah we hope that's you know they're going i think both of them are next week i believe at least 58 goes to the public next week with what they're thinking of doing so they're still working on their planning as well and they're talking to us obviously we're getting some advanced insight as to what's going on but that's firming up this week as well okay so by the end of the week we should i would say by the end of this week yeah we should have a good idea if it fits in you know one of the one of the things that we're trying to avoid is one of the possibilities here the the difficult part in feathering the buses together is that middle in the bus runs in the middle depending

057on when 58-68 are picking up and dropping off students the mid-day bus run is where there could be a lot of congestion depending on when class days are beginning ending moving you know if other school districts are looking at half day model you know that there's all of these models that are out there like ours are and as we try to fit them together one of the possibilities could be the only option available to us is an am slot or a pm slot that the mid days don't match up right so there is a possibility that we have to mess with the schedule but all the classes always happening in the morning or all of the classes always happening in the afternoon we're trying very hard to avoid that right we want this to like

058you always know for the rest of the semester when period one is happening right you always know when period five is happening we wanna we wanna add complexity of pm classes happening in the am and all these other different iterations that could happen so that's why it's it's taking time to make sure that our schedule fits inside a 58 schedule fits inside a 68 schedule and theirs is moving shifting while ours is moving and shifting so the logistics of the busing is very challenging two questions do you guys know what 50 and 68 are are you feeling okay so so uh 58 is primarily the elementary schools and and middle schools in downers grow and 68 is woodridge and some downers grove and some other folks in there so this with our elementary schools we

059share both and we share bus service between the three school districts so this is a big tetris puzzle that has to fit together so when we ask people if they're going to come in and i should know this i'm sorry at least people are going to commit to coming in for hybrid are we also asking them if they're committing to bus service or if they're going to get their children here we already asked about bus service last week because we you know as we said last week it's a chicken and egg problem right you need to know certain things so you can plan certain things so we have we asked families not even knowing what the schedule would look like and said we're working on a schedule where students could need to be bussed in

060the morning in the middle of the day at the end of the day based on that are you still interested in bus service and if so when would you need service beginning of the day mid of the day you know select all that apply so that we could start looking at what our bus numbers are so we know what our utilization could be so that then we could go to the bus company and start talking about do these any of these schedules work you know so we already asked for that information last week this week we'll ask for are you returning to in person or remote and that's the next piece we need to build the actual class schedules within the building um you know and then we try to get all these moving pieces

061to kind of solidify and gel together any other questions are you uh are we still trying to split the kids alphabetically if you will so how is that going to work in a class where three quarters of the classes is um in one side versus the other so i mean i mean like i'm just what if you had a class where 80 90 of the kids their their last names start with you know typically don't believe it or not the ones that it is a little skewed one way or the other the remote learners have helped us balance it out or that's one of the reasons why we've had to shift classes because it might have been a small class but on one of the days 60 percent of the kids are coming and on

062the other day it's 30 percent so that's why we have to carefully look at the rosters for every class period and make sure that they fit socially distanced into the classroom in which they're assigned so that work that we did in august to get ready to come back under the old plan we need to redo now because i think it's unfair to assume that somebody that committed to hybrid or remote under the plan that we proposed in the summer it's not fair to make them commit to this new plan now based on how they committed before we need to give families the opportunity to select plus everybody knows more about covid now everybody has seen the metrics now there's more information that might make somebody feel more comfortable sending or they've also experienced remote learning

063at home you know you might have a student right now that is ready they're afraid to come back in august but they're ready to come back now right you could have the opposite you could have a family that in august thought i'm sending my student to school i hated remote learning in the spring and now they're looking at it going well this is working for uh for my child so i think we're just gonna keep riding remote right so we don't want to make those assumptions for our families we want our families to choose and select and tell us what model of learning is best for them this this plan that we're looking at right now is the result of a great deal of work by not only our administrative staff but teachers have been

064involved in this as well yes the scheduling committee that formed the fully hybrid or the fully remote schedule in july and august are the ones we went back to and we presented two different schedule models to them that it wouldn't be fair to say that they built this from scratch but it's based on their work from this summer and we brought them this model that you see or a different model and said based on this what what do you think works best we also took that to our department chairs which are also teaching in the classroom teaching and of course the administrative team reviewed this as well right so because i know you just need your reaction trying to have some students in class and have kids remote on the surface that seems like it

065could be a little complicated but your examples i think show how that might happen and we've had teacher feedback to say yeah we can do this yeah the the other models require us to decide for the classroom teacher how much time is going to an in-person group and how much time is going to a remote group and you likely think naturally you should make that equal so you split it down the middle but as you see in these examples on a day-to-day basis that might not be what each group needs right um it might not match the goals and curriculum of the teacher in that classroom on that day and any variety or the needs of the actual students that are in front of them and if administratively we build a schedule like we did

066this summer where we try to separate those two groups it becomes much more complex it becomes much more difficult to follow and then everybody has to fit into that same box when we do it this way it does require more planning i think from our teachers right but it allows our teachers the autonomy to determine how time and activity should be structured inside of the class period so it's a it's all trade-offs there there is no great model right now what we're all trying to do is to choose the best of the worst i mean that that's really the world that we're living in right now and and i think when we stack up all the pros and cons and put them together and we looked at it over models that were intentionally separating in

067person from remote learners or putting them together in the same kind of time frame and working with them the advantages of this model outweighed the advantages of the other model we have examples of schools that are using this teaching both in in-person and online at the same time yes we do um it's hard to compare because they're not the exact models it's also hard to compare because it's different teaching staffs it might be a k-8 school versus you know high school district but there's definitely professional forums out there and professional organizations that are providing best practices tips ways to make it work i think we are how we are definitely an advantage over the fact that we have pretty good technology in this district comparison to other districts in the country we're supplementing this with

068the voice amplification devices which is something that we've heard from other schools that you know it's difficult to hear sometimes that teacher across you know the video chat if their voice isn't amplified we also know it's difficult to hear it in the classroom through a mask if it's not amplified so uh we have taken this opportunity to learn many things from our peers but we have a lot to learn ourselves so last uh last time we were together some concerns brought up about the minutes and um uh and then we're hearing now with this plan we're trading off right um uh i think the point i made was that uh in the end the goal is of course safety for all concerned but ultimately we have a curriculum that we're trying to get through effectively

069and as long as we can get over that that goal line um that's what really counts um because the minute is in a minute is a minute right so um so is i'm assuming there's still great confidence in this plan even with that trade-off that that we can get over that goal line yeah and the importance is that students are learning and progressing and we're meeting their needs and as i've said all along there's trade-offs here in those things i i think that in the fully remote model there's definitely some needs and some experiences that we we just can't effectively offer right and this model although causing a jumble in the minutes and maybe a reduction in minutes may increase the experience right so what we do know from all of the research on minutes

070it's all the research points to it's what happens in those minutes the quality of instruction in those minutes fully outpaces the raw number now look you got to have enough right you've got to teach to what's there but the experience and the quality of the teacher and the quality of the instruction is far of far greater importance than the raw number i i don't you know obviously you have to have enough but i think that we're doing a nice job here of of trying to balance them and then providing you know that teacher autonomy in the classroom to determine what their students need for who's in front of them and what they're trying to teach is trying to hit that that sweet spot by having those rotating weeks of fully remote in there because of

071the weird scheduling and calendar and those kinds of things allows a couple of weeks where you could infuse minutes back in for all students and hopefully the learning is bolstered by those in person experiences in between and you know we sent out our first round of surveys for feedback over the last week students got theirs today we'll be presenting on that the next time we meet in october and we'll continue to survey staff students families on their experience and adapt and change and get better as a result of it so we heard last week that i believe starting last week there are a group of students at both north and south that would be doing their classes remotely but from school because of major technology issues when we go to this new hybrid schedule if

072those students are here anyway will they be in class all day following their schedule or still following a remote schedule in a separate room or separate area it depends on what this family is selected and what they're doing right but likely for the classes that are meeting in person they'll go in to their in-person group right we don't want students crossing between group a and group b we want to keep those as their unique cohorts so if they're in the first half of the alphabet they'll go into their in-person classes assuming that that's what their family is selected for one week the mornings and then the next week the afternoons on tuesday and thursday but then when they're not in those in-person classes they would go somewhere in the building while the rest of their

073classes are learning remotely and continue to work remotely because obviously sending them home at that point they don't have the resources right we don't want to i just want to make sure we weren't exposing those kids to additional cohorts correct you have to be done they'd still be in kind of their small cohort they're working in small settings right now it's not large groups of students in any of these these settings any other questions well i know this works although you've summed it up in less than an hour this really does represent hey nancy one of our student board members oh i'm sorry sorry i didn't see your hand that's okay don't be shy no so i understand that transportation's already been a challenge but i wanted to know is there a plan in place

074for overseeing safety procedures like to and from school on the bus yeah there is a procedure in place for bus ridership to make sure safety procedures are followed so if if we're going to go through like a day in the life of a student as they ride the bus they should arrive at their bus stop with their self-certification slip there will be an adult on that bus that will check to make sure that everybody has on their ppe their face covering and their shield and has their slip and they will come in and be seated in a seat by themselves and any student that doesn't have their self-certification slip we will take their temperatures and make sure they're not running a temperature and ask them if they're experiencing any of the culvert-like symptoms if they

075are they won't be allowed to board the bus and will have to go home assuming that they pass the symptom check then they get on the bus with their ppe and face shield if they don't have that we will provide a temporary one for them then they go to school and they get in and then at the end of the day they board the bus just the opposite way we don't have to do symptom checks at that point and they head on back home there will be both the bus driver and a bus monitor on every bus to make sure that that happens effectively at least for the first six weeks here we will staff it that way and see how it goes you know the first six weeks of hybrid rotations and instead of

076having a sheet of paper couldn't they just fill out a google form and show them on their phone yeah we talked through that but there's some equity issues there's tech issues there's all of that those kinds of pieces when we broke it all down just the slip was some people don't have a printer in it no we've we issued that we're going to shoot a booklet of slips to every student at the start of the year so we made we made kind of the hall pass idea for every student to come to school speaking of symptoms you mentioned a couple weeks ago three weeks ago or three meetings ago they all blend together now there were some rules from the health department that if you had symptoms you couldn't go back to school without testing

077and there's all sorts of are those rules still in place they are still in place uh however the change that i referenced last week was that for many of the symptoms it's if they're new so if there are ongoing known symptoms like you have migraines and it feels like a migraine it's just another migraine that's not a new symptom that doesn't prevent you from returning to school assuming you can come to school and learn with a migraine right same thing for allergies or those kinds of things if it's a brand new symptom then you have to go through your 10-day isolation period or you need to get your doctor to say this isn't related to kovid but it is some other ailment and you're supposed to test negative using one of two specific tests to

078then come back before the the 10 days is up how are we going to monitor that so that's uh we have our nurses team in the building and then we've also contracted an additional outside agency nurse at uh north south and t99 to help with the volume of work that we expect will come with that so simply test having a negative test is not enough to come back you need to have a provider say yes or no because not all you can you can be positive you can have covariate and have a negative test so they'll also have to see a provider one of the concerns that uh came up somebody else you actually see him yeah sam said his hand up first stand please he just has been bashful you gotta go in there

079sam please i just had a quick question about the self-certification slips um what is the significance of that besides like is there anything other than just the students trust that we're basing that on is there like a parent signature involved or anything yeah yeah sam your parents are supposed to initial that before you come to school but yes it is built on trust right and more than anything what it uh it's attempting to do is to get people in the habit of monitoring their symptoms so that if something changes they've been doing a self-check every day and i'll wait a second something's different today maybe i shouldn't go into school right uh theoretically the safety measures are built assuming that somebody maybe may have covid and be in school right because we have people that

080are asymptomatic that aren't displaying symptoms yet they might not display symptoms at all so that's why all of the safety measures of the six feet of social distancing the masks the shields the hand hygiene all of those things the disinfecting of the schools the air exchange all of those things are in place assuming that somebody in school has copied my questions yes so i was going to ask parents some parents concerned about how we were handling contact tracing and also transparency and how we're going to be communicating to our parents and our students you know if they've come in contact with somebody so just a refresh on that yeah so we follow all of the guidance and procedures outlined by the dupage county health department and really if somebody in your space your building your

081club your activity whatever ends up with covid you'll receive one of two types of contacts the one that most people will get and should get if everybody's following our safety procedures and protocols both at school and at home would be a low risk letter which means somebody in your space at some point has been diagnosed positively with covet however we believe that you were following all the safety protocols all the safety protocols were followed and as a result you are not at a high risk of having covet however double down on your symptom checking and make sure you're keeping track just in case something got through right the opposite would be somebody you know was diagnosed with covid and you were declared a close contact so after talking to that person we're like hey you

082know were you ever in six feet of somebody for 15 minutes or more that shouldn't be happening within the programs we've built at school right and they're like well yeah you know we hung out before school or you know we sat next to each other on the bus even though we weren't supposed to and what okay so you spent you were within six feet of somebody for 15 or more minutes that other person is now a close contact and they would get a close contact phone call so somebody who is at risk at that higher risk is deemed as a close contact we have a whole whole protocol for reaching out to them and making a personal contact so that they know all the process procedures things that they should watch out for there's a

083whole communication protocol that comes from the dupage county health department so when people first get that low risk letter they're going to completely freak out and they they probably shouldn't they should just you should assume if you're out in the world life is low risk right now if you're following all of the safety protocols and if for some reason we believe that you're at a greater risk you'll get a personal contact from us and we'll walk through that with you so but tracking sorry the tracking we're doing though is only the tracing contract tracing if a student comes out with covet we will do contact tracing for their activities related to school we don't do it for their activities overall for the past 10 days we actually partner with the dupage county health department and

084work through that whole process so because i want because and we're seeing there's lots of people lots of kids out with groups without masks so it'd be much more comfortable if the contact racing would be all-encompassing and not just during their yes it is yeah and we do that like i said with the dupage county health department there's a whole process for that but it you know if people don't want to end up in isolation quarantine yeah they should wear their masks keep six feet of social distance do all of the things that we're doing at school they should do when they're not at school because then there's a there's two things that happen greater chance that you get covered which is the worst case scenario and the next worst case scenario is you're identified

085as a close contact and you have to isolate or quarantine and worry about it for that next 10 to 14 days well and i would also just so everybody is aware if you are a family member if you live with a close contact family member front whatever if you live with the close contact very few of us and we have our our families we live with our families um if you're living with a close contact that may actually impact whether or not you can be if if you're living with somebody who shows signs who's shown signs of coded or who is a close contact and has been told to isolate or test it may very well impact whether or not you'll be allowed in your workplace so it really does go beyond our students so

086you really are at a you really should encourage your kids to socially distance more masks i know we send people home all the time who are close contact relatives for 14 days it's the same thing here if you're yeah close contact of a relative you know we're talking a lot about covet contracting it but uh the flu season is coming upon us and um you know heaven forbid this would happen but uh if teachers get coveted or the flu who's going to be teaching those classes yeah so it'll work very similar to how it does now there'd be a sub for the in-person portion having two classes a day helps us meet the safety guidelines but it also does help us in subbing right it's a lot easier to find subs for two classes than

087four even though it's the same amount of time it's just the complexity of folding everything together right so we do have our normal pool of subs we also have in our contract that we signed with the dga last year the ability for every teacher to be assigned two periods of subbing throughout the year so that's an additional pool of subbing resources that we have and then you know we'll work through through those two things but we believe we're confident we have enough subs available at the beginning here to get us started now there is a chance obviously that if all of a sudden cases take off and they grow or we spike amongst the staff that we could end up where we can't continue in-person learning or a lot of people end up with iso

088long isolation periods or quarantine periods because they're not practicing all of these things away from school then yeah we could end up in a situation where we can't staff the building and we have to go we have to go fully remote for a period of time an example of this is i have a colleague that staff member had a wedding over a weekend people attended didn't social distance didn't wear masks they just attended the wedding and then somebody was positive at that wedding and nearly the entire staff in a building had to then isolate for quarantine for 14 days so they had to move to fully remote learning for 14 days while everybody quarantined so that's why we keep say it's important that everybody follows these procedures all the time so that we don't end

089up in a period of time where we lose large groups of students or large groups of staff members because they could have potentially come in close contact with somebody i have another just real quick question on related services have those being um some kids have those mandated minutes how are you delivering those services yeah we've worked through we're working through each individual family and their iep plan and how that would work with their iep team and putting together a remote we have put together remote learning plans for students that way okay so you know it's very obviously as an iep is it's very different from student to student but the iep teams have worked through that okay any other questions seeing that again thank you to you and all this stuff because again this yeah

090this represents many nights and weekends and hours and as i was working i have to commend you because i think you know when we last voted for the hybrid plan it was with the understanding that if it was not a safe situation based on what idph ultimately came up with we would not go forward and to your credit and everybody on your team's credit we did not go forward and now we have something that is more in line with what idph is sanctioning and i for one i'm sure i speak for everybody i hope it's because we appreciate the work of everybody who's done that i will continue to say if we would have had these guidelines and i know it's a novel virus and everything's changing but i will continue to stand on that

091soapbox and and tell you had we had the information that we have now in june we'd already be back i understand that yeah and i know people say i'm pointing fingers but it's just it's the fact of the situation yeah but we've listed this i mean if you're old enough you've lived through this with the aids epidemic we've seen it with sars we've seen it with h1n1 it's evolving it changes and these people idph see if they're all running as fast as they can just as weird so it is what it is but i agree i understand okay hearing another more of the comments we're going to go move on to uh the 2021 concussion oversight team oh i skipped that one in my slides so this is up for approval in the uh consent

092agenda this evening this comes to the board every year at the start of the school year we're one month behind just because of everything else that was going on but we do have a concussion oversight team according to board policy the board has to approve that every year uh it's you know the same type of roles that have been there in the past several years as we've done this and those are in everybody those names are in the board packet yes any questions on concession concussions no uh grant allocations 2021. all right uh this is one that also just is an information item for the board that comes every year as to the total amount of allocations we're receiving through all of the different federal grants so these are available for your review in here

093gina is the one that puts together this information for you every year there's really questions on this it's more of just an information item but if you do have questions uh you approve them tonight saying that you've seen them and that's kind of what you're you're doing since these are all determined at the federal level anyway it is a substantial amount of money uh district so thank you any questions is 2.260 revised and 2.265 newton boy i'm out of order here um there we go did we skip that one or am i out over the do we have the teacher administrative benefit report that's later that's later yeah well i can't order slides obviously an opportunity to review did anybody i know i had a little question so here's the yeah here are the two

094policies that are there so title nine changed over this summer next month we're going to come back and share what some of those changes are and we've just been really focused with the board on return uh to in-person learning but uh what used to happen was in 2.260 sat all of the grievance policies including title ix as a result of the changes in legislation and the recommendations of our legal team we've ada we have added 2.265 which pulls out title ix grievance procedures and sets it aside so somebody could have a uniform grievance claim they could also have a title nine claim they aren't uh absolutely mutually exclusive um we're asking the board to do the taking unusual action tonight to just wave the first reading and just adopt these policies there it's at the

095recommendation of our legal team that we do so it's all written by our attorneys you know the administration has had no oversight over these policies and they recommend because this law already is in place that we just adopt these immediately the administration's been trained on all these procedures between all the other work we've done gina herself has sat through more than 12 or 15 hours of training on this herself so that we are in compliance for all the training that goes along with this every administrator in the district has received multiple rounds of training on this over the last two months and next month we'll come and tell you what that was all about very good any questions or okay uh the 2021 school calendar campuses all right this is uh any change that we

096make in the calendar needs to come before the board one of the things we did was because that week of the non-attendance day on monday that we've talked about that october 12th week was already messed up we decided to just mess up the whole week and move parent teacher conferences off of the following week and back to the week before information on scheduling those and how they work i mean they'll all be remotely and how that all happens will be coming but essentially the important part tonight is that the board approves that amended calendar that reflects that it keeps us on our two weeks right keeps that the rotation fits inside of there any questions hearing none the next administrator teacher salary benefits i already skipped past that slide but every year that gets updated

097on the website and we are required to inform the board at a public meeting that we updated it on our website and we did did you have a question okay any questions the asc condensing unit uh this is the part of the uh air conditioning unit major part of the air conditioning unit at the administrative service center yeah this is like what does the majority of the work uh it is a 28 year old piece of equipment that jim is holding together macgyver style with duct tape and paper clips not literally but you know what i mean yeah and uh and it is reached it is more than reached the end of its life uh so jim went out for bids on this and is recommending that the board accept tonight under action the lowest

098acceptable bid and we get this work done [Music] all right this is the last week i brought you update on actual progress this week i'm bringing you an update on the budget this is the monthly budget report on the master facility plan the key variables that we look at is we're still hitting our gmax contract values so the amount that we told the public that this was going to cost is still the number that we're inside of that 122 million one hundred thirty five thousand eight hundred thirty dollars inside of that we have nearly did out everything that's where you can see unless you know we're down to about 1.3 million dollars worth of items to bid out over the next year so what that tells you is this is we're getting really close to

099what the absolute price is on this you could see the contingency adjusted a little bit off of work that was completed over the last month but we're still very healthy at 3.258 million dollars if you remember white was the construction group was asking for us to make sure that there was one million dollars in there for the final summer of work so we're well above that owner budget costs continue to increase which is due to things mostly uh related to found asbestos or lead paint and removing that so as the board is already well aware we have removed far more of those two substances from our building that we ever expected to but it's good that those things are gone uh you can see the contingency up there remaining ff e allowance that is uh

100furniture fixtures and equipment there will be a lot of that next year because both commons come online next summer that is a lot of furniture and equipment so you can see we have a little over half of that allowance remaining for that last part of the project now inside of that you know we've got a lot of the steam stuff done at both sides of town in phase a and b right the science technology engineering and math if you walk up past these classrooms at the end of the night you'll see a lot of that displayed and then the last bit of allowances that could become contingency if they're not used phase a 110 000 sitting there and that's about ready to come back because we're almost done with sprinklers and fire alarms phase b

101was the work that was completed this summer so allowances remaining after this summer's work are 194 000 so after we get through all of the final bills and punch lists and hours that is the amount that could come back to us it should be close to that when we're done and then you can see if they see is a large amount of allowances out because the majority of that work has not begun yet so we have another 1.305 million in allowances that if not spent now remember we're anticipating we'll need to spend all of that right but any amount of that that is not spent would also come back to the contingency at the end of the summer next year uh site improvements we have about 105 000 left in sight improvements and those are

102wrapping up as well so uh we sit pretty healthy so far as contingency and allowances sit uh i well ahead of budget or you know better than expected with our budget so hank not directly related to the budget but made me think of it by october 19th when the new hybrid schedule kicks in will the new science labs and that whole new ex extension at north be ready yeah the the southeast steam edition it's going to be really close to that time now that's not holding us back that's not influencing or we we're fully prepared to open school with that work going on it should be wow making sure you're all awake uh it should be right around that time that it's finishing up so it'll be right as they're coming back for that or

103just after they come back but it's in that window you know it depends on how the next couple of weeks go you know you saw it a few weeks ago and it was really steel at that point mike's on on friday and all the walls are up you know so you know they move really fast you know in that work once they once they move inside it it's crazy how fast they move do we have workout to bid right now uh yeah some some of that last dollar amount which is really case work for phase c has there's been a considerable increase in cost material costs this year thanks to covid correct and london right now is about 60 percent higher than it was in january i mean how are we how are we faring

104with dealing with those increased costs and and supply chain issues uh well the majority of our stuff was bit out before we hit the you know the real effects of covid i asked if we had things out to bid right now but the stuff that's out to bid is you know 1.3 million in the you know is what's left you know so in the whole scope of the entire project that's a very small you know it's less than one percent um so we're not concerned about that okay you know it's from i'm sure the the folks bidding on that are a lot of the same folks that have been bidding on case work throughout the entire project it's not raised any red flags amongst the team i'm glad we have a lot of contingency just

105in case so yeah you know it did it was a lot of tripping over one another or not tripping over that was the problem this summer is we couldn't trip over one another we had to stagger all the deliveries and arrivals and and that made it a far more complex summary that's another point too um you know to put to bed the myth that somehow you know uh that we we haven't had schools open so that we could get more work done that's that's not the case and as well um uh we haven't really haven't been able to accelerate much because of the you know these issues of keeping people apart and and you know we would have been able to open in that first week of school exactly the way that we anticipated right

106you know before the summer began the projects that are still going on like the dunham street circle here the steam edition at north or all projects that we knew would extend into the start of the school year but the the fact that the schools have been closed hasn't assisted us greatly in accelerating the process of cons the construction no it helped us early right like in the spring it allowed us to get footings in the ground earlier and those kinds of things things that we wouldn't have been able to do if students were on campus yes but then the complexity of having to maintain social distancing and separation over the course of the summer slowed us down so at the end we kind of just ended up where we thought we would be right i

107know this you know this i want to make sure everyone else knows too so anything else in distillery yes we have and they're available on our website that's how you can get to those five year financial projections all right mark's going to take most of this just a reminder for the board the reason for the five-year financial projection is that it really provides the best view of the financial stability long range as far out as we could reasonably be expected to project this is your starting point for next year's budget in the cycle and this is the first opportunity for the next year for the board to direct me and then ultimately the administration that our priorities are wrong in some way and are not matching with the mission and vision of the district or

108the board's expectations things that mark will talk about today three things that run through this presentation are obviously financial challenges due to the pandemic remember we ran a deficit a slight deficit at the end of the last school year mostly related to non-collected fees the need for working cash bonds because of that deficit that occurred last year in a projected deficit this year and then how long term were bolstered by expiring tips so that's your preview and i will turn it over to mark to talk about more of the specifics okay so the pandemic had its effect on our budget pretty heavily last last quarter of last year um and as as hank had mentioned it put us into a negative spot and it wasn't just the waiver fees actually it was one of them

109just one of the items interest rates anything that was tied to the economy dropped and came in lower than we expected in last year and really we're planning for that going forward so i'm going to start with a five year projection and there's a rather lengthy memo that goes along with this in the board packet and i encourage you to read that for the full details i'm just going to hit the highlights but we're going to start with the five year projection and then we'll discuss a working cash bond issuance we had a hearing for that and a few months ago and and we are proposing that and i'll get into some detail for that and then roll it into the budget for the next year that we'll be asking you to prove tonight the

110uh first one there you see this in your board packet as a much longer sheet this is just the top section of it and it's also in front of you important members you have yeah you should have the full sheet in front of you um the key thing here is that really the new construction value that we've had historically is has been pretty low really the since the recession we haven't had any great spurts in that area um but um we do expect at least i expect that with this pandemic and then with the economy right now that it won't be as high as it's been on average and at least starting out for the first year the the forecast to have a 0.7 cpi i'm sorry new construction value for for projecting our tax

111revenues which are highly dependent upon the cpi and the new construction together um the eav change really doesn't have a big impact on our revenue source it changes our tax rate that's all because the property tax caps have actually unhinged um our tax extension and assessed values as one of the problems i would say with the with the tax caps just one of them um there's really not too many key things on this sheet but it's just to let you know what assumptions were in place so that if we were to change those around it would have an impact on it anything with the gray grey shade with white lettering is going to have a high impact because it's going to have a direct uh impact on the on the forecast and more immediately so

112the second middle section here are the key variables uh the top line uh the projected enrollment we use a an outside um estimation by john casardo who's a does our enrollment projections he does it for almost all the schools in dupage county nationally as well you can see that for 2021 our current year it's actually up a little bit that affected our fte count and things like that because if you look below that we try and keep a consistent program which using this new metric that we started with last year is the average class size but also a couple of rows down the fte ratio of 12.2 that's that's not just certified teachers but it's all certified support staff as well and we try to maintain the program um in terms of the consistent experience

113for students of course this is a very strange year but going forward we assume we're going to keep the same quality programming in place gray areas with the white uh font here again are with if we were to change that fte ratio the ratio of certified staff to students or um below that they can't capital outlay for the annual capital outlay for projects and with the uh ms to facility plan kind of culminating next summer we're we've allowed that to drop down by a couple hundred thousand dollars but typically we try and keep that at 1.2 million dollars for out throughout the forecast and one adjustment that i may do this typically i use a five-year average for the consumer price index for property taxes but if you look at the lowest row there right

114now we've been watching it we track it every month and it kind of implies that we could be down as low as one percent so i'm using that as the estimation for the impact on property taxes um for the 21 22 22 fiscal year if we're going out to the um next page there's some tips that are really important and um have big impact on us um we have a fourth tip which is not um not even coming due yet won't end until the 2029 20 30 fiscal year so it's not really in the picture here but um the woodridge james avenue tip is and tip is a a protected area in terms of its uh it's a evaluation districts are aren't really enabled we the it's an area that is possibly blighted or as

115has a lack of growth in in areas so it'd be like an area where the buildings are vacant possibly and um james avenue was a tiffin wood ridge where um what happens it's a tax tax increment financing situation where um they freeze the value of the tax taxes to us in terms of assessed valuation access to those to make taxes on it and then they use the they still pay taxes but it's kept by the village instead of coming to the school district and they make improvements in that area over a period of time and it can last as long as 23 24 years and that's so these are really long-term plans um when they do it and so we have one that in woodridge that ended at the end of 2019 the new construction

116value that accrued from the last 23 years will now be released back to us and so instead of paying taxes and it being held by the municipality it'll come to us and so it's a boost in our assessed valuation i'm sorry our levy and our extensions for taxes um but we won't see that until the next fiscal year to us which is the the 20 uh or the calendar year 20 20 21 we won't see it until the 21-22 fiscal year because we defer our early taxes so i want to just lay this out so you could see the lag that develops between when the tif expires new construction hits the tax rules the next year and then the following year is when we actually see it in our budget and so the downgraders group

117downtown tax tip is uh expires at the end of this calendar year december 31st new construction will be added in 2012 2021 and then the taxes we'll see it would be the two collections or the series of collections we have in our calendar year 2022. and then the last one is an ogden avenue tiff which is a large tip um frozen octane by by the downers grove uh village it expires in 2024 so it is that's the only activity during this five-year period that we'll really see we won't see that until um 2026 calendar years ended in our fiscal year 26-27 so i wanted you just to see the picture because these are really rare we only have one other tiff and that's an oak brook again that won't expire until 2029 but from a

118financial impact if you go back up to the woodridge there's two things that we'll see that will help our our five-year forecast there's a 430 thousand dollar balance um that's our portion of the ending fund balance so there were stiff funds that were pushed into it by the village or collected by the village but they didn't spend it all by the time that they're expiring and so our relative share of that along with all the other tax taxing bodies is 430 000 it's a one-time hit but you'll see it in our in our financial forecast and then the annual increase that we'll we'll experience from the the property tax evaluation increases coming back to us will give us about a 96 000 a year boost in our taxation tax extension look at the middle one

119this is really the big one that we've we've known about and have been watching and working with the village on and that's the downtown to they issued bonds to do all the work in the tip they don't so they don't have a ton of money and they the money that comes into the tif is used for those to pay off those bonds and principal and interest and it it has and typically does exceed uh the cost of the bonds principal interest exceeds the amount that's been collected so the villages had to cover that difference so there's really no fun balance that's available there like there was with the woodridge tip but the impact to our chest valuation is going to be really large 1.2 percent increase it'll generate about a million a year in additional

120revenue for the district so these are things that we've been watching when we do a five year we know that there's been in the future where it gives us some some a safety net and the fact that you'll hear me use that term several times there's several different safety nets that we have that are coming into play here for the next one that's the bottom section of the the long form that's projected financial data and again the area in gray with the white is the key stuff that's unusual but if you look for the the second column fiscal year 2021 our revenues we expect to go up 1.6 percent that might be a little optimistic but we're hoping that they do still grow primarily property taxes but but we have if you noticed on the

121schedule that showed all the different uh federal uh programs and titles that we're in um you notice it's been dropping every year and so so is some of the state money that we're concerned very concerned about the state of economy in illinois and their ability to maintain the level of support that they've been giving us and so we have um very high concerns about that but so the budget that we have gives us about 1.6 percent revenues for this year for the 2021 budget expenditures 95.2 million and excess of revenues actually 377 thousand dollars the next line down is called transfers to other funds and this is something we started i would actually i think it was in 2004 2005 we started doing projects out of our operating funds instead of issuing bonds to do

122it we would issue debt certificates which are payable out of an operating fund and then we would not have to increase our tax to taxpayers but knowing that this this cost to pay those bonds would end someday knew that at some point we would have um excess room in our operating funds uh as kind of a safety net into the future and we we've done some serious things with this we we purchased land under this mechanism next to the north campus all the expansion of the north campus was done through death certificates and paying it out of the educational and other operating funds instead of issuing bonds and having taxable bonds to our taxpayers the norfolk extension to continue norfolk across from dunham to to springside was done with that kind of funding and also

123some other large projects inside the buildings we've done the same way knowing that someday that that would kind of go down and if you look at the transfers you can see that it does drop drastically in 2223 it's going to go from 3.8 million dollars of money coming out of the operating funds to pay for some construction and other things down to 663 and that 600 is largely stuff that we do put off um that's where our chromebook costs and other things that we use some small leasing projects for that and so that's a that's a big positive for our five-year forecast so it tells us even if you look at our change in operating fund balance and that's what i usually point have the point of the pioneer to the board look at the

124change in operating fund balance that tells us where we are we lost about a million dollars last year kind of unusual we usually don't have losses like that but all of our local revenues interest some some of us a waiver of these corporate personal property replacement tax which is something that's it's based on the economy in terms of taxpayers uh corporate taxpayers paying money that comes to us well if they earn less money a lot of shops are closed a lot of businesses are closed there's going to be less corporate personal property replacement tax available so there's we have two years after uh this year 2021 we're going to lose we project 2.3 million and in 2122 with 3 million which if we don't do anything would leave us with a negative fund balance you

125can see um where we would be that so what in the current year of 2021 you'll see in the gray box a 10 million dollar bond issuance and that's been recommended to the board of education um to issue working cash bonds so that we could bolster our reserves and have dollars available for the next couple years when we really don't know exactly i mean we're guessing it at these lost numbers the state of illinois is our biggest concern at least mine and that there's a lot of push for a progressive tax rate and if that's not passed there's discussion that all state budgets would have to start you know getting cut so we really don't know exactly where some things are going to go with especially at the national level certainly the presidential election is

126an unknown that could have an impact on the economy as well so this is where it leaves us actually it puts us in good condition we've always maintained a relatively low fund balance things have been predictable enough that we've been able to survive that way districts around us have up to 50 60 percent reserves which my philosophy has always been it's kind of like how corporations work it's the shareholders regarding the money in their pocket than sitting in the corporation's pocket and if we can um get by with the low low uh reserve level i'd like to do that but i think we're gonna we're going into some kind of unknown territory and i'm recommending a little bit higher balance is still very prudent um and that's where we would end up probably by the

127end of this five-year forecast if all this pans out the right the same way it's it's very um lean compared to you look at surrounding districts and others other schools so that's really the key things about the the forecast so um the next action is is an action any questions your mark yeah yeah can you go back back to that slide sure so in your the transfer to other funds we talked about the two seven and the three eight the next two years if you look at the excess revenue for this year at 377 there's still a lot of unknowns for this year we've been talking about tonight is there any piece of that two seven that could be delayed or pushed into future years like 22 23 or 23 24 when we look like

128we're in a better situation because i mean this this these numbers are good because of the the bonds that you're going to talk about now but if that 377 goes negative on us which it really could because of what's going on i don't know do we want to have more flexibility the candles be pushed out could you tell me where the two seven which one you're the 377 on the excess revenue okay right and then so i'm just wondering if that two seven the 2.73 transfers to other funds in the 3.837 in 2020 and 2021 do we have flexibility to push that out to future years where it looks like we're in a little bit better financial shape we can it would cost it would be a refinancing at this point you know and trying

129to stretch it out it'd be refinancing those are death certificates um we can but the the again the we think the safest solution is actually let them just mature on their own um and even with the 10 million baht and bob which i've talked to you several times about that and the the economy is getting very jumpy right now and even uh you know a lot of the a couple banks aren't going to bid on it and they've already told us that they aren't going to bid because they don't know what's going on with the state of illinois and they think that that's going to directly impact us and so it may not be a great time just to re to refinance those i mean we could we could but i i i was really

130thinking it would be better to leave that off go ahead and issue the bonds that we we talked about and calculated and then go that way yes it's just stretching it out and paying more interest over the long term but yeah they just yeah there's just yeah seems to be a lot of uncertainty next year things get really terrible again that might be a solution to to free up that you know somehow stretch it out over three or four years or something okay any other questions again there's i think i think a fairly thorough write-up on that whole five years so in the in the board packet so please um refer to that memo for more details if you walk away from here and have questions at all reach out to me and mark and

131i'll show you the answer soon so the next item that i have to present is the working cash bond resolution and we've again preparing to issue a one point 10.3 million working cash fund bonds the purpose of these funds would be to support the district's operating funds reserves which have fallen below three percent uh due to changes in the economy caused by the covet 19 pandemic we just broke through it to 2.6 last year and i believe the year prior to that we were right on the 2.9 level as well working cash bonds if you don't know their issue for working cash fund purposes to enable the district to have in its treasury at all times sufficient money to meet the demands for expenditures for corporate purposes the procedure that working cash fund bonds will

132be deposited at the working cash fund at closing and will be available for inter-fund loans accordingly they are not able to be issued as exempt from federal taxes if you issue bonds for money you're going to hold on to you can't measure them as as non-taxable or tax-exempt bonds that we use for our master facility plan where we know we're going to spend them on a schedule those those were able to be issued on a tax-exempt basis but the market is so tight right now that it's it's not that much of a spread between taxable and non-taxable bond bonds so it's it's still worth it to to go to the market now um this resolution is a parameters resolution it's because of specific parameters that are listed in it that um and and give the

133board president myself together to agree on whether the parameters are met and that we would have the authorization to sign and close the documents for the bonds bonds the documents needed to for the bonds the key parameters are 10.3 million maximum bond issuance maximum annual principal of 2.5 million dollars for the bonds to be spread out to not extend the annual debt service beyond 2028 uh to sell the bonds no later than march 21st of 2021 gives us quite a window if we have a bad market we can just wait uh for a while and it says a maximum interest rate of five percent that's a standard if you if we go to um a different type of sale but we expect it again we expect interest rates to be below two percent on this

134one but the bond council always puts five percent in there of course um so and i mentioned that the parameters resolution further authorizes the board presidents and me to approve the sale final sale of the bonds as long as the parameters within this resolution are being met um we're going to use a competitive bid process which is um we have contacted and sent out term sheets to banks that have bought bonds in the past who support schools we also there's other mechanisms those township treasures in different counties in cook county that buy school bonds and and are very competitive and so we will have a they all turn them in they're all closed bids they turn them into our underwriters and then we review them for uh making sure they meet their parameters and they

135also we would take obviously the lowest cost issuing uh let's see is anything else up there that i should make sure i cover in terms of eight years um the thing oh you know and the thing that kind of goes into the next piece is the um the debt service extension base that's you know i think uh anyway we've got that piece i wanted you to see it graphically because i've talked about it before how a dead service extension base works you see the blue line that's on you know that's towards the bottom going all the way across when the tax caps came out there was a realization that schools still have to do life safety work and would need is working cash bonds and there's a third item which is i think tort judgment

136bonds which is if you had some kind of a judgment against the district you could issue bonds for that to help pay off that cost but they realized that we needed a mechanism and so they allowed for a while it was just whatever that dollar amount was when they do the tax caps whatever it was i think it was 2.2 million for us at that time um you could issue bonds for 2.2 million per year in terms of debt payment so you couldn't cross that line but you could levy up to it and initiate bonds up to that um and so you look in the far left uh where we right now it's it's about 2.5 million now um and we assume the same amount going across we it actually can increase by cpi but

137we for this purpose haven't increased it with this calculation of the cost of the bonds um so the first three first two columns are already filled with life safety bonds from the past the third orange line has a little teeny bit of light orange in there that's going to be part of this bond issuance so we're going to fill in um going forward up for seven years the the the that service extension base we're going to use it and quite honestly because life safety is a cyclical thing every 10 years typically this is a base that's always going to be in our taxes i mean it can drop and it you know over time but it typically isn't because you know as soon as you're done doing the work for life safety new rules come

138out do you have to sprinkle areas that you didn't have to sprinkle before different life safety things are in place um i'm amazed at how they can always find new things but um so that's that's what we'd be doing we'd be filling in the orange keeping it to that same tax level so the taxpayer won't see a drop that they might have seen if we didn't do this uh starting with the 2023 i'm sorry 2021 uh school year by a little bit the average across of those is going to be about 30 dollars it's on the average taxpayer for net for a 300 000 home i think i've miscalculated it before and i said 12 so it's closer to 30 on average i think they're paying right now with our first year is about 48

139so that's the highest annual impact when we pick up the full orange bars but over the life of this it's about dollars a year for three hundred thousand dollars and that's um an important factor we have to understand that we we are very careful with our tax rate we still have maintained i checked with all the other uh high schools in japanese county we have the second lowest in this in the county of uh for tax rate a total operating tax rate and that's an important part and i i try to be a good steward of that and um that's why we'd like to just spread this out and not let it increase and try and have the at least try and minimize the impact to taxpayers as much as possible so just to be

140clear it's taxes that could potentially drop in the future that we are leaving at their current amount and not dropping to withstand the impacts of the pandemic here and i mean people will see their same property tax bill as a result of it and not less uh it is likely though due to this being used for other things like life safety projects and capital improvements and things related to that that we would have continued to do that kind of work in this space in the future anyway this is that emergency fund for when emergency projects develop that's what it was put there for by the state of illinois and that's what we're proposing to continue to use it for all right the next item is a is a budget hearing and i'll do a quick

141presentation and then you can maybe open it open it for hearing um so the first uh slide there is a revenue there we go uh this is a revenue that's we've um we've put it out in at the august 17th board meeting and had the board approved to be issued is a tentative budget it's been on display for more than 30 days so we're now at the point of being able to prove it and have it be our formal budget for the 20 21 school year fiscal year um i highlighted the bond proceeds in there this that's that's something that you know very obviously changes that exhibit by issuing 10 million dollars in bond proceeds it would really be shown as another financial source but in the final formal documents but i put it in

142there so you can see it does have a big impact on our on our combined revenue percent change it's up at 12.2 percent well that's why because it's his 10 million dollar bond in it um without that it's about a 1.5 percent increase and if you look at the replacement taxes that's the second line down under the fiscal year 2021 the orange topping there's property taxes 2.1 and this is one of the reasons states like i don't know use property taxes because they are not going to wither away and can go down when a recession or pandemic or something like this hits uh and changes the sets values it it helps the programs be better and consistent more consistent placement taxes that all the local things that have impact based on the economy are dropping

143replacement taxes 17 and that's a hard number that we got from the department of revenue that's not an estimate interest income is is going to drop some more it's it's dropped you look at on the right-hand side where a fiscal year last year was is starting to drop but we typically earn more than a million dollars a year in interest income and now we're down to 342 000 food services we do expect an increase in waivers because of what's happening in the economy with unemployment it's just something that we expect so we're expecting to lose money with food services in terms of um when we you know the program itself isn't even running right now so that's part of the problem we typically do based on just this the state support and the meal prices

144which are very low meal prices actually cover our costs of the food and and helps us cover some costs of just custodial care and other kitchen and replacing equipment in the kitchen and things like that that that it takes to run the cafeteria um but we won't we don't think we'll be taking in that much at all this year maybe half a year if we're lucky with with um if we can open the kitchen let's say the second semester and i doubt that that's going to happen but when we started putting the budget together that was our projection for it um registration fees again that's going to be affected by waivers and just other local revenues which typically involves rental income and things like that which have been disturbed right now too we're not renting

145out our property to large groups so overall the budget without the bond proceeds is about 1 1.5 1.6 uh of an increase and that's really almost totally attributable to to taxes the last two items general and state aid the state portion of that is largely a reimbursement of last year's transportation which was up much higher because of an increase in tuition students and the federal aid is that 300 000 forty thousand of the federal increase of three hundred fifty three thousand is covered related reimbursements we expect to get and we're applying for a grant with the iema illinois um emergency fund so we can get some dollars and recover some rubber costs for the ppe and um other things like that related to the pandemic so so those aren't really we hope we would love

146to see those costs go away and then the revenue reimbursement go away too we'd like to be back to normal so if we move on to expenditures um the fte the first item is salaries and the the fte uh accounts for about 1.3 percent of that we have some because of enrollment changes but we also have things like the nurses that we're contracting or being paid out of there out of that line item so we have we've crossed also related to the pandemic there but the without that it's about a 1.7 increase for existing staff about 90 of our uh salaries are tied to collective bargaining agreements and and so they go up and down with whatever cpi is for the most part and um and so we and we're in the middle of a

147five year or after this first full year of a five year agreement with our teachers and uh we'll be finishing one with our support staff but um we'll be working on a new one this later this year um benefits 3.6 increase um really typically the we budget budget six percent but we're having a real good year right now it's it's uh some of that i think is because of colbit or uh people who who would normally getting elected electoral surgeries are not having it done um and so our plan hasn't paid out so much but um 3.6 is our our estimated increase for that and yeah really nothing too exciting here the capital outlay is is down because we bought some activity buses last year and again we're trying to just tailor it down a

148little bit because of all the other construction going on in the area so the bottom line is really what it does to this last exhibit which is the fund balances you we just sort it all together for you so there's a beginning um and if you i guess the line to look at is that on the lower section the tentative budget totals we have about 408 thousand dollars in the operating funds exclusive of the health benefit accounts so there's a the health trust is 1.8 million dollars below that so we have 2.2 million dollars in the in the total operating funds for the district but we keep the health benefit out because it's only used for that purpose it's not like it could be used for anything else and if we do issue the bond

149and we hope that that happens you can see the last grouping right above that orange line is a working cash fund we'll be establishing a working cash fund which will now be part of the operating funds so you'll be able to see where it is every year and every month when we report to you but now we can track it you know where it's going tentative budget totals would be eight million dollars for the operating fund in the in the for the current year and so you can see we need to dip into that ten million dollar bond right away because we'll be about two million dollars short in the operating funds uh by the end of this year that's that's the item so now if you would like you could if you have any

150questions any questions from the board before we do the public hearing and open it up to anybody who would like to comment on but nope all right at this point no we had all this ahead of time at this point we can move into the public hearing nancy so this is a public hearing on the 2020 2021 tentative budget the tentative budget has been on display for 30 days as required by law now the administration brings the tentative budget forward to the board for final approval this is the final opportunity for the public to provide feedback on the tentative budget before the board takes action later this evening does anybody want to address the board come on come on up to the dear members of the board of education my name is scott o'connell i'm

151a member of the downers grove watch unfortunately our president tom sleeter is unavailable to be here tonight so i will be representing the watch for this hearing therefore i'll also be providing testimony and asking questions of various witnesses at this time while i'm concluding this opening statement i ask that the individual controlling the white screen here at the meeting in this and the screen available to those viewing the meeting remotely locate two pdf files additionally i ask that members of the board take a moment to locate and open the same records on their laptop computers i'll be referencing pages from the following two documents the first record that should be made available to the audience is the pdf file containing the isbe excel budget form for fiscal year 2021 as found on the district's web

152page the pdf file is 21 pages this record can be located by starting on the district's home page with the top line menu item labeled departments then business then financial information under the subheading budget information the second record that should be open at this time in anticipation of its eventual viewing is the record found within tonight's agenda at 7c entitled financial pages the pdf file is 24 pages with the first page being the monthly treasurer's report signed by school treasurer eric wagner at this time i wish to remind the elected members of the board that participation by members of the audience during a hearing such as this one is distinctly different from the public comment period that is required under the open meetings act to be a part of every agenda of every meeting held

153by the public body a hearing is not just another meeting held by the board in front of the community a hearing allows relevant statements both oral statements and written statements to be made by members of the community to the board so that those statements can be considered before the full board takes final action on a critical matter these statements are often referred to as testimony in addition to testimony from the community the structure of a hearing allows for questions to be asked by members of the audience of various witnesses in attendance additionally the structure of the hearing allows um i'm sorry it is additionally the structure of the hearing allows for questions to be asked by members of the board of various witnesses in attendance it is critical that each individual board member understand that

154during a hearing your position is modified to being at times a witness being asked a question by the audience administrators may also be called as witnesses and ask questions additionally if there are any other individuals who are considered to be expert witnesses those witnesses can be called forward for questioning during a hearing all witnesses including the chair of this hearing along with the other six members of the board should consider each of their answers to be the equivalent to testimony given under oath either answers given during a deposition or an open court i would like to remind each witness that i call that your answer should be related to the question asked and that the answer be truthful to the best of your knowledge and belief finally during the time that i have the floor

155whether i am providing testimony or questioning any witness i fully expect that the cheer of the hearing will maintain decorum and will immediately address anyone attempting to interfere with the hearing by informing them that interruptions will not be tolerated please go on there simply consulting i just wanted to to wait until they were done talking so i could be heard additionally under the criminal code of illinois if anyone interferes with the witness who is answering a question that person can be arrested and charged with interfering with a public hearing that warning is applicable to everyone including board members witnesses such as administrators and members of the audience that concludes my opening statement please confirm consider the following to be my written testimony and questions on the proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 i will be

156providing of this written testimony and my drafted questions to the secretary of the board of education in order for her to place both within the record of this hearing as previously stated my comments will directly reference various pages and cells found within the isbe budget form 50-36 for fiscal year 2021 at this time i ask that the pdf file containing the august treasures report and the other 23 pages be shown to the audience and be viewed by the board and administrators could you is there no we are not prepared to buy that nor will we ask that in advance therefore we will not be presenting it however i can if you send me an email requesting that i can float it to the board of education okay well on the treasures on the august treasurer's

157report um my first question was directed to board member drexler do you have the treasures report open no we don't you don't okay now mr o'connell there's no requirement the board members have any of these documentations that you're requesting open available or at their disposal at this time you can claim that that's the case but there is no requirement that they have access to these materials they have been provided access to these materials in advance of tonight's board meeting well let me tell you what's on the treasurer's report this is page two of the check register page f8 of the treasures report if you have the ability to access this you will be approving this in the consent agenda fruit later tonight um the third entry on page 8 begins with check number 223936 that

158line represents one of the bills that you and the board will be escalated this evening to approve the title of the fund and that bill is life safety on page on page 13 the 20th entry also is number 224 mr o'connell can you raise your mask please on page 13 i'm sorry on page 13 the 20th entry is also titled in the fund life safety in the amount of 773 dollars now these two entries um record the fact that later this evening the superintendent the chief school business official will be asking that this board approved the expenditure of 41 hundred forty eight dollars and thirty five cents out of the life safety fund a fund which has been labored by the isbe is the 90 fund now at the top of page seven of 24

159the third entry on page seven is life safety as i've said um well i'm sorry page seven is the [Music] earlier in the treasures report where it's f7 it's showing the expenses the accounts payable check registered fund totals and the title is life safety 41 548 dollars and 35 cents my next question is to um is that a question well since you you don't nobody is going to open this up because you don't want to um the name of that fund is the capital projects fund now [Music] if a fund is labeled within this records the capital projects fund a record presumed to be drafted by the administration and one that you are likely to sign under penalty perjury is it the is it the actual fire prevention and life safety fund of the district

160is anybody aware of what fund is are you aware of what fund that those expenses are being approved from i'm going to take that as a no okay now is for controller stale one of your duties is to establish record keeping that properly accounts for the various funds of the district as such you keep a set of books and the school treasurer eric wagner keeps a set of books so witness stand are you the administrator that overseas on a monthly basis this production of this record yes i am yes you are witness stalin is the fund label within this record as the capital projects fund actually the fire prevention and life safety fund of the district and a fund that has been designated by the isbe as the 90 fund yeah the fire prevention and

161life safety fund is a capital projects fund so we use that name that title for it as well in the short messages on those the answer the answer to the question is yes if it says life safety coming from it yes i would say it's a capital project fund life safety yes now on the very first page of your um statement of financial position you list the funds and there is a an mfp capital projects fund and there is a capital projects fund that has 316 000 dollars in it that is what you are claiming is the life safety fund yes yes okay thank you can i ask what this has to do with the budget itself correct this is this is supposed to be a public hearing on the tentative budget i'm getting this

162i'm assuming this will connect back to that assuming you're not interrupting me are you you're asking actually i'm asking yes i'm trying to figure out if this is related to the matter of the hand of the board of education which is a public hearing on the 2021 tentative budget or if this is you grandstanding on some other matter because if it's not related to the public hearing on the 2021 tentative budget the appropriate time to address the board would be at the end under public comment you would be restricted to three minutes now i'd like you to look at can you clarify if we are talking about the 2021 tentative budget i am about to go to the budget so on the budget that you're about to put about to approve and let's start with

163page two the fire prevention and safety fund at the beginning of this fiscal year july 1st 2020 shows it has zero money in it and zero expenses that is in direct contact is their comments are to us or that that's for tax levy if we issue the tax levy for life safety which we do not we would use that that account for that not a capital project like that so in the capital project group by law the proceeds from bonds for fire prevention safety pers purposes are required to be placed in the 90 fund which is the fire prevention and safety fund and expenses are supposed to be accounted for life safety purposes from the fire protection safety and if you said that on your treasures report that you're accounting for those out of a

164separate fund that's in direct conflict with the budget no and that was the fund is used a massive facility plan is taking care of the rest of the referendum and the capital projects fund with the further life prevention life safety is in a separate fund well it may you may state it's in a separate fund but it's not on your budget and even tonight you're approving expenditures from the fps fund the fire prevention safety fund which are not included in the budget you're about to no they have to approve can you allow him to answer i'd like to hear mr stanley i'm sorry i can't understand the thing you're saying i'd like to know mr stalin's answer mr stanley what were you going to say no there's there's capital projects funds and there are separate

165ones we use a 60 type fund for that there's a 61 62 63 different capital project funds the life safeties and sep is one of those they only give one column for all of our capital project funds that we use and that's once again and that's the ispe requires those to be kept separate we'll call them fps funds let me finish please the isbe the school code requires money acquired for fps purposes to be accounted for separately in an fps fund it is and on the budget it's not included no it's included in the capital project group well it's not it's not in the fund where it is required by the isbe to be our auditors don't have a problem with it and it's all yours so you have combined the life safety fund in

166the capital projects fund for accounting purposes thank you that was one of my questions in the campaign's group of funds it's one of them section 17-211 s states the following when any taxes levied or bonds issued for fps for fire prevention safety energy conservation and school security purposes such proceed proceeds shall be deposited and accounted for separately within the fire prevention and safety fund i will repeat the key phrase such proceeds shall be deposited and accounted for separately within the fire prevention and safety fund that's the 90 fund and not the 60 fund based upon the evidence presented this evening it's clear that this tentative budget must be rejected by this board due to the fact that controller stalin has not presented the accounts of the various district funds in accordance with the school code

167additionally the donors growth watch urges each member of this board to review the last six budgets prepared by controllers stalin and approved by various boards you will find a pattern and practice of seated boards accepting at face value the work product of controller stalin as it relates to the life safety fund the tentative budget misinterpret misrepresents deliberately we believe the district's finances it is the opinion of the dollars grove watch the controller stalin's actions are intentional and not an accident or a simple oversight the life safety section of the school code is clear and unambiguous and yet both the school treasurer and the school controller have established a set of books that are not in compliance with the law therefore this budget must be rejected and this hearing must be suspended by proper motion until

168such time when it can be reconvened on or before september 30th during the interim the superintendent must take responsibility for the production of a tentative budget that's drafted by in compliance with the law during the interim the chair must take responsibility for the availability of the school treasurer eric wagner to answer questions as a critical witness to the financial condition of the district that concludes my written statement in the life safety fund and is absence within the tentative budget now i would like to move on to a second issue the watch beliefs must be reviewed at this budget hearing i promise that the issue will not take very much time will only involve questions addressed to one individual who is physically present at tonight's hearing i do have prepared questions for treasurer wagner but i

169will submit that and write submit them in writing to the chair so that he can provide written answers prior to this budget hearing being reconvened at a later date so he has prepared the on page one of the tentative budget the upper left hand corner um please pay attention look at the upper left hand corner controller stalin has prepared this budget utilizing the accrual method of accounting for most of you that fact in its significance may not mean much that is not intended as an insult it is simply a fact that if one is not trained in finance and accounting you would never be expected to understand what controller stalin and superintendent teal have done with this tentative budget what they have done is simple they have attempted to use this tentative budget to convince

170this board of education the members of the waltz in this community that there is evidence to support a 10 million dollar working cash fund bond sale within the final approval approved budget for fiscal year 2021. on page 5 of 24 of the tentative budget you will see that on the title of the page the summary of cash transactions with in page five of the tenant of budget it appears that comptroller stalin has removed from the various balances found in row three all cash that was actually received by the district from dupage county treasury rent henry for the 2019 tax levy prior to june 30th 2020 to be clear controller stalin has removed cash from the july 1st 2020 balances that has actually been received on or before june 30th 2020. that's what one does if

171utilizing an accrual method of accounting for a budget however the inclusion of a working cash bond sale within the 2021 budget is about cash cash on hand at the time the bills need to be paid another interesting point about controller stalin's fund reporting on page five is that unless comptroller stephen has reason to believe that there will be no distributions of the 2020 extension prior to july 1st 2021 there will in fact be no outstanding working cash fund loan as of june 30th 2021 article 20 the school code expressly requires school treasurer eric wagner to immediately repay that loan upon receipt of any part of the 2020 extension therefore ph 5 is a material is a materially misstated record that actually distorts what will happen with regard to the timely distribution next may and june

172of the 2020 extension to the district in general and the education fund in particular additionally this intentionally distorted picture of the future is being disseminated in order to support the issue of a totally unnecessary bond sale controller stalin and treasurer wagner each are required to keep a separate set of books this redundancy serves a purpose two sets of books by two individuals builds in a check and balance so that both embezzlement and fraud become more difficult to execute given those subtractions of actual cash with within this cash summary record row 3 does not actually reflect reflect the cash balance on either july 1st 2020 or june 30th 2021 for the education fund within this summary controller stalin has recorded a loan from the working cash fund to the education fund the two cells are c6

173and i15 next spring treasurer wagner as the legal custodian of the district's funds will not need to request a lawful order from this board to execute the loan found within this budget that is a fact due to the 2020 extension distribution next spring during may and june the education fund will have approximately 30 million dollars in the fund in cash as of june 30th 2021 if the board president had invited treasurer wagner to be available tonight for questions his hearing would have heard his testimony that as of june 30th 2020 less than three months ago the education fund had 31 million dollars 31 million six hundred eight thousand one hundred eighty four dollars and 24 cents in cash this record was given to each member of the board as part of the july board packet

174my question is witness stalin in preparing the tentative budget are you in possession of any record drafted by either the office of the dupage county clerk or the office of the dupage county treasurer since february 1st 2020 that addresses the anticipated timing of the certification of the collector's books next april by the clerk or the mailing next may 1st by the treasurer of the 2020 tax bills if so have you provided that record to the members of the board as evidence that this that this district faces a cash flow issue next spring if so can we all see that record right now at this hearing you have to ask the question was so convoluted we are on the cruel basis with the cruel basis you defer and we're elected by that the question is are

175you in receipt of anything from the county that says the tax receipts won't be timely next june no i don't have you have not the answer is no thank you within the bond transcript for this district's 1996 a working cash fund bond sale is a record entitled statement of need for working cash and tax exemption certificate and agreement within that record it states within section 2.2 the undersigned controller stalin hereby certifying the firms thorough familiarity with the financial books and records of the district end of the fund the undersigned controller stalin has caused the cash flow estimate to be prepared on the basis of revenues reasonably expected to be available and expenditures reasonably expected to be made by the district during the time periods set forth in said table my question has witnessed stala in

176preparing this tentative budget a budget which includes your recommendation and the recommendation of superintendent teal that the board approved yet another working cash fund bond sale the third since you arrived in the mid 90s have you prepared the same 36-month cash flow summary to support your claim that remains june of 2021 the education fund will be unable to pay its bills based on the accrual basis of accounting yes based on an accrual yeah so the board did you pay your bills on accrual do you pay your bills with cash we record them in our financial statements on the accrual basis but when you cut a check it's cut with cash correct we don't spend next year's cash now we we defer it and that's a general accepted practice auditors have accepted it for my duration

177well that does it three different types of honor your major report disputes that because you have deficit balances which means you've spent money already and for example in the transportation fund that you didn't have yet so i i don't believe that inaccurate description of what you do well okay then don't believe it well i'm i'm going to trust my eyes i'm not going to trust you so much excuse me excuse me for a minute please um nancy i mean i'm almost done yeah i believe this if you have a question for me please ask me but please don't interrupt i'm wondering how much time we have to give you i already told you i it's as long as i want and if you let me finish i'm almost done i could i could move to

178close the public hearing couldn't i no that would be illegal why i don't know i i think we should let mr um o'connor finish i will at which point i will emphasize to everyone who is listening and for the record that we have external auditors i literally i know i just i've heard this song advanced before are there other people that we want to hear from too well this is over here we can restrict for three minutes at the end there's no time limit to a hearing but this is an open hearing but i am going to ask you mr clown to please finish there's i am about to finish members of the board of education six years ago this month during a hearing held on september 15 2014 for public comment and questioning on

179a proposed sale of 1 million 525 thousand of funding bonds i stated at that time that there was no need for the proposed bond sale in fact i call i called the proposed bond sale recommended by then superintendent mcdonald and controller stalin a fraud that sale never took place tonight i'm informing this board that the current superintendent and controller stalin are once again attempting to bully yet another board into yet another unnecessary bond sale that could easily be construed to be fraudulent there is absolutely no demonstrable need for a bond sale to fund a loan fund that will simply sit as yet another tempting source of funds for future expenses i strongly urge each elected individual of this public body to vote no on this tentative budget and send it back to the desk of

180the superintendent with direction that the unnecessary working cash flow and bond sale be removed and that the life safety fund and all of its assets and expenses be properly reported if this public body persists on the path of approving this budget is presented this elective board of education will force the citizens of this community to conclude that you're using the current climate to sneak a backdoor bond sale under their property tax bills beginning with the 2020 extension that concludes my testimony and my questions thank you for anybody else who wishes to address the board is there anything on the podcast regarding this no but i know online yes i'm sorry oh thank you i'm checked while you're checking i would just like to remind everyone that we not only have external auditors that audit our

181records annually and we have had never any really substantive finding of any ill use of funds but we did in fact mr o'connell is somewhat correct in that we did lose money on a bond sale and that was because of the assertions the ill-founded assertions of mr o'connell that's right that caused some people who were willing to invest to pull out and in fact he has not only used the resources of this district but has also caused financial harm to this district so i'm sorry that he has left to hear that perhaps he will listen to their tape would you could he agree right he's he threatens what he does now this is something he does so that he can try and threaten that there's a illegality some illegality involved with the issuance of the

182bond and so that to try and discourage bidders who would come in and foil the project so so he has in fact hurt our community and he may do that he's done it with other schools and he's done it for 51 as well nancy i might add too that in addition to the um the audits that we have every year we're also our practices are recognized every year as being exemplary by outside three weeks ago for 21 years in a row mark and his team were awarded for financial excellence from the association of school board officials and that is actually something that would be picked at by the certificate committee if we were using the wrong fund or um so he's he's reading it you know and i don't even know what year he got

183some of his his beef information from if it's sometimes it's decades old um so i feel pretty comfortable that we have a solid budget in place where we are he wants us to spend our deferred taxes that we from the next fiscal year um and that's a safety net for the board to defer our taxes we we it makes us operate with a little bit smaller budget because we're taking we're taking our taxes and from this year and moving into the next year and having to work with older taxes so there's a small percentage difference and it gives us a cash flow but only and it's you know if we ever decided not to do this we said we would have to say let's go back to the cash basis of accounting so that we

184can spend the money that's that's being deferred now so it would weaken us financially and so um and we wouldn't be we wouldn't be following generally accepted accounting principles either so it because you don't do things on a cash basis anymore you do it on the accrual basis and account for things in the right fiscal year i don't have comments from the public i finally found them but i and i wasn't listening very carefully but i i just as the superintendent of schools want to just point out a couple of things about our budgets one we have been rated as a district of distinction for over 20 straight years for financial practices two every year we go through a thorough accounting process the last i think 15 year 10 to 15 years of those audits

185are available on our district website anybody can go look at those and see if there was any significant deficiency weaknesses or findings in those those are reported to the board every year and then we talk about how we close any deficiencies in the rare case that they are found three we spend the money in this district responsibly after it comes in many school districts spend on borrowed money and when they hit springs like what we hit last year then they are forced to go out and borrow money at high interest rates to close the gap for the remainder of the school year this school district does not end up in that situation the school district monitors its money spends its money after it comes in rather than on loan and many times we are the

186school district that other school districts come to and borrow from us and then we collect that interest from them at a high rate anybody who goes back through the books for the past decade plus will find that this district this board the financial team here have been excellent stewards of the taxpayers money and i will stand by that any day of the week if the public is shaken by this at all i encourage them to reach out to me and we will happily sit down and answer any of the questions that come our way and on top of that i just want to say that i'm just really disappointed that he didn't stay to hear this last little bit of comments that were made by by our uh superintendent and the other members of the

187board and mark stalin i think it was very important that when you come in and try to change things to hear both sides of the situation and that was not done and i'm very disappointed that that would be brought forward and not i agree with you and i would also say that i know that different members of administration have spent substantial amount of time amount of time trying to explain this time and time again yes and and if there are things like this uh i feel he had 30 days in order to come forward and this is this is the way he does this i mean i've been this did this raise any other concerns or doubts among board members that you'd like us to address before you take action later this evening no we

188need to call the closing close i move we close the public hearing michael ii mike terry thank you mike davenport aye terry pavicich aye rick cavanado aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye and nancy kupka aye the hearing is closed we will move on to the consent agenda now i need a motion for oh is there any is there any item that any member of the board wishes to remove from the consent agenda for further discussion now so be hearing none before we move i would just like to call out the thank you and i don't want to mispronounce their names um kevin clinton clementine yeah for their uh lovely donation of a cello and a concert verbal cello and other um supporting things that's that's very kind of them for and for a

189great boon to our music program yes for for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes a personnel report contract adjustment certified appointments classified e personnel report resignations classified see the financial pages d 2021 concussion oversight team e the amended and 20 2021 school calendar of the acceptance of donation donation from kevin and gina clinton so moved seven moves i'm sorry who seconded thank you very much terry pavich aye mike davenport dan nicholas hi rick cavanado hi joanna vazquez drexler aye and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda passes we're going to move on to the recommendations for reaction first thing we need is a motion for the board of education to approve the 2021 budget as presented so moved that's it mike and joanna thank you michael joanna yes thank

190you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick palminato aye nancy kupka aye board member oh good go ahead stay motion here and board members need to sign the budget before they leave this evening we'll do thank you happily next week for the board of education to approve the lowest acceptable bid and award mechanical concepts of illinois contract in the amount of 53 650 for the condensing unit replacement at the asc so i moved second is that you terry secondly was seconded i didn't cherry seconded and mike was the first person thank you mike davenport hi terry pavich aye rick perrinato aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye nancy kupka aye motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the 2020 excuse

191me 2020 2021 grants as presented so moved second mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick cavanado aye nancy kupka aye motion carries and then we need a motion for the board of education to approve board policy 2.260 the uniform grievance procedure and board policy 2.265 title ix sexual harassment grievance procedure go ahead julian mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick cavanado aye nancy kupka aye motion carries the next item for consideration is the issuance of not to exceed 10 million 300 000 in general obligation limited bonds to be issued by the district pursuant to article 20 of the school code for the purpose of increasing the district's working cash fund the

192board of education will consider the adoption of a resolution providing for the issue of spend bonds sorry classes are fogging up and the levy the direct annual tax to pay for the principal and interest there on the resolution sets forth the parameters for the issuance of said bonds and sailed thereof by designated officials of the district mark stalin district controller explained that the resolution sets forth the parameters for the issuance of said bonds and sailed thereof by designated officials of the district he summarized the perth in terms of said parameters including the specific parameters governing the manner of sale length of maturity rates of interest purchase price and levees and tax levy for said bonds the title of the revolution of the resolution is resolution providing for the issuance of not to exceed 10 10

193million 300 000 taxable general obligation limited school bonds of community high school district number 99 dupage county illinois for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund of said school district providing for the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds to the purchaser thereof may i have a motion for the board of education to adopt said resolution as presented and read by title so i moved second mike and terry thank you very much any discussion nancy did you mention the last this part of it with private sale or public underwriting with raymond james i'm sorry i didn't hear what you said there's open here there's another part in there that's just in the last reading up on the up

194on the screen but it says uh in the proposed sale of said bonds through private placement or a public underwriting of raymond james what that does is it it i don't know if you and if you said i didn't i did not thank you i missed it because this is how this is another piece he'll go after he'll say that we didn't um the board didn't approve raymond james being an underwriter for this project so to be clear it's the resolution providing for the issue of not to exceed ten million three hundred thousand dollars taxable general obligation limited school laws for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund providing the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds through

195a private replace excuse me a private placement or a public underwriting with raymond james thank you for that thank you that i'm confirming that is my motion that is your motion mike and i second that and terry seconds julie there's no more discussion no so julie please call a role upon the motion to adopt said resolution mike davenport aye terry pavicen aye rick cavanado aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye and nancy kupka aye the motion is carried and said resolution is duly adopted julie please report this in the records of the board of education of community high school district 99 dupage county illinois thank you moving on to the second reception of visitors this is the second reception of visitors which is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic

196pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydia visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone and state their full name the proceedings may be tape recorded are being tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes the board's presiding officer myself reserves the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated would somebody like to address the board [Laughter] appreciate it thank you you've definitely heard your three music failed math too have to listen to that okay my name is carrie swenson i have two kids um i've talked to some of you already

197i have two kids in district 99 a junior and a senior i had a nice time speech hank you blew it for me because you addressed everything that i had in my speech all my concerns make sense um as a board and as a school district um that signed an oath and i have the verbate the verbiage of your oath right here specifically to what we're dealing with in our community right now i am concerned the numbers are wrong dupage county health department illinois state department of health told me the numbers are triple counted sometimes the numbers um of people not even living near us are coming back here that's directly affecting these kids getting back to school based off of risk management that hank which we all want them to be safe i'm not

198saying come back guns blazing no mask okay but we can't do that really if we're restricting everything else based off of inaccurate information um i can give you the names and numbers that i've talked to it is a problem other schools are going back less restrictive same populations different counties so as we move forward i see your plan i'm happy with it it's the foot in the door we're getting those kids that need to be back in school back in school and we have the choice for the remote learners however for three months what if the flu season doesn't hit us what if this flattened curve continues to be stagnant what if the numbers change to 80 000 people in illinois instead of that or positive instead of over 200 000 because of the triple

199quadruple counting so i know you have your metrics moving side to side you know moving up and moving down the fact that there's no room for more time and i understand the scheduling is concerning we can't finish out the year like this are we waiting for the vaccine our numbers aren't that bad so i think as a board and as an administration you need to also be our voice for the community and ask the health department what are these numbers from because dr aziki today specifically said they're counted multiple times for one patient you can only be a risk factor in the neighborhood once you can't be a risk factor three four five times so when we're talking about these metrics it's really important to be using that accurate information you are the stewards to

200our children and we expect you i have a voice they have a voice you all have voices you are in charge of the education for these kids i'm very happy that we're getting back with what we are we have the foot in the door to show that we can do it right these kids will wear a hazmat suit stand on their head and sing old macdonald if they can go back to school you're not going to have a problem i've talked to administrators i have them in my family they're thrilled to be back so moving forward that's the only thing i didn't see addressed thank you for the timer and thank you for listening to me thank you student board and i do appreciate the work you put into all of this so thank you

201thank you thank you anybody else wish to address the board it's getting away from sorry i'm having trouble working technology situation is thank you hi um my name is david fisher i have a child at diners grove north um i didn't have anything written or pre-planned i didn't plan on speaking until i signed in tonight and i just wanted to start off by by saying thank you to hank mr fisher it's slipping sorry yeah i just wanted to say thank you to you hank and to the elected officials of the board for handling things the way you've handled things i know you're getting barraged with emails and angry parents and frustrated parents and passionate parents who are simply here to advocate for the wellness of their children and i know that everybody here all has

202those same goals in mind when we're talking about our children i'm very passionate i'm a very passionate person very passionate about my children so when i see my children on a daily basis going through the motions of what they're going through and i talk to other parents like kerry and groups of other people that are positively for the hybrid plan and returning to school now we all have the same goals in mind so i just wanted to say thank you to to you all i know that you have our students best interests at heart and like kerry said the numbers are bogus they keep telling us that it's up to you guys to make the decision so we're getting this back and forth we feel like we're in the middle so it's either the illinois

203department of health is making the calls or you guys are making enough calls they're saying you guys need to make this call and i'm glad that you're going back i'm glad that you've got this plan in place and i would say stay the course i also want to thank all the people in the community that have started the facebook grassroots movement of the hybrid learning that started in august as well as the 400 plus families and members and parents that we created just five days ago we went from zero to 400 on a facebook page all in support of returning to school now in district 99 so for all those parents that are watching on youtube and that have supported our little lift please sorry uh we really appreciate it so i just wanted to

204say that stay the course as long as the numbers are going to remain low we really need our kids back especially the special ed kids that have social emotional needs because they're not getting it with remote learning i don't care what you think or what you might say but remote learning long term doesn't work i have two kids with ieps and i see their struggles and i talk to other parents with kids who don't have ieps and normal kids with straight a grades struggle emotionally and socially in this environment so remote learning long term doesn't work and you're cheating our children out of the rightful proper education by keeping them at home so i'm glad that your plan is to get us back into the classrooms be it a hybrid modified hybrid but the ultimate

205goal is to get these kids back in school that's all i have to say thank you anybody else like to address the board i'll be brief as well my name is lynn goldminus i have a junior here at downers grove south this year i have a freshman in college that graduated in the spring he's at purdue he's starting his fourth week there working through the hybrid classes and he's very excited to be on campus he had somewhat of an in-person orientation week and he's very excited to still have a roommate and i've been following the numbers looking at the data my background i'm a chemist i've been a substitute teacher in district 58 for many years since my kids have all been in school so again i'm with them looking at the numbers i don't

206think these numbers are right my youngest son is a sixth grader at st joseph school in downers grove he's back at school he's starting his fourth week this at this time i'm there um i'm working there as well this year and so far we haven't had any problems with my older son my younger son my youngest son and i'm looking forward to this hybrid plan i hope if it happens on the timeline that's set um because last time was really tough to hear the timeline and then within a day or two before it was it was shot down so i'm keep keep praying for uh the truth and the right the right data and the right interpretation so i thank you all for your time and um we're very we've been very happy with district

20799 so i hope we can continue and move forward thank you thank you thank you thanks anybody else wish to dress lord okay what um thank you for coming out you know i just want to i i do have a couple of virtual comments oh go ahead i keep reading that yeah okay um let me zoom in so i can actually read it my eyes are getting tired as the night goes on here all right the first comment is from sandy bowl freeberry well i appreciate all the effort by our teachers and administration i can't help but put my child first when i look at the fact that we're delivering eight to ten less weeks of instructional time in any back to school plan but dr thiele said that the curriculum will be eighty percent

208at most teachers are admitting to teaching content with numbers like 50 to 60 percent and remote learning fatigue will reduce even that i'm having a very difficult time being the positive support i know that my child needs while reconciling the part-time schools she's being provided we already know that we will she will have to repeat chemistry with the nightmare that spring learning was and already feels that you'll have to repeat physics high level science classes are not best taught virtual or halfway and so she struggles to stay engaged it is a throwaway class in her mind and it's part time school i don't know how to find a teacher for her let's be honest a tutor isn't what she needs if she's being provided half the curriculum she doesn't know what she's missing i know

209the tutor won't know i am dismayed that we haven't been able to find ways to bring critical courses math science lit laying arts to our kids in a way that produces real benefit and not just more busy work and memorization for a test the instructions for ap exams came out and i disregarded there is no way she has learned enough in the last eight months or been brought out of a horrible funk to re-engage her brain critical thinking test-taking skills that we would waste any money or incur through additional depression from poor performance on taking those tests my child has worked so hard since she was three to be a great student and her immobility and disengage mentality has us both crying most every day i don't care if we go back or stay remote

210i care that one of those plans delivers more than part-time school that we have a plan that has teachers really reaching these kids that there is more support and more engagement today as usual she said she doesn't see the benefit of going to college since nothing means anything anymore my school loving honor role overachieving kid has had the love of learning sucked right out of her and i blame the board of ed for district 99 for that find a solution please [Music] the next comment is from frank d vitale well i'm grateful that i live in a state that takes the pandemic seriously i hope the school board understands that the illinois public health officials prioritize keeping hospital icu beds open over keeping everyone virus free maintaining six feet of distance does not keep everyone

211safe it merely means that people will get the sick or get sick at a rate that our hospitals can treat furthermore i'd like to remind the school board that the district spends a lot of resources in supporting the young hearts for life program where we celebrate every time we find a young person with an undiagnosed heart problems there is a growing body of evidence that teens and persons of all ages wind up with serious long-term heart and lung problems even if they are asymptomatic because of these reasons i certainly support continuing fully remote learning those are all of the public comments that came in virtually thank you okay um did mrs swanson want to speak again what miss watson did you raise your hand to speak again i'm sorry she said she was joking oh

212i'm sorry i saw you yes i thought you want to speak again oh okay i'm sorry i just didn't like to i would just like to add you know i know it's frustrating i mean nobody nobody i don't think anybody believes that anything short of in-person education is really what all of our kids would want or deserve but i really want to commend administration because people are doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances incorrect data undoubt you know probably but it's all the only data we have so at the heart of this we have to keep our students safe and we all have to and and if we really want to get back to school in person and we really want to do things the best for our their students we really have

213to do the only things we know this is a novel virus but the things we have to do are well documented in the medical literature wearing masks staying staying home when you're sick staying staying six feet away it's what we've got and it's got to be done not only in school but outside of school in the community because short of a vaccine you know we can still reverse the tide of the virus and it's only by these concentrated efforts consistently and doggedly by all of us that we will so i just i have to throw that in as a nurse of 40 years who spends 10 hours a day working with patients with covent and in fact had one die today i'm telling you it is out there and it is not something to be

214trifled with i'm just i'm just giving myself an opportunity but the education system has not been shut down and i would say 240 deaths i don't want one of my children to be one of those deaths i agree i agree anybody else want to say anything before me go on okay moving on let's go to the um reports report on legislative education network of dupage there's been a couple emails this past week i could summarize but i think everybody has them if you if you don't have those lend emails let me know i'll forward them over to you thank you assistant um said uh accepted a gift of 500 face shields from the district 99 foundation so on behalf of sethe i would like to express a heartfelt thanks senset is in the process of

215its rolling opening uh september 28th was the target date however um it's obvious we're not going to make that target date and it will be october 6 that um to begin with hybrid instruction um let me see all staff are currently providing remote instruction there and there is the possibility of in-person related services most of sasa's staff are currently working from home but do have access to the administration center ppe kits have been prepared for staff and member districts have provided assistance with devices for students and administration and getting them to the students as soon as possible thank you julia a district 99 education foundation yes um we um we wanted to uh let faculty know that we're still doing um mini grants for things that they may need for their classrooms or or for

216remote learning any anything so please we're going to shorten the form so that they can turn it in faster for their department chairs and for the superintendent to [Music] look at before it comes to us and we are still taking money for the covid uh families in crisis those can be um sent to the um on the on the um foundation theater foundation was huge yeah yeah sorry and um then we also were trying to work on how we can do pizza wars remotely and we may be doing a coupon book or something to that nature and um we really wish we could be doing pete's wars in in real time but with the way things are we don't know and uh we just approved our mission vision and goals and our bylaws were approved

217so we are on the road i don't think i forgot anything did i no i think you got it all d99ef.org is the website yes thank you thank you thanks tara thanks hank um and uh illinois association school boards yeah um even though the that triple eye has been conference has been cancelled this year the the delegate assembly goes forward virtually so i have um a orientation virtual session i got to go through and another week or so and then then there's two discussion periods that'll take place virtually in october and then in november we'll have our actual delegate assembly but uh they've kind of broken it into some pieces so that we we're not trying to go back and forth with presentations and discussion during the actual assembly as much trying to get that

218stuff done ahead of time so so that's what i'll be involved in a little bit the next couple months i'll report back in but you know what's going on thanks mike uh upcoming board meetings october 5th 2020 we'll have a workshop at 6 30. i'm assuming it's here uh we're still two children to be determined and then october 19th we'll have our business meeting at 6 30 to be determined yeah we need a motion to we have no close session we need a motion to come out no we have no closed session we need a motion to adjourn i'm sorry so move cherry moves i'll suck at that motion mike seconds all those in favor aye aye aye aye all is opposed thank you all yo remember you