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001mike davenport here shirelle fuller here dan nicholas here terry pavich here rick pepinado joanna vazquez drexler president pledge allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we'll start with um an approval of minutes for the july 20th 2020 business meeting the july 27th 2020 special workshop meeting and the august 3rd 2020 workshop meeting with anthony mike thank you terry pavich aye mike davenport aye shirelle fuller aye dan nicholas aye rick pavinato aye joanna vazquez drexler and nancy kupka aye the minutes are approved next is the reception of visitors the meeting agenda includes two opportunities for comments from the audience do we have anybody waiting to comment uh no we receive no comments we receive no comments receive no comments okay then we'll

002move on to recommendations and reports of superintendent returning to school dr all right so to provide the board and our public on returning to school uh just to review this is the timeline up to this point um a couple of things have happened since we met the last time including new well specifically the most important part is new illinois department of public health uh guidelines that were released last wednesday uh excuse me either but maybe can we turn him up or come a little closer am i the only person having trouble hearing him i'm having trouble here tim can you get my mic up a little bit spin how's that any better can you hear me now no he's got to say a little more a little more can you hear me now i can

003hear you now all right okay thanks tim yeah thank you okay so last week uh on wednesday we received additional guidance from the illinois department of public health we had been told that the friday before that we would be receiving information and when that friday went by we had seen that there was new rules fire filed by the idph that i'll just explain in a second that we thought was going to turn over guidelines to the dupage county health department instead we got these surprising 4 pm guidelines two to two work days before school was going to start which is not enough time to work through and i'll explain that process in a second so we ended up going remote today's the first day of school and we'll work remote for a little while here

004and i'll explain that process later on this evening but it's kind of how we ended up where we're at so uh the changes that we're really factoring in here is that emergency rule uh the new guidelines that came out last wednesday which results in us having this week one modified schedule remote which is really to get the year kicked off get to know students get to set up expectations make sure that students can connect online and be up and and working and then for at least the next two weeks we'll be in the remote schedule um and we'll go uh through that then beyond week four is still to be determined we're still going to work towards in-person learning i mean that's the ultimate goal is to be able to do that but we're still

005awaiting additional illinois department of public health guidance including metrics and i'll walk through that process in a second here so this rule that i was talking about what it basically breaks down and says that the occurrence of an outbreak amongst our you know inside of one of our buildings is consistent with this clause 690.30 okay and then closure results in shifting to remote instruction as imposed to in-person instruction so the old laws and rules around pandemics talk about physically closing a school building the new rules talk about shifting from in-person learning to remote as we did heading into today if we look at this uh control of communicable diseases code that it references back here all right so there's the reference 690.30 c this is what 690.30 c says this is existing language around pandemics

006and outbreaks so except in an emergency which is the key those first three words are the important part this is what we need to find through metrics from somebody from some health organization whether that be the local health department or illinois department of public health this is what many board members including dr kupka have been asking for all summer i had a meeting in july to talk with isb about getting these metrics with senator curran we're still waiting on them but uh this is you know the idea was that uh closing schools or with this new law move or new rule moving to remote instruction is done in cooperation with the local health department okay so what what it breaks down to well i thought i had this screen up here there's the there's the

007rules so accept an emergency right we don't consider closing the school except for is recommended by the local health department okay this has been there for years okay so the new rule points to the old rule and in the end what we believed last week was that we were going to get these metrics that idph through getting this rule passed kind of told the local health departments come up with metrics to provide your schools last thursday morning i was in a meeting with the dupage county health department that had worked for the whole week with health departments around the region to put together these metrics and then we were informed about an hour after that meeting that those were not what's going to be released because illinois department of public health would be coming out

008with metrics okay so just feel like the the goal just keeps shifting around between people and those of us at the local level whether it's those of us that are superintendents or those in the dupage county health department still continue to get late unclear guidance from the state levels and and this is just what has continued to happen all summer and is continuing to happen now into this week so we believe that the local health department would be providing these metrics and guidelines they were prepared to but then we're told not to what we know all along is that no matter what happens with the metrics it's really up to local superintendents to make the call as to whether we're in person or remote we'd consult with the local health departments but the way we

009understand it it's still up to the local superintendents to determine this we could argue all night about whether that's the right call or not but that's where it says ultimately what happened was last week we didn't have any of this guidance to go on but instead we received this whole new set of guidelines that none of us expected to see there was no advanced notice we got at the same time that the public got it as has happened with state guidelines also these are the major changes that were in there but we really only had two days to implement them any of these guidelines require us to review the guidelines with our attorneys requires to put processes in place communicate them to our faculty and staff and have it in place and worked out before

010students get here two work days before students are going to come back it was not enough time to do the legal review to to do everything that i just outlined uh so really you know we have all these major changes we know that there's more coming we expect that sometime this week those metrics and additional idph guidelines are coming it's totally i can't open school for in person unless i know what the safety guidelines are to do so so we need this time to understand it to educate people the medical review the legal review of these kinds of things and to build protocols okay so just a quick overview this one out in the message to the community but just to review in case any board members have any questions about it this is really

011the just to narrow there was a lot of concerns in that document that we have but the key concerns to kind of just flip the switch for the administrative team here to say we can't come back in person are these so this old guideline that in close contact was 15 minutes at a time now it's 15 15 minutes over the course of an entire day in a high school with passing periods and buses and common area areas and classrooms activities occurring after school it's nearly impossible i don't know how we could ask any student to tell us who add up all the time you spent with people who did you spend 15 or minutes more with three days ago i mean it's just not likely that anybody's going to be able to track that we'll

012we'll look and see if there is a way of tracking that but we haven't we haven't sat down to even work through it because we've been working on just getting school started the next one is documentation of assigned seats taking photos of assembled classes so part of the whole person of bringing a whole purpose of bringing students back for in-person learning is so that they can move around and do things in the classroom and somewhat interact with one another i don't know how we track every time a student moves in a classroom and run a stopwatch for every time they're next to somebody different it's impossible yeah i mean yeah these are very difficult to me the next one was uh two confirmed cases of infections occurring within 14 calendar days of other individuals within

013the same classroom would be considered an outbreak so that would meet that criteria then to go from in-person to remote learning the challenge we have in the hybrid model is to meet all those other requirements of keeping people six feet apart we have all of these intricate schedules of a b and kids that are there on different days so just because a student is positive for kovid and was in a classroom now we have to sort out were they in the a group or the b group were they both at school at that same time were they out of school so every one of these is now a logistical challenge to work through to find out if it meets that criteria are they together on the same sports team are they you know where could

014that nexus be at school tracking that is not something that we had worked through up to this point then there's a whole part in diagnostic testing this new requirement about anybody who displays covid like symptoms while at school needs to get tested uh well right now testing is a challenge and turnaround is a challenge it's two to four days on average to get a result back uh if you can get a test this is a challenge going to be a challenge for families that want to send students to school but it's a major challenge for us trying to keep schools staffed that somebody's going to be out for for 10 days or when a result comes back but if a result doesn't come back for four days they're still out for at least those four

015days you know it starts to become very challenging to staff a building this way and i might be wrong but they're asking for rt pcr tests they're not asking for a screening test i think in the guidelines which means that it takes even longer yeah i just know from the i don't know the intricacies of the testing i just know dupage county health department said best case scenario is two days in getting a return um so this one is if you have covered like symptoms but you don't have covid you still need a doctor's note saying that you don't have covid and that same negative test result this for some of our families will be a major challenge and for some of our staff doing that is a major challenge if you add on top

016of that if you have reoccurring system symptoms that are covered like you need to go through that same process but then have a negative test on a weekly basis to return to school i don't know how i'm going to staff a building with with that especially if you're waiting four days for a result every time you go in even if somebody tried to do this i don't know how it's manageable for any individual to go through that level of testing on a reoccurring basis how many weeks would this go on i mean if as long as covet exists so once you once you've had covet-like symptoms correct so if you have i now have to get a test every week for now till who knows when so who knows when so if you have seasonal

017allergies and you're showing covid-like symptoms you need a doctor's note that says you have covet-like symptoms or you have seasonal allergies and then weekly you need to get tested to make sure that that those symptoms aren't due to covid they're due to your seasonal allergies so seasonal allergies is going to knock out a third of our the student body has allergies from september so according to this guideline the only way they can participate in school is to have this doctor's note in a weekly negative test if they have ongoing covet-like symptoms even financially i would think that's going to get disastrous correct this is a pretty big burden on any individual staff or student i all right i'll let you finished going through all these guidelines and i have some questions this extends now to

018also household members so if a sibling comes home and has coveted like symptoms or a staff member comes home and their child has coveted like symptoms or spouse they are now quarantined for 14 calendar days you cannot you must be quarantined until an alternative diagnosis is made or a negative result is received test result is received so we're in that same kind of this delay so you could start to see for students it's going to be really difficult for teachers because you're gonna have kids on these rotating calendars of when they can leave when they can return you know i have six kids today i might have seven tomorrow and then three the next day you know there's gonna be in in-person learning you start to get to this is not going to be a

019quality experience for anyone if kids aren't coming back on a regular basis if teachers can't come back on a regular basis it it just becomes not a great experience for anybody um so this is when the administrative team took a look at these as they came out um we were already concerned about what the metrics might say about returning which we we still haven't seen yet but seeing these things we realized very quickly that this would be a challenge to me i discussed them with the dupage county health department after having a discussion with them i decided that the most prudent thing to do with two days before school started was to just immediately shift to remote learning and then before i take questions on these this is a common question that i've seen on

020social media and via email is that these are just guidelines that the state is providing but these rules when illinois department of public health provides quote unquote guidelines to a school they're not optional right they're the health experts i am not i have to assume that everything that they're telling us is designed to keep students and staff members safe that it's for no other reason than that for that reason to protect this the district and taxpayers not only just to keep them health healthy but to protect us from liability you know we don't want to end up being sued over this well first of all we want somebody to get sick and we don't want somebody also to come after us with a legal claim and cost the district and taxpayers a bunch of resources

021and time as a result of that so the way we look at this is that shoulds from illinois department of public health to come shalls right we must follow these guidelines these guidelines are essentially mandates and finally we still expect to receive additional guidance in the coming days we expect that illinois department of public health will release these metrics that we've been asking for all summer and i'll explain what i think will be in those metrics based on the conversations i've had with the health department in a moment we'll get additional legal guidance on interpreting the guidelines so yes we must follow them but our attorneys always provide us you know here's what it means to follow these things and to protect your students and staff we also know that there's additional guidance coming soon

022on data collection what we need to collect around students and staff members that are ill and then how those metrics will be used in determining if we can return to in-person learning and then finally some guidance on how superintendents are supposed to use all of this information to determine if we can and should transition back to in person from remote or once we're in in person go back to remote these are all things i hope you can hear i know i have a mask on but from the tone of my voice that have frustrated great me greatly over the summer and especially over the last week that is schools across the state are trying to return students to school we don't have superintendents don't have the information that we need to make those decisions in

023a safe and timely manner so mike you said you had some questions yeah um so it would seem to me that the department of public health issues guidelines for people to adhere to i've it it almost seems to me though that they've issued guidelines that are impossible to adhere to i mean i i i i'm not i mean and i just tell you i mean this was just devastating for so many families i mean we we so many heartfelt conversations we had here this board our staff trying to do the right thing for our students trying to find a way to balance the risk with the reward and we've we finally came to a consensus a unanimous consensus and uh then i have just all yanked away by these guidelines is it was this is

024devastating um i fully agree with the decision i mean i i don't i don't see how we could have decided anything differently because these shoulds are shells but i don't i mean is it even is it even worth our time now to try to try to figure out how to comply with any of these guidelines knowing that i mean just on their on the face it seems like a waste of our time um that's a fair question mike but what typically happens is this guidance comes out is that all the guidance comes out then there's webinars and meetings with the experts so we can better understand because maybe there's something in here that i that our team is not interpreting and superintendents across dupage county are not interpreting correctly so this isn't just you no

025you've been talking to once this came out the last four districts in dupage high school districts in dupage county that were going to a hybrid model we all were forced to move to remote as a result of this now you know hopefully the additional guidance will come out this week then hopefully we'll have webinars and those kinds of things where we can talk with the experts to better understand it through that sometimes we we find like oh well you know we said this but if you do this there's a pathway and this is how we spent our whole summer working to get to the point of the hybrid model would be okay here's the guidelines our team would sit down and talk through okay we think we could meet that by doing this we'd go

026to the experts and say all right if we do this thing can we bring kids back yes that'll work okay we'd go to legal and talk through legally we're protecting our students are we protecting for liability in this is our policy correct our instructions correct to protect us legal would sign off on it right then we eventually get to the board and have the board sign off on that that that for every new set of guidelines that's three weeks worth of work right you know so um i don't know you know we need three or four weeks to work through this this unfortunately it didn't come over the summer when administrators had time without students and staff here now we have to balance this work with students and staff trying to educate everybody at the

027start of the year so hank sorry so you know i'm the biggest one of the biggest supporters of a hybrid but to be fair with these new metrics and to be fair to our students and to be fair to the teachers and the staff i don't know how you can plan for a return this semester i just don't know if it's possible you know once we get new id ph guidelines once we get new guidelines from dupage once we work through all the legal issues you're talking a minimum of five to six weeks from now before they can go back at that point you're nine weeks into the school year with what six weeks to go before winter break and and the teachers sitting there not knowing whether or not they're going to be in

028classroom or out of class i just i mean i i share your frustration it's just very frustrating but at this point at what point do you would you recommend um and this is going to sound bad i don't mean it this way but i just don't have a better expression at what point you pull the plug in the semester with wanting to go back to school yeah that's i i share that same question here is when when i read through all this i almost felt like they should just make a call at this point and maybe they have nobody said because how does the administration keep wallowing through this week after week you know because now we're actually have started school right so yeah i'd like at least the upper i'd like at least the

029opportunity to see what the new guidelines are this week see if after they've seen this and seen how schools have had to respond to it if the you know if sometimes clarifications come out you know there's different stuff that comes along and give us you know another week or so here to see what the next round of guidance is and then from there make the decision especially because inside of that will be the metric pieces which i'll kind of explain what i understand those will work like in a second so i'd rather not throw in the towel today or this week i'd rather get the week started we we already were planning on remote for a couple of weeks give it time for the dust to settle on this and see if it if it's

030realistic no i was just gonna say for instance the one about going from 15 minutes to 15 minutes a day 15 minutes at one time to 15 minutes a day is there any explanation that's provided how we went from that measurement that metric to the other metric no the the guidelines did not come with rationale that's why because that's such a drastic change on the guideline it is a drastic change many of these are drastic changes okay this one uh terry i can't can you speak another one i'm sorry it still doesn't uh doesn't sound like it's can you hear me that yeah yeah i know it's hard to talk but um and it doesn't address that when the regular flu season comes into play because um you know all of those symptoms are very

031similar to the flu season symptoms and you know that's going to put us right back where we started from and that could start uh middle of october so you know that doesn't give us a whole lot of time in between yeah i'm really sharing uh dan's feeling on this i i mean you know the saying fool me once you know shame on you fool me twice shame on me i don't trust the state i don't i don't trust i don't trust that if they if we could even submit our plan to them and have them approve the plan i don't trust that they would you know we'll get right close to it again and they'll yank it from us i don't think there's some sort of nefarious role on the state i mean these guidelines

032frankly except for the 15 cumulative minutes are no different than a business or even a hospital for reason for uh healthcare workers the difference is the setting because it's easier to manage in business or even in a hospital sure it's almost a possible advantage in a conversation like a school right so why don't they just come out and say in those settings it's just not possible to do it your school should be closed because mike i think in some of the smaller schools it is possible because then you would lose like one class okay out of a school right in a smaller elementary school district sure this might be absolutely possible but in a big school district you know we were talking tomorrow we should have been bringing back almost 2 000 people to this

033building yes when you talk about the number of contacts people have and the number of staff it takes to run that setting yeah it just you can see how this falls apart here right if you're in a small school district of you know same teacher with the same group of kids in the same classroom all day long you might be able to manage that but in a big huge high school like ours these become too weighted well they put some metrics around the size of this yes they could have done no these are our guidelines if you are this big this big yo i don't you also have to think about the community so if you're in a school in the middle of illinois that is at a lower number of cases for 100 000

034it's different than we're currently at 91 or 93. so there's just a lot of factors it's a move and it's moving well one of my one of my um one of my things i was thinking about through our whole deliberation and uh back in late june late july when i said i was leaning more towards remote one of the reasons for that was because i saw an inherent dependability in that you know there is a predictability everyone knows what we're doing we know that's not you know they can't take that away from us and we can plan on it and everybody can just wrap their arms around that know that's what's going on and and plan plan accordingly and at at this point um you know so i'm i'm okay with if we wanna another

035week or two or what have you and see what else the state comes back with but at some point here i'm i'm more comfortable committing to committing to something for the rest of the semester and just working on that one of the items in our in our board meeting tonight our you know goals in in you know the fact that we're not working on so many other things right now and so when we talk about weighing the risks and the benefits and all in everything that we're doing right now you know i'm i'm concerned about how much we're losing in terms of uh our educational planning and in reaching and achieving those goals because we're we're we're working on this you know we're building on quicksand here and and you're going to come up with

036another brilliant plan the last plan was brilliant i mean i i think i think our hybrid plan probably is a model for any anybody any other high school of our size to potentially use but knowing that we could come up with an adjusted plan and then have new guidelines come out and another couple weeks after that and then lose it all again that's what i'm afraid of is is it this constant changing and i i get that some of it is evolving right we have you know more information more data but at some point i think we just need to accept that that's the reality that we're living in and uh and and uh and just say hey we're gonna commit to remote for the rest of the semester hank at what point do you

037think you would be at what point should we be looking for that recommendation from you for the rest of the semester is it three weeks is it four weeks yeah i'd say the week after labor day we should know what we're thinking for that at least the short term through september so when is our next board meeting september 17th okay for probably the rest of the semester right because you should have some interpretation of the data maybe some new guidance that we can say yes we can work with it and maybe put a plan together or no at this point considering that at that point we're four weeks five weeks in the school that we should make a decision so i'm just trying to get you to a point where we could know that at

038that point we should be able to you know meet some kind of you know at some point yeah i'd also like to give the team an opportunity to work through what special circumstances it's still appropriate to bring students back we're still planning on following through with athletics and activities i mean those are smaller groups they're unique cohorts of people where it's easier to track and and follow these kinds of guidelines that are going on than what we have with a full return to school in the hybrid model so we'll continue to work through what those smaller group settings are that might still make sense and labor day is what the fourth i'm sorry today's labor day is the fourth labor day is seven the second the seventh so we'll be one weekend so hank um

039you're thinking that these guidelines would be okay to be used for t99 and for special education because that's more of a one-on-one type situation you know is that gonna really be a problem for us to meet their education so t99 is starting remotely and as they evaluate how they might be able to work through these in that setting we have to be careful when we use the term special education because there's students across a wide range of experiences within special education so um no i mean that's what our team needs time to work through is to figure out what scenarios still fit within these guidelines where we can maintain program uh programmatic uh instruction and which ones are just out of bounds won't work within these new things i just don't know that yet we

040need you know we immediately switched to just trying to get the school year up and running remotely i don't know if you've seen the pictures but ed and janice and their teams have literally thousands of boxes lined up and they're starting to pack those so that students can get their materials i mean they've been working non-stop to get all of those things pulled together so i mean it's shifting gears and focus right now we got to focus on that once we get the gear established up and running we can start talking about what kind of in-person might work and by then hopefully we'll have the rest of the guidelines the full picture to work from i think having a date like the 14th where we can let students let parents let faculty let everybody know

041you know i think that's i think that's a fair thing that gives us enough time to do that one goal [Music] well i also want to say that as much as i've lost a lot of faith in in leadership from above i have a hundred percent confidence in yours and in our team and i i think i think you've done an outstanding job this summer and and to get us to this point here um we've been very transparent and i know that that brought with it a lot of you know a lot of people getting to to see things and learn things as it was happening and it brought criticism along the way and comment and maybe made things a little more difficult but this i think you know our our team's done a great

042job hank and i i wanted to say that tonight all right so to just review a couple of things so this week is this week one modified schedule students aren't meeting in the full remote schedule yet right we're following that same modified schedule we would have followed this week to get to know our students all right so we're really focused on building relationships with students getting them set up into routines getting them their resources you know and getting the year started and then next week and the weeks after that all right well here it is you've seen it it's up on the website and then for the next two weeks uh oh i didn't change the line underneath we're always working on establishing relationships but uh then week two and three we work on establishing

043that remote learning schedule and making sure that that that works and is effective and that's uh in this more block style schedule with access periods in the middles of the day so students can get help when they need it so that's where they'll be for the next couple of weeks so returning to school considerations we talked about a few of these so these are things that we'll consider uh between now and september 14th you know how to meet these guidelines what those additional guidelines are in the metrics you know especially i expect that some of those metrics are going to be built around community outbreak and what that looks like in our overall community around dupage and kane county and also within our own school district so in the meeting many meetings that we've had

044over the last week around metrics these are things that we expect might be included in these this isn't by any means i'm saying that they'll be there but these are kind of terms and concepts that we've had heard tossed around in in all of our meetings with health leaders so the idea of incident rate so that's how many per 100 000 per day or per week type of metrics uh how many covid like illness hospital admissions that there are in your area a huge one is diagnostic testing turnaround all right as we talked to the health department they continue to tell us the fact that a student or a staff member that appears to have kovid can't know within 24 hours if they truly have it because then when you get to the point if

045it's four days later and now you're trying to truly contact trace it's too late right you can't remember all of that stuff by that time and as you've seen to get people back in a timely fashion we need under 24 hour turnaround if not quicker on these results and then what are those individualized school metrics that we're going to be tracking and what other localized conditions would be in place that would be factored into this so what that means is if there's community metrics that say what pick your whatever number it is but it's an outbreak in a couple of long-term care facilities that are driving the numbers up it's not necessarily in the population of students you're serving the health department will factor those in as we discuss is it appropriate to be closing

046schools or you know moving schools to remote learning if we were in in person so uh as i mentioned all of these remain with the superintendent in consultation with the health department and they would be making recommendations that it's okay to come back in person [Music] if or the metrics seem to indicate that right or they indicate that you should not be it should be fully remote or it should be somewhere in between we believe the metrics right now are pointing to somewhere in between which is why we're remote for instruction but we're still allowing athletics and activities in some shape or format to be here if the metrics get so bad we might have to cease those activities as well or if the metrics get better maybe we can open things up more but

047we're still waiting to see what those metrics actually are this is what we've talked about one of the key things that i've learned in my discussions with the health experts over the last couple of weeks you've seen the bullets at the top before but the last bullet is new and what we've come to understand is all of the safety measures that we've put in place inside of our schools are only effective to a point if community spread is too great in our community our safety measures will no longer be effective and a great analogy or a way of describing it that we've come up with with the health department is kind of the idea of your airbags your airbags in your car are there and they're built to keep you safe up to a certain

048speed but there's a threshold where if you're going too fast your airbags don't work for you any longer so if you're going 40 50 60 even 80 miles an hour your airbags are going to be safe and help keep you safe but if you're doing 125 down the highway well your airbags aren't going to do so much for you and that's the idea of community spread so with all the ppe and safety measures and social distancing and hand washing if there is just too much covet in your community those measures get less and less effective you know another analogy we use is like a hockey goalie right you could have the best goalie in the world and they could stop every shot on goal but if there's two guys shooting on goal your goalie is

049going to get less effective and if there's 3 or 4 or 10 or 15 eventually pucks are going to get into the net and as your community spread gets greater there's more shots on goal and it's more likely that one's going to get through and somebody's going to get infected right so and this is what nancy's been saying all along but you know it's been made more clear to us the effectiveness of these measures in a school setting early in the summer isb and idph many superintendents believed that as long as we were following these things community spread didn't matter right that these measures would keep you safe in a school setting regardless of how much covid was present in your community or at least they'd be safer in your school than they would be

050in your community but it's becoming more and more apparent in these conversations with the health experts that there's a threshold that it's no longer safe to bring students back to school and those are the metrics that we're waiting to receive a couple more things for you here so here's the ongoing challenges as i see them availability of testing the availability of students with 10 days and 14 day quarantines and those kinds of things ongoing symptoms the availability of staff for those same reasons the fact that we have new guidelines we know are coming and unknown metrics that are out there and that the rate of community spread definitely will impact our ability to come back in person for either small groups or large groups so the best thing that the community this is what the

051health department keeps telling us if the numbers go the other direction like they were in june early june we should have everybody back at school following the hybrid plan they said you know dupage county health department at least is would be very comfortable with students coming back the more that the numbers keep ticking up like they have been recently the less comfortable they get all right any other final questions on this topic all right our next item is 2021 school goals and as mike alluded to earlier this is usually the board meeting where you get to see all of those and i have none for you our goal all summer has been to try to get students back to school in a healthy and safe way regardless of whether it's in person or remote so

052that's all we've been working on once we get settled down and school gets settled we'll start looking at more long-term goals we're still continuing the things that we have been doing like our equity work our work around curriculum developments professional development all of those things our teachers are learning more faster than they ever had before because of the situations that we're in we have plenty of goals in which our district is going to continue to improve but we have not sat down and thought long term beyond that at this point we hope to be able to settle down and do that soon and then we'll start working on those and present them to the board including some long-term planning that was originally on the agenda for this year was to begin planning for a strategic

053planning process i still hope to be able to do that in the spring otherwise if board members have individual things they'd like for us to focus on or investigate this year please reach out to me and sometime in september i'll be meeting with the administrative team to start thinking beyond getting the school year started uh what we need to be focused on and sometime probably middle of the year we'll bring you a plan for those goals for the rest of the year and then through the summer and heading into the next school year so hank quick question and i don't know if it's necessarily in goals but i didn't know where to ask it sure what's the status of this year's student board members i think this year more than any other year it's really

054important we have the perspective of the students on the board and i know that that was delayed for a while but what's the status of that utter janus so hopefully sometime in september we'll have them up and going all right next topic is certificate and excellence in financial reporting this year is the 21st consecutive year that mark and his team have been recognized for excellence in financial reporting every year they get this nice plaque and we are running out of spaces to put all of these plaques so julie got to work on a project earlier this year and went out and got a brand new plaque there we go that has now on here 20 of the 21 well i i think or maybe it has all 20 all 21 on here now so and

055we have room for more mark so don't put up now um but uh mark uh is also been recognized a long time ago the monarch award which is an award that recognizes the top csbo in illinois he was supposed to receive that in the middle of kovid when this all started in the spring it was delayed till the fall but i think the board and i hope the community recognized that in mark we have one of the absolute best controllers and business officials probably in the country here uh within district 99 uh this type of recognition you know 21 straight years of this i joked his department can finally drink now you know they they've gotten that old i mean that that's uh that's a long string of doing it right uh and and great

056work on behalf of the taxpayers and the citizens of our district so mark thank you for all of your hard work thank you thank you mark thank you and giree is our bouncer out the hallway she's part of that team as well [Applause] that's that's something it's it's a team that does this and it's um it's drea is a big part of it and the hr department every department has to pull the other data to get this thing updated so it's a good good team project for us so mark you get to work with jim to figure out where to put this okay it's about 90 pounds and there's some open you've got some open spots that's good so you still got work to do that'd be great thank you all right so with that

057being said we'll transition into the tentative budget yeah in spite of getting the certificate the certificate of excellence is really in reporting it's it's putting together a document in the right format so that you can be compared to other schools but also to you can fully assess where a district is it doesn't mean that your district's in good financial shape doesn't doesn't say that it just as you can someone reading the report can determine what shape you're in in a fair way and it's done in with all the the international standards actually so um we've got a tentative budget here to to look at and in the 26 years of my being here it's been the toughest year and hardest year to even know where we're going with the education delivery model and putting some

058room in the budget for for those things that may come up more things that come up there you'll see some nurses that we could possibly contract for when we bring kids back into the buildings for support in that area a lot of little details like that are built into it but i'm going to hit the highlights um the the first thing i'd like to do is catch the revenues um crap and and you see right in the middle of it there's a nice green bond proceeds in fact if you can see that 10 million dollar bonds this is a working cash bonds that a couple of months ago is we started to realize this was going to be a problem we came out of last year and we were down in a lot of key

059revenues if you look at that column other than the property taxes which um one segue here is that property taxes are are this is why we use property taxes to fund education they they are stable in our economy there's we will have them if you have a an economy like hawaii for example is a perfect example on the other side they don't have a property tax they just have sales taxes but now people aren't going to hawaii there's no sales tax there's little money for schools so there's this having the stability of the property taxes is is key for us to be able to deliver a quality program to our students and be consistent um just about everything else is is negative that we can control and over you know we came off the 2008

060recession and thought okay maybe we can start to build back economy was coming back and then now it's it's being crushed on us again the last quarter of last year and the projection in this budget we have 2.8 i'm sorry yeah 2.8 million dollars of reduction in local revenues interest food services registration fees other local and it's not really a reduction in registration fees and the amount but we expect more waivers so they think they'll be waivers of that amount just because of what's happening in the county with unemployment and we're guessing at some of these numbers we don't know how bad they'll be but we're trying to protect and get the best document we can in terms of the projection for our budget um so other than property taxes general state aid and federal

061aid are both up um aid really is just there's always we always talk about special education transportation and that the money that we spend out this year we get reimbursed in the following area well we had a really big year last year with special education transportation and so that's what that 250 or so thousand is that's all one line item pretty much it's pretty much the special education reimbursement that we expect and that's only if the state keeps it at the same proration level of about 83 percent um so they give us about 83 percent of what we spend in that area um and the condition that the state's in right now we don't know but that we're taking a hopeful they rarely do cut special ed though it's usually the last thing they cut

062from the budget in in the last probation that they make so we're optimistic that they might still do that um the federal is up only because we we did get or we have a grant or an allocation i guess of the federal covet money to our district the first one was about 308 thousand dollars and we're hoping to get some more this next year in addition we haven't received that 300 000 yet but so it's part of it's built into this year's budget and we also expect possibly another another round if they get to some kind of agreement politically is that federal money is that that's the federal money yes that's the federal bump so those are the two big things and and the revenue side other than taxes that look good everything else as

063i said 2.8 million dollars um has been hard and we were hoping to turn this budget around but um a few months ago we started talking about several months ago we started talking about working cash bonds because the district has always had some safety nuts it's always been one of the safety nets that i've known we could go to in a pinch the second one is more drastic and that would be actually to go back to the cash basis and start recognizing early taxes but that would be that would be the start of a downward spiral and so we don't have many more safety nets left other than maybe just another round of going through all the departments and trying to set a target value to cut expenditure side and try and do without and

064change and do things differently maybe slow some hiring do some different things that that will all impact the program we deliver and so we're trying not to do that right now we have when it's a september meeting i'm going to be bringing a five-year projection um which will show that in two years our our debt service transfers going to the from the operating funds to the debt service fund to pay for things that we didn't want to issue taxes for those will fall off and it's a two million dollar piece right there so we have that bright thing going on in the future we're some hope that we don't spend all the expenditures when i get to those we have some pads in there maybe we won't have to spend all that but um so

065we will the the real test will be the five-year projection where this comes out right now the cpi is trending towards a one percent um but that might be optimistic we don't know where we're going to be we still have a an election coming up in november that could change things too so there's a lot of pieces a lot of things on the table there's a lot of things spinning around so i'm just going to come through really quickly on the expenditure side sally's up to a total of three percent about about one percent of that 1.7 of that was for existing ongoing staff just the net amount after retirements if you know we were giving everybody just about 2.3 because that was the cpi factor for this year and it's up it's not as

066high as that because we have retirements that came up and offset some of that in existing categories and we have some new fte at 1.3 for any new fte um some will be needed because of the delivery model but so we have some room in there determining um until that's determined let me get to some notes here so i don't miss anything big i think the operating expenses is is expected increased by 2.6 percent or 2.8 percent overall purchase services i just discussed salaries purchase services are getting increased by 187 000 that's where we we have some 140 000 of that is for additional for nurses if we go into delivery with kids here when we do that hopefully and supplies well that's really where the big hit has been but a lot of that

067can be covered by covid which is on the revenue side we are still kind of figuring out what what the right amount of supplies are in some areas there would be some situations where we actually need full gown covering for some of the staff members that work maybe at the transition 999 t99 center where they're helping kids do daily tasks and daily things like toiletry and things like that so they want full full gown to for that then it's not you know they're not tremendously expensive but we're still trying to figure out what the right balance is for all these things um and and maybe some of we won't even know until kids are there and we we learn more about what what we really need on a daily basis that we never thought of

068before capital outlay is going to go actually down by 434 thousand we are going to lease some of the technology for some of the internet background and some of the things that out here uh we talked about that when we talked about a wintrust lease we had approval for that to lease some technology and also the um the chromebooks for this year so so we're seeing it in smaller pieces and capital outlay we'll need the lease amounts rather than the entire amount of the outlay and we had four four activity buses that we pushed off from last year and got the vendor to push them through to this year so we hope we get to use them you know because some of them were in pretty bad shape and so they needed to be replaced

069but we hope to that we can actually use them this year tuition expense is going gonna go up 3.8 percent five percent is the number that we've been told by our uh liaison schools where we're sending kids on a special needs student sign up for tuition on a tuition basis and they're they're saying five percent is their anticipated cost partly because of the same issues we're dealing with their additional costs of of working with the students and nursing and things like that that are required in their facilities but the actual count right now it looks like it's going to drop a little bit so instead of a full 5 increase it's about a 3.8 percent increase and that's a very conservative number meaning that we're anticipating that most kids that are placed will be there

070for the entire year that's not quite going to happen so i think we'll even come in better than 3.8 unless we get a new influx of more kids so and um that's it for the expenditures hey mark before you get off of expenditures um sure the only thing i didn't see in the notes that i would just want to understand a little bit better is what is the impact on our busing costs um with you know the potential remote or at least the first three weeks remote and if we go longer term but do we get any type of savings from our our bus we'll get 20 savings but here's here's the deal they're they're really in a tough situation right now because it's possible on the table it's possible we won't have any busting

071all year if things are made if the state changes our mind or the thresholds change and it's like okay it's like you're saying is the first semester already gone we don't know what this pandemic is going to do we we had a meeting with i had a meeting with the bus company along with our two center district the the business managers and last year they were they they accepted 40 percent of what the normal fee is to try and keep their drivers in place and at least have a majority if not all of the drivers needed to run our routes if we just picked up the phone and said we need them next week they would they would do their best to get all the drivers they need the reason that they were able to

072do it so low some districts paid 80 percent last year hinsdale i think were paid 80 last year um we held out for 40 because a lot of their staff were took unemployment and they they so they were on unemployment and could be called back pretty quickly that's running out and so they're not able to do that anymore and so now we're feeling the full 80 likelihood we haven't finished negotiations but that's probably where we'll be with the transportation and that's only we're going to get a list of the drivers that are assigned to us so that we know who they are and so that if we flip the switch and we say we need them that they better not have been unemployed for the last three months when that happens so we're going to

073have a verification of of what we're paying for so we're going to pay for 40 of their overhead costs of leasing the terminal that's not an owned company it's a leased terminal leasing the buses so all those things they're fixed costs that they've got to keep paying to keep them in business and then 40 another 40 up to that amount for the drivers to keep the drivers in place so that's a that's a and it pains me to to to pay for that for not getting any service but it also means if we want to really get kids back in the building at some point even if we do the hybrid method we need busing we need to get the kids that are out more than a mile and a half to get them in

074so we do need to i feel we do need to keep them how will that 80 percent number change if three four weeks from now the determination is made either by us or by the state that fully remote for the semester yeah if if it's done for the year we'll we will stop it i mean we'll stop it for this year because there's there's no way it wouldn't work even if we kept if they kept them through may they're not going to keep them over the summer and and as well so they'd have to start from scratch the next year i think and we'll have to work through that because if we're still able to bring back some kind of programming for athletics or activities or small groups of students coming in we still would

075have some busing needs so you know this is some of the stuff we still need to work through as we get the rest of the guidelines and you know there's still work to do here [Music] okay you conceivably need more buses than less yeah we could need more rather than less if we end up bringing students back and especially right with the protocol if it's like x 16 kids per bus or something you know reduced to your right you could end up with needing more for athletics or activities some of the earlier guidelines we saw this summer were 11 students on a bus and if our routes are capped at that size then you're going to need a lot of buses to even just bring in small groups of students rather than all of your

076students so do we have any feeling about the the solvency of the busing company they're the largest in the world uh which also means they're probably hurt more than anybody in the world right now but um that's why at least in illinois this has been the common you're somewhere between 40 and uh 80 last year and now everybody's getting pushed up higher um it's it's possible they go out but it's nothing we can really determine at this point if we we're doing what we can to try and keep this terminal open and uh they may be having some other terminals to close back so we'll figure if this one's solvent at least maybe they'll keep it running yeah i think there's a balancing act here right absolutely and because part of what we would be

077paying for is further you know there's there to be available buses down the road when we need them sure if if they go out of business we can't we can't do it without busing the the other big expenditure that's in the in the contracted service is food service and they're having a worse problem right so we are working with them to see how much how we can keep their program running at the lowest level and doing that through the pre-reduced lunches to to students and doing whatever whatever we can to get those lunches out and getting them preparing those lunches for us and helping us and we deliver them so how is that working mark i mean are they are they um is there some transparency are they showing us their books that sort of

078thing to justify i mean they're they're definitely i mean we're they're not gonna there's no no fad in what we're paying them actually we're paying them for actual sandwiches or we're telling them bill is for the we want to keep them solvent and yeah they have virtually no revenue other than what they make for us and those sandwiches for free and reduced and it was it was a fairly large volume of activity when we included every student under the age of 22 because that was and it was didn't it was not uh requiring it to be free and reduced it was anybody in the community well they haven't renewed that piece and so now it's right now we're looking just at the free and reduced group and uh we have approximately eleven hundred twelve hundred

079kids that fit that that you know that uh situation and we we need to get a good number of those at least half i would hope to keep them viable to keep some staff going here but i know they're making cuts and it's we may not see the same paces but hopefully they can get up and running when we need them but that would be not as hard as the drivers the bus the buses have to go through a cdl program it's a two or three you know it's at least a month wait for for them to get up to speed and before i i forget um related comment to busing our buses that we've purchased that we're not using right now the activities and and this would go for any of our vehicles i

080know is is jim got something going where those do get used every now and then just so that we don't incur damage from things sitting and not getting used um so they're gonna be brake problems other mechanical things we'll maintain our fleet yeah yeah and you mean just to keep them running so that there's no yeah from sitting yeah and actually we have a mechanic we have a mechanic on staff in the district and so this is when he makes up all the repairs on it and fixes the brakes and you know i know that protests themselves they need to be driven every now and then yeah just yeah take them around the block that sort of thing so we'll give them the staff to take home if that's the recommendation tank will be driving

081the minibus well the only problem is we forget that you're driving one of those when you're driving to a burger king and you take the top off it's a convertible um operating funds yeah so let's go to operating funds and that's this is the story that's you know this is why the 10 million dollars is in there and actually uh how how sad is this that the 10 million dollars with the current interest rates we'd probably earn 75 000 worth of interest if we didn't need it at all all throughout the year it's just they're really ridiculously low rates um but using that 10 million dollars and assuming we're successful with that ref that request non-referendum requests we would be able to stabilize our funds pretty quickly and probably through the course of the year

082if you look at the ad fund we did some shaping around back in between the funds in terms of allocating revenue so that would we would keep the other funds like the building fund transportation and imrf positive at the end of the year but the ed fund is where you know it all falls that's the biggest fund and that's where the largest negative would i'm just kind of condensing it for you uh to see where it is but we might be able to transfer somebody from transportation for instance or even operations of maintenance and not tap the working cash but ultimately we would probably tap the working cash for at least a couple million dollars this first year and my goal with the five-year five-year forecast would be to try and recover that that money

083that we're losing these years hope that the economy comes back hope that we get some normal interest years because just the weakening of those revenue streams the local revenue streams is really what got us here and and this that can come back we would really be good and i think there will be something that we normalize in our hopefully in our economy um that's a did i think i talked about everything on that piece the others did last hold on i do want to point out i don't think mark has have you ever brought a negative balance negative budget to the board i've never brought a negative to the board so 26 years he's never brought a negative budget this tells you what you know what kind of times we're in and also you know

084when you look at this you have the ability this this board and this community has the ability to tap into this 10 million dollars of working cash bonds that's 10 million dollars of 30 million dollars that's available to the board to use in the case of an emergency i think that these current times fit that definition there are many school districts that do not have this safety net to tap into so the reason we have that is the work that mark and his team have done for 26 years to build up this kind of capacity in the district so that when this once in a lifetime scenario comes along we're not in a spot where we are offering less services to our community we're in a spot where our community needs more services from us

085and we're able to offer those and i know a lot of people would look at a you know two plus million dollar deficit as oh my goodness what is the district done wrong with their finances what what the the citizens here in this community have gotten is unprecedented times in so many different ways right now and the ability for a school district to amp up services to meet the needs of the community because of decades of good sound fiscal management where other school districts are looking at how to do cuts we're looking at how do we support kids in the best possible format the way i look at this this is why people move into a community like downers grove and district and woodridge and district 99 community is because when these time these times

086come this is the level of service that we can offer our families and uh i think that this is not this is a success story of the finances in this district this is not a negative story of the finances that we have in our district and uh you know we always say that those kinds of funds like working cash bonds are rainy day funds or our case of emergency brake glass well it's raining and we need to break the glass and that's why we're we're going out and issuing those and as a result our students will be well served and i believe that mark will probably bring you a five-year forecast uh in another month like what he said where we'll get right back to that same level of solvency pretty quickly because of all

087of the other things that he's put in place to make sure that we're in a good good position so thanks well you know and actually we still have that exhibit up yeah this is an easy way easier way for you to see what's going on the gold line or yellow line that's at the at the bottom it's tentative budget totals the revenues of 105 million include that 10 million dollars of bond issue if you take that away it's roughly 95 9.5 i'm sorry 95 million dollars and and actually the revenues compared to expenditures without that 10 million revenues exceed expenditures by 300 000 so we're a little bit still in the green now the the loss comes from the next column where we're transferring money from our operating funds to pay for large capital things

088that we chose to do and that really were fantastic but knowing that okay if if rainy day comes we have the support of the working cash fund wouldn't have been able to do that if we didn't have that safety net for us to operate and the positive thing about the working cash and that that's what the debt service extension-based type of bond is it doesn't increase the tax rate it keeps it from falling okay but it doesn't increase the tax rate there's a there's a debt service limit that in 19 2004 i think it was 1994 as well um came into play that we were spending about this amount for debt service for working cash bonds at that time and that the amount was frozen for about 20 years and just recently they made it

089so that it will grow now by inflation but it was the same two million dollars for 20 years and and now we can it's it's gone i mean it's not it's it's available it's opened up again because we've been paying paying it off and been using it for different things in fact there was years when it was zero but we issued some life safety bonds and some other things like that and we use that without increasing the tax rate to individuals so it's it's not letting it fall i don't want to say it's not an impact to a taxpayer but it's it's not something new that a taxpayer is going to take on and if they were actually two million dollars is is about one-fourth of what our referendum was and it was 65 dollars

090for the referendum so it's somewhere in the 15 to 16 dollar per 300 of market value of a house so don't drop off their taxes that won't drop off it's in how many years not a lot of money they actually we're federating it over we won't see any of this impact until about three years out and then it goes from three to seven years so it's really spread over the next seven years is when we'll be repaying um for these bonds bringing the principal and issues on the bonds so it's a very nominal impact and it's a very smart safety net we could have gone 20 million dollars i think with it but if we use 10 million we can still go back to that same authority and so i i'd rather force this to

091live with just this amount right now and still have some more safety net going into the next you know decade or so so for clarity this bears repeating so if you own a home in district 99 prop property that is worth 300 000 a few years from now you'd see would increase in your taxes you would have seen you would have seen it drop by twelve dollars now that's not gonna happen yeah you won't see it we're filling in that stream and taking advantage of it for up through the next seven years and it's only like a couple hundred thousand the first two years because we have life safety bonds that are already taken some of that so the headline here is that your taxes are not going to be going up your taxes aren't

092going up and instead of dropping by twelve dollars in three years they'll drop by twelve dollars in seven years right but in the meantime the community sees no reduction in services as a result right that's the headline get back on track this will stabilize us i mean this is this is a beautiful thing we have any sense of what's going to happen to our costs well actually right now we're we're putting money back into the health benefit funds because we raised our the premium by five percent and it's actually we've had very few i mean maybe a lot of elective surgeries have been put off i believe or had to be so we're running at a positive right now and we do anticipate raising that next year maybe another five percent three to five percent

093and so in january it'll increase so now it just affects half of a year we already know our rate for for half a year and so it's it that's allowing for that but we're keep we're i'd like to just keep that flat you never know what's going to happen we might get some really big costs because we are self-funded for our largest plan our ppo plan so we we do have some risks there we do have some reinsurance it covers at a certain level um so that it you know we won't have a huge claim but we could get a bunch of little ones you know so yeah so the non-opera non-operating funds are debt service capital projects and that's what's up in the yellow that's those are the funds that i don't show you

094on the quarterly basis because they're pretty much they're so large and if we tried to average them out it would throw kind of the comparisons off but this is showing that for debt service we're going to have 4.8 million dollars sitting in account now from taxes that we've received we'll have revenues of new taxes coming in 11 11.8 million dollars we'll be spending 12.1 million dollars we'll also get some transfers in 2.7 that's coming from the operating funds that we saw on the the fund balance exhibit 2.7 million coming in and it'll have a little bit higher balance 7.2 million at the end of the year and this is just for debt service it's going to the multi master facility plan and all the things that life safety all those expenditures that are related to

095some kind of debt are paid through this fund and it's primarily taxes and the transfers in are the revenue stream for that capital projects that's the massive facility plan you know if you notice we've done a little work around these schools um for that one we're just taking the white company as a projection for me to tell me where they think it'll be they've been it's been kind of sliding up on us so we're we've been doing a little bit more because the school's been empty so we had to read you know we'd adjust some of our investments so we could you know have the dollars to pay them as it went through uh this last month was about nine million dollars of um work from the prior month so uh we we've been going

096trending around five million or so a month so they got a lot more work pushed through in the last couple of months and some of it is a lot of the the stuff here at south with the theater the the auditorium all the costs for those materials that were part of it as well so that's a capital project they're they're saying approximately 56 million will be spent in the next fiscal year getting us towards it that goal and getting it done the long-term debt on the bottom is just to let you know what we've we've done the the top one is what's paid from debt service taxes so that's what the taxpayers pay every year is uh for those for those bonds there's 119 million dollars most of that is a master facility plan of

097136 million dollars but that's still what's outstanding at the beginning of the year this assumes we're going to issue 10.3 million for working cash 10.3 is because the 0.3 200 000 that is going to be needed for interest to pay off before we get before we get to the next tax cycle and then we have a hundred thousand dollars in there for issuance costs it probably won't cost all of that but that's what we we put into it um if it doesn't it'll come back to us in our debt service fund and then what's paid from operating funds is the bottom this is what we've we've done very few districts have have gone out issued debt certificates and done this out of their operating funds and this is uh next to the certificate of excellence

098maybe it's another thing i'm most proud about is that we pushed and found new ways the the extension for the norfolk road um science labs and up grades we you know we've done in the past without going to the taxpayers so i'm always very proud of that and and overall even though we're we're issuing the 10 million dollars in bonds our total debt outstanding is only going to go up by 2 million dollars because we're paying off other debt the uh so i know i've been on been talking too much but we're going to try and get through this last piece the other thing we'll do is with this budget we'll probably put this budget out tomorrow in this format but by wednesday we'll have it in the state format if it's approved by the

099board of education or you like to use that form it's got a line by line for each fund and some people like to go through it i don't think anybody's picked one up in a while but we'll put it in the state format and it has some some other sections to it that are this is just a high-level approach to it and we offer them to the libraries we've been told maybe they don't want them anymore because nobody's coming by to look at them but we'll try and push them out to the libraries we'll have one at every attendance center we'll have one at this asc it has to be on display for 30 days and it will make that so that and it will be posted in the newspapers later this week and in

100september we'll be asking for formal approval at the 21st meeting september 21st there's anything else you could let me know any questions tomorrow for me thank you i am i honestly um i was afraid things would be a little worse so for me this is kind of good good news um with everything that's happened at the end of last school year and uh and projecting forward um we're we're really fortunate to be in this position well every there's a lot of people involved in it you know the they come things surprise me sometimes that they bring us stuff that we need but they also surprise me with things that they don't need or better ways to do things and so we've got a great team here all right master facility plan update um you're sitting

101right now and here's one of the updates in the space you're in right now which is pretty incredible uh i think this is a an amazing space that we have to offer the community here as it's come online i think you can see it's unlike any other space that we have in the district up to this point and i i will say i pushed really hard for those windows over there with the board and i underestimated how how much of a difference it would make things if i knew that that would make this space look that good i would have fought even harder so it's turned out to be an amazing space uh other things going on south auditorium hopefully you've seen that massive structure being built on the other side of the building that's

102coming along really well fly tower is up and now they're going to start building the structure that comes out in front of that which is the black box theater the theater classroom backstage all of the the theater shop washrooms dressing rooms a variety of different spaces that come in from there south commons is on the inside of the building but the steel is up for that we have the grand staircase steel in place if you're able to peek out into that space you really get a feeling for how enormous that commons is going to be when it's in place for the start of the next school year the north gym it is gorgeous that that new floor is unbelievable the space is great the amount of natural light that comes into the multi-purpose room the

103gym the alley that commons area is pretty impressive and the culinary arts lab is in place the library has been redone when you open when you enter into the building now from the 4th street entrance one of the most drastic changes is that instead of looking up at the second floor and seeing some display cabinets you look up at the second floor and see this grand entrance to the new library and it is just breathtaking to see the change that that makes over at north high hopefully board members over the next couple of weeks you can reach out to me and i can get you on a tour to see all of these changes budget wise we continue to track pretty similarly to where we have expected to be for uh the last uh last

104couple of years the big number to look at is contingency 3.7 million dollars if you remember when we started the project we wanted one million dollars remaining in contingency heading into the last year of construction we're almost at four times that amount even with the changes that we've made to improve the campuses one of the projects we'll start working on this fall and one of the things that will be a goal that will bring to the board in this we had always told the community we would be touching a certain percentages of our hallways and classrooms as a result of the construction one of the things that we've always wanted to try to do was if we had money left there to be able to touch every classroom and make the the lighting the floor

105the paint the the writing surfaces what we call you know make it light and bright freshen up all of those spaces and make everything modern we also wanted to try to eliminate the feel that we saw in some of our bill some of the visits we made to other buildings where students talked about like the jetson wing and the flintstone wing you know where you know where one part of the building felt really old while another part of the building felt really new and students didn't want to end up in the flintstone wing right so we believe and we're going to work through the math and the exercise here this fall that within that contingency we'll have enough to have every classroom and every hallway match what you see here with the fact that it

106will feel like it's been a renovated space at the end of this project so we hope we hope we're able to do that we're going to bring a plan for that and then hope that we have that contingency sitting there or plan to have that contingency sitting here to do that work so uh one of the goals and projects we'll be working on i just i'll i'll voice some of my early support for that too um knowing that in our current situation i mean because the plan all along was that um that we would do those things but it'd be coming out of our capital and we would do it over a period of time correct and knowing the um knowing the unpredictability and the everything that covert has brought on our likelihood of being

107able to do that out of our budget going forward is is definitely reduced and uh and so it seems like it makes sense to take advantage of this opportunity because of course uh you know another alternative would be to not do those things and rebate the money right correct four years ago i didn't expect that this would be here right i expected that we'd have to work hard to keep a million dollars in here for this last year there's just so much that we've touched and so much is unexpected like at north high where we opened up the elevator well elevator wall and a steel beam is just running through a wall that nobody ever knew was there right well that comes out of contingency to fix that um but in the end we've done

108a great job of managing the budget in this project and uh i thought four years ago i'd be coming now and be presenting a plan to [Music] fix all the flintstone parts of the building over like you said a 10 to 15 year period right um but i think you know we're gonna have this opportunity now to just to finish off all the spaces also to give credit where credit is due um it speaks to the um you know the great job that our architects and engineers have done as well um because it's something i i pride myself on is and on our projects you know that we do for people i you know historically we've had something like a one to three percent contingency for our projects which is is kind of unheard of

109um because we do a lot of things on on existing buildings and uh they certainly had all kinds of things here that could have been unknown and they obviously did a very thorough job of documenting and anticipating work that needed to be done such that that work was part of the bid process which saves us money because every time there's something more that needs to be done you know you don't have as much leverage once the contract has been as you do so doing a great job and detailing and anticipating saves clients money and white has definitely done that for us here and so they deserve credit as well so i just want to put that out there um this is great to have we have this much left is really not the industry norm

110yeah we're we're out facing like i said where i expected we would be the other couple of numbers to look at are unwet that's the amount we have left to bid in our work you can see there's not much left it's only about 1.2 million dollars worth of work or products or those kinds of things to go out to bid and then in the next slide these are the numbers across the top you can dig into the report later but just the things i want to focus on we're still on track for that contract amount we're well within that guaranteed maximum contract of 122 million the contingency we have about 2.8 million dollars uh worth of furniture and equipment to buy that's to fill those common spaces yes that include so that 2.8 that doesn't

111include updating the flintstone no that does that that doesn't include yeah this includes all of those other spaces so auditorium and the commons which are some pretty big spaces with equipment and furniture uh that we need to fill and hank i forgot too i don't think that that remaining contingency includes time no you're stealing my lead mike right sorry so then the next section the remainder contract remaining contractor allowances this is that first level of contingency that remains that hundred and ten thousand in phase a is about ready to come back to us that was for sprinklers and fire alarm systems which are almost nearly complete across the entire district so that should be rolling back to us and then phase b work is wrapping up now so some of that 265 000 would be

112expected to come back to us and add to that 3.7 million dollars in contingency as well phase c is the work for the next year so i don't know how much of that will be available to us but some of it definitely will so it's at 3.7 million in contingency plus whatever remaining contractor allowances at the end come back to us so you're you're probably pretty close to four million dollars you know like i said you're four times what we expected to have when we started this project at this point um so we're doing really well so hank you uh anticipate completion by august of next year 22. yeah by of the commons in the auditorium yes we're we're expecting that for everything yeah every that that's what's left out there over the next years

113really those commons spaces a couple of offices here and there and some other side projects um and then if we add in those spaces that weren't as originally you know inside of here the classrooms and hallways we'll have to make sure that those can fit and get done in that time as well we're on pace for all of our spaces here to be ready if we bring students back in a couple of weeks except for that southeast corner at north high which we always expected would be somewhere in october that those would be available that that was a major major project and ended up with a lot more unexpected problems inside of there than we we had originally anticipated so like i said hopefully board members you'll find a time and we can get you

114on a little walk it's actually it's a long walk especially north high julie went on it with me today bring your walking shoes because especially north i mean we only didn't touch what the admin winged this summer and maybe the fine arts area otherwise there was construction going on in every other part of the building this summer they they saw a lot of work done this year some people may be expecting that because the buildings don't have all the students in it that somehow the work could be getting done a lot faster but in fact probably the contractors are also dealing with covet issues and and that weighs into how much they can really accelerate well and that's part of it mike and that was part of the struggle this summer especially at north high

115you know rick has commented greatly about the the amount of truck traffic and how it backed up their uh by dan and rick's houses part of the challenge that we've had there is the number of people that we can allow access the building access to the building at any one time because you have to keep social distancing and you can't have people piled on top of one another as we've done in the past which just causes a backup right and it slowed everything down that's part of the reason why that southeast corner is behind where we had originally intended on the other side of that though is the fact that the spaces that we're working on are all standalone spaces so the auditorium and the commons we had anticipated would be being worked on all

116year long uh because they aren't spaces where students are going to be right so it's not like having students here helps us speed that up anyway because they weren't we weren't going to have construction going on around students during the school year anyway so um it might provide us a little more access but not a ton more than what we expected before otherwise i had one more thing to comment on and this was a great idea by board member pavonato by rick was to recognize our neighbors that we have inconvenienced greatly over the last couple of years at both north and south high a lot of dust a lot of truck traffic a lot of noise and our neighbors have been very patient with us so julie went to work on trying to find a

117neat and different way to recognize people it wouldn't be like you know a bouquet of flowers that would die in a couple of weeks right so we wanted something that would be as permanent as the structures were building so julie went and found a nice small company that is put together these cool little boxes you can see on the front is the building futures logo that was the logo for the project and inside this cool wooden box i'll pass around so you can see it is this cool hammer that inside of it has the district logos on it so i will be presenting one of these to every one of the neighbors with i'll write a little handwritten thank you card to each of them and uh we'll also put in a a coupon for

118some car washes since we've dirtied up cars quite a bit as just a small token of gratitude to our neighbors so we thought that would it you know it's it's something that's that's nice and will last last a while so nice moment memento for our neighbors and a little thank you all right that's it for master facility plan progress the next item is freedom of information requests we've had them and filled them and the list of those is available on the district website thank you that's it for superintendent's reports moving on to the consent agenda we need a motion for the board of education of the board [Music] there was a change in the financial pages i wanted to bring your attention because we were asking you to approve two checks tonight for the activity

119buses where we put uh those off we had put the the company off um until july and august to get paid for those we we have delivery of two of them and the other two are going to come in the next one and so we wanted we've added two checks to the financial pages we wanted you to see those and make sure it's added to the original financial pages you got was to pay for the the two two four activity buses coming that was updated today uh i think it was friday friday yeah so from when it was posted on so if you looked anytime late in the day friday on it would have already been in here yeah that's why it's a separate post both versions are there they're original and revised i have

120just a quick quick question i kind of part of the consent degenerate personnel report so i know that we had you know in our anticipation of going to hybrid we were looking for teachers to fill spots um is is that something that we put on the pause or yeah there are there's no additional hires in here due to leaves or anything at this point okay very good okay so we need a motion uh for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes a personnel report either absent certified transfer physician classified appointment certified appointment specified the personnel report registration is classified and see the financial pages with you and just that very much okay terry pavisic aye rick pepinado joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye sherelle fuller hi dan nicholas

121aye nancy kupka hi the consent agenda parent says next week the recommendation for the action we need a motion for the board of education to accept the tentative budget for 2020 2021 for display purposes on the sale of 6 35 pm september 21st 2020 for the public hearing to be held at south high school thirty six months old school donors elmo shirelle and joanna thank you [Music] shirelle fuller hi joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye dan nicholas hi terry pavisic aye rick pavanado nancy kupka hi motion carrier [Music] these were presented last month uh the only person that had a couple of or only board member that had some questions was board member davenport uh answers to his questions were provided to him and the rest of the board of education mike davenport aye

122shirelle fuller hi dan nicholas uh rick cavanado and nancy kupka hi the uh [Music] but i'm going to just see if any other any other comments came in we can go back let me just look right now no report joanna assassination um we are uh in the process of improving the bylaws everyone has to send us uh approval because we're not meeting in person various reasons and um we're also working on a way to uh have pizza wars uh in february so it will look a little different maybe depending upon how things go but uh that's our our big fundraiser of the year so we want to make sure that we don't lose interest in that so that's what excellent that's good news terry [Music] yes the foundation is collecting for families in need due

123to covid related uh needs the it's on the education foundation website ef99.org and so far they have raised i believe over 26 thousand dollars and those funds are available for our principles to use right the principles help us identify families in need and then distribute those funds excellent big thank you to our community awesome uh mike did you i'm sorry terry what are you doing that's it okay mike i guess uh nothing other than you know as we all know the triple i got cancelled so there won't be a won't be a conference to go to in november i don't think is it cancelled does it remote uh the what i read was it was cancelled the the triple i conference in november that we have been cancelled and uh it's there's no remote uh

124sessions or anything like that it's just it's cancelled do we have anybody for the reception of visitors no no other comments for the reception of visitors thank you okay we have two upcoming board meetings september 14th we'll have a workshop meeting at 6 30 p.m where we'll be determined and september 21st we'll have a regular board meet business meeting again at 6 30 pm again to be determined in its location uh do we have anything else otherwise we will the movie adjourn mike second 10 seconds all those in favor hi thank you everybody you