SD308 Board of Education (4/25/2022)

001present miss swanson dr president all right pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states with liberty and justice for all okay item 4.1 is our april pride winner so at this time i'd ask the board to please join me up front as we recognize and congratulate our pride award winners for the month of april had a nice cool house okay tonight the board of education acknowledges the pride winners for the month of april pride stands for proudly recognizing individuals demonstrating excellence the board of education implemented this program in the fall of 2015 to recognize promote and celebrate the many contributions made by the teachers and employees across the district teachers of the month are sponsored by allied first bank this recognizes what our teachers do day in and day out for the continued

002growth and success of our students awardees as your name is called please come forward to be congratulated by the board and dr sparlin congratulations to the following teachers for having been recognized as april teachers of the month vanessa fehrenbacher a second grade dual language teacher at boulder hill elementary [Applause] mary hardy a special education teacher at a segal high school anna hogue a german teacher at oswego east high school [Applause] and julia stokel a k-5 instructional coach at lakewood creek elementary school teachers and at this time we invite the building administrators to join us up front with the teachers the board and dr sparlin for a photo hold on hmm congratulations [Applause] the next awardees this evening are the april employees of the month which is co-sponsored by chick-fil-a in huntington learning center this award

003is given an appreciation of employees who go above and beyond and are always willing to lend a hand awardees as your name is called please come forward to be congratulated by the board and dr sparlin congratulations to the following employees for having been named april employees of the month amy bill is a special education teaching assistant at east view academy [Applause] and jenny long a security dean's assistant at sweet life [Applause] congratulations to our employees at this time if there's any building administrators here you can join the employees and board with dr sparlin for a photo [Music] we'd like to remind our community that the district does have an open nomination process which can be found on the district's website we thank our generous district partners allied first bank chick-fil-a huntington learning center and culvers

004for helping make this program a success thank you [Applause] um 5.1 public comment on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board 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 please note that comments are limited to three minutes per person for a total of 30 minutes no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion

005during public comment if your questions or concerns require follow-up and member of the administration will reach out through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you jacqueline bias i'm going to put it down can you hear me i'm jacqueline byes and i live on grapevine trail in oswego my husband and i are parents of three children in three different 308 schools two of our children have special needs and are in self-contained special education classrooms our boys are currently in fifth seventh and eighth grade hunt club thompson and over at plank i'm also a special education bilingual teacher in a neighboring school district my husband and i are also on the board for epic epic 308 exceptional parents of exceptional children you become involved and become an advocate when something matters to you i

006want to thank you all for being part of the 308 board of education as you have all found a reason to become advocates for the students teachers and parents and all community members before i became an educator my husband and i had to learn how to navigate the world of special education alone there were so many obstacles acronyms learning curves and walls that go up when you have children with special needs throughout our many years of special education services that our children have received in the school district some have been good some have been supportive and some have not i'm here today that you to ask you to thoughtfully consider when parents reach out to school administrators for support such as one-on-one aides to support them have you visited the junior high high school and

007elementary special education classrooms have you had candid conversations with the educators and support staff within those classrooms do they feel supported by their administration do parents feel supported by the administration are students truly receiving what they need in order to work towards their highest potential are your teachers and paraprofessionals receiving what they need to support each and every special education student how is this information shared without resentment or retaliation i don't typically ask for more than what i think my children need or legally deserve an iep is a legally binding document that is supposed to be followed by all staff who work with that child however have you given thought to what happens when there isn't enough staff to support that child's legally binding document this is happening every day in our school district we

008recently requested a one-on-one aid to help support our middle son during the school day we were questioned as to why not why now in seventh grade would he need a one-on-one aid when he never required one before we were warned that just because we asked for a one-on-one aid that he may not receive one we were warned that there was a shortage of paraprofessionals the pandemic affected some students more than others if you know anything about autism you know that children and adults with autism thrive on structure i'm here to ask that you consider what is happening in special special education within your schools within our schools why is there a shortage of paraprofessionals can we do better as a district to support your overworked overstressed and underappreciated special education teachers and staff what can

009we do to address recruitment and retention of our paraprofessionals thank you so much thank you i will send the letter since i didn't get to finish thank you thanks thank you michelle trager thank you jackie nice job hi i'm michelle trager again a parent of four in the district i'm going to talk fast and i know that i emailed you so you should have this information and the relevant cited uh studies i'm asking the school board for three things one a plan for raising awareness and training our educators about fasd and neurobehavioral informed approaches two to plan to make the month of september fasd awareness as it is nationally and three to contact our representatives and senators and ask them to co-sponsor the fasd respect act which will help provide funding guidance and infrastructure to

010contribute to the aforementioned training there are provisions through the department of education in that bipartisan proposed legislation the exciting news that i have to share is that parents and advocates have been meeting with representative underwood's office along with other legislators offices last wednesday afternoon representative underwood called me herself to say that she had signed on as a co-sponsor that's how important this is it's crucial we get as many co-sponsors as possible so the bill can even get called out of committee to be voted on as a school district we should send her a note of thanks for doing this and we should contact representative foster and senators duckworth and durbin and ask them to do so as well again fasd impacts 1 in 20 people which is 2.5 times the rate of autism in a

011district of 17 000 students that's about 850 students in over 90 90 percent of individuals with fasd will develop comorbid mental health conditions as far as the training i want to tell you that in february i was invited to present about fasd at the illinois council for children with behavioral disorders i didn't see anyone from our district there in march i was invited to present about fasd to the macon pia which is decatur special education district as part of their professional development day other districts and other entities that serve educators and children are recognizing how important this is when the school board talks about the importance of mental health and the importance of sel the concern about suicidal ideation in our students it is lip service unless we acknowledge fasd when the board talks about

012diversity equity and inclusion it is lip service unless we acknowledge our students with the highest needs and most severe disabilities and unless we acknowledge fasd which occurs across all socioeconomic statuses all education levels all races all ethnicities all orientations and all cultures in which alcohol is a part of life if we say we are a trauma-informed district it is lip service unless we truly understand how trauma affects the development of the brain including fasd which is a prenatal trauma and there i am with time despair since i didn't email our student ambassadors i did print out these sources because this is great information for them to have and to understand how the political process works as well thank you michelle keaney good evening my name is rachelle koenig i've already emailed all of you on

013the board and the administration but i just wanted to read my uh a good portion of my email for the record first of all i want to thank all of you for what you do this is not an easy job it is not easy to be in front of all of these people and not everybody brings their empathy with them to every board meeting and i really do appreciate that i also want to acknowledge the administration because it's tough right now it's tough to be a parent in this current climate of the world and it's tough to actually educate children during this time so the mental and emotional and psychological and physical labor that you all put in is not lost on me and and many of us um i'm i wanted to speak just

014because i first of all i have two sd 308 students one in uh at ohs a freshman and one at trauber junior high school who's in grade seven they've been in this district their entire educational lives their father and i moved here almost 16 years ago from the city of chicago so we aren't from here but we've been here long enough to understand the dynamics of this community my reason for speaking today is just to express my concern regarding the challenges to curriculum programs and even the books in our school libraries there is a censorship attempt going on right now that includes redaction restriction relocation and removal there are inflammatory accusations being lobbed lodged against teachers and librarians and there is an opposition to representation within the curriculum that for me is unsettling at best

015i am very much aware as are many parents that any student can have access to the internet and read or view absolutely everything that we have been talking about including books and materials on any list circulating anywhere i also know that our children know more now than we did when we were their age and they know more now than we do right now it's as i said it's not easy to parent it during this time my concern is to make sure our kids are as informed and empathetic as possible including learning actual history recognizing and respecting differences and practicing inclusion i'm concerned about our district's ap status if the censorship gets out of hand and i'm concerned about our district losing money to frivolous legal challenges when there are so many more important issues and

016causes that matter to our kids and their future i ask that the board allow the sd 308 administration teachers and librarians to use their education and expertise to discuss and determine the curriculum programs and media available to students while they are at school and i ask the board to encourage any parent who does not agree with said decisions to make their requests specific to their children only again i want to appreciate say how much i appreciate everything you're doing and the time here tonight and um i have extra time so thank you very much again thank you thank you thank you for trying your best all right that's all for public comment all right item 6.1 is an informational item from our ambassadors and members of our superintendent student advisory committee anya and colton and

017monica so uh tonight we get to talk about the future of the student advisory committee and the roles of student ambassadors um there's several vacancies that's going to be coming up that are going to be coming up in the next school year so this is a chance to kind of lay out the structure and um and really get a head focus on what's next to come for us and this committee okay so yeah just so um we can just preface some things before we get into the presentation itself um like colton said we're going to be recruiting some new people there's a lot of seniors on the committee um they're going to be leaving next year so as we're recruiting new members we just wanted to emphasize a couple of the objectives and goals that

018we have for the members who want to join the student advisory committee or want to be a student ambassador next year i think the most primary objective is to illuminate student voice the whole purpose of this committee is to highlight the concerns opinions thoughts and ideas of our respective student bodies and this is a really big portion of what this committee is all about in order to be an effective member of this committee one must be extremely driven and have a passion for these thoughts and passion for representing student mindsets the second objective is to collaborate and of course the committee members have to collaborate amongst themselves in order to create solutions for the problems that we're seeing but they also must be able to collaborate with the student bodies whether that be indirectly through

019research and through surveys or directly by directly speaking with them through interpersonal connections and communication and finally they have to be able to employ vision uh as you might have seen this year there's been a lot of i guess dilemmas and problems and issues that have come up that we've seen prevalent in our student bodies whether that be sexual harassment uh whether that be mental health issues but in order to actually solve these problems our members must have the vision necessary to know what a solution could look like for our future and so now kind of to go over the structure that we settled on for next year's committee like i said before there is going to be some vacancies next year myself included as much as i love this role i get to graduate

020and move on to college but um so we have actually all of our members from oswego high school we're seniors this year so all spots at oswego high school will be filled additionally with the two new spots we've added to the committee so there's going to be two more students from each high school on the committee two more positions so a total of five from each high school and then included in that five one student ambassador for each high school to the board um so up there highlighted in light blue is the positions that are filled we've decided because of uh the vacancies and what a phenomenal job anya monica did um anya will stay on as the oehs student ambassador for you know that continuity and and kind of uh everything that they've learned

021we've all learned to go on with future uh committee members and a future student uh ambassador so um yeah that's that's and monica will be staying on too as an advisory committee member because um she was fantastic and she as well as everyone else on our committee and all the adults that were able to be on that committee it was a really great dynamic group of people that i mean we were all so excited to work with and it's it's bittersweet to leave but it was a really exciting opportunity so but this is the uh the structure for next year so this is the structure that you're proposing or this is the structure that dr sparlin has approved for you guys uh proposing composing this entire presentation comes from everywhere i got well i wasn't

022sure i gotta ask okay um i'll introduce myself real quick i'm monica lopez i'm a junior at asuka east high school and i'm on the just a member on the student advisory committee and i'll be talking about the term length so um anna and i specifically will be saying um going into our senior year we're staying on the committee and i'm super excited for that and she'll be saying as student ambassador i'll be staying on the committee which means that for no one's like colton said we'll be coming up for oe and then it so when you apply we'll um for the when you apply on the committee um you'll stay on your junior year and hopefully continue into your senior year unless there's some extent away in consider extenuating circumstance that prevents you from

023fulfilling your role your senior year but will be expected to continue into your senior year and then currently only juniors and seniors will be able to apply um yeah they'll be chosen they're doing a year to expect sorry and then um we're currently not accepting any underclassmen as permanent members on the committee but we're open to that idea and then yeah just like colton mentioned before there are currently a couple of vacant positions okay so the actual application process is quite a bit to talk about so i'm going to try to cover some of the big points right now like colton and monica had mentioned we're planning on having four student advisory committee members per high school um through this proposal uh that you know the student of the sd3 board of education can kind

024of like think about and then one student ambassador per high school and they would all be juniors and seniors as of right now through this proposal there are a couple of different i guess roles and responsibilities that each type of member would have but it's mostly schedule based not skill based and i'm going to expand a little bit upon that later so a student advisory committee member has to attend this scheduled student advisory committee meetings they usually happen you know after school either ohs or at ohs sometimes through zoom they have to assist with research that we've done through some of our meetings and also through survey development which has been administered a couple times this year as we've talked about through our student advisory committee reports prior to its administration and finally they have

025to be able to provide insight into student voice specifically they have to be good with collaboration communication these are really important skills to be a student advisory committee member and that's the primary role of that job a student ambassador also was to attend the student advisory committee meetings they also attended the board of education meetings as colton and i have been doing this year and they would be providing student ambassador reports they would also assist with the research and survey development prior to administration but they would also provide and convey student voice to the student board and it's through that relationship between the committee members that get that student voice input and the relationship with the student ambassador who gives that input to the board of education that we can have that smooth flow and

026really provide that connection as liaisons between the students and between our board of education to kind of illuminate some of the problems and issues or even just the thoughts of our student bodies so then kind of just like i guess bouncing off of that we were thinking through this proposal that we would only have one application for both the student advisory committee member and for the student ambassador but at the beginning of the application students would have the option to be considered for only the student advisory committee member only for the student ambassador or they would be open to be being considered for both and that's because there's a lot of similar skills for both roles there's a lot of public speaking or just interpersonal communication there's a lot of i guess collaboration it's the

027ability to be able to do things on your own but also have that sense of teamwork but the main difference is you know the schedules of what types of meetings you go to that sort of thing and we think one application which would be a little bit more efficient to analyze seeing as we have quite a few vacancies might i guess evaluate the applicants effectively and then um we had a couple of things that we did like about the old student ambassador uh application elements one of the was the two recommendation letters i think that's a really good way to gauge uh student i guess like personalities student involvement inside or outside of school an essay gauging the purpose of them applying for the role and i think that really evaluates someone's drive you know

028like what is i guess your motivation for wanting to be on this committee what has driven you to want to represent the issues and the thoughts of your respective student body and we also did appreciate the fact that there is an interview after this application had been reviewed and i'm going to go a little bit about the application review after this slide but about the interview last time it was conducted by the entire board of education but we had proposed that we're open to that as well we had proposed that it may be conducted by the returning student uh advisory committee members and that would uh be in tandem with also mr grays mr mrs bankowski our principals mr gatewood and dr waller in order to incorporate i guess some sort of student voice into

029the decisions for our future student advisory committee and especially as students who have been in this role before it may be important that we have a say or i guess some sort of i guess perspective into who we might be working with in the future and then like i said earlier there is application review and that did happen before the interview last time we want to keep that the same we think it's good that we reviewed the applications and then determined who we would want to personally interview to gage who's best fit for the roles um so the people who would be reviewing the application would be the same people who would be doing the application of the interview process just for that continuity and we'd have to consider several things first one's availability like

030i mentioned there's differences in schedules so one person who may be i guess fit for both roles might fit better into either student ambassador or for student advisor committee member depending on that schedule and the second thing that we'd consider based on that schedule i guess aspect is the multiple year commitment if they're not seniors already um and of course that's not mandatory people might not be able to do it for several years but it's definitely a benefit if we can have that sort of flow with experienced members as they continue in that position as new members are coming on as well and that could be kind of like you know monica helping new members come in adapt to the role and the responsibilities or i would help the next student ambassador with their roles

031and responsibilities as well and we also thought that possibly seniors and juniors could be considered equally because this is more evaluated not on age but mostly on qualification your drive your motivation and your purpose that you want to accomplish within this committee so there will be no advantage or disadvantage through the suggestion based on grade level and so that concludes this presentation if any of you guys have any kind of questions feel free to open up to any three of us um i would just like to say one more time this was a really great opportunity i appreciate dr sparlin and the board for creating this this role for students um it's i like i said in the first board meeting i attended it's a it's a great opportunity to have as many voices at

032the table as possible and with our uh added positions there's gonna be even more voices at the table uh hopefully uh so yeah if you have any questions feel free i have some i'm gonna because i get to hear from you guys more i'm gonna direct some of these to monica also so she gets to participate too um so tell me about how what would be your guidelines as you're interviewing new people to come onto this committee what would you be looking for in people to join the committee have you given that much thought yet i was just i like i really enjoyed the questions that we had from our original interview because i felt like they as i was answering them i was like oh these are good questions like for me to answer

033i remember one of them was talking about like what's something that you feel like needs to be better about like the education system like what's something that we can personally improve on and i like remember some of my responses about it i was talking about like freshman biology i think like curriculum with that that was another question was about the curriculum like what can be like better for that um and then i think like involvement with uh like how how much are you involved in school and like what are you involved in like why are you involved in that do you just do you join a bunch of things just to be in them or do you enjoy do you join a bunch of things do you join that much i join things join clubs

034or stuff like that and actually engage them and like put effort into what you're into and so questions like that i think would be good too and then kind of to add on to that by looking at their um their school activities or whatever they're involved in you can see that drive and commitment they have to any kind of position or anything that kind of they're involved in looking for someone who is able to [Music] gauge the student body to to be able to reach out to students to to have ideas on how to reach out to students i that was one of the questions i know we were asked was you know how are you going to reach students it's it's a really important factor if you're going to be sharing student voice and

035kind of not limiting the um knowledge experience and opinion to that room to that committee but really reaching out to the i mean the entire student body because that's who all of us speak for that's who everyone in this room represents and tries to make a great education system for so kind of looking for those qualities is really important in finding someone who's going to be successful in any one of these roles so yeah and i think like i'm so sorry no you're fine you're fine i was going to just ask if you had anything to add i feel like i was something to say but um i think one thing that i was considering because i was thinking about this when i was like making this slide i was like what am i really

036looking for and i think a really big one is problem solving because we're faced with like so many issues you know and i hear from so many students all the time because they're like yeah i know you're the student ambassador you know what about this problem and i'm like thinking about it and there's like you you're approached with so many different issues that either you hadn't considered before or you didn't think you'd have the opportunity to share before and i i don't remember what question it was but it was a good question um there's a question we got during our interview and it was like a very like in the moment situation like what would you do if this happened what would you do if someone reached out to you and i think the ability

037to create a response that's genuine on the spot like this is what i would do in order to make sure that this committee is successful or in order to make sure that student voice is illuminated having that problem-solving skill being able to respond effectively in a genuine manner that shows that you actually care about the purpose of this committee is so important that's something that i would definitely look for is that a spider those are oh i couldn't do that you guys just did that with a spider dropping from the ceiling it was teeny teeny tiny i didn't just say you did it's all okay yes and i maintained composure you guys this is pretty cool to get to see some of the work you've been doing um what are the things and again i'll

038start with monica just because she doesn't normally get to have an opportunity to share um and uh what are some of the things that you're you're looking to address in a more robust way next year in the committee now that you'll have some people potentially returning that have done this before what what kinds of things would you like to be able to do that you weren't able to do this year because everyone was new does that even make sense i don't know yeah i would okay i would still have to continue um talking about the issue of sexual harassment because i just remember when that survey came out and that's a big population of people were super concerned about that i was just like like i personally wasn't super concerned about that but i think

039another trait when you're on the student advisory committee is being open-minded and realizing that like there are a bunch of problems that may not affect you but they affect everyone else and this is a big problem that it needs to be solved especially with such a heavy issue of sexual harassment so i think that i would like to continue more and i think um a lot of more of mental health because that's still like a really like popular issue that keeps occurring and that students are still concerned about and so trying to figure out more ways i still feel like we haven't really students still aren't necessarily fulfilled with everything that the district has been doing and i still hear complaints about mental health and i still hear my my classmates complaining all the time

040and i'm like well if you can complain but we have what are you gonna do about it let someone know so something can be done and so i think mental health is another one and i think just more like curriculum-based stuff too i think um just like in like the student-teacher like relationship and stuff like that like how to like better that relationship in the classroom anything to add i think she hit it you know just being able to continue it like because like we spent so much time thinking like how are we going to do this survey you know how are we going to reach everybody but now we got like we got like a head start i think we can just hit the ground running you know like this is exactly what we

041need to target we have the data from our first student survey i think we can make a lot of progress seeing as we'd have returning members to guide our newer members and like truly like implementing like new like new um guidelines but like like something new implementing something new to actually create like an effect on students because we say we're going to do it but i want to be able to actually do it and actually have it like make a difference and i want to see my classmates and my peers more happy and more happy and more content with like what's going on thank you i appreciate it all the work that you guys did on this thanks for answering those thank you yeah i do want to say that you know i've only been

042on the board i don't know maybe less time than some of our student ambassadors yeah very yeah exactly um but the feedback that i've gotten um that you've shared uh has been invaluable already so i think that it already matters um and it does make a difference already so and i've only been here two months it's probably more than i even know great job thank you does the board have any other questions regarding this i do i have two questions how is the transition with everything that was the data collected the learning with regard to sexual harassment how are you going to transition that from the current team to the new team is there a plan for that like specifically interpreting the data yes so it does help us that there's two it does help

043them that there's two returning members we had great um assistance from dr waller i mean she spent so much time uh desegregating data so that you know for some of us that have never looked at a google form or answers from a google form or any kind of survey she did a really good job of giving us to giving us it in a format that the minute we looked at it we could lay out and sit here at a table and say okay well that that's clear that that's an issue or or you know this amount of students is is are uh worried about this or um whatever the case may be i think having you know dr sparling dr waller and mr greywood and our principals there will really help that transition because monica

044and anya they've had experience with this but all the adults they've had even more but i think now that they've really been able to look at that data or look at any kind of raw numbers and get a conclusion out of it and them still being there that's really going to help any kind of transition to new members and it was really helpful as a new member as someone doing this for the first time so i think that'll even be more beneficial having adults and two of your fellow peers helping you along the way yeah we still have all the disaggregated data i think we still have the research papers and we discussed that as like a whole team so i'm pretty sure we're pretty clear on everything and i think another thing is the

045fact that we can really just like communicate them like the first couple of meetings could be centered around you know just providing that information setting that foundation um and possibly even another part of the interview or the application process is you know seeing like with some of the work that's been conducted this year already how do you think that's been implemented are there improvements to the implementation was there anything memorable from those surveys just to gauge if our applicants really understand the format and the structure and the impacts of what we've done as a committee and seeing that from the reverse perspective that's what i was hoping to hear and then my second question is you've provided really great road map and and steps forward for us and i'm incredibly grateful for that is there

046anything else that you could would ask of the administration to support this student voice going forward you can ask for anything i still feel like something that i've that's always been on my mind at these meetings i still feel like we're missing like like a student population that like i mean obviously there's not much we can do about it but i think we do something like it's like students who like don't always like check their emails and don't like how to phrase a nice way students that aren't necessarily more active in school like us three and i still feel like we're still missing that like little population that is probably getting affected by this by the most and it's just like this little forgotten population of students that are like kind of like left to

047side like oh if they don't want the populations that don't that don't want they aren't doing anything to get help but truly they need that help they need that assistance so i still feel like if we could figure out a way to reach out to the students that like they may put up a front may show some resistance but still being like hey like we're trying to help you like administration is here for you because i still feel like there's just this big wall between the administration the principals and these teachers and the deans and the students and there should not be that wall it should it should be a bridge it should be like that easy communication so i still feel like that's still there and i just if there could be some way

048for administrations and teachers and deans and stuff like all the employees just to be more like not like you're already engaged enough but like re doing like the extra extra step to get to those like that population of students incredible insight you just spoke for a lot of people thank you that's kind of what it's all about yeah yeah i was gonna say go ahead no i won you weren't wrong okay so can i say yeah um so you know when we when we brought the youth participatory action research project to the district i just want to say you guys are like the poster children for it like i have met the authors of this project and this initiative and they would be so proud of you guys for what you're doing and how you're

049doing it and it really is student driven and so when you want to know what's going on in your school this is a example of how to get to it and for you all to do you see the skills that you're gaining when you talk about how dr waller showed you all how she was desegregating information or or data and you were able to see it for yourselves this is what ypar does it actually creates these social scientists for as students who are who are engaged in methodology and creating questions to be answered and then and analyzing it and making meaning of the data i mean it's just like all right here and i'm just so excited i'm so excited for what you're learning for what you're doing for what you're discovering for our our

050district and um it's it's meaningful and you can take this and put this on your resume for colleges and they are going to be very excited that you're gaining all these skills but that you're making an impact for our district so appreciate it very much should we ask ali and jared if they yeah of course ali jared it's hard to hear everything so if this was covered i apologize but um the only the only thing that i had was uh i mean first of all i've been just thoroughly impressed i want to say that but the only piece that i have i certainly sorry excuse me i certainly understand uh the junior and senior piece and i don't have a problem with that at all but i i certainly um wonder about um you know

051looking into the future some type of mentorship where we're um advertising this for uh freshmen and sophomores kind of um looking to make sure that they understand um this option and so forth and again it's hard to hear everything so that might have been covered but i i don't know if we could speak to that or talk about maybe that option just making sure that we're getting that advertisement out to them i also appreciate that you guys are comfortable enough with us to ask questions i know at the last meeting and i know that we ask you guys a lot if you have questions but i noticed at the last meeting you asked your own and that was huge for me same same um if i could answer uh the one question that mr clogger

052asked uh we did consider when we were thinking when we were talking about this uh the fact of considering underclassmen we thought as of right now specifically with freshmen it's kind of hard to or there isn't really an avenue right now to reach out before they get because you get to freshman year you're in a new building um it's kind of hard to reach out over the summer or even in the their eighth grade end of their eighth grade year to talk about this position or gauge any kind of interest in it and really your freshman year is should be focused on adjusting to high school now we and and same thing with sophomores um it was kind of the fact that you know this is going to be the second year um that doesn't

053rule out any ever underclassmen being a part of any process and we even can talk about uh while not having a permanent member on that committee certainly you can gauge uh any type of sophomore or freshman or multiple a group you know as a have a group of sophomore freshmen come to any kind of forum with us or any kind just to gauge their interest that's always possible i know that just the fact that you know it was the second year and there's not really an avenue to reach out to anyone who's not even in the high school yet when this is a a committee and and roles held by high school students i just knew that that was kind of we all knew that that was maybe pushing it a little just for the

054second year so i don't know but any of them can submit questions or frustrations or to you right absolutely and that's something that i think we should definitely improve on for next year creating like really like open communication um with the rest of our committee that doesn't mean that you know you have to find you know the student that you're looking for that's on the committee and like a school of like 2 500 30 000 students because that's hard it's not finding all that but like making that i guess like open communication form like colton was talking about that's something that we could definitely improve on for next year creating some sort of you know i guess like media platform or kind of doing more outreach something in school or even just like providing opportunities

055during lunch periods for students to come and talk to us because i know students have ideas and it would be great to hear it you know just like right from them instead you know trying to get things from surveys all the time because while that's really helpful for widespread data you know you can get some really valuable things from just listening to someone speak absolutely and they may be more inclined to talk to you at a lunch one-on-one versus in a open meeting type of thing again like a scary room with a bunch of adults i appreciate that perspective thank you so much saw i saw a lot of uh heads from the board nodding up and down so i'm assuming that the process that they've laid out is uh they're you're giving them a

056green light to move forward with what they've uh suggested um we had discussed that i believe in closed session earlier i'd like to continue to do that before we make a decision yes all right thank you so much wonderful great presentation thank you great information thank you for all the time you've given to the other kids you're okay to go thank you all right ursula is dr bailey uh up and running to zoom i can there he is okay well good did you hit evening again i am here ali swanson she's not showing up okay two sick board members from home that is definitely true but can i point out the dramatic improvements from the days of holding a cell phone to the microphone yes yeah okay ellie's there dr bailey you can hear us

057i can can you hear me yes yes yes well welcome dr bailey this is john sparlin uh thank you for joining our board of education meeting this evening we welcome you to the meeting and the four's yours well thank you i can't i can't see anyone can you see me we can okay i'm just gonna well i've been watching the board meeting so i know what it looks like at least so i do have a sense of who i'm talking to and um i've spent my entire professional career in education and i got goosebumps from some of the presentations you had tonight between the talk program and and bionic and amplify and uh i just want to say wow uh congratulations what a great district and thank you um i was also a science teacher

058so the robotics team uh i have a special place in my heart for that um that accomplishment so thanks for letting me be here tonight and uh i'm sure everyone's got a lot on your plate and it's tired so i can be really brief with my presentation although i'll make sure that i give you all the information that you need i'm going to share my screen and it'd be great if you could let me know that you can see it okay yes yes sir all set yes okay um so i've become quite obsessed with superintendent evaluations over the last couple years and uh and we started in new york state with a group of superintendents and board members and uh with some research and came up with um a set of problems that we wanted

059to work on so uh the problem that we identified with superintendent evaluations by school boards and you could argue that this is one of the most important jobs that a school board has is to provide a thorough evaluation of the school superintendent and unfortunately what we found a lot of was inconsistent or non-existent annual evaluations as you know in illinois it's the law to do a an annual evaluation of school superintendent and i can't tell you how many times i've come across school districts that don't do annual evaluations we've also seen in the field that there are often quite subjective annual evaluations using superficial feedback and hearsay rather than clear criteria and evidence we also often will see a lack of alignment between the district's annual goals the national standards and superintendents actual evaluations and

060then lastly we see quite a bit of inefficiencies whether it's a paper-based three-ring binder or a word document or google docs that take way too much valuable time for both the superintendent and the school board so what we've been doing and what we have now in 270 school districts in new york state and now approximately 40 school districts in illinois is called super eval and super eval is a simple efficient evidence-based online system so that the superintendent can use national standards and the district's annual goals to show that they have evidence of meeting those goals and that criteria and reflecting on those goals and that and that evidence to promote growth of the superintendent and support the superintendent board relationship so that's what it is i have a four-minute very short four-minute video that will

061give an overview without getting into the weeds of the program too much so i'm going to play that now and if you could uh i'm sure you'll be able to hear it but let me know if for some reason you can't hear it welcome to super evil super evil is a new way to conduct your annual superintendent evaluations online saving valuable time for superintendents and school board members super eval creates unique roles for superintendents school board members and board presidents allowing users to access only the information they need to complete evaluations based on standards of excellence in just five easy steps super eval defines a reflective and evidence-based evaluation process the super eval dashboard drives the evaluation process displaying easy access to the five essential steps completion statuses for each step and due dates that

062are defined by the leadership team [Music] the evaluation process begins with the superintendent defining annual smart goals derived from longer term district and or board goals these annual superintendent gold align with the performance evaluation superintendents can enter custom goals or select from an example list of goals used by superintendents across the state once goals have been populated superintendents can mark step one complete [Music] step two requires superintendents to reflect on each of the 24 competencies defined by the council's superintendent model evaluation rubric throughout the school year superintendents can supplement their self-reflection by adding supporting evidence to their portfolios with drag and drop functionality the annual goals defined in step one will auto populate in the last domain once reflections are complete for each competency and supporting evidence is attached the superintendent digitally submits his or

063her self-evaluation to the school board for review triggering an email notification to all board members in step 3 the school board reviews the superintendent's self-evaluation including the reflections and evidence before conducting their own evaluations school board members have the option to start a new blank evaluation or an evaluation that is automatically pre-populated with the superintendent's rubric responses each of the competencies has a rubric identifying four levels of the superintendent's performance with descriptors for ineffective developing effective and highly effective board members can also easily reference the superintendent's self-evaluation reflections and evidence the board president can conduct his or her own evaluation as well as have a real-time high-level data view of how the evaluation is progressing this allows the board president to lead the board through the process once all board evaluations have been completed the

064board president can mark step 3 complete supereval automatically consolidates all of the school board's evaluation data into a single evaluation saving time for the board president by eliminating the need to manually collect this data the board will then meet to review the consolidated evaluation make any adjustments necessary and prepare the final evaluation for the superintendent's review this process is closed to the superintendent once step 4 is completed by the school board it triggers an email to the superintendent permitting access to step 5. super ebell compares the school board and superintendent evaluation to present a data view that identifies areas of agreement and disagreement providing an excellent catalyst for discussion superintendents have the option to add post evaluation reflections and comments at the conclusion of these five steps the superintendent and school board president applied digital

065signatures to finalize the evaluation once the document is signed the evaluation is finalized and super eval generates a foil version of the superintendent's evaluation that can be used in response to any foil request the evaluation is then stored in a digital archive that can be accessed at any time [Music] so that'll give you a good sense of of what the program is about a couple things i want to point out we have rubrics that are built into the system uh they're based on the aaa aasa national standards for superintendents these should look pretty familiar to the board its relationship with the board community relations staff relationships business and finance and instructional leadership so there are 24 super superintendent competencies across those five domains in the last section we allow the superintendent and the board to

066define annual goals that they'd like the superintendent to work on so that the superintendent can put in evidence and reflection as to how he or she has met those goals i mentioned that there are 40 school districts in illinois i just always list some of them because a lot of times school districts want to know who else is using uh super eval to evaluate school superintendents and so i like to share that i also often get questions about the cost so i like to put that up front super eval is based on an annual subscription model that goes from july 1st to june 30th the cost is based on two evidence evidence-based funding tiers i believe us we go through it 308 is in uh tier two if i'm not mistaken so that cost would

067be eighteen hundred dollars for per year that includes the superintendent and the school board for the purpose of evaluating the superintendent over the years superintendents and school boards asked if we could add additional roles into super eval so there is a way that dr sparlin would be able to use this to evaluate his cabinet uh any principles that report to him and any any additional staff so uh for a hundred dollars per additional license dr sparlin would be able to use super eval in the same way that the board evaluates dr sparlin dr sparlin would evaluate the people the leaders in the school who report to him and then we do have a component of this where the school board does their own self-evaluation for 300 annual subscription and then there is a one-time onboarding

068fee that includes training on the on the program so i'll stop talking there and um i know i've met a couple of board members and dr sparlin and presented this a couple times so i hope i'm i'm not being redundant and i'm happy to answer questions that any of the board members have about super eval i just uh dr bailey nice to see you again i had the opportunity to meet dr bailey as well as three different school districts at the triple i concert um in the past november this past november and i will say it kind of floated out of there and i think i ran straight over to teresa and i was like teresa did you hear about this um because it's definitely something that is needed when i was campaigning for my

069board seat one of the things that i was conflicted with and frustrated with is kind of lack of common language lack of understanding the process and from a strategic standpoint and for me going through an evaluation cycle with uh regarding the superintendent contract once there was definitely some confusion every every board member enters from a different perspective from a different um you know experience level i happen to be an hr practitioner so this is something that is incredibly um close to me and something i'm very passionate about but not everybody has the same filter through which they are doing this and so i think the opportunity here um for our district is exponential i think that once we can align the board and the superintendent with the goals for the district and then dr sparlin

070can align his cabinet and so forth and so on i think the opportunity the synergy for that to happen i think just will make things uh more transparent i think it will give us the opportunity to save money and understand what is expected and then what is actually uh produced so um this was a no-brainer for me i brought it to the board and wanted to share it i had the opportunity as dr bailey has up there to hear from all of these districts they had both their board president and their superintendent present and many of them had some of the same frustrations and and challenges that we've had and to hear their um testimony as to how they were able to overcome that with this was um very impressive and we even had the

071opportunity one of the superintendents opened up his evaluation and went through it with us which i thought was incredibly brave um and there were districts that were you know large and small and so forth so you got to see you know where other people were finding challenges and they were very similar to what we were going through also the automation of it this is very similar to what teacher how a teachers are evaluated i've used the evaluise software before for teachers and this reminded me very similar where you upload your artifacts and so forth and it gives dr sparlin the opportunity to do so on a day-by-day basis versus having to sit in front of the board um in a closed session and answer questions from a year ago which is we none of us

072can remember what happened so i'm just very excited about it i hope the board sees the value in it um dr bailey i i when i saw this in november though i thought the board evaluation part self-evaluation was a part of of this that they were intertwined um do you mean do you mean in terms of cost or do you mean in terms of the program itself both so the the school board uses super eval to evaluate the superintendent right um that's that's what the platform fee covers um it's a separate process for the board to evaluate themselves so it's still within super eval but it's it's a very different process where the the board does an assessment of of how it's meeting best practices for school boards and then throughout the year the board

073collects artifacts and evidence and reflects on on those best practices and then comes back and does a second you know how are we doing type of evaluation where each board member then you know for example the board speaks with one voice when evaluating the superintendent or whatever whatever the thing is that the board's working on uh the board completes the rubric about how the board's working so they're connected but they're really um separate processes and and a separate cost to do that okay thank you i i must not have understood that i also want to share that uh the illinois association of school boards has adopted this as their official uh super evaluation tool and that is part partially why we get a discounted fee as we are part of it one of the and

074i don't remember which district it was but one of the districts said that they were really struggling with goal alignment and once they set the goals for the board and then once they set the superintendent goals and the superintendent set his cabinet goals uh they were all the same which i thought was interesting but they just said that the alignment of all of those and seeing it physically seeing it and being um able to evaluate against it really [Music] showed where the holes were in their process and jen if i can add just one more point to that the the retention rate for districts who use super eval is 96 to 97 year over year so when when school districts when school boards when superintendents use this they sign up again and they really like

075how this does align goals with evidence and reflection and gets the whole entire school district moving in the same direction uh and providing that accountability for everyone along the way exactly so that you know that you you'll see right away if something's not working in terms of meeting annual goals and that's a wonderful conversation to say hey this this is something we need to work on and uh i've always believed that education is about growth and so that's why we do this and uh we're very much in favor of the alignment piece that you're talking about that's that's really important to though thank you dr bailey and i know you couldn't see i i was i was about to start asking you some questions i appreciate your adding on before we get started though dr

076sparling are you comfortable continuing a conversation about your contract in open session yeah that's fine okay thanks um second so i have done these as most people could imagine seven times um on paper on paper i have compiled these two of those times myself i love the concept of automation let me just start with that i love it i because having actually done this the time commitment involved was about 20 to 30 hours of that week wow wow and most of that time was spent tracking down my fellow participants to make sure that they had given thought to what they wanted to add and offer in terms of things so that was my experience so i can see the benefit of an automated system but i do have some very specific concerns that i want

077to make sure and this is probably more i think you did a great presentation i feel very clear on what what it is that you provide and i appreciate that but really with my fellow board members a few different things um and maybe dr bailey first you could answer for me one of them and you're cool for real you're okay okay one of the concerns that we have had in the past um the concerns and the problems that you listed um yeah these are these are real problems um and they have been uh throughout several different boards however the problems tend to be [Music] what uh mrs johnson had mentioned that everyone comes from a different place so one of the things that often happens is there's no feedback given how and on this um

078i heard you say that you can provide evidence and documents to support the feedback throughout the year but board what if we don't use those what does that do to solve the problem of will we commit to using those tools in a way do you see what i'm saying um because i have often received straight numbers without comments or feedback or anything to give any clue as to what was informing that decision so this tool could help that but frankly most of these categories are categories that we have on the current evaluation the automation process is awesome the cost is pretty low um i believe we already have a border val tool that we use through iasb so i don't think we would need to in my opinion i don't think we would need to

079purchase an additional one no um dr sparlin or well dr bailey so the question is how do you solve the problem of specific feedback what what part of your tool would change that problem or solve that problem that is different from doing it manually what about the automation process makes it more robust for dr sparlin in terms of feedback sure that that's a really good question um first of all i would say that having a rubric that's point and click the rubric has descriptions for performance so you know i should show you this rather than just right so we currently have that same rubric for performance i'm speaking more to the comment piece rather than the rubric okay the specific feedback piece i'm gonna say that you know the the if if board members aren't

080committed to giving feedback to dr sparlin and we've facilitated that by identifying the the criteria providing the standards provides dr sparling goes through and says here's my evidence here's how i'm reflecting on that evidence here's how the evidence is indicative of my performance with regard to the competencies that have been identified or the annual goals quite frankly there's nothing in super eval that will force the board member to give constructive feedback our our point in doing this is to create the process and make it easy and efficient but thank you sorry i would never claim that it provides motivation or um right you know know what i mean well and and that's what i was asking for is to highlight that that doesn't take the responsibility off of us as board members to observe hold

081accountable and handle our our no responsibilities but the automation piece of it can reduce some of the barriers to having time for it um i don't think that's a bad idea i do have a couple very very specific questions but can i i actually have a bridge to that to your question so for instance when um a teacher is evaluated on student engagement she will she or he will upload artifacts that specifically hit on student engagement right yeah that's and well and that's the piece i really liked so let's say that you have an option community engagement for dr sparlin i'm making this up right now along the throughout the year and we also what i would presume we would want to maybe do like a quarterly or a halfway through the year and say

082here's how you're doing so far right he could have uploaded 12 things that he did in the community that we may not normally know about so then when we're sitting having our closed session evaluation when he's not in it and you're like well i know he went to this and i'm like well i didn't see him in anything we now have an opportunity to have engagement around these things where we may not have before and so what i appreciate about this is that instead of us having to dig for it it's up to dr sparlin to say okay well here's what i've done against this specific goal thank you um so really quickly dr sproul and i have a few questions for you regarding this typically in your contract um we have to agree to

083the superintendent evaluation tool being used and we usually do so so that you have the entire year using that tool um so is it your impression that this is going to be used for this year's evaluation or that you will have this to inform you for the following year yeah we had uh we had that conversation when dr bailey was presenting and uh that's something that i had spoken to and i would like to use it beginning for next year so you have i have the year as ms johnson just mentioned when you talk about artifacts and uploading and being able to demonstrate the efficiencies of each one of these goals and and things of that nature so you have that year and you're able to do that as you as you go thank you

084for that answer that's kind of that that fits with what i believe i've always learned been taught understood about how the contract evaluation process for the superintendent works um so that makes sense um do you like this tool dr sparlin does this feel like it will help you portray accurately what your job is and how how you're achieving it yeah i like a lot of i like the things we just just apparent some of the things that were already said you know whining board uh aborting the superintendent goals along with the cabinet because i see i i think right off the bat i would like to use this with my cabinet as well so we're utilizing on the same page and we're utilizing that same tool and we have all of our arrows so so

085to speak in alignment go in the same direction you know i like the self-evaluation piece i like the idea of being able to upload the artifacts that demonstrate you know that that these uh these goals have been met and this is how i see them and i like the self-reflection piece and like you said um sometimes the feedback has been you know it's been there but it's been lacking and you know we've talked about this before and um i i like this idea but like dr bailey just said you know it's up to everyone to provide the feedback as well that's the key point i want to really have in this conversation is our responsibility and i don't i also don't care i i don't prefer having these conversations also in open session given that

086word self governance is a closed session topic but since we are discussing it if it's okay with everyone else i just want to make sure i'm highlighting that it is our responsibility to be looking for these things throughout the year as well um and i think that that will serve us if we use a tool such as this it that that is a that is the most important piece is that this needs to be a consistent piece for us as well yeah for the sake of your first question i just want to give dr sparlin a chance to elaborate on the first question because we did have an extensive conversation in regards about this year and next year okay thank you and i just wanted him to uh just elaborate on i thought what else

087we discussed in the meeting in regards to what could happen yeah we we also talked about a um utilizing a what was the what's the word i'm looking for light white yes yes came up with the idea of you know that you know we could do a light version of it and uh so you know i and dr bailey said you know when we had that conversation he said that we could do that if you know a white version obviously the artifacts and all the types of things that would be there i mean if you're going to start this if we didn't use it anyway exactly right right yeah but it would give us the opportunity all of us to utilize the two of the issues no i i don't think that any of that

088is a bad thing actually and no additional cost thank you well right and i think what i appreciate the most is this 1800 a year contract that is very low yeah if i remember correctly the our budget is significantly higher than that and this would be a tool that would allow us to more effectively handle our one of our most important of our three responsibilities which is hiring a superintendent and evaluating yeah right so i i i really like this lorry to your point about how you didn't get a lot of feedback and you had to chase it um super eval prompts and does the prompting so it kind of takes a little of the human part of it out so it's not like oh the president you know bugging me the president's bugging me

089so um but also number yeah i gotcha yeah no and and i and i didn't i want you to sure i i want to make sure that i'm also speaking accurately on behalf of all of my former board member peers that you know this isn't any one person it could be any single person in a given year if that happens to be a busy week or whatever so that to me when we talk about a superintendent evaluation is the most important thing is that this is an ongoing tool rather than a once-a-year tool um and i know dr sparlin and i have had those conversations also that it it feels incomplete um because what if you don't you don't remember a year ago or even six months ago or cove it happens where all the

090things yeah right so i'm super super interested in in looking at this um when that was you actually answered my my last question which is are you looking at using this something like this for your cabinet and you are um so that is for me something interesting because i like the alignment with senior leadership and what we are also looking for because it does put everyone on the level playing field so that's my last question one of the killings that i think you have to leverage i just want to make sure to get the value i know what was going on and i don't know if we would say i missed this comment i i was just saying i i think it's very smart to leverage it you know through the cabinet and whatever however

091deep you want to go um to get the true value um because they have a dollar hundred dollars per additional that's that's so can i just get those the oh yeah ali and jared do you have any thoughts or comments is this uh is this coming out what what bucket of money are we talking about that's coming out of capital not capital outlay it comes out of the board of education our budget our our board budget that we thank you i just want to the other point that was that was really driven home by these other districts that i had the opportunity to hear from is that it also holds the board accountable and i'm not saying dr sparlin has said this but there are some times where he may get a call from seven

092different board members who have issues and it's very hard like what is the one voice because we all have very different perspectives and he's very good about saying okay this is what i'm hearing the board say but this really kind of puts it in you know black and white here's what you said were my goals here's the art you know and so i think the other part that is very um impactful is that it also keeps the board accountable well yeah i i i really i really think this is interesting um yeah i i guess i i have a few specific wonderings about things like at this current point we are able to see performance reviews that each of our fellow board members has submitted for better or for worse because sometimes for dr sparlin

093that helps him understand because he knows that person oh they would view this this way because of acts um will we and he still have the opportunity to see which board members were reviewing things so that if we have follow-up questions we can ask i had that question i was going to defer to dr bailey i believe on the video it showed the anecdotal comments but it looked like it had the name of the person underneath it did i see that wrong or did i see that correctly you saw that correctly uh you as a district and as a board have the option of providing the names of the people who provide the feedback or you can remove the names and and only provide the feedback so and done both ways both ways in the

094district and my personal feeling is that there should be a name attached to that feedback and and i think that's the way you build relationships is that you you address you know people who have things to say so thank you dr bailey my recommendation is to keep the names but some districts don't want to do it that way thank you thank you dr bailey i know it's so hard to see being doing the remote and i really appreciate you coming in to do this via video at a disadvantage um actually on further reflection i think we don't give dr sparling the names the people who we do give each other the names of the people so that would be something we should probably consider is that the other thing dr bailey and you can touch

095on this this their program is also very um customizable you can call his team and if we choose not to use those 24 and we want to add one that might be a further conversation perhaps in the future at some kind of board agreements or whatever but um i feel confident that i have the information that i need now from dr bailey if we want to ask anyone else ali and jared do you have any more questions before we let dr bailey go i would like to expand on one of lori doyle's question if i may the question where we all answer a question differently based on our sometimes our own relationship with him like how i would more experiences yeah right so how i would answer a question is sometimes very different from what

096fellow board members would answer a question so how does buying your system cut down on that or is it just that's always going to be how it is this is just a different tool to use yeah that was so i'm sorry i'll let him answer that's a really good question too um i think uh the way our our program works is that when you rate dr sparlin on the rubric it takes the average of the seven seven responses yep he might so that in terms of the rubric that's where he'll be evaluated on so whether it's highly effective or effective uh wherever that that happens to be but then the comments themselves can be based on very different experiences from the board members but i would also argue that the the most important thing that

097should be based on is the evidence that you either see or don't see in dr sparlin's portfolio if you will um that's legal is there a way sorry go ahead sorry in in our the last several reviews that dr sparlin and the board have agreed to we have weighted different sections in different ways is that an option with the software it is not okay so that would be a difference in how we do an evaluation currently and again with dr sparlin's permission we rate in past years we've rated the board priorities as about half even though there might only be four or six that's about half of the weighting of the review and some of the other things have a lower level rating based on what the board has felt at that time we wanted

098to make sure he focused on being board priorities in this format if there's no waiting available it's worth considering how does that get set up so that the importance of board priorities if that is still this board's priority is to have board priorities rated higher in his performance review how are we going to capture that and not dilute it with other things that we have currently been weighing as less important because we might have 14 things but four of those things are worth half of the grade so to speak well it can be based on what the competencies are that we choose so if we think whatever broad i mean board priorities isn't actually an item so whatever those board priorities are let's say social emotional we pick the competencies that match that and those

099will i'm sorry i thought i saw on here i thought i saw on here and i just want to make sure i'm understanding this right because this is different to me um and i haven't had the luxury of looking at this previously so i had seen on here in the quadrants you were looking at the five domains with the five domains in our annual goals f1 f2 f3 that's what i'm referring to as sport priorities no common language is important yeah um but i'm seeing that as three things in a list of yes thank you so much for changing to that one that was the one yep there's 24 competency and only three are on annual goals whereas currently we rate those as fifty percent of the evaluation um am i correct dr sparling that's

100about 45 it's it's a it's more of waiting yes yeah it's a higher weight so that is so i get the competency that goes into each of the goals sorry but it's it's and to use the common language annual goals um those three things weigh a lot higher right now which is a significant change so i would be concerned about and thank you ali for expanding on that because that's actually what made me think of it um i want to think about that part of it and how do you make this is the system able to work for what we have valued doesn't mean we still do but what we have valued which is we really want to see and i think we'd have to discuss that in closing yeah and well and that's what

101i'm saying i there's some of this that kind of falls into open and closed and i don't want to overstep on that but it's hard to have this conversation without those pieces yeah i think most districts identify specific competencies and don't evaluate the superintendent every year on all 24 competencies right so i the way i would i would probably do that given what you've asked me is i would identify specific competencies and and remove other competencies like that's just a click in a box and you can pick which competencies you're using i would also say that your annual goals are where you know maybe that's where you put your highest priority is in the annual goals and you can put as many or as little as the annual goals you want you also have the

102option of just using annual goals and evaluating dr sparlin not on the 24 competencies but on annual goals and and having that be the only thing that that you use thank you for sharing welcome yeah i i heard that that there is flexibility to that and so the conversation about that would be a closed session conversation i think um okay that we would all have together but thank you for explaining that there is flexibility in that okay anything else thank you so much dr bailey we'll be in uh touch you for your time and and thank you for what you do for our community um it was a real pleasure thank you thank you goodbye all right item 7.1 is a presentation from associate superintendent faith alquist regarding professional development thanks i thought i'd come

103over here so it's a little easier for those people at home to hear from me so i'm really excited to talk about envision 308 and professional development this evening as you may recall a part of envision 308 is having an annual report on all things professional development which also includes the preview of a three-year plan this is the first time that we've presented this but we'll have this annually and just as we're getting started i felt like it was really important to talk about some of my beliefs around professional development it is the responsibility of all of our leaders while i'm party of one here this evening there are hundreds of people that are involved in all of the processes of developing our staff with professional development i feel really strongly that the trainings that

104we provide to our administrators and to our teachers need to model the type of instruction that we want our staff to provide to our students and then training needs to be ongoing it is not a one and done type of a situation we bring on with our coaches and have repeated processes and then it needs to be monitored through classroom walkthroughs through our student and staff survey data as well as our achievement data to see how we're doing and then finally each staff member has a role in their own advancement of their skills it's my belief that if we want to develop our administrators to be instructional leaders then we have to expect them to model good instruction so this next piece is something that we use on a regular basis it's our vision for

105instructional practices and what's a little unique of this is it's not just student and staff the far right columns are also what roles do our building administrators and our district administrators provide when they do this training so this is part of our climate for learning in component five and it is our expectations for designing for engagement and when the team sits down to work with their coaches or with each other to make professional development we keep these things in mind so whether it's for students or whether it's for teachers we're looking at having some autonomy in the learner that they have some choices there that they have some differentiation because we have lots of experts whenever we sit down to do professional development as well as novices just like our teachers do with our students

106and then having collaborative structures and having time to reflect that's really key with what we're wanting our staff to do with our students so we need to model that and then really being upfront with what is the expectation and learning targets we talk about that within our classrooms and then the sense of inquiry of having staff or students ask questions and apply their learning and of course all of that with the final role is about establishing a level of trust where students and staff can take risks and then go on with learning so this next uh chart is really something that i'm going to come back to several times throughout the presentation whenever i sit down and look at professional development or i'm like oh we're just not getting it um i reflect on our

107ability to do these five things and this is not just about professional development this is about how do we build a climate because when you think about training 2 000 people over many complex issues over many years this is about managing complex change and this chart kind of keeps in mind what is important when you do that so for example in the first column if you go down and vision is missing then you go over to the purple and it tells you what emotion is likely to happen then you have confusion if you have all the skills which is usually where professional development starts and ends if you are missing that you have anxiety with education incentives is more about the why do we do what we need to do if that's missing then we're

108at resistance if staff doesn't have the materials or the time then you get to frustration and without putting all that together in an action plan then you have false starts so it's really important to start with the vision and when at all possible you need to encapsulate all the different things that go into what a teacher or a school or a district needs to do so that they aren't stand alone and they aren't considered death by initiative so this is the vision and for those of us that um for those board members that are brand new um you may not recall this climate for learning framework was written right before uh covid and this is everything that we are trying to do special ed general ed english learners this is the entire picture of what

109we want for students and for staff and it's not just the esd directors that work on all of this we've recently adopted a interview process through hr where our questions for teachers and applicants are aligned with the climate for learning so we stay right up front this is what we are about in sd 308 so i'll start with this piece and all the vision because as i said if we don't start off with that vision piece we can't do the rest of all of the things that we need to do so at the very top with explicit sel instruction you'll see my green check marks there and green says it's established and yellow is we're getting close so with explicit sel instruction we've incorporated what are the sal standards what are the curriculum materials where

110we're at with where we want to go does that mean that we're there yet no but we have that vision of where we're going so the check mark is green when you look at common expectations for behavior we have a vision of where we want to go and our elementaries and our junior highs have common expectations for behavior but our high schools don't yet they're almost done i was hoping by tonight i would be able to turn that to green but they're very very close and then the next piece is how do we integrate sel and you'll see later that we have some components of what that would look like just a reminder those social emotional learning skills a lot of what we're talking about is organization managing emotions managing stress being able to look

111at different perspectives so it goes very well when you're talking about a math problem do you have resilience to have that productive struggle it goes very well with social studies where you're talking about different viewpoints with all the different curriculum areas we'll be working on having some of those pieces integrated and then we did talk about youth voice and i know we call it student voice sometimes when we wrote this document we called it youth voice but those are the same things you'll see it's a little check mark because we have some great things and you saw a huge presentation tonight on that but we're going to expand that and that's going to get bigger so i didn't know green or yellow i wanted to give a lot of kudos to what has been done

112already so it's a small green check mark and then that next piece supportive school and classroom climate it's this is so huge that i've broken into different components this involves our equity work our academic work engaging instruction it also holds all of our expectations for our staff members learning in it is our vision for literacy instruction and this is what we've been working on with all of our k-8 staff members and lots of trainings and coaching and what all of this looks like it gives the overall pieces of what should be in daily literacy instruction it also ties in our diversity statement on reflection with our equity statements this is where we're going in literacy we also have our vision for math instruction uh and a lot of work has been done in the junior

113high level on this and this is just being introduced to our elementary staff it again describes all the types of instruction that it should occur daily and it has all of the coaching pieces of where we are going to improve our math instruction then the last two that are on here for vision is the staff sel and we do have a collaboration type of a team approach that we are wanting to roll out eventually based on john hattie's research on teacher collaboration that is aligned with envision 308 and inquiry-based instruction but we realize that our staff is really stressed out right now so we are not pushing that right now but we have a vision of where we would like to go and then the last piece is that supportive discipline and dr pajasic has

114been working with a team on this because we need to have a common shared vision and a lot of this isn't just us at esd saying this is what we're going to do we want to work with teams so we have a shared vision we have lots of people that have put into those pieces so all of that is just the vision now we need to start working on skills incentives resources action steps all of those pieces so i'm going to go through and talk about each of those with the different areas of our climate for learning and our three-year professional development plan so first with explicit sel instruction this is that first component now that we have a vision we can work on other areas we have skills and trainings that continue to need

115to be done and then a lot of this work it will now be on the why the incentives looking at student survey data looking at how we are doing it meeting the needs of that and then continuing on with all of those um highlights of the work uh each slide after this is organized in the same way that the first row is what was done in 21 22 and then the work as you proceed down each slide that would happen in all the subsequent years part of our decisions for all of this is we did conduct a staff survey we had 667 responses and we asked staff where they wanted training with social emotional materials that was one of the lesser needs as identified by the staff now i'm going to talk about common expectations

116for behavior as i said the vision is really really close what we really are working on now and have to put in place is collecting data by our office referrals by talking with students all of those pieces to get to the why we need to continue to do those improvements and then once you have data that you can compare across schools then you're able to really get in and target professional development and instruction around those pieces the next piece is the sel integrated with academic instruction and you can see some of the highlights next year as we roll out the new k5 social studies instruction there will be really specifics tied into how do we build social emotional learning skills with that then you can see in the following year we'll have six through 12

117with social studies and then after that we'll be starting to work on the k-8 ela curriculum and how to integrate all of that next is youth voice and engagement and a lot of this also is about that inquiry price and how do we get our students to really go after what they want to learn and using that inquiry piece you'll see a common theme as in vision 308 and in our new materials whether it's in math even in the reading and literacy frameworks but especially in science and social studies inquiry is a huge part of that where students decide questions take on their own research and then provide their answers and get used to weighing their evidence and sources to form their opinions also when you look at our staff survey on this for inquiry

118that is the top three in the top three of what our staff said that they needed so we will be building that into our plans as we move forward also part of this is student choice and we had two different components that we looked at at this not only the staff survey where it was in the top three for the highest need but we surveyed all of our high school students and 41 of them reported that their teachers almost always are frequently provide choice we'd certainly like that number to go up to be higher than that then this again is that big category of classroom climate so i've broken this down uh this uh component that is here first is general and then i'll go to literacy and math math first with general it's really

119about all of our diversity equity inclusion training which i want to remind everyone is about including all members of race but it's also inclusion of special education students specialized instruction for el students just really how do we meet the needs of each and every one of our students and a lot of this is looking at data by demographics to identify our areas for improvement we've had over 40 trainings in dei on this year and we will continue all of those pieces when we asked our staff um this came up as the highest need and cultural responsive teaching of what they are wanting more training in uh we asked them more details within that and the two highest areas were recognizing and responding to inequities and then also having courageous conversations i said a huge part

120of this is knowing how we're doing and knowing how we're doing by demographics so really getting in and looking at data our staff identified that as a high need as well then if you get to just how we are doing with all of these pieces with literacy lots and lots of work was done with elementary and junior high staff this year on what that looks like getting in and looking at data we've identified some new data sources that we're going to need to especially help out our first graders on next year and then additionally you can see when we get down to 23 and 24 that we're going to need new resources in k5 in in ela this next piece is looking at differentiating instruction which is key to both our literacy and our math

121frameworks this stat was pretty interesting to me so 50 percent of our staff identified this as a high need and when we surveyed our students 50 percent of them said that teachers frequently are almost all the time design activities to meet students where they are and stretch you to learn more so we've got 50 percent of the students saying that their teachers are doing this and we've got 50 of the staff and of course we'd like that to increase on both student and staff surveys on what they're saying that they need this next piece is math specifics on this our data and our classroom walkthroughs show we need to work a lot on precise math vocabulary and collaborative structures so we've had a lot of training on that and then as we look through on

122what this looks like we looked at student achievement data and saw that there is a difference in gap between our girls and our boys and we've identified and done trainings around that so lots of work to be done in math some of the things that will be coming especially for elementary will be working on number sense and i do think that we'll need some outside training and experts in that in the next couple of years all right staff sel as we had said will continue to work on that but we're not going to roll out the team structure of those pieces because we've heard a lot loud and clear our teachers are tired they're really working and we want to keep that for a little bit later all right so um i just want to

123make sure everybody knows all the different modes of professional development there's institute and school improvement day trainings but ongoing coaching is huge and we do have a coach at each of our elementary schools and then two that we share for junior high and two that we share for high school uh and that ongoing piece coming alongside having somebody down the hallway that can really help answer questions or go in and teach while you model and then we utilize we train all of them ahead of time and then they go out and train with their principals and assistant principals out at the buildings so we also have offerings through esd and individual training opportunities that are just kind of a bonus if people would like to participate them and then committee work and study groups and

124of course we have a lot of staff that does individual work and reflection to really get where they need to be this next piece is just an example of what the elementary schools have been doing since january and we do modify this sometimes and we backed off a little bit when we saw that staff was really feeling like they were being overwhelmed with the amount of new things that were coming in but again this is how we use our wednesdays how we use our faculty meeting times um what this looks like and this next piece just because i kind of geek out about how we do all of this is just to show kind of how leadership and that climate peace has changed uh over the years where he used to think you had one

125person that was leading they told people then they told the people below them and so forth what you really want to get down to is that design-centric piece where all those pieces fit together if you think about math vocabulary but if it doesn't have great classroom management or students don't have a sense of belonging or social emotional all of it has to work together to have a great climate for learning so when we think about what we're working on in teams everybody within ed services may have expertise but everybody has to be working on all the components of climate for learning to make it all work so then to bring it back to what we said we would do for the next year by next april is by then we want to have all those

126check marks turned to green for the vision components and then have a system of data collection for student behavior so that we can analyze and then come back with another three year plan based off of staff surveys student surveys achievement data and classroom walkthroughs so the goal here tonight was to talk about a three-year plan and then there are the links of all of the different trainings that happened at the elementary junior high and in high schools and then part of our presentations is how are we doing and i was back and forth between making progress and making great progress and attainment and i landed just slightly to making great progress and entertainment with all the things that we want to do for climate for learning questions i know that was a lot of stuff

127that's great you know what um i i had a question and uh we did talk about this in teaching and learning i believe um differentiated training so we know that there's teachers that could lead these training sessions um right and then they have to sit through it every year so what are you so um part of the expectations for engagement is that we would do differentiation just like we want our teachers to do that for students so for example when uh i give a training on the math framework for elementary i will say okay here are where we want to go here are some things if you're already an expert of articles to read and here are some things if you're a novice and give people choices in the activities that they might do or

128give them time to reflect and dive in and do their own research if they already feel that they're at this level eventually even at the school level when we write our district improvement plans we may have one elementary school that the data the classroom walk through say they don't need this particular thing we're not going to have one size fits all if they already show that they don't need it so that's the type of differentiated instruction we're talking about i know teachers will love that can i ask you about math is it okay yeah so i noticed you talking about wanting to increase vocabularies and number sense particularly in elementary and one of the things that generally speaking is something i'm interested in is not just what we want to do for the kids starting

129kindergarten next year but there's 18 000 kids that are already past that stage so what are we going to do for those students that need to make up the things we weren't teaching before so a lot of the work that's been done at junior high this year is really getting in and trying to work on that not any fault of our staff as there are some polls or things that are going in or even what's been lost due to covid while that's while they've students um although some students have really excelled during comet 2. is getting in and looking at what are the priority math standards and diving in to make sure there's understanding on that there are not all math standards are created equal on what needs to come after that so we've established

130priority standards and are focusing on those number sense is really hard if you're at junior high level and you haven't you don't have a good sense of number so we're working on some of that but i will be very honest with you that is a very difficult thing to establish late in the game so how do we do that do do is there a way to still do that because that's where we look at our academic achievement at the end of the day are graduating seniors our academic achievement in math is low correct it's way lower than we want it to be even if it's higher than state standards it's still not enough so that tends to be i think from what i've heard from you before a a function of a lack of number

131sense from elementary years number sense uh place value but then if you're taking away some of the teach the all the standards and really getting in depth into and if you have to go back and review the concept of multiplication in sixth grade so that and you do sometimes correct yeah and by giving our staff less standards that they have to teach them all to equal they aren't all equal thank you i appreciate that jared ally did you have questions i just had one uh might sound like a strange question but uh and it's uh 667 responses yeah 30 um is that good it's not that's not stellar but it is it is a large enough sample that we felt that we could you know answer those questions i agree with you that we'd like

132more than that and we'll have to figure out different ways to get that numbers higher it's not stellar yeah i would say that the data is probably good but the engagement's not just for clarity for for the rest of the viewing audience 667 out of how many possible we have 2 500 employees but not all 2500 would have been evaluated on this so how many were were offered the opportunity to complete the survey approximately i would say around 1500 by the time you take maintenance and transportation and other people out so it's so less than half is what what that kind of amounts to thanks for clarifying i have a question um and i might be this might be a little bit early for this question you said the coaching that is coming from the

133instructional coaches is that where we the instructional coaches that we brought on with our esser funds so some of those coaches had um that was in place before our esser funds our interventionists are things that we're using for esser uh it's been my experience that that coaching uh bringing in a staff member that's there that is trained on literacy math sel behavior technology to incorporate all of that and bring that back what a model that we use frequently is we train the coaches and then we train the assistant principals and then we train the principles and then those three provide the training to staff so that you have the leadership and the person who does the evaluation but also some of those experts to work alongside with staff to help support those those needs so

134it's not our essa funds it's something that we had utilized funds before this as a means to really uh improve our district the concept of train the trainer sort of so to speak it is but it's a more than a one-on-done institute to train the trainer so would you either now or in the in the near future consider reallocating some of those coaching based on need by school so if we really need two or three coaches at some schools but two schools could share a coach would that ever be um perhaps i don't see that in the near future for us to say that a building doesn't need a coach at all right right so maybe partially but we're still at a whole lot of new training to roll out so i don't see that

135right away i just wasn't sure if based on assessment data that you would say we really need to shift some resources to these schools to really help boost right and then it might be that lindsay shannon heather myself go in to do more of those pieces or we would have coaches go over in mass on a given day and have people share that responsibility for that professional development but not take it completely away okay okay faith do you want to go to your let them try to get back our other board members and i it might be more comfortable i know you want to take the mic you want to take the mic okay so you mentioned at the top of your presentation that um our teachers are you know have a lot on their

136plate right correct um and so like how do you how do you balance sorry about that how do you how do you how do you balance what they have on their plate right and um for those of you who are at the board committees there's there's two schools of thought and i think both are right we have so much to do to improve so full forces that way we have staff that are working so hard and they're exhausted back off they're right too um and i think it's about listening um talking with the principals who've gotten feedback from their staff and we have you know backed off on a few things this year we have um put off a few things into next year's calendar already and are waiting uh into longer into the school

137year to give staff more time to to think about that i think a lot of it is building trust with people that they can tell you this is where i'm at and listening may is never a great time i've been doing this for a long long time in may as always when people are exhausted february is also not a really great month to ask but throughout the year we've had some feedback especially with our elementary staff that have to teach it all when we're doing literacy framework math framework new social studies new they teach it all um and that's a that's a big big job yes staff sel is huge to our climate for learning if our staff is super stressed out and have short maybe patiences a little less or don't have more energy

138to make one more phone call it falls apart so we have to be really careful about that in designing our climate for learning i did have a couple questions can i ask i'm sorry um on slide six we talked about explicit scl did we i know that you said it was in the vision stage but have we made attempts at making that more interactive i know we've talked about that before so for high school uh yes we'll be talking to you about uh our plans to re-uh think high school sel very soon um and then slide six okay i'm on slide six let me go back to it hold on um i had purchase of sel materials question mark so we purchased sel materials and curriculum for this school year just for this school year

139correct okay and that's not something that maybe the students and the collective could come up with our student advisory committee i i was actually thinking something very similar ali about can our student advisory committee participate in what this redesigned high school seo would look like yeah that's kind of where i met with that one sure i don't if we have kids in our buildings who are quite frankly doing some pretty great things and have a pretty good handle on some of us i think um we'll want to dovetail and put those things into place with our we'll want to start out the high school year with work on sel and our our student group won't be quite ready to say on day one this is exactly what we want people to do but definitely including

140them along the way and having those peer groups is really really impactful um and we can definitely maybe incorporate both of those the timing won't be super great well just start off the school year with him but we have talk at bionic that presented at our last meeting also you know beyond just our own student advisory committees um that i i would really hope that we are really taking seriously that that student voice piece that we have that tiny green mark in that big yellow one right above it so we're talking about those two things together there's been and they also spoke earlier about there's a when when they're talking about there's a missing component and kids they aren't grabbing this is a really good opportunity to also engage those kids we've been having a

141lot of discussion around talk and how to incorporate that as a district program and you'll see some slides in the near future i know dr sparlin saw some very early saturday morning on how we could write that into envision with those pieces i think to ali out i'm sorry are you done ally nope slide 15. okay i'm getting us to slide 15. i have some concern when you start talking about using referral data because i think you're missing a whole group of information when you're only using referral data can you expand on that um i don't you said something i don't know if you i don't know if i read it but you said we're going to use referral data so one of the things that as you monitor the health of behavioral instruction on

142how we're doing is you want to look at for example if we were looking at fights that were happening at the high school are they happening in the classrooms or are they happening in hallways or they have oh they're all happening outside of bathrooms well then how are we redirecting our resources to do that or if you're looking at office referrals for disrespect in the classroom is it happening across the board or is there a certain teacher that has a lot of the office referrals for that and they might need some support so this is really looking at how are we looking at our the health of our instruction as we teach and reinforce and build relationships and i understand what you're saying and one of those pieces is that one of that is attendance

143another could be looking at those but what did you say at the end ellie sorry i'm i'm i don't disagree with any of what you're saying but what what i'm saying is you're you're missing a whole group of kids that are that are giving you some good data on what's going right if you're only looking at referral data so are you saying that we should be using the staff the student survey data um i think i think just as much as you're using the referral data yeah to identify what's working yes but to identify where we need to target improvements i think but that will also that'll also give you that too i just like i just i just want to caution you that just using referral data isn't really giving you a whole picture

144i don't think right it's just saying where we need specific areas of improvement um right and then slide 22 okay slide 22 um analyzing data to improve your instruction you said it was a high need but only 11 of the staff said that right and what i'm looking at that is the combination of high need and moderate need um of you know where the and i was combining those two pieces and that comes out in the top three i get that but here's my question to you which has been a question for many years now how are you looking at data if you're giving different tests so that is something that we need to work on but in our new k-8 assessment especially that we implemented this year that's everybody using the same data to

145look at our literacy and our math instruction on what that looks like and then as you're probably aware the high schools have been working on grading practices and finding common uh assessments among courses we're not there yet but we've been working on that for a good eight years now how long have i been here um slide 27 i'm almost done i swear that's that was my concern with five 22. you need common finals i know we keep talking about it and well then we dumped finals so if we are not doing common finals are we now doing common assessments so there will be common um assessments with as we work through our grading practices but as you had said that's a ongoing process and during cobit i did not make a lot of progress on

146that um and then slide 27 is my last one you said ongoing coaching yes um and you talked you talked about the high schools sharing people and the junior high sharing people and my question are those people that they're sharing where are their actual offices are they downtown so at edmond at junior high they are at dac but they do spend quite a bit of time out in classrooms and being at the schools or providing digital training and things remotely at the high schools one is at each of the high schools they do not have offices at deck and do we have room to move the junior high ones into the buildings yes and no we have one that really her expertise is in math and the other in is in literacy and to push

147them just to the schools or house them at one specific school right now we really want them to be servicing all five schools and working with our elementary coaches too so that there is cross articulation for k-8 so right now i'm not intending to have their offices be at the schools but they do have to be in the schools frequently observing classrooms even going in and modeling and teaching that right but i guess my question is when when we say frequently do we mean the same thing how frequent is frequent on some days they're out the schools five days a week some weeks for like an hour or like the whole day it varies greatly um and they did do a lot of the classroom walkthroughs and going through and looking at the junior highs

148and the elementary pieces um if you'd like i can gather more of the schedules yeah i just like i appreciate that they're doing the walk-throughs but if they're doing a walk-through for a couple of days and then they're spending two weeks downtown talking about the walk-throughs that they did it really doesn't help i can guarantee you they're not spending two weeks talking about the classroom doctors i okay it was an exaggeration for argument's pick i would just like them to be in the buildings anybody else yeah i have one thing it's really kind of more of a comment than a question uh maybe kind of a question but first just appreciate and thank you for uh strategy and the conversation around strategy of how we improve the quality of education in our district it's so

149refreshing to be having these conversations now and discussing what what is and what will be directly impacting our students as i was thinking about a couple things that you said early culture to me even when i'm going over those slides about what's missing the vision the skills incentive resources and action plan culture impacts our strategy far greater sometimes than any of those things and so one statement that you made because this is a lot and this is only one initiative that's a part of envision 308 and so when you made the statement of of death by initiative it just made me think about the teachers and and the people who have to implement it still and so my question was is what part or what role does the board play in the pace in which

150we're running and because the the thing that we're all of the things that we're trying to improve upon can actually have an adverse effect if we [Music] you know so i'm just trying to figure out i think it's all great and we and it's all just like you said the six and one half dozen in the other it's it's so needed but at the same time i just want to make sure that we're doing it right and not just doing it and so i wanted to ask you know what role do i we play in that pace that could be contributing to the way that the teachers are feeling and i know that's a very tough question but correct but i think many times and i can think of a particular instance where we're at

151the stage on oe that you know the more that we can work collectively to build trust and communication it makes all of that work better when you ask about the pace um we have to continue to listen you know i there were there were more check marks that i wanted off on green this year but we had to really look at where our staff as learners are and our staff is at at that and you know i think the more that we can collectively say that our teachers are phenomenal and they're great uh and our students are great but it's it's systems and it's things like this that if like if the systems break down we're not going to get where we need to go um the pace is hard because some teachers can be

152like faith catch up we should be doing more on this and other people are like oh if you talk so you know like um and they're all right i'm just like our teachers that have to face their students every day they're students that can be 100 miles an hour on something and other students need a little bit more time either with where their past experiences were or what else is going on in their life i don't have a great answer for you on how to determine [Music] the pace other than to really set a clear vision which is what we worked really hard to do this year and then help people monitor their own pace of where they're going with this to differentiate yeah and there was an unfair question well i say it this

153way is that we should be i should be asking ourselves that question yeah because we are the ones that set the priority so it was it was me thinking out loud you gave actually a great answer to it because that was that also helped inform me and made me say why am i asking her this question this is the question i need to ask myself but but thank you because you know this is great and great information but it is something that we have to discuss when we're when we're considering world priorities for next year and eugene i'll just add in when you talk about culture being completely separate from all of these when i look at culture i tend to look at the box incentives yeah that's what i was it culture culture is

154very often from my own experiences here and elsewhere culture tends to be harmed when you disincentivize individuals from achieving the action plan so that's where i place it it kind of overarches the whole thing but i don't really think it's separate so much as if you skip any of these it's because of the culture that they're missing well yeah i i agree i think culture is an overlay so if you look at the box the purple boxes to the far right i feel like that's the culture that we create when you and more often than not incentives is where i think you see what's in it what's in it for me or what's in it for our students or what's in it for our community or what's in it for whoever incentive to ins to

155play a large role in culture i think so one last comment is i agree with you but i think culture is all of the boxes and not just oh yeah definitely it's not even maybe it may be weighted differently with each person but i think it's all of these things contribute to it and so i just want us to be you know we just we have to talk about that it's just us that we have to have yeah i agree well this is where we do that yeah yeah exactly all right thank you so much thank you thank you doctor um can i go out of order because i think i'm going to have our student ambassadors because it's getting late yeah um so i'm going to start with 8.4 and have our student ambassador

156reports and then um you guys are free to go because i know you've got school tomorrow unless you want to stay and i'm fine saying you're fine thing can i ask just a quick question about that why did we move the comments till the end well all the comments yeah because because you're bringing up a really good point it's 9 45 and it's late for them well i was going to let them go first with their comments no i know but we moved the whole section to the end oh okay that's just like we can start with the 9.1 consent agenda no no no no no i think you're misunderstanding me i i was asking um the the most noticeable change to our agenda recently is that before we go into information we usually do

157our student ambassador reports and board member comments and superintendents report but now it's at the end of the meeting that's what i'm asking about yeah it was an effort to give the other the presentation presentation and the guest and if there's any if there's any uh staff an opportunity to go first but it's i guess not the same consideration for the students yeah those tend to not take too too long generally so without wasting more minutes because i've taken two um yeah i totally agree about switching to let them go first okay for today for today okay so well we're anyway i don't really remind you i'm gonna let you guys go first eight point four student ambassador reports okay thank you so much um so last week colton and i met with dr sparlin

158to discuss the structure and the future of the student advisory committee which our current members have been really excited to do this year and our returning members would potentially be really excited to do again and then last thursday the students from our student advisory committee uh made that presentation we provided earlier about the potential proposal for how we would recruit new members into the student advisory committee um and then we'd also like to say that we plan on evaluating a lot of the considerations that have been brought up by the other members today um such as setting a foundation for new members and our current progress that we've made so far at the beginning of next year or reaching out to more students to get into direct contact with the student advisory committee to really

159facilitate more communication um but yeah thank you all for providing such amazing insights we really appreciated it and thank you for listening to our proposal and i think that's it is there anything to add colton okay so i see what you're saying now you're just saying put we're going to going forward or just for today we're going to do students we're going to talk about it later i'll let's we don't need to worry about it right this second i'll i'll explain a little bit further when it's earlier okay all right so now we're going back up to 8.1 before mrs samuel if you don't mind could i do my 8.3 my superintendent's report the reason i ask is because i've incorporated our student ambassadors into the report so when i'm done with this then then

160they can take off okay all right uh so good evening board tonight i'd like to uh two things i'd like to start my comments by congratulating oswego east senior or as we student i should say hannah king for being named to the honorable mention allstate academic team of the illinois high school association for 2122 school year hannah is one of 50 students recognized this year out of hundreds of nominees so congratulations hannah we've uh we've we've uh congratulated hannah and a few different things so quite impressive and um since our last meeting i had the opportunity to attend the bsa black excellence runway show at oe and it was a really great night highlighting our students and their talents uh step teams performed student artwork and poetry were shared and the students modeled a different

161different apparel and the runaway walks it was a very well attended event and i know i enjoyed it and i saw that most people everyone seemed that was attending seemed to do that so last thursday i attended the large unit district association conference attending conferences such as luda provide me with the opportunity for some professional development as well as the opportunity to speak with other luda superintendents and to engage with my peers and professional dialogue and one of the sessions that i attended i wanted to highlight because i participated in a session that was all about student voice and as we all know student voice is a priority of ours here in 308 so one of the sessions featured a panel of students and the students were asked a variety of questions to provide student

162voice on educational issues so i'm going to highlight just a couple of the questions that were asked and then i i told i told anyone colton that i wanted to ask the our student ambassadors to reflect and respond on those same questions and the first question was if you could change anything about our educational system uh what would it be and what should we be thinking about and some of the responses from the high school students that were part of the panel were that you know they're not going to school to memorize and take tests maybe do more projects instead of memorizing information they talked about having this was interesting when they brought up the concept of open book tests as they said in the real world they need the ability to seek out resources

163to address problems being able to find the solution over emphasizing uh memorization they felt essay standardized tests such as sats where we spent too much time on those um and a senior that was going to college talked about how it out that being she's going to be a teacher and how she felt that in the profession we need to give educators more credit after all everything people learn in professions came from teachers and then one of the students spoke in depth regarding representation as a student of color and they we need more students more teachers to reflect uh our student body and how they through their entire k-12 experience they only had one student of color and that was something that was very important so when i listened to these student responses i couldn't help

164but um think what would our you know what would our student ambassadors and our other members of our student advisory committee and how would they respond so i wanted i i told cole and anya i wanted to ask them if you could change anything about our educational system what would it be and what should we be thinking about um so one of the um responses with relation to like projects my mind kind of was the same thing with like hands-on learning and changing curriculum i i would want to see you know and especially in high school when you're taught anything that is either just you know something that you have to learn in high school or something that may be struggling to you you always kind of hear the you say to yourself when you

165hear from your classmates that oh when am i going to use this right like when is this gonna ever come up in my life again or whatever you know whatever the case may be and my my thought is like you know what if there was an an avenue where at a high school at any school you could take what you're learning in any class and apply it to [Music] an industry or like a field you're interested in kind of like college i mean you go to college you learn specifically about a degree in high school it's kind of a lot less customizable you kind of have to pick and choose what you're interested in and there's programs there's actually uh one of our cte teachers was was discussing it with me but there's programs that

166use common core classes like geometry or or any kind of other english or math or social studies and it goes like hand in hand with another credit that you can get um for a specific industry so for with geometry for example it was you would take a geometry class and simultaneously take like a construction class because i mean right there you i mean how often do you use geometry and construction but just that aspect of seeing exactly yeah you will use this if you're interested in this field you're going to use this all the time and really it kind of acts as a motivator whether rather than hearing that voice that oh what am i going to use this and that really that just kicks it to the curb i mean it's really hard to

167focus or even absorb any information after that because i mean i i've said it about you know countless classes and i know 10 years down the line i'm going to be like oh well now i'm glad i learned this right but really having it more noticeable to students that you are going to use this and having actually an option for them to use it so that's as a student i wish that our education system focused more on as a whole i mean everywhere so yeah yeah i think that was like good insight into like the career aspect of things when i first thought about this question um i think something that's really like gets discussed a lot by students is the inclusion of soft skills and student engagement and the exclusion of like like you

168said right like memorization-centered academia so like the inclusion of like long-term and short-term projects uh teamwork engaging individual work or like guided research that i think colton was talking about a little bit can include students into the academic environment and involve them in class work in a way that's a little bit more like meaningful it's more memorable and it can also simultaneously teach students the soft skills that they'll need in their future whether that be uh in their careers socially emotionally and i think incorporating those skills into the learning environment can teach students not only how to be like a better student but it can teach them to be a better person and i think that's something that has to be incorporated in the educational environment because spending so much time here we are developing

169our personalities and our individualistic traits here so kind of incorporating that and those skills that you should be learning alongside your education i think that's really important but yeah that's just something like i wanted to build off of thank you so much at this the the panel that i i attended was an hour-long session so there were quite a few questions that were asked so we're gonna i'm gonna go with one more question and because it goes directly with what we've been talking about with some of our research and some of the information that we got that we garnered from the staff and from the student surveys and uh the second question was why do you feel there's so much anxiety and social emotional issues for kids these days and some of the replies that

170were given from some of the panel was that they got off track a bit during the pandemic and it's going to take a while to get back and this creates anxiety amongst kids they talked about mental health issues have always been around the pandemic highlighted this and social media causes problems deteriorates kids social skills by texting everything's texting texting texting everything on social media makes it look like everyone is doing all these amazing things which just isn't reality and uh a couple of other things that says like breaks need to be breaks so when we take spring break and winter break that we really need to step away and let kids de-stress instead or students be stressed and you know and step away from that and then they just talked about the amount of homework

171when you know kids these students have athletics they have work they have family obligations and things like day after school so i'll ask you the same question why do you feel there's so much anxiety and social emotional issues for kids these days i think i think a really big one that i agreed with was social media and it's not something a lot of especially like teenagers acknowledge they're like well it's a great way for me to talk to my friends it's a great way for me to talk to my family that's absolutely correct but what it also simultaneously does is that it shows a part of people's lives you know what people want to show it's part of the whole story they can show the best things about themselves their perfect academics or their perfect

172social life um and it makes people feel like that's the standard and that's what they have to achieve and it creates a lot of pressure and it makes you feel like why am i not like this all the time but nobody's like that all the time you know everyone has their own set of problems and everyone's completely different and completely unique but social media sets a really high standard because everyone's only showing what they want to show and everyone can only see what's shown there and i think another reason might also be because students lack direction and guidance um when you're deciding your career or deciding your like entire possible future it's like a huge burden and with um the age for finding your future career getting lower and lower as there's more competition in

173the educational field some students may feel like they have to start deciding things as early as middle school to get a head start to start standing out in post-secondary education because if you start in high school some people might think well i'm not going to be good enough and a college might not look at me or a future job might not think i'm qualified enough and it's a lot of pressure and i feel like there are so many options provided in schools which is amazing it's something that i've truly loved being in oswego east there's so many amazing extracurriculars i've really started to find my passion but a lot of people don't have those resources and that lack of guidance in finding that pathway means that a lot of people are under a lot of

174pressure all the time to figure out the entire rest of their lives between the ages of like 14 and 18. and kind of like piggybacking off that i thought of the same thing as like you know in the pandemic social media that was really one of the only forms that we could interact with students that we were no longer seeing seven hours a day and i think it only um exploited the fact of how i mean really toxic it can be and to the point of um you know to a point being made of you know school getting harder i don't necessarily believe that school or school work got harder but that huge event that happened to all of us it made it harder to deal with all of those same expectations that we once

175had for ourselves that other you know you know the school had for us um it really was kind of a a pause that that completely shook up what our generation our students as a whole thought was expected and so when i think of you know why there's so much anxiety and and and you know emotional uh effects on us i mean that my ad the first thing that came to mind was so it was really factors outside of like school and curriculum while that plays a factor in it it was kind of how those things affect how we can uh learn from school and learn from curriculum and and how that just exacerbates all of that so that's yeah well thank you so much for both of you sharing your responses i told the i

176told uh dr berkey the executive director of the large unit district association the next time they have a student panel i want to make sure i'm able to bring our 308 students to talk to the superintendents because uh i am always so impressed with your insight and what you have to say so thank you that's my report for this evening thank you if you guys would like to leave here okay all right so we're going back to 8.1 board member comments and i know there was a presentation that you wanted to do so over the past few weeks i've had the honor of participating in oswego high school's talk and hike programs as we all know that fall under the bionic umbrella they shared with us these programs last meeting at our last meeting until

177i experienced them in person though i truly had no idea the impact that they were making on our students i wanted to give a special shout out to the high school students who have created this amazing safe space to share vulnerable life experience experiences which with each other talk and hike have not only shown to be powerful but even transformational they center student voice and validate students lived experiences i know that a lot of people have contributed to talk over the um years but i wanted to just give a special thank you to the teacher sponsors wendy colleen and rachel who have poured their time and energy and heart into these programs last week uh during talk at ohs i also had the opportunity to speak with administrators from manuka valley view and romeoville they

178were all there to train them and their students to train with our students and teachers so that they could take those programs and implement them in their districts this next year yorkville elgin newark plano sandwich lasalle and tri point we'll also be training with our uh staff and students to the seniors i just wanted to give a hike was i spent the day at a hunt club with hike and then this was talk at ohs that's a former ohs student that came to speak to the participants i wanted to give a special thank you to the seniors just an incredible group of students who uh literally i think are gonna change the world while visiting hike at um boulder hill with the fifth graders i just wanted to show a little bit about um how

179each of the classes are introduced maybe maybe not do you know how to play the video it looks like something video would have to go what does that say yes oh there we go so here it goes there's no sound anyway it's very exciting it is if you haven't experienced well it's just like the football games the where they run through the tunnel and it's all that excitement and people standing on each side and look look there you go so the energy is absolutely incredible and those students um are so in awe of the high schoolers they're like superstars um and it was just it was beautiful to see try to get to the next slide here while visiting hike mrs simultan and i also had the pleasure of meeting the boulder hill watch dogs

180watchdogs is an acromen acronym that stands for dads of great students this is a family and community engagement educational initiative these awesome dads i really wish you could see the pictures there they are these awesome dads provide positive male role models for students demonstrating by their presence that education is important they also provide an extra set of eyes and ears to enhance school security and reduce bullying as you can see in these photos dads were reading with students patrolling the school entrances and hallways escorting students from one class to another supporting staff they had 10 staff members out and so much more i'm sure that they do that i wasn't able to capture uh mrs simultan and i took the opportunity to chat with them and learned that these specific dads take off uh one

181day a month they use their pto time to spend the month in the schools they were enthusiastic they were engaged and excited and they are certainly making a difference i also want to thank principal jones for the tour of boulder hill i had such a warm and welcoming feeling it is without a doubt a special place finally i just wanted to congratulate the banarsik junior high bulldogs on 20 years of learning growing and achieving i'm so sad that i can't be there on friday to celebrate with them but i wanted to extend my gratitude to the students teachers and staff that have made bedarsik a successful school we may not always be able to make event dates but i know that we all truly appreciate being invited and i was just very proud to uh

182represent 308 the last couple weeks great thank you anyone else um jared ally okay all right now we'll have 8.2 board committee reports i have some comments i'm sorry i thought you were starting with them oh no i was just i said anyone else and then okay go ahead you said anyone else as i thought you were speaking to them because i didn't finish with that um so yesterday i had the opportunity to attend the u.s navy band concert that they offered for free at oehs it was pretty packed i must say and it was an opportunity for anyone in our community to see for free professional musicians and singers that gave a show that i don't think our gym has quite ever seen the quality of before in 15 years it was it was

183pretty amazing to have that just hanging out on a sunday afternoon for anyone who wanted to attend so i wanted to thank mr rexra for bringing them here um it was definitely a one-of-a-kind kind of situation for for the whole community so that's pretty cool um yeah that's that's what i've got i'm gonna leave i'm gonna leave the rest for uh conversation later okay um did they answer jared alley anything for board comments no i'm good okay all right now we'll go on to 8.2 board committee reports uh we'll start with the equity committee okay um we met on april 12th renee sartor the director of vl services shared a draft presentation with committee the final version will be shared with the entire board soon committee gave feedback regarding parent communications special education amongst our

184el population the need for el services to be considered in all hiring and other decisions but um she'll be presenting that to the entire board soon so okay thank you now the finance and facilities committee report sure we met on april 19th um fun fact that was mentioned is that we have over three million square feet of space in the district which just blows me away but that's a lot of space that our facilities team does a phenomenal job at managing we talked about the uh just some some standards of how they use and what they do in regards to cleaning and using green products and and all of the guidelines that go along with that we talked about ada compliance and we even talked about facility facility rental income and and even the process

185of of what comes in and how we can how is that managed and and how it can even be consolidated we talked extensively about student fees and um and the process for which they are by which they are collected in in in the utilization of push coin uh we did go over the envision 308 maintenance plan uh talked a little bit about kluber and and even uh how the central office are oh and just even talked about how we can utilize the central office staff in order to address some of the needs that are in the building and then lastly we we also discussed our financial projections for fiscal year 20 and and and in detail in regards to basically everything that we talked about the last board meeting so we just had a a

186passionate very interesting conversation and i just love all the input from everybody on that committee okay thank you very much and last teaching and learning committee met on april 20th renee shared a presentation with that committee as well on el services discuss the growing population of students the need to track student progress over the years even after they're no longer considered el students again she'll be presenting that to the entire board very soon uh and then there's nothing really up to say faith also presented um professional development progress report so and that was presented uh 15 minutes ago okay thank you very much okay we'll move on to 9.1 consent agenda are there any questions on the consent agenda any questions on the consent agenda can i have a motion to approve the consent agenda

187please i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 9.1 minutes from the board of education meeting on april 11th 2022 open and closed session and 9.2 to acknowledge the foia request received by the district second miss simonton hi mr plogger no lights oh they're gone i could have had this often seen to see your phone jared i'm surprised he didn't text someone someone we're getting you back okay do we need to do it again do we need to do it again okay so um can i have a motion to approve the consent agenda please i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 9.1 minutes from the board of education meeting on april 11th 2022 open and closed session and 9.2 to acknowledge the foia request received by the district

188sergeant miss hamilton aye mr plogger hi mr gatewood aye ms swanson hi mr cerrone aye mr doyle i miss johnson hi motion passes 7-0 10.1 approval of the student rights and responsibilities section in the student handbook can i have a motion please i make a motion to approve the student rights and responsibilities section in the student handbook as presented second mr cerrone aye mr gatewood aye ms johnson aye mr plunker hi miss swanson hi miss doyle i miss simonton aye motion passes 7-0 item 10.2 student disciplinary case can i have a motion please i make a motion to expel student 2021-22-5 through the first semester of the 2023-2024 school year pursuant to the board's written findings and decision as discussed in closed session with a review by the district's alternative education coordinator in the spring

189of 2023 who is authorized to consider returning the student to goal at the beginning of the 23-24 school year based on the students successful progress in the areas of behavior including police involvement attendance and grades the alternative education coordinator shall provide a status report to the board of education at that time second miss doyle luna abstain miss swanson hi mr cerrone aye ms simonton aye mr gatewood aye ms johnson aye mr pluger hi motion passes six with one abstention 10.3 approval of board of education meeting dates 2022 2023 i make a motion to postpone item 10.3 until our may 9th meeting can i have a second please second miss simonton aye ms swanson aye mr plunker hi miss doyle aye ms johnson aye mr sirone aye mr gatewood aye motion passes seven zero 10.4 approval

190of destruction of the audio recordings can i have a motion please i make a motion to approve the destruction of audio recordings of the closed session meetings from april 27 2020 through october 13th 2020. second mr cyrone aye ms johnson aye mr pluger no mr gatewood aye miss swanson hi miss doyle no miss simultan aye motion passes five five to two 10.5 approval of the release of those closed session minutes can i have a motion please i make a motion to make available no closed session minutes at this time due to a determination that it continues to be necessary to protect the public interest or the privacy of an individual by keeping them confidential second mr gatewood aye ms doyle aye ms johnson aye mr sirone aye ms simonton aye mr poger hi miss swanson

191hi motion passes 7-0 10.6 approval of 2022-23 administrator contracts can i have a motion please i would like to make two motions the first motion i make a motion to approve the building administrator contracts as presented in closed session second miss simonton aye mr plogger aye mr gatewood aye ms swanson no mr cyrone aye ms doyle this is build the building thank you this is the building aye ms johnson aye motion passes 6-1 i make a motion to approve the district administration contracts as presented in closed session second miss simonton aye ms swanson no mr plogger hi miss doyle no miss johnson um i mr cerrone aye mr gatewood aye motion passes 5-2 point seven approval of personnel report can i have a motion please i make a motion to approve the personnel report as

192presented second miss doyle aye ms swanson no mr cyrone aye ms simonton aye mr gatewood aye ms johnson aye mr plunker all right motion passes 6-1 can i have a motion to adjourn i'm in favor i make a motion to adjourn oh sorry second all in favor all the favor aye