SD308 Board of Education (12/4/2023)

001Community Unit School District Board of Education meeting for December 4th 2023 you oh can I have a roll call please mrone here Mr gwood present Miss Johnson present Dr Mario present Mr pler present Miss Simon present present please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance I pled Al to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liy and justice for all okay okay 4.1 public truth and Taxation hearing we will now hold our tax Our Truth and Taxation public hearing for the 2023 Levy we will therefore have three opportunities for public comment tonight the first opportunity will be during this public hearing on the 2023 Levy if you wish to make a comment about the 2023 Levy please make it during the

002public comment portion of this hearing if you wish to make a comment on the state waiver application please make it during the public comment portion of the next hearing if you wish to make a comment about some other matter unrelated to the public hearings you may do so during the third opportunity for public comment make sure that you noted on the comment card during which portion you wish to speak this is the public hearing conve convened by the Board of Education of community Unit School District 308 regarding our requirement for a truth and Taxation public hearing for the 2023 Levy at this time I would like to to ask the district administrators who will give information and updates during this public hearing to introduce themselves and proceed uh every year the board of education is

003required to approve uh the levy for the upcoming school year for the upcoming year so for uh this this time of the year we are introducing the 2023 Levy the levy is the is the amount that the district requires to be able to fund the obligation of the education in the district and it makes up about 60% of the revenue that the district uses to fund operations in the district thank you and now the board asks members of the public to comment on the 2023 Levy when the secretary calls your name I ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that the comments are limited to three minutes per person and that neither the board nor the administration will be answering any questions

004during this time thank you for your comments so there are no comments on the tax levy so we will now close the public comment on the or and the public hearing and we will now move to the next hearing 5.1 a public hearing on the state waiver we will now hold a public hearing on the state waiver application for full day school Improvement days we're going to have two more opportunities for public comment tonight the first opportunity will be during the public hearing on the full day school Improvement plan days waiver application and the second opportunity will be during the public comment portion of the meeting if you wish to make a comment about the full day school Improvement days waiver application please please make it during the public comment portion of this hearing if

005you wish to make a comment about some other matter unrelated to the public hearing you may do so during the second opportunity for public comment and please make sure that you've noted on the comment card which portion you wish to speak this is the public hearing convened by the Board of Education of community Unit School District 308 regarding the full day school Improvement days sip State waiver application at this time I would would like to ask the district administrators who will give information and updates during this public hearing to introduce themselves and proceed invite Dr K hello my name is uh Dr Heather KC I just wanted to provide a few updates on our state waiver application historically we have utilized half day school Improvement days as part of our uh teacher collaboration and building

006collaboration process what we would like to do is move to full day uh we think that that will be more effective in terms of the collaboration process um we are approaching and um looking at this waiver in uh collaboration with our asgo Education Association um we are looking to implement three full day uh School Improvement days and the reason why we're able to go in this direction is due to our bankable minutes so throughout the school year we do have enough instructional minutes above and beyond our requirement so we are able to explore this option um both for scheduling and collaboration purposes okay does the Board of Education or any other District Administrative team um have any questions or thoughts to share great progress thank you okay Dominic what you say great progress yeah something

007we okay so at this time I would like to ask our administrators if they have any additional information documentation or recommendations that they would like to have before the board um while the while we consider whether the to authorize the full day sip day waiver application okay all right we will now close that portion of our public comment for the s State waiver application at this time members of the public may make comments when the secretary calls your name I ask that you come to the microphone and state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that the comments are limited to three minutes per person and that neither the board nor the administration will be answering any questions during this time thank you for your comments are there comments or

008on the state waiver okay thank you now we will move on to public comment 6.1 on behalf of the Board of Education I would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we received from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school education residents interested in speaking to the Board of Education this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name I ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback in order to hear from as many people as possible comments have been limited to three per subject three minutes per person for a total of 30 minutes so what we'll

009do is we'll take um the the first subject and any individuals who um have comments and then um for any additional portion of the 30 minutes we will then use that for as many um individuals who would like to speak on the same matter so comments should be addressed to the Board of Education as a whole and not directed to an individual board member audience or staff member the board does not participate in discussion during public comment followup to your questions or concerns will be addressed by Administration through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you Jen Snider hello board members hello you're not supposed to talk to me it's been a while since I last spoke I took a break because my mental health needed it being here trying to talk to

010you trying to make some sort of progress has been difficult and exhausting there's been a lot of frustration and a lot of Tears nobody here has made anything about this easy someone told me recently that I just have an axe to grind and they said it as though I was going to be offended I absolutely have several axes to grind and there is nothing shameful about it I have an axe to grind about old post failing their students in multiple ways I have an act to grind about administrators that failed to fail incident reports in a district that doesn't seem to care about it I have an act to grind about how little the people in this room actually pay attention to these public statements and process what is being said even if you were

011looking at me right now it doesn't mean that you're actually listening I have an acts to grind about how it has become overwhelmingly apparent that the district has too many people that aren't particularly trustworthy I've come to figure out that this is what my regret is with this entire ordeal it isn't my actions that I regret because I've never regretted those it is that I trusted the district after every conversation I trusted the Old Post administrators that they were going to do what had been discussed in our meetings I trusted that their priority was student safety I trusted that they were working on it I was wrong then I did it all over again because I didn't learn from my mistake the first time around I trusted when someone with in this room reached out

012and insisted that they cared and that they wanted to help even when everyone else warned me about them I still put my trust in them I was wrong all over again I was railroaded and learned a very unfortunate lesson it has taken a few short months to completely destroy my trust with the district from teachers to administrators to third party vendors I no longer trust anyone I'm listening to what my children and their friends are saying so much more than I ever have and I'm taking it with a lot of weight as the kids have proven to me that they can be trusted more than the adults teachers are publicly humiliating and shaming students they are creating situations that puts classmates up against one another and staff members are boldly complaining about mental health absences

013being excused and their distaste over I'm completely disenchanted with every aspect of wolf poost and the district over the course of the last year I have learned that the students are not the main focus no matter what anyone says the politics finances bottom lines and personal gains is what truly takes over I've listened to the board discussed traffic and infastructure more times than I can count except the district doesn't own any roads isn't paying for construction and has nothing to do with any road work there has been far more concern about students sitting in traffic rather than elementary students being put in danger on a consistent basis there's been more concern that students have to leave home earlier to accommodate traffic than there has been concern about ensuring that all students are in a safe

014learning environment free from violence bullies and constant racism from peers I understand now why people from outside the district tell me what a mess this district is when they find out where we live I'm Giving Up on asking for your help in keeping elementary students safe and the parents informed thank you so much your time is up don't worry I will email this to all of you thank you thank you Leah Philpot [Music] good evening I'm here to talk about book Banning about three years ago can you move and speak into the microphone I can't hear you about 3 years ago there was a concerned parent that wrote into the school district asking to offer replacement for teaching To Kill a Mocking Bird in English class and she said that due to the racial climate

015in most buildings um and in the world I'm questioning what thought went into assigning this particular book sitting in a classroom where you're a minority having to hear such egregious acts and language is very uncomfortable I know that students both black and white have complained about the nature of this book yet it is still required reading she continued to email the district about her complaints about her child having to hear the nword in harp novel and it made them uncomfortable the district teachers got together and offered an alternative for the following school year of 2021 and according to the English oehs English department chair Amy Hawthorne she said that no students chose the alternative to tequilla Mockingbird that year despite that Faith doist the associate superintendent chose CH to ban the book entirely from the

016school if a book is historically and generally accepted to be appropriate but it is replac replaced in the curriculum and thus disallowed then it is banned as a subject matter to be studied it is B from the curriculum I just want to um ask ask that when you make your comments if you would not direct them at any individual or um staff member or board member or audience I'd appreciate it I'm not directing them towards an individual I'm telling you the timeline of of what the information was and how it went down yeah there was a staff member's name mentioned because she is in the email thread of what she has discussed I wasn't speaking to her go ahead okay I think it is a mistake to ban To Kill a Mocking Bird and I

017think that number one the complaint is about the book even being allowed in the classroom which open opens up the door to other issues and the argument should be that it's been determined by the board that the value of the novel lies in the theme of turning racism on its head this is not what we should be striving towards it may be um use it may use examples of historical evils of racism but the ultimate theme is pointing to a higher way of being a higher ideal than what a number of the characters do in the novel they serve as an example of bad behavior Behavior not Behavior we should be emulating Behavior we should be condemning just because something exists or is displayed doesn't mean it is an affirmative of that action the conversation

018of racism is clear in that novel that it is bad it is evil and we should do better with the dialect novel to Killa Mockingbird a conversation is going on in that book and it takes place in language and action which affirms an anti-racist stance and the Injustice of racism thank you so much for your time Mandy doy good evening everyone my name is Mandy doy I am actually a freshman football parent um if you'd have told me a couple of years ago that I would be up here I'd have told you you're crazy because I would never be talking about football the way that I'm going to talk about football tonight um I'm here to ask for artificial turf we need artificial turf on on ohos and OE um and I will tell you

019a few reasons why um mostly so that our players can play on the field and so that they know the conditions that they're going into unfortunately and I know that some of you will say well NFL are going away from artificial turf but the truth is we don't have the money to keep up a Turf uh or keep up grass like the NFL so if we go to artificial turf we can um play whether it's a drought or we're raining we don't have to worry about our players getting hurt because they're falling in a hole or the conditions are not accurate or good for them um plus I've seen a whole bunch of stadiums things that I would have never thought before I've gone to uh Yorkville and planfield and Lincoln Way West and they

020have amazing stadiums and I just think if we want to see the pride that we need to see in OE and that we want the community that we want to create I think that that really starts with our stadiums our soccer players can play on them we can have invitationals which could potentially bring us some Revenue I've been in the District long enough to know our financial challenges um I also know going to planfield and seeing their fabulous concession stand that I'm pretty sure we bought it with our uh interest on our bonds that we purchased from them but I mean that's just the joke that we were all saying I know that's probably not the truth but that's just the word on the in the football parents so I'm imploring you I understand that

021it's a great deal of an investment but I think that for um the long future and the future of our football players the future of many sports not just football I'm here representing football but it's dance it's soccer it's um uh band I mean marching bands can have invitationals on our artificial turf they don't have invit or they don't have competitions on regular grass I don't have a marching band student I have a student that has graduated in 2006 2014 I have a junior and I have a freshman here so I have been at OE long enough to see where our stadium is we're getting there the new track is wonderful I you know we have a lot of great things that are happening in OE but we need to continue to improve those things

022and as you can see by the young gentleman behind me I think that they also want to play on artificial turf considering that their parents got them out here tonight to um support the initiative so that's it thank you thank you Nolan k good evening I'm Lan cobal I'm a junior who plays football and P vaults at as Le I'm here today to express my concern of not only our football field but our track as well my freshman year I broke my ankle from the uneven field and we couldn't host any track meets with the track's unsafe cons uh conditions we were promised it would be better for my sophomore year and things barely trained changed we hosted on a track that just passed the bare minimum safety level to host meets at one meet

023our po vating Runway area was completely underwater causing my teammates and I to work together to get the water out which we were able to but after all the hard work our event was still canceled the unsafe grounds of the football field in track has caused cancellations and injuries for football players in track one may feel that switching to Turf will only help the football players however that's untrue cheerleaders dance in the band work as hard as we do all summer and after school to prepare for Friday Night Lights when games get canceled due to unsafe conditions that's a let down for many the community looks forward to these nights just as much as we do this is not how I would have thought my high school years would be working out on uneven M

024muddy grounds that are covered in water a good amount of time and risking injury every time I'm out there a turf field would will be safe and will not only give my teammates opportunities but it will also allow other sports to practice and play on as well I appreciate you listening to my concerns and I strongly hope you do the right thing by approving Fielding to the f future thank Youk you Bob eams not sure I said that right sorry it's uh hi I'm Bob Iams that's a tough tough fact to follow from those two but first uh thank you for the opportunity to speak thank you for uh being board members and advocating for our students to make uh sd308 better um I've lived in iGo for about 15 years I have a sophomore

025student athlete and an eighth grader student athlete um I'm here tonight to express our concerns with the ongoing field conditions um at the football field um and want to advocate for the proposed uh uh for a proposal for Synthetic Turf uh during the 2023 fall season we were only able to host uh three home games um due to the unplayable condition of the field um on October 13th the final home game was moved to York Field's brand new synthetic turfield uh to accommodate uh for that to combate that last game um which resulted in loss ticket concessions Revenue but more importantly importantly it cheated our band dance uh cheer our football team our parents um and even our seniors on their last game that was frustrating uh based on our understanding the football field and

026the practice field just really can't be maintained or were initially designed to accommodate 3,000 students um at an 8A school um over the last years Synthetic Turf has become really the expected type of facility for high schools in Illinois um I understand sd308 is the seventh largest largest District but unfortunately we're the only School within the conference that doesn't have Synthetic Turf as I mentioned Yorkfield just installed their field last year the Valley View schools have had Turf for at least 15 years so what does this mean for resty 308 we need to allocate Capital dollars for the implementation of synthetic turf fields that both both OE OE and oehs to accommodate the activities that others have just mentioned we're not asking to be better we just want to be equal with the other uh

027teams that we compete against synthetic tur Fields will directly enhance the experience of nearly 500 fall athletes and students at each High School this doesn't this number doesn't include our spring athletes um our award-winning Beast of beasts of the East band would have an opportunity to compete practice and and host events on this field soccer would have an opportunity to to choose a grass field or a natural uh or a synthetic turf field for their events lacrosse and new sport within the district is going to need a durable field to play on uh dancing chair would benefit and our 15 or 150 member football team um would benefit from training practicing and playing on a facility that's on par with uh the other schools we understand The Upfront costs are significant uh But realize that

028the longterm DET termin return on our investment um including reduced maintenance year round use and all weather conditions more Pro programmable hours uh no need to rest the field and potential Revenue opportunities with our local organizations um like oitf asgo bears and other soccer groups a project like this can be complicated and challenging from a logistics and schedule standpoint but it's something that can be done in a short amount of time based on my experience as an architect I've been involved in nearly 60 projects like this um with school districts and park districts um it can be planned out designed bid and constructed within a six-month period just to wrap up um it's time to reinvest in our facilities reinvest in our kids a new synthe field will not only address our Sports um it

029will also help establish Our Community Pride thank you thank you [Applause] [Laughter] you Ryan Chrissy good evening I'm Ryan Chrissy I'm an Ole resident I have a freshman daughter here at OE and a son who's a sixth grader over at plank I'm a special education teacher in head varsity football coach at glenbard South High School in glennellen and today I'm here to talk about uh the turf which is in my opinion a significant initiative that holds immense value for our district and not just for man and not just for monetary purposes our student athletes musicians and Learners deserve a reliable and sustainable surface for their activities be it Sports marching band cheer dance or learning Beyond enhancing the overall experience the financial benefits are substantial offering lower maintenance costs and extended usability the district can

030establish a consistent Revenue stream through various Avenues including rental opportunities ities for programs like asigo youth tackle football local soccer and Lacrosse clubs football jamere and marching band competitions moreover the rise in popularity of sports like lacrosse and field hockey present additional opportunities that would be impractical with natural grass fields lastly our softball and baseball teams would be able to have meaningful and productive outdoor practices early in the season when most of their work is completed indoors while opponents highlight concerns about injuries and costs it is crucial to note the reputable organizations such as the National Football League Players Association recommend transitioning to grass fields the reality of injury risks on artificial surfaces is evident and as someone who deeply who is deeply involved in athletics I have witnessed serious non-contact injuries although I would

031prefer natural grass for all of my players at all levels maintaining a consistently safe grass surface is nearly impossible for dist districts without the extensive resources available to professional and collegate sports organizations acknowledging The Upfront financial burden on a Turf surface I propose exploring such Solutions as intergovernmental agreements with organizations in and outside of iGo neighboring towns local sports entities as well while the initial cost of installing Turf is substantial it can be spread over an extended period of time through loans or through the district's capital budget can pay for it in one lump sum importantly as I mentioned before lower maintenance costs that are required on Turf compared to Natural G grass make it a financially Sound Investment furthermore the potential to add revenue streams particularly through rental opportunities for the turf surface with

032lights adds a valuable Dimension to this endeavor in conclusion embracing artificial turf not only fulfills the immediate needs of our students but also positions our district for long-term success Financial sustainability an expanded array of opportunities for our community thank you for your time thank you than [Applause] you Jamie Liams hi I'm Jamie aams I live in iggo as well and my kids both feed into iGo East High School my son Lincoln's a sophomore and he played on the varsity team and he also participated in basketball and field field here at OE and my daughter's in e8th grade at Plank and then uh she participates in volleyball and track and field and is very much looking forward to coming here next year um with my job I do have a great understanding of how a board

033uh interacts with a District staff regarding policy capital projects Staffing operations and maintenance of facilities and how often during Community feedback like this today um you know either from our partners or from our community members parents it can play an active role and help the distri strategically focus on our efforts moving forward today I'm here as a parent to voice my concerns regarding the playing fields uh as you can see um and work with I'm asking the STA the board to work with the staff to focus on um working on this for our students our coaches and our community to help plan for improvements and Fielding the future for District 308 I'm aware that maintaining the football fields especially in the condition they are right now has become increasingly challenging over the years and it

034was disheartening for our entire team but more specifically for senior football band cheer and dance program participants and parents who were deprived from that experience to host their last game at OE rightfully so our Fields were extremely muddy due the excessive wear and tear on the grass creating the uneven and unsafe plane conditions that you're hearing about today our cheerleaders and dancers were slipping during the performances band members covered in mud and our football players getting hurt we had kids this year who would score a touchdown or be running off you know um out of bounds on a play and as soon as their cleat hit the paved track they completely wiped out um practically and drained themselves um so it's just concerning to see the unsafe conditions that our facilities are in in an

035era where almost all of our opposing teams have tur Fields our athletes are at a disadvantage when they go to away games not having that same consistent practice and playing service that everyone else in our conference has so it doesn't only affect their performance but it's also impacting the overall morale of the program I understand implementing changes like this is uh challenging and it does take time um and I just hope that our voices are heard today and it helps Drive some urgency with um the board to the staff and to pay attention and help Rectify some of the situations to ensure our students have those fair and safe environments I really appreciate your dedication to the well-being and success of our students and look forward to some positive changes that will benefit in our

036entire School District so thank you so much for your time and consideration thank you thank [Applause] you Nico Vach that [Music] right hi thank you um I got four kids that will go here two that are here currently um I'm not going to repeat everything they just said everybody kind of has a lot of the same stuff some of the stuff we're not covering like we were talking about safety and stuff like that I know somebody sent out picture of the field at the beginning of the year uh OE and Os even at the beginning of the year they're pretty tore up the maintenance and stuff to keep these up is really almost impossible for the budget that you guys put forward for it the synthetic is really the only way to go to where

037it's able and ready for these kids all year round they're going to get hurt on these fields and we've seen injuries we can't sustain it if we have rain or anything it's just we fall behind and there's no way to to keep it up so that's the one thing I think you guys touched on a little bit that I think is so important and just keeping up with all these other teams that have these synthetic Fields so our kids are not at a disadvantage I think everything else pretty much guys covered but that's something that's so important for these kids so thank you thank you thank you Ryan soless good evening thanks for allowing us to be here today uh taking the time to to hear us um like like Nico just said um I

038have a student uh my son is a sophomore here in in asgo East uh he loves and enjoys and uh is football is his life um right now he's committed uh long story short I I don't want to repeat everything that everybody else said I think you guys kind of heard it loud and clear as far as the importance of but I'm I'm here just advocating to as a business owner um um understanding the importance of a cost to a business and a return on investment of a business is very important um I think as all the parents have said here uh there's a lot of there's a lot of return on investments with with the synthetic with the synthetic field just it's not a sunk cost you have opportunities for across all sports across

039all divisions across um all youth levels to have opportunities to continue to bring Revenue into the into the school into the into the district by being able uh with a with a solid plane field uh to be able to have outside activities um competitions for band for for football for soccer um my son personally so from a business standpoint it makes sense it's just reinvesting in the business to to to to grow and it's a cost at one point but it becomes an investment down the road uh from for many from from many aspects the other thing is my son was one of those individuals that uh was two times this year uh was playing on a muddy field went and hit the track and completely wiped out hit uh injured his back and injured

040his leg had to take him to the doctor in one of those situations so you know when we look at safety for the kids um you know the inconsistencies of of the playing field and the inconsist and the and the and the horrible conditions make it very hard one for them to be safe two to really be able to play at their best ability um and not and not just this school for any other schools that come in you're risking the injuries of all these other kids too um so yeah and third keeping up with the field having the have the money to keep up with the field and and continue to to try to address the issues just becomes a lot more costly down the road than the investment that you're going to make

041to to to invest in a synthe synthetic field that requires less maintenance um forly you know my son talks a lot about other kids and I know kids Talk Amongst each other and you know I hear I hear I hear things on on what my son tells me about how other kids want to and don't want want to come due to this due to that and the football field and Sport and the conditions of the field at in the long run do do make a difference when people are looking to move and they're looking for good school districts it's not now more dayss it's not even about it's it's about the education that they can receive but there's a lot of really strong athletes that want a want a good program to play for one

042that support the children to support the parents um that create that culture that community and uh when when you when you have when you have word on the street where the field stinks and uh and the conditions are horrible and uh it it it affects the program and it affects it affects it affects the the community and the and the and the program you're trying to build um you know we have a good culture here and uh we don't we don't want that destroyed by by by people not wanting to move in and having some some athletes being able to come to to to ASO School District because of that but that's really it um thank you for your time appreciate it you thank you Chase the mod greetings to you all hi good evening

043I uh Echo most of these sentiments but I maybe I'm going to come at you from a pun intended left field here a little bit because when I'm sitting in the stands I mean this is a matter of Pride uh let's be a beacon I have a son who play we all have a things have changed a lot out there it's very competitive and we need a leg up so you know a lot of these points have been made already but I would say you know look we're in Kendall County we have a pretty good tax base here and I can't help but say when I go to another field I I I do say what what what's why don't we have do we have the money for a turf field or we we should

044you know and that's that's as a taxpayer right and and the other side of this is is the road they take you're talking about college recruiting there this goes a little deeper and and we need to shine a little more for the next step in evolution here for these kids so I I think of that as well um if I'm we're getting a visit from a a recruiter and if it's a a good day maybe we'll we'll it'll pan out but you know what if it rains a little then we we might have a disaster on our hands in that regard too so I I hope these points are well taken and uh there's not much more to say other than that so thank you and let's get some Turf all right surf and turf

045Lincoln hi my name is Lincoln I Jam I was able to play varsity football this year and I have a goal to play college football at a high level I feel that the facilities of spigo East are limiting my ability to reach my goals three times a week during the summer I feel the need that I have to go to drive and to commissioner's Park in neille or planfield North High School to train on turf field safely I speak for my fellow OE teammates and my cross town rival friends we need syn Synthetic Turf to compete at the AA football level thank you thank you thank you thank you that concludes our uh public comment Mrs similton I know we don't respond to things but I just want to share one thing to everyone listening

046and so forth I'm a crazy football mom coach chrisel probably tell you I am I've wanted her for a long time but one of the things that I've seen recently on social media is a lot of misinformation about our track and field about the what is happening and what is not happening next next year so I strongly urge everyone to please make sure that you're talking to your principal talking to um our administrators to understand what is truly going on and when it comes to our facilities we have um bonly finance and facility meetings that we is open to the public and we encourage especially the group that wants Turf to come to those meetings and to hear what's going on we've been talking about Turf it's one of the first things that I talked

047to Dr katti about so please make sure that we are putting the correct information out there because it's really important yeah and I'll say something but not now I'll wait till board member com you're thank you this is like we're we're getting out of order here I appreciate it okay your turn all right good evening everyone thank you all um this is really a followup to our last board meeting where we presented um updates on our school Improvement planning process and and as of July 1 when I entered the district and was really grateful for the opportunity to spend really 90 to 100 days engaging in a variety of meet and greets which included hearing about um everything from our facility needs to our Stadium needs to the kinds of challenges that our students were

048experien in terms of who they are and identity and the bullying and the racism in the schools that some students may be experiencing as well as the opportunity for academic success in ourselves um all of these really came together in terms of being able to start to reflect on those and one of the things that one of our markers as a district around progress is the Illinois report State card that really Fe gives us feedback whereas an opportunity to really review in a holistic manner some of the high level academic data some of the high level feedback as it relates to culture and climate that we get through the five Essentials as well as some of the points of Pride that we have as a district we are an incredible district and I feel so

049proud to be able to be in this District to lead it and so tonight you have a a chance to now hear some of what's moved out of the space of both um the Gathering of information that I engaged with with our senior leadership team in terms of reflecting on where we are as a district and now moving into what our engagement will look like as a response to that now I want to highlight two things in the presentation you're going to hear from Miss faith dest and Heather conc this this evening two things one is that you're going to hear really because of the timing in which there was this leadership shift what are the priorities that the principles and the schools had already centered in terms of the work that needed to happen

050this year and you're going to hear about that the second thing you're going to hear is what are the responses and what are the the direction that I am proposing and that we are proposing that we need to move towards in terms of initial planning in response to the data that we've gathered tonight you'll get really high level information about that and then at the following board meeting you'll start to get even more granular sized pieces of this information so I just want to kind of frame that that tonight you're going to hear both what are we doing now what have we planned to do because we didn't wait for this data to come out to start preparing for what we're going to do this year we had a a plan that had been EX

051listing in relation to what we call Envision 308 which really identified markers around priorities and we had things to celebrate and there were things we needed to do to do better and I'm grateful for the team and our principls our Educators our taas every staff m in this district has been working very hard to make this a successful place for students and tonight you're going to hear some of the highlevel direction that we're going to do to start to go to those next levels of success going from great to Greater not good to great so uh I want to turn it over now to Faith and Heather thank you so much thank you so much um with that we are also welcoming Dr Waller Mr obafemi and Mrs citas in our presentation also so you'll

052be hearing from all five of us um so throughout the last couple months um we've been studying the system we've been meeting discussing with our building Leaders with our district leaders and as Dr kelti mentioned we're at the point where we're than trying to ready our system to move forward so what we're going to discuss tonight is as we talked about last time those celebrations and connections from our Illinois school report card data that we discussed last time um to our plan for improvement then we will shift into what are some of those activities some you've heard about um in our report so far this year but some are upcoming throughout the year and then next we will go to our action plan which we've just started to delve into um that's what we will

053be focusing on our highlevel uh goals and objectives really related to not only the work of the superintendent Advisory Group but then also um ongoing suring survey data and data that we have collected and analyzed thanks so much going to bring us back to uh celebration from uh the last time around where we had a 10 percentage Point uh in increase in grades 3 through eight of our students that are meeting proficiency uh for reading and it's one thing to celebrate that it's another to figure out well what happened and how do we keep that going so in uh talking with principles looking at our classroom walkthrough data talking with staff um several things especially at the junior high level come to mind and some of our Junior highs had 16 20 percentage Point uh

054increases and we worked at increasing the implementation of our sd30 literacy framework which the last year that was really focusing a lot on independent reading we used a lot of our essr funny money to come up uh with texts from various backgrounds levels interests uh and increase that engagement uh and explicit instruction and reading especially at the junior high level we also looked at it small group instruction uh and really geared it toward what students need uh and then I cannot help but really recognize the work of our Junior High instructional coaches that we're providing daily on the job right when they're needing it uh training and coaching for our teachers if you go to the next piece uh this can I real quick can I ask a quick question because I know this happened

055when we got this presentation and I'm sorry but I want to ask I want to ask this here while it's fresh in our mind so we heard a lot we've heard a lot about scores and where those scores need to be and what I just heard you say was those those extra Esser funds definitely were connected to that and what we were able to do with that was definitely connected with that increase is that going away this is the last year of the SR funding correct okay I just want to make sure that we note that thank you right moving on uh to math not quite as rosy we are still holding it steady but I do want to highlight a lot of our work in the last few years has been to decrease the

056opportunity gap between genders uh we have a bigger Gap than the state does and we have been looking at the different learning styles that are somewhat attributed to gender uh and have been doing what research would tell us we need to do to increase our uh girl math scores so that is a lot of the work on collaborative structures within our math classes uh and then also explicit vocabulary instruction and this is crucial especially at the elementary level because then when they go to Junior High the junior high Math teachers are speaking math language that sometimes our students can't access if we don't do a great job at vocabulary instruction at the younger grades again want to highlight uh our Junior High instructional coaches because we would usually see when we have a new math

057adoption a decrease or a dip in scores as teachers get used to that and students have not had the scout in of the years prior and instead uh we remain steady so we're very optimistic that we will see an increase uh this year going on to the next slide and some of our ongoing plans for improvement and now I'm talking about this year we want to continue the successes we've seen with the literacy framework we are moving now into writing uh because that is the other pie piece of that for many writing lessons uh and then we want to continue all the things that we had found out from the successes for the reading part in math we're working on building thinking classrooms which if you get an opportunity to see it it's really great

058it's it's students owning the process a lot more critical thinking a lot more real life problem solving uh and then we'll continue our work with collaborative structures and explicit vocabulary instruction if you go on to that we also there's a lot of instruction that isn't just literacy and math so our climate for learning framework is something that we will continue to work on our school Improvement planning process where we get together go through data make tweaks on the school Improvement plan we'll continue our walkthroughs uh we've done our first uh thousand classrooms will'll be doing another a th after winter break uh and then the high schools are doing some really great work around coaching and creating together uh with teachers a walkthrough tool for them to use and now I'll turn it over to

059Dr Waller right good evening everyone just as part of that bridge I just want to highlight um you may want to speak is Dr Waller but we are hosting a series of reviewing mentioned School Improvement planning where we'll be highlighting all demographic groups and there academic performance not just one particular subgroup and so part of the work will be to review in the school Improvement plan so if you want to add that to your the structure you've set up for principles sure absolutely so um our principles are going to be going through a reflection model process um in the next couple of weeks with District administration and um the intention of us doing that is really to get them to reflect on the data that they're utilizing in order to meet the goals that they've

060set forth in their school Improvement plans as well as um to determine the support in areas that they need so having them really look at the data interpret what that data May mean and then actually putting some steps in place um for support that they may need in order to make sure that they hit those goals um so that is the the wrap up in 23 24 as far as the work that they're doing with school Improvement um and shifting to the equity and engagement piece I'm very excited about the Dei committee that has been put together uh members on that committee represent um building administrator District administrators um all departments coordinators roles just trying to make sure that we have everyone at the table in order to um make effective uh changes and so

061um the Dei committee um this past week um they are drafting a Dei District policy and so we're excited about where that's going and um that will go to cabinet and then it will go to the equity teaching and learning committee to get you all feedback um and then in add addition to that um and that's a policy committee sorry just want to add that yes and the policy Committee of course yes um and then the other portion is around our success indicators and the development of those in in effort to support the direction that we take with school Improvement for 2425 and so right now that Dei committee is um determining the data that we want to use as well as analyzing the specific data for these specific areas which are around lessening the

062academic opportunity Gap um as well as increasing a supportive environment so um we wanted to say uh you know looking at student Behavior won't we don't want to necessarily focus on discipline right because we really want to focus on the relationships and those pieces um in addition to that um we are um excited about um looking at different programming as it pertains to special education as well as gifted um and then continuing to build those relationships between staff and students and just as importantly student to student as both faith and Dr Waller mentioned it's um our goals and objectives are Beyond just reading and math um so some of the work that is ongoing in um seal student behavior and Safety and Security we are currently in the uh curriculum review for our tier one

063um seal curriculum for our early childhood through 8th grade students we also have a working uh committee that will be intertwined with our mtss structures about our tier 2 seal interventions and supports we have uh classrooms that started piloting and are continued to Pilot this year classroom calming corners and calming strips as well Asal picture books in order order to keep students in the classroom um and then uh more importantly especially connected to tier one explicit instruction related to student Behavior data in terms of our student services and safety uh we implemented new student support plans and safety plans really focused on um supportive measures to our students um that are experiencing some safety or security concerns um we also established building based threat assessment teams last year as we talked um not only related

064to policy with our district level threat assessment teams but then moving down into our schools uh so we have instituted a new threat assessment protocol and then finally one of the things that we have implemented throughout this year is a collaborative program um working with um our as Wego police Department really focus on reducing uh repeating um offenders of vaping and fiscal altercations so those are some of the things that we have ongoing right now connected to the work from last year so as We examined um the data whether it was our all data or by subgroup or by gender um what we're looking at then is not only our academic Behavior data um we talked about our attendance data our student support data but then also our survey data across the district from our

065parents from our students and from our staff and through those examinations four main goals have emerged so at this point these are still in draft as Dr katti mentioned we will come uh our next kind of third part of our series is um our action plans goals objectives and then our measures that's where we're focusing on right now but our three goals focus on our Partnerships our organization our culture and climate connected to student growth and our financial transparency those were the key themes that have emerged through our data analysis and discussion so going Beyond just um state level data in terms of what we've talked about on the school report card we're also looking at our five Essentials and focusing our goals through the lens of one of the five Essentials this is our

066district level data from school year 2023 um and we receive an overall report not only on the five measures but then also on submeasures correct are currently in terms of effective leaders ambitious instruction supportive environment and involved families uh we did receive a overall neutral rating and then in collaborative teachers um we do we did receive a week rating So based on these five Essentials that's guiding our work through the connection to our goals so Dr K if I just say one thing there which is that I can you go back one slide so I want to highlight here for really the board and for the public just for a second and we'll have time to go deeper this at our next presentation but essentially what you're looking at is a description of what our

067system really looks like if you want to calibrate for schooling success if you want to think about what is the system to get to Student Success this these are the five key components of that success effective leadership collaborative teachers involved families support supportive environment and ambitious instruction that's the system that leads to significant outcomes and what the research will say is that if you get three out of five of those that's primed for Success you're going to be moving you're going to be what's the expression cooking with grease right you're going to be you're going to be moving and that you need three out of those five systems to really be primed for success and so that data is really helpful for us when we think about the survey and the surveys is coming up

068in a few months um if not less that input provides us with reflection opportunities to see how we're doing on these in this these systemic areas thank you Contin so um as I mentioned what we're doing is looking at the systems as a whole connecting our goals to one of those five Essentials as we move forward through our uh collaborative planning process so our first goal um connected to involve families um at this point I'm going to turn the discussion over to Dr Waller and Teresa to talk a little bit more about our goals all right so um we're very very excited to um to you know Elevate and see all of the amazing work that um Michelle early has been doing um as a part of this goal um and so ultimately um we

069are focusing on a couple of things um we have been having meetings with parent University um to Foster this new relationship and create this partnership in order to meet the needs of all of our community members in various ways um and so we're very excited about what that is going to look like in addition to that um our superintendent Advisory Group has um met yet again um and it's it's very exciting to see the different stakeholders coming together so that we can um gain the different perspective persectives and build on these goals and bringing them into the conversations um so I know those are two pretty powerful things that we're going to be doing within go one so thanks building on that a little bit um that one the first part of that really turns

070internally and looking at how we can engage and build up that structure from our um inside and then the second piece of that is really um as we try to take that structure and turn outward and what does that mean to um build those Partnerships across our community both business and Civic organizations so the desire to have those um formal relationships whether they be contributing through um student experiences um Financial Obligations Partnerships um really thinking outside the box so um it's kind of a two-fold uh looking in inside as well as engaging the community as on a broader Spectrum so in terms of our next goal um what we're looking to do is focus strong L on more collaboration and Partnerships so working um with our bargaining units to establish those collaborative structures um we

071talked about it a little bit with our state waiver and really formalizing our collaboration what does that look like um also as Dr Waller has mentioned really examining our school improvement process and how are we collectively working together to improve the student experience so in terms of objective four um we want to look across the system at our districtwide programs so we've talked about what can we do differently at different levels um our from our early childhood all the way through to our Alternative Learning experiences so how can we do some program evaluation um to not only look deep into the student achievement data but what are those experiences look like um and how can we strengthen those programs so our goals and objectives will be um really focused on where are we now and

072where do we want to go um to have clear and definable experiences for our students in terms of goal three this is where um you might see some change over the next month or two um really looking at culture climate and and Improvement across um both our academic and seal experiences so um in terms of professional practice what does a effective um uh learning experience mean for our uh teachers for our staff members what do those opportunities look like to not only deepen their learning but impact change across our organization um so what are some in really the connection from objective five into objective six is what additional learnings can we bring uh to provide more foundation and focus on Equity um across both our academic and our seal programs I know with everything that

073has been said so far I hate to say the most important ingredient is the money to pay for so I'm going to bring it all home so one of the key things that we know as a district we've been struggling with is to get a good handle on our finances and the uh goal for is creating transparency and just doing a better job of making sure we have adequate resources to be able to fund all this important uh work that we need to do and in doing that we're going to do that in in two two key objective one has to do with just creating a culture of conservatism whereby we manage the resources efficiently before we spend money we have to ask the question do we really need to do this and even if

074we're doing this it's just the best way to do it so that's the key thing we want to manage our resources well we also want to be very transparent and very being very clear in communicating how much we're spending how we're spending it and and also letting folks know that we're doing it the best way possible that's what we that's objective uh seven object objective eight which is somewhat related to seven is that most of our buildings will build the last 18 20 years and most buildings when they get to be about 20 years they need some TLC right and uh so some of those buildings now we need things like uh rooftop unit which uh is helpful for for Ambiance in the building and also what you will call V uh building envelopes the

075uh the roof as well as the uh the windows they need to be looked at and replaced and in order for us to start doing that in a planful way instead of just doing waca we are talking about creating a master facility planning and that process will be one that will include all stakeholders we're talking about Educators we're talking talking about administrator we're talking about our parents and trying to reimagine moving forward from now moving forward 51 15 years from now what do we need our buildings to look like and how do we go about making sure those buildings are durable and they're well careful and the process of doing that is to master facility planning and uh what we're planning to do is in the next fisal year making sure we have resources in

076place to actually create an RFQ where we ask Architects to come up with us with ideas in leading the process in doing that thank you so in terms of part three so next steps in our process um we're going to come back with a more um indepth and you know as Dr katti mentioned kind of grain size of our action plan and success indicators so these are just some examples of what you will see as part of the action plan for each of our goal so as um Teresa and jadan mentioned we're currently in the process of our implementation of our superintendent advisor group so in conjunction with action plan steps and items we will also be bringing success indicators so what are those intended outcomes what is the impact in ongoing monitoring not only

077of the plan steps but then what are we looking to achieve as part of the system so what data are we looking at what is the monitoring cycle and what is the intended impact so for goal two as we mentioned one of the current uh action plan items is a refinement of the school improvement process um really connected to not only the district goals but also the collaboration model uh goal three we're looking to redevelop and Implement an equity focused multi-tier system of support so looking at both our academic and our social emotional learning and supports of our systems through the tiers of both you know in and out of the classroom and then an example um connected to what rapael was just speaking to is identify those savings moving towards zerob based budgeting in

078order to then look at uh the impact on other potential programming so these are just examples of different uh action plan items connected to our goals so the timeline over the next six months is to establish our collaborative District level teams um so we're working with our Union Partnerships and our uh building leaders to realign the goals um through those Partnerships focus on Improvement and collaboration and then finalize our district Improvement plan so that we can then make make strong connections between our goals and our objectives at the school level so what this timeline does is it moves up our school Improvement planning process so we can really kick off that work at the end of the school year into the summer um to be ready um at the start of the school year so

079this is our our next phase of our timeline for the work connected to our goals and objectives any questions I have a few but if you don't have the answers to these you can get back to me number one if we had situation where we have um well first of all start with this one uh unlike the private sector we have to have a balanced budget correct we're not we're we're not the federal government so we can't print money so that option's off the table too correct if we were to finance some of this we would have to go and ask the voters am I incorrect about that like in other words if we didn't have the money and we had to go Finance it it would be the voters who would have the say

080correct uh Finance what exactly so in other words if we needed we didn't have enough funds for the facility needs that we think we have that would be a voter decision at that point am I correct absolutely because uh and if I can if I can explain yeah go ahead a school district I what is called a desent debt extension based limitation and we're maxed out out so in order to be able to issue Bonds Beyond that and the the short way of doing that is to do a referendum where the the taxpayers in the community will vote Yes or No to increasing that Deb extension limitation yeah I'm aware but thank you for telling me no there's the reasons why I'm asking uh my third question to you if you don't know the answer

081to this that's fine let's see I already know the answer to Valley View they do not ask for tax anticipation warrants I already know the answer to planfield they do not ask for tax anticipation warrants because we actually gave them money last year in interest and they bought ours so I don't need to ask about those two do you know if Yorkville West Aurora East Aurora Manuka High School District because those high school districts are always funded better um than these unit districts let's see am I leaving anybody out are any of them experiencing a situation like us where they're asking for tax anticipation warrants uh based on my knowledge the answer is no and if you would like I can you know I can yeah you can let me know off offline what would

082be interesting also is to understand if any of those districts also have uh gone three years in a row where they decided not to raise the levy no yeah thank you thank you yeah please you you know the there was a slide about seal and there was a a bullet point at the very end of that that I didn't quite understand with that explicit instruction related to student Behavior data you want to speak to that so if you can just elaborate yep so the work of the schools was to develop um tier one in you know Behavior instructional expectations so based on their specific data whether it was in the hallway in the classroom on the playground what are some of those expectations of how to you know be a student in the cafeteria how

083to be a student walking down the hallway so um because that could look very different at Early Childhood versus the high school level so that is done um per school but what are some of those explicit um instructional expectations and how we in essence want our students to relate to each other and um you know uh work in the space connected to the outcomes of our data so we look at the data to enhance some of those explicit instruction pieces Faith Jadon anything to add to that um I would just quickly add to a piece of this to is around self-regulation and those pieces and so um we need to be able to look at the student Behavior data as it pertains to you know bullying and things of that nature in order to again

084have that explicit conversation regarding empathy and and self-regulation and understanding our emotions Etc so extending it to that space as well well I will say that at the schools when I'm doing the walkthroughs uh um when I've done walkthroughs in the past Heather what you were talking about is um very obvious um after it was explained so there's it's definitely getting implemented um the other thing I had was on the last slide it has a timeline um is embedded in there success indicators is that coming okay so okay so that's part of the the work at the very very beginning so um those success indicators will be developed um at the district level and then kind of refined in um at the school level also are are you I just want to clarify the question

085so when you think you're saying that are you referring to metrics to measure the progress towards the goals that were identified with the objectives yes okay so that's so yes so part of what each of those objectives will have are action steps and then of markers for what does success look like for each of those which is when we're when we're referring to success indicators we're talking more holistically as a district versus what's in this goal right this goal is really uh strategic move to say we've come I've come in the district has launched what the plan it had and is building now we've got to figure out how to go from great to Greater right um and so what what the success indicators that Jadon is referring to is we're looking at what does

086it look like to ensure that we're seeing a holistic success for all of our students across multiple now some of that will be in the metrics you'll see around the action planning work and the goals and the objectives but if can we go to the the the the slide with the goals and objectives so these four goals are really connected to if we're going to Now set up let's say smart goals as a district which stands for specific measurable actionable results and timing I like to include in their inclusive and Equitable but smarty goals goals I digress so my point is that in order for us to build that there's some excavation there's some coordination there's some transparency figuring out where the funds are there's some high level organizational change that needs to happen to

087even get to the starting point right this could be very different if we came okay here's what we're going to do here's what we're going to do in six months or 12 months I'd be lying to you there's some a really important groundwork that has to be done oh yeah principles teachers engagement Partnerships with parents and our Union leadership cementing these building a real culture of vulnerability and Trust to then then move to them like okay so now can we determine how fast we're going to go there are Vital Signs and imp expected impact outcomes that are connected to each of these four goals in other words what do we expect to see achieved within 90 days this is really a 90day will it be extended but really this is then connected to some 90day

088work and then that will launch in the spring really towards probably a year if not 18 months from that point on that's all I know okay I I want to invite the board and really the public as you listened um questions that come up please send those in email us um we really appreciate the feedback um this really why we' launched superintendent advisory groups uh superintendent working groups I mean it's really to engage we've had this past week last week we had the the Dual Lang the E Forum I apologize the El Forum um these are all vehicles to really start to get feedback around these action steps I just have one comment more than a question on this and you know uh especially if it's ever insinuated that I don't listen in fact um

089usually when something's brought to me mean not only do I listen but I drive my wife crazy because I don't sleep uh and ponder over situations and so when we're looking at all this um you know one of the conversations I've had with multiple stakeholders outside of the district and this is why I think all of this is important I'm just going to preface this is um it is very difficult right now in education for us to have um honest courageous conversations about where we're at and um I talked to there are a lot of Educators in this in this District which is great it's a great place to get a lot of information from um I had one educator from a from another District I'm not going to speak to about this District right

090now but from another District who was telling me that um her particular Elementary School had hundreds of Crisis calls already this year like five crisis calls on average a day um I know that I've talked to um an educator in a very influent District near where I live who is talking about how they have kindergarteners who are being cleared out of classrooms and and attacking Educators and so forth the reason I bring this up is because many of our best laid plans also need resources and when I saw an article recently where um ISB is is being begged by many districts in the state to be very careful what they're going to do with funding because the needs are increasing they're not decreasing um it's um it's it's very important right for all of us

091to listen to the entire conversation and look at everything that's going on because um if our legislators continue to hedge at well we don't know about after next fiscal year um some of our best laid plans are going to have problems and that's not NE necessarily reflective of us and the first thing I try and figure out is what's going on with multiple systems not just our system and when you have Will County legitimately talking about um taking some of their funds from their budget to try and fund an alternative school that is busting out at the seams because and and then they can't find help and they're Outsourcing um and they're seeing behaviors even in their alternative school that they haven't seen um this is indicative of where we are at as an entire

092system and so we need to be very cognizant of just like we're talking about making an investment an investment on the proactive side is is imperative at this point um but there's a reason why those districts are asking isby and I want this to work for us and and all these people pieces are important but the system as a whole not just our system but the system as a whole has to hold together also right okay well I have uh two more points of reflection that I would ask and hope to see in the next iteration of this presentation um the first one is that we often use the terms culture and climate together and they're two very distinct and separate things and so I I'd like to see us um if possible separate those

093things and talk about what things belong with what climates the stuff you see on the top if you look at a tree and the culture is the stuff you see underneath and so when we're talking about school culture and climate where does mtss fall where do other things fall I think it's very important because culture and climate are very very different secondly I was can we go back to um the where it talks about engaged families or increased family engagement right so we have increased Community involvement in schools by expanding current relationships and creating new Partnerships but then we talk about building relationships with families those are very different to me and so I think that if we're aligning goals unless I stakeholders are a lot of people I think that family engagement and stakeholder

094engagement need to be delineated because increasing um involvement with families and parents and Guardians is needs to be focused on and very myopic because it's incredibly important and then what other stakeholders whether it's community community um groups Community businesses and so forth is different um so I'd just like to see that maybe a reflection on that so we understand what specific goes with what right and so for tonight's purpose I I appreciate that I'll just underscore that what you're seeing so what emerged here right so why did this emerge this emerged because in the various engagement with parents principles Educators teachers and what I heard is that there wasn't a coordinated structure to really support those things to leverage that partnership that needs to exist both internally but also with our our community that there

095is a lot of resources left on the table oh yeah as well as and those resources are not just Financial those exist on the table too I was going to make a Turf joke but I won't um and then also resources in terms of human investment and coordination and Care partnership and so those two that's it and so I love that you kind of highlighted those two things that affirms what's in our action plan you're going to get some more granular siiz things um but and the board will have a chance to respond to that both publicly but also in advance no I know that and but but but but so thank you all for your feedback um our next presentation this evening um is related actually that's to build on um next we're going

096to invite Miss doist to speak about our uh organization and organizational and curriculum audit um really this is an opportunity for us to really almost create a selfcheck as we start to build these plans for next steps this is an opportunity for us to create a I would call almost like a third party that's going to start to give us feedback as to whether we got it right so not only will the board but the public public will have their feedback but this gives us almost like a third investment to say are we getting this right and what did we miss Faith the stockless all right so first I want to talk about why do we need an organizational and curriculum audit and it's really important to pone in on that word organizational as well

097as curriculum so it is to look at curriculum material systems but it's also all the context around the supports uh and the systems in which it lives and then the second part of the process which will be really important for us is to involve more teachers more staff District administrators the coaches all of that through the process um of assessing what we have and then also looking at those results to determine what are the next steps and professional needs you know moving forward so when you look at what is examined in an audit yes it's curriculum guides yes it's you know resources and textbooks but it's also test results it's also our policies it's also funding it's also how do we staff and Coach everything it's our Union contracts you know just so much of

098what what is the business that we do and how are all the different tools um that we use uh to do it and then when you look at how it's completed you might think it's well it's a group of people looking at our books looking at our test data it's a lot more than that it's doing classroom walkthroughs these people will come and do that it would be surveying our students and staff some of our interviews and then yes going through hundreds of our sd308 artifacts uh and our scope and sequence and looking at those pieces so we talk a lot about the importance of collaboration Workforce when you think about five Essentials that's where we were back at that collaborative piece and this will involve a lot of teacher input on curriculum needs the

099delivery it'll talk to instructional coaches on their um determinations of next steps and then also looking at professional development moving forward know Dr con already talked quite a bit about five Essentials and the alignment to five Essentials those are those four draft pieces that we have here and this work really centers in on goal two where we're talking about overall organizational health and systems uh to increase student achievement and learning through high impact instructional strategies and then also the climate and culture and increasing student growth looking at inclusive academic andal programs and practices and this will be looking atal curriculum too this is not just uh academic curriculum a huge piece of this as we've talked about is collaboration with our Union so we've already met with the Union leadership to talk about the purpose

100and the need for this and tomorrow I'll be doing an online piece for a lot of our instructional uh for the audit the organization through uh key members from our Union uh and then we're going to continue to work with them throughout this process as well so some of the process we've created and posted in RFP we had it posted for 30 days we received three different proposals things that we really looked for are um professional references here in Illinois if you're looking off of Illinois standards and Illinois bandat it's important to have some local references also the qualifications and expertise the capacity and then of course the fees uh and we went through that uh and we are really looking at cmsi they were the only a vendor of the three that had expertise

101and professional references here in Illinois and we thought that was critical they also had the largest emphasis on Equity they also were the most comprehensive and we'll be spending a little bit of time uh with the board Equity teaching and learning committee looking at this more and they were the least expensive option so uh the cost of this uh is 96,500 again this is more than just looking looking through information this is getting out to schools looking at uh classroom walkthroughs survey pieces our next step is to bring it back to the board uh for Action in January and if it is approved we would begin that work right away so that we could have this Baseline of data and plans for improvement by April then that last bullet point is just a reminder that

102it's not a product that we're searching for but also the process to continue to collaborate with our Union leadership uh and have them joint we go through this Venture together in improving our instruction quick question yes this is really good this makes me excited but I have a question in regards to um expertise in and experience in Illinois I in Illinois I think that is phenomenal do you know what other you don't have to answer this but I'm thinking about from a benchmarking standpoint what other states um do they have experience with because I'm wondering how are they going to Benchmark what they find in our district to say if it's good acceptable or not are they only going to compare to other schools in ill or districts in Illinois or are they going to

103say here best practice some of the other references I'm looking at their whole proposal uh here there is work that has been done in Oregon there's uh work that's been done in Texas there's work that's been done in Arkansas uh work in Iowa so it's not just uh Illinois but we thought it was really important that they have a knowledge of Illinois I have a um I guess comments and maybe one question but um I just want to EMP like excuse me I think this is a great move curiculum touches every single student every single year every single day um and this type of an investment I think is important to know uh where we're at and continue the digging that we've been doing sorry that's okay the the digging that we've been doing um

104around other areas um I just want to say I think that we're hiring a company or an audit company to do this because we want an outside perspective and we also maybe at this point don't have not the skill we we have the skill but maybe not the capacity to do this type of an audit at this level is that why we're Contracting out with someone else no cuz there are various ways so in audit I want to frame this two ways there are lots of ways that we can engage in you know reflection self-reflection engagement there are lots of tools for calibrating the system what you receive through a comprehensive audit of this nature is you essentially bring in um practitioners but also researchers who can really provide you with a high level but

105also grain size assessment in relation that can Benchmark your against other systems I'm within the system already right and so everybody here is within the system there are going to be natural blind spots um I'll give you an example my four goals tonight that or our four goals that we brought tonight that I that I that emerged and I say when I my they emerged out of what I led in terms of the assessment of the district and engag in with all folks at the highest level of the the senior leadership team down to students those yielded high level markers that we need to pursue right it behooves the board now to essentially what we'll have is now a third part is going to come and say yeah you're hitting it early on in this

106process and it provides us with really like expertise but also to say you're the blind spots you've addressed this organizational Health we're ility evaluation systems we've we''ve we've changed our organization chart we're looking at pilot studies around we're doing some Pilots around our ly we've got building them classroom this provides it and for a district this large um this is actually quite a deal given the level of depth they have of of of facility I'll give you an example tonight we're discussing potentially a facility audit um a comprehens of Master facility plan next year that's going to probably cost twice three times the amount and that's just for the physical plant that's just for the brick and mortar right that audit will cost 3 to 500,000 potentially and districts typically will do it Elgen just

107did it um 300 has done one recently I think in the last couple years those cost even more but yet we have people internally who may be able to do it so I think it's a great question and I appreciate the ask because it's important to know that it's not that we're not doing inter reflection it's not that we're doing calibration and Faith mentioned this evening jadan and her work and our team has done a lot of different calibrating things what this does is it provides us with a much more laser likee attuned um and focused reflection on both curriculum but also organizational systems and also priorities they may say hey these four goals you got to change them they may say you've thought of this but let me let's give us some let's give

108you some better recommendations yeah thank you um that's clear and I'm just wondering the Le the I just want to set myself up for what I think is coming from them we're like the board of education is going to receive like a report like with some recommend like they'll we'll we'll see their findings that's right correct okay well you want to speak to the findings process or yeah sure after they do their classroom walkthroughs and the initial piece there's a uh an overview that here's where we're at and then they go back and create a very polished you know product of here's the uh results that will take a little bit more to have in polished form and there'll be an executive summary that we can share and then pages of more details uh and

109summaries of the different components and then you have different programs the equity lens you know there's so much to all of this okay thank you I have a question more about the process and something that maybe we need to um possibly punt to the finance and Facilities team at some point but why are we not seeing the three proposals side by side and then with your recommendation instead of just the recommendation it's kind of we've had it all over the board where we get recommendations or we see all the prop it I'm not saying see the full proposals but see kind of a side by side of these are the three companies we looked at these are the fees associated with it this is what the output that we'll get why are we just seeing

110only the recommendation I I would really like as a board for us to understand and have something very uniform so that when you're bringing recommendations to us we are seeing that I think that without that type of process um we've struggled in the past and I think moving forward we need to decide what that looks like when you're bringing proposals to US versus a slide that just says we receive the three here's the recommendation we don't know what the other ones are to understand or to be able to ask questions we we can provide that for the next board meeting first of all and secondly we will definitely I think for the finance facility committee bring the procedure and make sure that there's some opportunity to calibrate that and then bring it to the fin

111next board meeting so thank you for that be fantastic thank you great feedback okay all right 8.1 Dr Keli we will have your superintendent report all right good evening board it's been a rich evening already and I appreciate all the engagements on multiple fronts and I apologize for the the coughing I am not contagious I was tested for All the Above So for those of you ducking and cover uh you're okay um I'd like to welcome first and foremost several members of our senior leadership team who joined who stepped into new roles this evening Dr Heather concade now serving as Deputy superintendent Dr Jadon Waller who is now serving as our assistant superintendent of equity and engagement Dr Brian zy assistant superintendent of Human Resources they say if you want to go far you go

112you don't go alone you go with a team and I'm grateful for the team that we've assembled um these individuals have been value members of our senior leadership team and following our last board meeting um have now stepped into new R and I want to congratulate them on their uh career opportunity before them and their continued dedication to this awesome District um tonight I also want to express warm wishes to those who celebrate special holidays this time of year um Hanukkah bodh Day Las pasadas winter salces hulie Christmas and Quanza just a few of the wonderful traditions of this holiday season our community is filled and Dr birthday and Dr W is filled with the yes Dr Wall's birthday is in the spirit of this period um if you wondered why you were feeling so

113happy so um this is a wonderful example of all the various traditions and cultures that really bring U make our our district such a wonderful and unique place to live and work and be a part of um we want to wish you all a special time filled with Gatherings with your loved ones and celebrations that create lasting memories this is our last full board meeting of 2023 hard to believe we I'm going to get emotional we encourage our students to finish out these final weeks strong we have lots of important learning to do and we want to thank our student ambassadors for all they're doing and that work and I hope everyone has a wonderful and restful break tonight I'm also thrilled to introduce and we are joined by representatives of the iGo Junior Women's

114Club who are presenting a check to pay for student lunch balances for families who fall outside of the free and reduced lunch program [Applause] guidelines for families experience hardship having this expense taken care of really means a lot we sincerely appreciate the club's generosity and partnership for the benefit of our students and families I want to just continue to Echo that we all we live in a world right now where there can be so much harm and hurt and when a group of individuals arise to fill a place that is often overlooked there's nothing more powerful and to be celebrated than that and I want to thank you so I want to invite the board to join me for photo as we receive a check that's a large check I wonder who was going to

115sign so let's uh let's take a quick [Applause] [Laughter] photo wait where's RA you want gra this to you thank you very much thank you thank you thank [Music] you keep filling in keep filling in y so good close together close together say lunch I got switch phon for their hold on here we all right thank you so [Music] [Applause] much [Music] plan to try come up to the mic so please please so we just wanted to let you know that we do plan to try to make this an annual thing to contribute to food insecurities within the community now if yes we should stand if anybody feels so [Applause] moved if anybody feels so moved to join your efforts in contributing to this fund what do they need to do how do they find

116you what's the process or is this just for you all um no absolutely it's not just for us we do have a website aso.org so you can follow us there for different fundraisers Within the community one of our biggest initiatives is scholarships for high school seniors uh at OE and Os and we have a huge red carpet party in March March 2nd and um keep an eye out for tickets they'll be going on sale um the middle of December middle of this month um and we invite all community members to join us at that now say your say the website again asgo junior. Org the word Juniors is spelled out yes and we also have a Facebook group last year we did 19 scholarships um all $1,000 each and we also do scholarships at wanzi

117Community College wow so cool thank you thank you and with that I want to invite board members as part of my superintendent comments um I've um I it's important that we share in some of the good news but also important announcement that may be coming up so I want to invite board members to jump in here and share some of those uh shout out to OS junr Sydney Hamer uh Long Beach uh state recruit as she was chosen by the Record newspapers as the girls volleyball player of the year yeah it's a Long Beach I like I like that right the beach different Beach but still the beach we are so proud of the 105 students from my weo East and the 68 students from MGO High School who have been announced as the 2024

1182025 Illinois State Scholars um these students join their peers across the state in the top 10% of the graduating seniors and recognized by their outstanding achievement congratulations moving on seven students from asigo East and eight students from asigo high school were selected as 2024 Illinois music Education Association Allstate musicians these students will participate at the 2024 All State festivities with others from across the state in Peoria January 25th through 27th congratulations to these talented musicians ASO East High School's kinetic Wellness Department received the Illinois Association for health physical education Recreation and dance Health Blue Ribbon program award the this is a testament to the great program we they provide for our students congratulations Community cares does so much to support our district families they currently have families needing sponsors for this year's holiday project please

119consider signing up by yourself or with a group to help make the holidays brighter for these families in our community please follow the link on our District 308 Facebook page or visit ww w. communitycares group.com that's c mmu n t y c a r s gr r o u p.com to find out how you can help thank you can I can I interject into that we have actually filled all of our sponsor positions nice there's still opportunities to donate funds um so we're we're always looking but we're happy to say that we have sponsors for our families awesome that's awesome thank you by the way Mary Joe for all you do appreciate you we wanted to extend an invitation uh to the community to participate in a showcasing of cultures and traditions at bac's annual

120celebrations around the world event or C cundo on December 8th uh the event will be held at East viiew uh from 6:00 to 8:00 so you can visit the District's website calendar to find that information but everyone is welcome good and finally as a reminder the public is invited to attend all board committee meetings where particular topics are discussed details are presented and recommendations are brought forward to the board as a whole coming up later this week Wednesday December 6th is the equity teaching and learning committee meeting at 5:00 p.m. finance and Facilities will meet on Monday December 11th at 6 p.m. and then Tuesday December 19th the policy and legislative committee meets at 5:00 pm these meetings are held at the District administration Center and there's opportunity for public comment at each of these

121meetings and by the way I want to point out I don't want to call out his name because I don't want him to get embarrassed but we do have a an OE student who I think has showed up to every single one of our committee meetings and so you're seeing your notice and appreciate it be the change right be the change right uh with that that concludes my superintendent comments um there are so many exciting things that happen in this District um and uh so much learning and it's I'm grateful to have the board joined me in reflecting and celebrating those so thank you for that Madam president thank you thank you for that report and if you guys don't mind can we go out of order and do the stup the student ambassador report

122because it's getting late and we need them to get their sleep and be ready for tomorrow so we're going to go with our student ambassador reports oh I have to make a motion to do it can I have a motion to um have our student ambassador report go after our superintendent report tonight I moving to 6.2 right move to 6.2 or 82 uh I make a motion to move item 8.4 to 8.2 second Miss menm I Mr pler I hi Sim hi Mr G hi Dr Mario hi hi motion passes 70 we will now have our St our student ambassador reports can we make that permanent so we don't have to do this a lot yes well we have to make a motion for that no no we just do it all right so over

123the past couple of weeks we have made some very successful plans for Ascend on January 26th the main topics of discussion were deciding on a schedule that will give students ample time with speakers and for reflection determining how we want to organize our speakers discussing how to give students decision-making power on which speakers they want to listen to while keeping students organized and focused and lastly how we can Ensure students are engaged throughout the entire day we plan on continuing this planning at our dece December 11th meeting so we can have an appropriate amount of time to make sure we communicate these plans with teachers and staff appropriately lastly I just want to discuss the triple I conference I had the privilege of attending two weeks ago myself and other ssac students were given the

124opportunity to be part of a dayong intensive on student voice this program included important lessons on breaking down barriers between between students and administration discussion of important issues within District Statewide and a breakout session with just student attendees this breakout session was one of my favorite parts of the day as we got to discuss issues we are addressing within our district such as sexual sexual harassment and mental health with other representatives to find unique ways to tackle these issues overall it was a great experience that I will remember as I continue my work as a student ambassador thank you to the board and administration for giving me and the other ssac members this amazing opportunity that was awesome thanks all right oh okay um I was not unfortunately able to attend the triple I conference

125last month as I was attending an entertainment conference in the Sunshine State of Florida um I was able to learn a lot about the business industry however and the hard work that does go into that field um overall the ssac has been um focusing in on planning our Ascend um in January and we are looking forward to completing all prod all of our projects and finalizing our details uh by the next board meeting so we can provide essential communication about Ascend uh as well as pushing out and receiving our um much awaited results um from our teacher survey so we can create a strong action plan to kick off second semester strong uh with how we want to utilize those results results thank you you thank you very much and you guys are excused second

126semester oh my gosh okay now we'll go back to our 8.2 board committee reports so we have finance and facilities and then policy and legislative um finance and Facilities would you like to share out sure uh the O EHS the asgo East track oval is striped and completed and available for use the high jump pole vault and long jump should be completed by May 2024 depending on whether I think that's really important because there is some misinformation out there right now that um says there will not be for next year and it's really important that everybody understands that we have a very keen eye on that the outside track will be ready for track season the high jump long jump and the pole vault will be completed inside the high school if it's not ready

127by the track season a lot of this is unfortunately determined by vendors and timing and uh materials weather so we kind of have to absorb um those delinquencies when they come for come to us the ohos track still in progress with a completion date of May 2024 depending on the weather in the interim we have reached out to Yorkville High School in planfield central to host our home track meets OS will utilize the OE track occasionally for training the OE tennis court is complete the OS tennis courts are anticipated to be completed by May 24th depending on the weather tennis season should run without interruption the ASO East pool maintenance of diving boards and their starter blocks is needed gathering information on the cost at this time and we will will update the finance and

128facility Committee in December clubber our architect has presented a 5-year plan to our finance and facility uh committee for approval and it will be presented to the Board of Education um yeah and then yeah just uh I don't know this it kind of ties into our the meeting prior to this where we discuss you know how we're going to look at contracts moving forward and uh making sure that we're um buckled up in that process as well so I appreciate the S oemi bringing that to us and um you know we're looking to make sure that uh some of these situations uh don't happen again well I think it's also um and and kind of a different topic I think it's also great that we've got A Five-Year Plan put together um that cloer did

129for us so that we can start to kind of uh actively plan and budget for some of these repairs that we all know need to be done at this point in time y one piece just to give the history here um some of those things were done in the past and then Financial Calamity occurred and so um I I I'm I get just as frustrated as other people um trust me I do but I think I I'm not sure how else to I'm just not sure how else to articulate that when those things were happening um you know uh I don't I don't know what else we we could have done at the time to to convey that there would be years and years of of effects from from all of that um I feel

130terrible about it every day right but um I can tell you someone sitting up in bright lights on a stage when you're discussing Cuts there wasn't one person who thought well we'll be fine after this um so I'm happy to see us getting better and thank you but I know we're not where we need to be so I don't think anybody's arguing that yeah it's gonna it's take a while take a while on I didn't realize we had a page two we did discuss the water main break at um ASO high school I just want to shout out to the maintenance team did an incredible job um thank you Mr Queen please send along our appreciation what they were able to do in such a short amount of time to um mitigate the risk of

131more damage was incredible so we were very proud of that we will be receiving the Board of Education will receive a bid for mowing on January 8th and then we will have um action on January 22nd and something that I am very excited about is we put out a an RFP that's a request for a proposal for new food service possibly could be Aramark again we don't know um but last year ISB took away the low bid requirements so we now have the chance to award the Food Service bid to align with our board priorities and our values and our vision um there are wow this got updated there are 15 vendors that have shown interest so far which is amazing the RFP process will allow us to do a food tasting and visit the

132cafeteria and there will be a um small committee put together to help within student ambassadors board members to take part in the tasting process and we have also um very proud of Amanda and um Dr or Mr uba in um really putting all the needs of our specific district and our specific schools in the RFP to ensure that um all of our students are getting the same food um on a daily basis at the same time especially with what is um presented in the menu which we know there have been a lot of issues so we look forward um to getting back that information and that's two more vendors that submitted since we met as a finance committee so that is very exciting okay policy and legislative okay um we had um two basic conversations

133at the um policy and legislative committee uh we did some work on policy uh reviewing policy from press and and an additional policy um that um will'll bring forward to the board as well uh and then we spent another half of the time um discuss discussing uh legislative matters um Jared did a nice job of bringing some information that he gathered uh about the districts um around us near us kind of around us uh and and helping us visualize what characteristics we share with those districts to see if there is any natural um natural connections that we could make in regards to advocacy at the legislative level um that conversation continues um started yeah we're just getting started with that what did I miss I think we were also talking to the ISB or we

134were considering talking to the iasb about potentially in the future having some Regional having a regional meeting I have to keep telling this down having a regional meeting um at this location depending on what they're in this District depending on what their parameters were um it seems that we I guess from from what we've heard we have been fairly quiet um within iasb for a long period of time and it's uh we need to start getting our voices back yeah it kind of ties into some of the feedback that we received from IB we had what I thought was kind of a courageous conversation too when it came to uh we had a great um suggestion from uh Teresa about um perhaps um approaching our um region which we're in iasb we in the kwaki

135region about perhaps um seeing if they can get legislators together and we could go that route one of the things to think about um that our conversation went to when it comes to advocacy for our district is there's a couple of pieces one is we are definitely on the border of our region so Kettle County isn't even marked on the map as being in Kish and we're the largest District in kennel County and clearly we're in the Kwak division uh but if you go to TU 4 they're in Dage and if you go to planfield they're in Three Rivers and so we really are like we talk about being kind of where everything meets over here we really are kind of where everything meets according to them we had some discussions about whether we wanted

136to have discussions with iasb about the way they've done the regions that came up um and then you know and this is the hard part to kind of convey to um the community there are there are committees there are there are leadership roles in the regions and then there are leadership roles at the Statewide um myself being on the board six years that's like nothing right um it's compared to other districts who claim those uh leadership roles they've had a lot of experience and a lot of board members on there I am not advocating for anything other than to make sure that the general public understands we've had turnover um that we've been uncomfortable with uh when it comes to Administration level but we've also had turnover at the board level and I'm not saying

137that it hasn't been necessary or anything but there are consequences to that right and one of the consequences I'll talk about it more in my board comments is we seem to not know the whole history of things that have come before us sometimes and um you know we can we can say a conversation started at a certain point from our perspective our perspective is limited right um and so so a lot of times those conversations trust me have started long before and and there have been people who sat in these seats and have said many things uh and witnessed many things also uh I am happy though that the board seems very excited about staying in iasb because that was another thing was brought up we've actually had board members who wanted to remove themselves

138from I uh asgo from iasb as well so I think those were everything you did a good job of covering everything else I just wanted to add those pieces of the conversation that happened and I should thank you again for putting all of that together it pretty awesome it was actually fun I enjoyed it I know you enjoyed it I knew it was fun when I got it like within 24 hours like oh Jar's been having fun and texts along the way contrary to popular opinion I do listen and then I I go forth and I told you my wife gets tired of me not sleeping thank you all right 8.3 board comments who wants a start you've been going last so I didn't prepare anything but I just wanted to say triple I was

139once again um quite inspirational and walked away with a lot of ideas and thoughts and so forth but more than anything I just want to say that our students man did they shine once again um we even had our former um one of our former ambassadors come back and one of our former committee members and I'm grateful to Caitlyn and Monica it was just such a joy to see them and spend the day with them and they continue to represent us weo and put us in such a bright shining light so it was great it was a great it was definitely great um another great weekend I can continue with comments and just say um was my first time at triple ey um great experience uh lots of you know getting to know each other

140and hanging out and also lots of learning in the different sessions uh I got to attend um some uh session on negotia negotiations I got to attend a session on uh teacher Pipeline and I had to attend a session also uh with a panel of legislators which is one of the um more pertinent takeaways as they discussed ebf which was um a is always a topic uh related to all the things that we're doing here on the board um and I'll say that and I have my detailed notes uh but there was uh two legislators there as well as a Deputy Governor for education in Illinois um and my summary of my notes are that uh for next year as Jared has said several times um ebf will likely be funded at 350 minimum uh

141and then from there there might be some competing priorities uh those priorities include higher education early childhood education um and fun funding for to support migrants in this the state uh so some good takeaways lots of learning and a great opportunity uh let's see so uh a couple things that uh I'll start with the I went to a at Triple A a piece on sped funding uh special education funding uh a couple of things I I pulled a lot out but I'm just going to highlight three um ebf does not provide for high cost low in students with disabilities so as we see that population increase we should realize that um also uh idea hold harmless is based off of 1998 numbers um so when we talk about anyone messing with evidence-based formula that should

142be alarming to say the least especially if you have someone in special education uh I'm not going to get into details but there's potential where Outsourcing um could be affecting our maintenance of equity and for those that don't know that this is the formula that makes sure we aren't reducing spending on special education um so there was that the delegate assembly was very interesting uh I'm important to be transparent here so the biggest generation of revenue for iasb comes from dues and Conference conferences and programs the largest expenditure is on personnel and progress some of those um um Outreach pieces that they do there were two candidate I I apologize for this I felt terrible about this there were two candidates for vice president um we didn't know so just so we're aware what the

143process is you can submit your name but this goes back to you have to have a certain uh criteria you have to have so many years in you have to be a certain level within the um um within your um your region so in the kwaki region for us none of us I'll tell you right now none of us are eligible to run for any of it um but um so I'm I'm sorry they didn't tell us that somebody did submit their name who was eligible it was a board member by the name of uh from Valley View I'll just leave it it was a board member from Valley View um and um they did not win uh instead the person who won is from a non-unified district down state um discussions about uh this

144came up in our large District Meetup that Mary and Joe Mary Joe and I were at attended the lack of transparency with that piece and some of the lack of transparency with the delegate assembly in general I think we're pretty darn good here and we do the best that we can uh there was a consent agenda both items on the consent agenda were taken off but then no one had a discussion on the one that was taken off um um and uh that was the school resource officer it was accepted with about 65% of districts voting yes the industrial construction resolution did not even reach a discussion which I thought was terrible I'm I'm not you know wherever we go with it we go with it but the fact that we weren't even going to

145talk about it was very disappointing the new bus driver resolution also passed and there was not even an attempt to move the employment history review resolution to the floor so it didn't even make it to the floor the one piece I'm going to add that's not triple I related though kind of my first time at triple I was in 2015 and I went at that time with another board member and we went to many of the exhibits that had Turf um and we came back and we were like wow this would be very cost effective here that was 2015 in fact it was mentioned in a board meeting in 2015 and we talked about how that would be very cost effective it's actually one of the probably I don't want to promise this but it

146was right around that time where I coined the phrase the things that we are doing to save money are actually costing us money I know and I remember this very well from 2015 uh however a very bad sign of a district trying to make investments is when you are having to utilize tax anticipation warrants um it's Hey listen I would like to pay off my house I would like to I don't know spend no money on anything except for paying off my house that's not realistic I have a mortgage and I can't do it right um so I understand the piece about investing I 100% agree that this makes absolute sense um anything that we do that keeps us from getting to a budget or I'm sorry a balance where we don't have to borrow

147money from other districts those are hard decisions right those are hard discussions as far as a loan goes the the community spoke three times well the community spoke two times and said no um a third time the county said no which was on the sales tax piece actually not going to use the person's name but I actually had a an elected official who no they're they're they're Republican who said that was an ingenious idea because because you were forwarding all that money to at the time we had a policy that forwarded all that money and would have would have gone towards property tax abatement which probably would have garnered a lot more support when it comes to things like levies and so forth uh but it didn't pass right and we're not a business so

148we have to have a balanced budget legally we can't print money because that's the federal government um and tragically it's on display for where the spending levels are for for districts we we are not in one of those tiers that's better off uh it keeps me up at night because I am absolutely 100% concerned about safety of our students full disclosure I walked out on the asgo high school field and a couple of you heard me say this this thing's in terrible shape I thought we were G to I thought I was going to watch the Chicago Bears come out and and and blow a game out there no both teams played better that's very true they did um but I just just I say this only because the conversation happened about eight years ago

149and then we went into budget cut mode we asked for money it didn't happen and we decided as a community we were going to crawl out the the hard way and these are all effects of that I don't like it I hate it um you know and the decision is easy it'd be easy because it's yes it is coste effective you have to have money to invest money though that's how that part works unfortunately hard way what's that crawl out the hard way what is the hard way meaning we weren't because we borrowed up to our what do you mean like like we could have passed a referendum and that would have been an easier way we decided that wasn't you meant the we as the community we are a community yes and and we

150we collect I know sometimes it's hard for us as As Americans to think we but we so okay no I got you uh I'll would just say ditto to everything with the uh triple I student voice Jen summed it up pretty well excuse me there was one um session that I went to uh that was creating trauma responsive schools and it was two comments uh one was unaddressed childhood trauma is one of the single greatest Public Health crisis in our country and so when I think about that um I'll say the second one first and then I'll give a summary the long-term effect the long-term impact of trauma is related less to the trauma itself and more to the community's response to that trauma and so when I think about those two comments and I

151think about our postco schools not just for our students but also for our teachers and staff it just makes me think or know that we have no idea of the impact that Co had on our teachers and on our students alike and so when I think about um and here the behavioral concerns that we have and and that was the other thing is that you know it's not the behavior and so I'm just excited about the plans that I saw today um that implemented everything is from AAL perspective because I I think that we have continued opportunity um to to make sure that we are caring for and building the community that's responding well to the to the students and uh staff and administrators who have experienced trauma whether it was through childhood or whether

152it was recent um so that we can be sensitive and not punitive in our response yes really good very good so for the community um the return on the investment that is made by um um allowing us as the board to attend such conferences is that we bring back um best practices we bring back um tools and we bring back um products that help to make us more efficient and effective and you will continue to see those things in play um as we start to have more conversations about um our experience experiences um and bringing to the table all those tools and best practices and products that will help us um for me one of them was around this idea of how do we as a board determine our Effectiveness because you as a board

153you know we're responsible or well we're we're focused on two things organizational Effectiveness and student learning but how is it that we as a board determine our effective and one of the um sessions I went to was on evaluating our Effectiveness through policy and so there are tools and processes that you use um to when you look when you're looking at uh your policies and we could go um you know one by one to determine it and I want us to actually take a look at that and I want to bring it to the policy and legislative committee to see what they think of this uh tool and um how we might use it to evaluate our Effectiveness as a board can I say one more thing I forgot about my turf response yeah I

154appreciated everyone who uh gave the the their responses and so constantly I thought about what is the actual cost to maintain our current uh field and I've been doing research for the last several weeks and I absolutely am nervous about we don't want any injury um but I don't want to ignore the fact that it is statistically proven like one of the reasons why all the NFL teams Etc are moving away from Turf it's not just because they they like um grassy Fields better and yes they have the money to maintain it but it's statistically proven that there's a a significant higher rate of non- cont in injuries with turf fields and so I just want to say it that we do have to there's a balance between making sure we maintain what we have

155so that we reduce injuries but also understand the injuries that could that could take place with the turf fields as well so we just have to make sure that we con consider all things um when we're considering what solution we'll go with well and I think we haven't even approached this topic right yet and All Turf is not created equal there's a lot of safer Alternatives out there um my son played on um Olive pits which are you never think of but there are a lot of really cool Alternatives out there and so I just want to be careful I I want to let Mr Queen and his team do their due diligence and be able before we say no to Turf for them to be able to bring us any possibilities of what's out

156there but I do also know because Dr sparland and I uh spoke about this as well that it cost us an incredible amount amount of money to maintain what we currently have and when you know that it is subpar maintain yeah use that work then you think okay we're paying all this money because we haven't as we sit in trust for the community we haven't had the support to go forward so we haven't spoken about it as we get the support they've been waiting in the wings you know ready because this is something that is important but we also have to be careful that it is not All Turf isn't created equal so% all I'm saying is consider everything yeah absolutely and that gentleman that was the coach who came up here and spoke he

157said exactly what you said he said exactly what you said okay M okay um I'm gonna lighten this up a little bit so I I also went to the triple conference it was my first time did spend the day on Thursday in uh full day of equity immersion which I really really enjoyed really learned a lot of things really really enlightening um couple other places that I've been to over the past couple weeks uh I was happy to be invited by uh Toya Jones the principal at Boulder Hill um I was there at the beginning of their uh staff meeting last week so I spoke for a few minutes there um though the teachers there the whole staff there they're all rock stars um you know they they don't have an easy job that particular

158day the topics that they were dealing with were not easy so I um I appreciated the opportunity um and um again rock stars every one of them uh I also went to Prairie point last week where bionic made an appearance again uh this was the first hike presentation that I've been to um so they pulled out the fifth graders at Prairie point and they did basically basically a two and a half hour presentation um the kids were very responsive bionic does such a wonderful job they're so well rehearsed um and the and the kids were so receptive to it um and once again I think it's important for kids to realize through some of those exercises that they may be thinking they're alone in in a particular situation but they're not and I think the

159um I think that kind of helped to kind of bring it more to light so very well done um and then finally I was at the Christmas walk as we Go's Christmas walk this past week and I happened to be one of the bus hosts now if you remember Friday the weather was awful rain so needless to say there weren't a ton of people parking in the O parking lot and busing on over there were some um but it gave me the opportunity to spend some time with a couple people from transportation so I would like to give a uh shout out to um to Andy and dispatch who we had some with some really good conversations about what's going on uh great guy um great thoughts great ideas um and also he was he

160was kind of filling in because Jessica who was the driver was still our um still out dropping kids off so I spent the second half with Jessica um she's been driving not too terribly long uh but she enjoys her job she enjoys the people that that she works with um you know she admitted that there were some some things she felt needed to be to change but um overall she was pretty positive so it was very helpful to me and enjoyable to to spend some time with both of those people um amidst the rain and everything else that was going on so that's it from me just a couple things uh attend did the uh asigo Special Olympics uh the ASO wild cat varsity game they uh beat Elgen 30 to 26 I believe um

161and I I I really want to thank the parent that reached out to me uh to to all of us I believe to let us know that it was coming that there was a game uh it was a day before though so a little tough but um so I I encourage any Community member out there to let us know um about any events that uh are going on um the other thing was um I did attend that e Forum um that you were speaking about um uh it was well done there was a a an appreciative and optimistic Mo mood um at the table I was at there were lots of uh circular tables filled um with community members it was um I was it was uh impressive showing put it that way so um

162and uh want to thank the people that put that together so yes okay um we're going to 9.1 the consent agenda you know what I'm oh yeah say there was there was one other thing you know um I did as far as with the turf um I did reach out with some of the you know community members uh to give a little bit more context obviously and there's going to be a presentation later on today so um I'm going to refer them to the presentation that's going to be coming um just kind of give a little more context is where what we would have to forego you know if we were to be doing that for capital expenditure purposes so um but I already provided that context and I think that they you know there's

163a sense of uh uh willingness to to try to figure something out but we'll see so sorry it's okay thank you okay can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda please make a motion to approve all items under consent including 9.1 minutes from the Board of Education meeting on November November 13th 2023 open and close session 9.2 to acknowledge the foyer requests received by the district and 9.3 to approve the field trips presented Mr Gatewood hi Dr Mario hi Miss Johnson hi Mr Cerone hi Miss Simon hi Mr pler hi Miss Ben I motion passes okay financial statements and investment schedule are there any questions on these items I don't have any questions and I'm going to also punt another thing to the finance and Facilities committee but we stop putting the bill

164pay on and when we make changes can you please let the board know why we are doing that so I'll bring that up also in the finances facilities committee thank you thank you wait jent I'm sorry what part of the bill payment pardon me what part of the bill payment because there is a list of Bill that were paid or that were up to be paid in 11.1 yeah it's a it's a different it's a different program or a different report sorry but you'll bring it up in the finance and facility but you'll bring it up in the finance bring up in the finance fa okay thank you uh fiveyear project planning any questions you received a report this evening about this I think that's what you mention did you need me okay yeah just

165if I can do introduction bill you want to do in we're welcoming to the mic uh Bill Queen our director of buildings and operations and Charlie from CL so all that work Rafel was talking to you about we're going to give you a little 5-year plan on what that Outlook is it's a little combination of what's been identified through our 308 visions and with my team itself the finance and Facilities committee has already reviewed this FYI right all right Charlie I'll let you lead around that on through it you just tell me how to work c um this is work uh for both this year and and parts of next year for the uh the physical year 23 24 I'll note the two items when you're looking specifically into each box but at the top

166items that are starred are in process at some point they're either in design or through construction or in construction or going to construction or going to bid um the other thing I want to note is uh the uh values that are there are either budgeted values and that's in parentheses or their actual bid values that that you're seeing there um the other thing that I wanted to point out uh is in the next this slide and subsequent slides you're always going to begin to see a roof and we've talked about this over time you guys have been approving roofs every year for the last three four years and that's going to be a trend that'll continue one of the pieces that came out of the Invision work with uh Bill's team is that uh you

167have 22 academic buildings 23 academic buildings um and the high schools are of square footage that they're so large you can't do the entire square footage of that roof at one time it's a it's too much for any contractor to do over a summer so what they recommended was to divide the high schools up into 13 so that you would couple couple a high school with an elementary school so as you see an elementary school being done there's portions of the high school being done and then you'd have a Junior High in a year all by itself so um you you're seeing that we're doing a um the Fox Chase Elementary roof will be next summer um there's uh some flat work we're looking at right now to do at various schools um the other

168item on of up there to look up of note is the health Life Safety plan the health Life Safety plan um some of you might remember was recently done in the 2016 2017 years um at that time going through 22 buildings over a summer and uh identifying all the violations and reviewing all the violations and putting together the plans for the State uh we decided it was better on the district's behalf if you broke it up a little bit you have about just under it's 3.4 million square feet of building so we broke it up about a million per per year we've just finished doing the health Life Safety surveys for the high schools and we'll be presenting to the board in January uh those violations as soon as we complete the internal review um

169and and then the other element that was discussed before at the finance committee facility finance committee was evacuation plans per building which we started that process this last week one uh next year um again looking at a uh the rtu projects that which you've already approved again not items that are starred uh there any corrective work uh that requires Capital funding U health Life Safety could be done either internally with your staff or externally with third Pary so any projects that might come out of that at um and that's a just a budgeted number now that's being vetted right now as we go through this this work um there's been funds identified remaining from Esser to uh accomplish some U facility back um building automation system upgrades you have several uh Antiquated um systems that

170need to be upgraded to help uh Bill staff identify when issues go off in the middle of the night and then we' be continuing the health Life Safety survey portion and we would be tackling the junior high schools next summer um the following uh year again there's that roof again you'd be seeing some high school work at bernart UH Junior High School the Bernardi roof replacement uh there's partial roof work slash the skylighted area in here um Long Beach cooling tower replacement uh interestingly enough it was refurbished but it's starting to rust through it's it does need to be replaced now at this point um and then there's addition the the corrective maintenance that would come from the health Life Safety survey phase two which would be the junior high schools and then we would

171be starting the phase three which is the elementary schools and it would in include the Early Education facility as well um next one okay um then there's uh areas of this building that we're going to tackle for roof repl replacement in fact it's the far area over um by the gyms uh Prairie Point roof replacement would occur at that time too there's a lots of miscellaneous work at southberry to be done uh some health Life Safety excuse me some HVAC testing and balancing work uh some well as some asphalt and concrete flat work uh as well as some Hardware that have that been identified uh security and safety measures in in the Invision planning work and then uh same with Boulder Hill very similar and and miscellaneous items that uh could grow at this point

172we were asked to revisit adding Boulder Hill to the concrete for the um in the first slide or second slide for next year's work so Bill and I are going to do that this week as well is to get out and take a look at Boulder Hill and see if that work has elevated from corrective maintenance which is non um hazardous to something that's more like a health Life Safety you're going to trip on it and then uh the corrective work work that would come from the final Health Life Safety phase um and then Tom uh Thompson junior high is scheduled to be replaced uh the roofing replaced on that area the original part of that building uh there's an addition done in 2008 six I think and that roof isn't scheduled to be replaced

173just yet so it' be the older portion of the building the uh 1999 section would be scheduled to repl um also concrete repair repair work at the um facilities location uh Hunt Club concrete work and then Bo call Bas and corrective maintenance work and as these get further out into the timeline um they're more flexible because we have to respond to issues that might arise and some other items that have come to pass uh that bill and his team have identifi identified daily with his staff so just in case uh you're wondering where's all this money coming from we know he's getting close to Christmas but so uh if you remember back in uh February of 20122 there was a refunding done and the proceed of that refunding was actually $18.6 million of that amount

174we've actually uh spent uh $5.1 million through the end of September so we have $1 13.4 million that has to be spent and based on the fact that it's refunding was non- taxable Bond were required by the IRS to to start spending this very quickly and we actually we gave them a a schedule of payment of uh expenditure back then we said we were going to have it all spent by uh no later than the uh the third quarter which will be February of 2025 we haven't done that so what we trying to do sp all $18 million by the third quarter Yeah by February of 2025 and how much has been spent today we've spent $5.1 million and the reason why we're required to spend it is when you issue non- taxable bonds you're

175not supposed to earn extraordinary interest rate on it if you do there's a clause in the IRS uh rule that is called Arbitrage rebate which means you can issue an untaxable Bond and then put the money in a bank account under on interest on it you expected to earn reasonable interest but if it's more than reasonable interest then you have to pay a penalty so in order for us to avoid doing that we're trying to uh to Che up and trying to get uh some of this native project done so that's where the money a big chunk of the money is coming from that $13 million left over from the February of 2022 uh go refunding mon two questions um you halfway answered one I I'll I'll follow up that one after depending on how

176you answer so the at the end of this five years what percentage of roofs across the district would have been completed and if you don't know that's fine we can we can get it I can get back to you with absolutely but we do have that yeah CU I'm just thinking about how much more money will we still have to spend after this 5 years is we of get exact because it's a it's a moving Target unfortunately because that's what we've identified right now and with buildings the old that they get with the kind of increment where we get very cold very warm uh tends to have a negative impact on roofs so it's a moving Target agre and then the second part to that I'm sorry you someone was going to say something yeah

177yeah and this is the body of work now right at any given moment anything could change with this document in that sense if we do get a critical breakdown we would have to Audible and relocate those funds to where we needed to fix right correct this this also doesn't cover any work that we would be doing with our civil engineer or anything outside of clubber this is this is strictly the work that we are doing with clubber so there's other projects that me and Mr OPI will will be looking for that parking lots and things of that nature that we would have to lean on for our civil engineer yeah CU my estimate was this is roughly about five million per year and I think it was like 2.7 the last year um and so

178uh the second part to that question was um how we be building what oh you you answered that oh you answered something see man I knew I was old I was going to forget I'll remember in a second go ahead jar is any of this on here I guess I have a two-part question first is any of this on here at a point where it could fail on us and we have to move it up and two is there anything that's not on here that could fail um because you kind of allude the fact well things could change that makes me think that there are things out there that could potentially fail no we're just at that life expectancy right no nothing's critical to where it's going to fail but we're getting to that life

179and it could what I guess then what is it that could change this right so you said well something could change just hypothetically if we were to lose a boiler or something at one of the buildings that is something that we would have to replace immediately as an emergency fix okay so and yeah okay I don't want to okay thanks appreciate so I'm I'm also thinking total budget and so so this this let's say roughly 20 million doll but this is only a percentage of the master plan that will come late that we spoke about earlier that will come later yes which could be an additional I think the one of the last estimates we said I don't know what the estimates are but it's only a percentage of that and I'm just trying to

180make sure that everybody understands that this is just a very small percentage of the greater absolutely plan that we need money in order to pay for for all capital projects absolutely which even every anything else could be included uh wish list Andor critical needs absolutely I will be reluctant to make a guest toate because that's the whole point of doing a master facility plan we would not look at just what is needed right now we will look at as we plan into the future as a district we'll look at the education programming we'll look at different things to come to that uh to that figure so right now I'll be I'll be premature and just uh spitballing if I were to come up with what that number would be until the master facility plan is

181complete oh I get it and I'm just trying to make a point that this is a small percentage but yet it's still a 5year plan to even only do this absolutely okay absolutely yeah and on a good note we and it's and it's funny you know when comand reaches out and what are you guys doing what's going on over there utilities are down majorly well we're saving money on these new roofs that we're putting back so we're getting that funding back and we're making a difference in how our buildings react to the climate so so we're getting some funds back by updating these roofs and going with these high efficiency chillers and boilers and things of that nature we're actually going to see some returns from combat and energy places that's great okay thank you

182thank you all you thank you thanks Charlie thank you um any questions this evening about the Labor Management partnership contract report no okay RSP enrollment analysis contract I had one question so my it was an assumption on my part so I'm my guess was that the two years and the reason why we need the current years to create the Benchmark or is it supposed to be 2024 and then 2026 so the contract uses obviously historical data current data to provide us projections about this year and moving forward and then at this time next year they'll use this year and next year to then next year and Beyond that's what I thought but I just wanted to just make sure that okay that makes sense yep but the report that we will receive is similar to

183last year's will where it will include his historical current and future um projections both for um attendance-based and programmatically based that's why we have to provide the enrollment and if we've moved any of our programs around our district sites how far do they go out is it only a year or just as far out as information is available um I believe it is five years but hold on one no it's fine just just wondering cuz I'm wondering if it's five years they for the student count but they report back yeah yeah yeah she they're supposed to look into the the future just wonder how far and then if it's five years out then do we need to do it again next year I was actually wondering the same thing but then again I'm thinking about

184it that level of information is probably worth the investment regardless even if even if it's only incrementally changing year-over year um especially since we're in the growth mode again Dominic's going to invest in a DeLorean so to my understanding we've uh done this enrollment projection every year the report that we received last year was past current and future where the current was the current school year uh 2023 and the future included four years of projection 24 25 26 and 27 so it's five years inclusive of the current school year all right thank you y next junior high any questions about the junior high school English learner support contract okay uh policies for first read any questions about those coming forward okay thank you board okay action items 11.1 approval of bills for payment can I

185have a motion please make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of 2,154 79676 as presented second Miss vmou I Dr Mar hi Mr Cerrone hi Miss Simon I Mr Gatewood hi Miss Johnson hi Mr cler uh abstain so motion passes five six six oh Jen was here she came back sorry six and one exstension um action item 11.2 State waiver application can I have a motion please make a motion to adopt the resolution to submit the state waiver application to the Illinois State Board of Education as presented second Dr Mar I miss Simon hi Mr hi Mr C hi Mr Gatewood hi Miss ven hi Miss Johnson hi motion passes 70 action item 11.3 Stuart Farm lease can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the steuart

186far Stewart Farm lease as presented second Miss vmou hi Dr marel hi Mr Sone hi Miss Simon hi Mr Gatewood hi Miss Johnson Mr cler I motion passes 70 action item 11.4 resolution for fiscal year 25 budget development can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the resolution for the uh fiscal year 25 budget calendar is presented second mrone hi M Johnson hi Mr cler hi Mr Gatewood hi I Dr Mario I miss Simon I motion passes 70 action item 11.5 resolution for property tax appeal intervention can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the resolution for the property tax appeal intervention second Dr Maria hi Miss venman hi Mr s hi Miss Simon hi Mr Gatewood I Miss Johnson I Mr blobber I motion passes 70 action item

18711.6 adoption of the 2023 tax levy can I have a motion please make a motion to adopt the 202 to I'm sorry make a motion to adopt the 2023 taxt Levy as presented second Mr Gatewood I Miss Johnson I Dr marel I miss ven I Mr hi Miss s i mrone I motion passes 70 action item 11.7 approval of separation agreement and general release can I have a motion please make a motion to approve the separation agreement with Dr John pesky as discussed and presented second Miss similon I Dr Mario hi Miss Johnson I Mr Gatewood I Mr Sone hi Miss venman hi Mr cler I motion passes 70 action item 11.1 approval of personnel report can I have a eight 11.8 um approval of personnel report can I have a motion please make a

188motion to approve the Personnel report as presented second Dr Maria I Mr Gatewood I Miss Johnson hi Mr Koger I miss Simon hi Mr Cerone hi M venman hi motion passes 70 can I have a motion to adjourn make a motion to adjourn at 950