SD308 Board of Education Public Forum (11/15/2021)

001okay i called to order the oswego community unit school district board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mrs doyle president mr gatewood president mrs johnson president mrs croner here dr moreno present mrs simonton present mrs swanson please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation [Music] all right item 4.1 is pride award recipients and tonight i'm pleased to announce that we are starting the process of acknowledging our monthly pride proudly recognizing individuals demonstrating excellence award winners in person so board i'm going to ask you to join me i'm going to we're going to get in a single file line facing the facing the outside in front of the speakers okay and

002teresa you want to go ahead and start you got it so tonight the board of education acknowledges our november pride recognition winners as dr sparlin stated it 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 teachers and employees across the district this year our district has an open nomination process inviting anyone to nominate teachers and employees we thank our generous district partners allied first bank chick-fil-a huntington learning center and culvers for helping to make this program a success awardees as your name is called please make your way up to the stage to be congratulated by the board and dr sparlin please hold all applause until the end of each category the first awardees are the

003teachers of the month sponsored by allied first bank what teachers do day in and day out is vital to the success of our students they plant the seeds of learning and help our students to grow these two teachers have been named our november teachers of the month first is allison abels from oswego high school and our second teacher is miriam osich from boulder hill elementary school congratulations to these two teachers [Applause] yes the next awardee category is our employees of the month this is co-sponsored by both chick-fil-a and huntington learning center this award is given an appreciation of each employee's ability to not only go above and beyond but also for their ability to reflect the true meaning of service our two employees that have been named as november employees of the month are keith

004mecklenburg from the transition pathways program who is unable to join us this evening and sue roach from oswego east high school congratulations [Applause] at this time if there's any building administrators with us this evening from these schools you're welcome to join and board members if you could please make your way over to the edge of the stage here we'll do a photo with our winners and a reminder for everyone else we invite you to consider nominating a teacher or employee for the special recognition you can do so on our website at sd308.org backslash pride thank you and congratulations to all of our november pride winners [Applause] a little different thank you congratulations congratulations thank you [Applause] i need some hot chocolate okay item 4.2 each year on november 15th marks the official statewide observance of

005school board members day in illinois nearly 6 000 people serve on the local school boards in illinois across 850 school districts that serve almost 2 million students in our public schools in illinois on behalf of our administration our staff and our community i would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your commitment in the governance of our school district many people have no idea in regards to the number of hours evenings evening events that you put in on a weekly basis you spend countless hours working in committees attending board meetings and pouring over thousands of reports each week on an annual basis and you do it all for no money but you do it as a service to our community and to ensure that the students of our

006school district are getting the best educational experience that we can provide you work to ensure that the opportunities offered by the district are equitable for all and that we are educating all students to reach their highest potential so tonight we say thank you for putting others before self your work and service are most appreciated probably more than you know so again thank you for your services board members to school district 308. [Applause] thank you 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

007it 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 3 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 during public comment if your questions or concerns require follow-up a member of the administration will reach out through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you dallas shivari so you all can look at it while i speak please can you hear me okay yeah my name is dallas shabari 308 board members you are now holding a piece of artwork that was drawn by a former 308 student this

008was excuse me this was a college assignment that was recently completed by a 308 graduate student who carries these memoirs forward into her pre-adulthood the student did reach out while being bullied and nothing ever was done worse still some administration observed the bullying first hand and looked away this is why i'm here tonight i'm speaking out for these students recently a 308 mother reached out to the community asking other parents if their child had ever been bullied with no type of communication to the parent after the incident had occurred as a three-weight mom i am appalled there are several response i'm sorry i'm a little nervous so please excuse me i was appalled that there were several responses from other parents who were never notified by the school this is absolutely unacceptable the students of

009this district need to feel that school is a safe place multiple quarantines ridiculous mass mandates and the so-called online learning that students continue to endure last year to now leaves a population of students silently struggling in less than three months the chicagoland area has lost 10 children to suicide 10. recently one of those children called oswego home a student in our very own district one suicide death is too many and ten is alarming and in my opinion should be declared as an emergency the bullying from this district with this nonsensual excuse me non-sensical rules social media pressures cyber bullying and other student bullying must be addressed before one more child becomes a victim i ask you to turn to each other and answer this question when will the emotional and mental health of our students

010start to be a priority when will this board take accountable actions and demand changes to a better to better addressing bullying please look at that photo one more time and understand that that picture tells a story characteristics of these actions must be identified and resolved our children deserve your help thank you may please have that back when you're done thank you tom the ninja tom naneke i'm going to read really fast because it's exactly three minutes good evening crt being taught to our children is a huge issue and an area of concern in our community and around the country parents are being called [Music] to thousands of school districts including here but don't worry i am told in my response to the foia that i filed currently are we are using this vendor for their

011bank of questions to design our own surveys there has been no teacher or student use of this product and i have to wonder if the word yet is missing from this response because who will ultimately be asked the questions in the surveys that you develop from the bank of panorama's questions that answer to me is obvious our students and our staff the district committed to a contract for a cost of fourteen thousand three hundred dollars per year so nothing to see here sounds like the june newsletter that was sent out to the community telling the parents there was nothing to worry about the parents that were questioning if crt was being taught seem confused and everything is okay now wrong i think it's becoming clearer and clearer each day that steps are being taken to

012introduce critical race theory into the language of all subjects being taught adam andrewski of forbes magazine wrote an interesting story on october 12th about panorama education and their ties to the attorney general and to the true intent of what they are selling to school district here are three direct quotes from that story the first quote critical race theory usually teaches that america its supporters and her institutions are inherently racist and discriminatory and that race is used as a social construct to oppress and exploit people of color the second quote from the story while the company doesn't use the term critical race theory on its website ezra nomani of parents defending education an anti-crt parent group at the forefront of recent protests claims that panorama education is using data collection as a pretext for school officials

013to push controversial ideas about race identity and sexuality and the final quote from the story panorama sells surveys to scroll districts across the country that focus on the local social and emotional climate these surveys are then used as justification for new curriculum from other providers that some parents call critical race theory and find objectionable let's quickly go back to my foyer response from the district currently we are using this vendor for their bank of questions to design our own surveys huh surveys saying crt is not a class in our curriculum is a true statement but it is becoming harder and harder for me and other parents to believe that crt is not being interwoven into every class being taught a recent foia uncovered books titled anti-racist baby white fragility stamped racism anti-racist racism and you

014are being added to several of our elementary school libraries we have much larger issues with the mental health of our children than wrecking their minds with these gross untrue aspects of critical race theory let's not waste more time filling their heads and instead teaching them how to read write do math proficiently and learn the real history of our nation and the rest of the world thank you thank you ariane ammakur can you hear me um i was going to talk about something else but literally none of that matters anymore i would just like to say that i went to law school and in law schools are the only places in this country where critical race theory is being taught and it is an optional class and i believe 90 to 95 percent of law schools

015in this country where it is taught that students take a different perspective on the laws and histories of this country to look at america through the lens of the narrative of race as the gentleman over there mentioned crt or critical race theory is not being taught in schools and it is not being taught to children as they try to read write and do math proficiently but let's assume it was let's assume that in this country in elements [Music] and black neighbors what is wrong with teaching our kids to acknowledge the horrific history that black people and brown people and pretty much any other person who is not a straight white man in this country has gone through and what is wrong with acknowledging that and acknowledging there are steps every one of us can take

016to heal those scars to become one nation indivisible i don't just like to say that the ridiculous narrative around crt in this country has poisoned the public debate and it is hurting people like me it is hurting people like my parents it is hurting people like attorney general merrick garland whose grandparents were holocaust survivors please for the love of god we can debate about what our children are learning absolutely that is important but i never thought i as an immigrant would live in a country where kindness is a wedge issue that's all i want to say thank you isabel gershon hi my name is isabelle and i am a student uh at oe i am a freshman and i'm here to speak um for culturally responsive teaching again as we stated critical race theory is

017not being taught in k-12 schools because it is a law subject so i don't see why i would bring that up i am coming to you as an lgbtq plus and jewish student as a district and i'm going to tell you we've there is homophobia and anti-semitism in these schools i'm not blaming any individual members but i'll i'll speak about a specific example i had a friend in history class and when they were reading about the holocaust every time she said jew a student yelled dirty over it this is what students are facing and i feel like it is ridiculous to say that adding kindness and adding a perspective of empathy to education is going to harm us we are in need of help we are in need of support and we need to start

018teaching our kids our students to have more empathy and to look at every story with the victim in mind i would especially like to um address a certain thing i've seen in the community where people are comparing math mandates to the hall cost and i feel like this is another example of how culturally responsive teaching could really help our district because currently there are adults who are who were not who were sadly not educated enough on the holocaust because they weren't taught with the lens of empathy that they believe that the murder of of 10 million people based off of their race their ethnicity their religion and their sexuality is the same as having to wear a piece of cloth over your face i understand if it's not comfortable i don't love wearing one but

019i think it's ridiculous that we are fighting over math mandates and saying things like this when when our students are suffering from all this discrimination when we're fighting about if pronouns are are acceptable to bring up when it's just figure speech and i know i'm kind of ranting and i apologize for that but i would just like to address that students are hurting right now and focusing on just some you know talking national talking points from parents who don't who are not even in the schools is hurting all of us jennifer stamp hi my name is jennifer stamp and i have a child in district 308 when the u.s supreme court desegregated schools in brown versus board of education they recognized the importance of public education for all races on equal terms they noted explicitly

020in the decision that public education is not only important to a democratic society but it is quote the foundation of good citizenship there is a lot of talk about patriotism these days but we rarely hear about good citizenship good citizenship isn't decided by skin tone sexual orientation or parental choice in the legal sense it's decided by the u.s constitution and in daily life good citizenship rests in how we treat each other it calls for us to form a more perfect union public schools are for students from all walks of life they teach our nation's values not the values of individual parents it's never been a parent's choice to dictate the values of our nation i challenge anyone who opposes crt to accurately define discuss it and explain how it's being taught to a kindergartner i

021could have saved myself a hundred thousand dollars in law school debt if that were possible but it's simply being used as a euphemism euphemism for civil rights and the civil war and to not teach those things if public schools remove certain parts of history they will necessarily have to omit portions of the constitution as well as ignore the sacrifices of our citizens and soldiers throughout history there would be no meaningful way to discuss the civil war or civil rights without discussing our constitution i am told that white children may feel uncomfortable in these discussions i imagine children of color feel very uncomfortable in these discussions and if parents want to be involved this is where parental involvement can ease the discomfort of their child and help them with that emotional upset instead we see parental

022involvement in the form of political theater and intimidation tactics if people want to call themselves mama bears or patriots sit your child down and teach them about our nation's history teach them about the constitution that would be the patriotic thing to do sit your child down and talk to them when they're having an emotional problem that would be the mama bear thing to do you can do it in a way that gives your child comfort rather than engaging in fear tactics and terrorizing a community i hope that they would do it in a way that helps perfect our union and if you do that i'll root for you i'll work with you i apologize but your time is up thank you thank you that was all uh 6.1 we are ready for board member comments

023okay um i have several this evening first i want to thank dr sparlin and the administration's recognition of the school board and the work that we do and really recognize my fellow board members i just want to say that this is one of the hardest jobs it's one of the hardest jobs i have ever done in my life and i've gone through grad school and had a doc have a doctorate in all a lot of things and i've worked with kids in trauma and this is one of the hardest jobs i've ever had to do and extremely heart wrenching and people don't recognize that and i'm i'm guess i'm just letting you know and letting all my board members up here know that that we're together and i appreciate all of you even even when

024we don't agree right because that happens but this is a very hard position to have a love and passion for our students and for wanting everyone to get a good education and to honestly always be a target of criticism no matter what choice you make that being said um regarding the vacancy that will occur um i know nice segway right i know good job but uh but people also need to know the reality of what they're getting into um and there's lots of rewarding things as well but it is challenging but i am going to say that the process for filling the vacancy will likely not occur until january we will have 60 days to fill the vacancy once mrs croner is no longer a resident of our district at that time we will make

025applications available online and you should receive emails to know when that process has started the board will be interviewing a select number of applicants and then we'll choose from from those interviewed applicants one thing to be aware of is that we need to select someone who is in the oswego congressional township since that is where mrs croner is from and in order to represent those constituents if you do have any questions or if you would like to get on a list to be notified when the applications are ready you can email ursula for that or if you have questions you're certainly welcome to email myself and the last thing i just wanted to say because this is our our last meeting before thanksgiving and hanukkah i did just want to wish everyone a a happy

026thanksgiving and a happy hanukkah um i just wanted to say that i try every meeting to send out a note of gratitude to who different constituents in the district and i have done so with our teachers and our bus drivers and our tas this week i would really just like to talk about our home and school associations across the district they provide a very important service to each of our schools regardless of what they're called home in school home and what what have you i'm very grateful to them for all that they continue to do they fill in gaps where the district is short whether it comes to technology or services for our students parties you name it and i'm very grateful to all of the those home and school organizations across our district and

027what they do for our communities so thank you to them would anyone like to speak okay thank you okay so um board committee reports we have the finance committee yes um this is an interesting one simply because the topics that we're going to discuss are two of the presentations that are happening so um i will defer to those topics and i'll add my comments in during those sessions for for this for that committee um and the same really for uh colton and anya they're going to give a report later so i would let it come from them and then i'll chime in at that time and i'll just add for finance and facilities that we did have a lot of conversation regardless of we're not going to go over the presentations but we had a

028lot of conversations surrounding wanting to make sure that we communicated well what it is is the narrative behind the numbers because the numbers can get a little bit intense um and the spreadsheet's long but at the end of the day there's a story and that story is how we educate and so wanting to make sure that's communicated i think was the the main thing that came out of this that we just want to understand where our money goes thank you um and the teaching and learning committee you want to go or you want me to go ahead okay um similar to financing facilities we had presentation that we will be seeing here tonight um by faith and had some great discussion regarding that and a lot of good questions were asked and you will see

029you know we've got some work to do but it was great to be able to discuss that in the committee prior to this meeting and for them to be able to see it and add some input and help guide faith and make some suggestions so i will also you know hold back on my comments in particular regarding the presentation until we actually have that as a public body tonight so yes thank you dr mourinho and good evening board i'd like to start off with some congratulations this evening congratulations to the ohs boys cross country team and finishing fifth in the state also congratulations to audra soderland on finishing 15th in the state cross country as well congratulations to the girls swim and dive on winning the sectionals and finishing fourth in the state tournament this

030weekend the team was only two points away from tying for second place uh the 200 freestyle relay of chloe diner katie grisik lauren wiley and karine geist took first and were state champions for this race so congratulations to them and all the girls swim and dive very nice showing this year i'd also like to congratula congratulate all the student athletes who signed national letters of intent for college last for next year we had around 25 students between our two high schools who last wednesday signed their national letters of intent and last week was also national psychology week and we which is celebrated every year november 8th through the 12th and this year's theme was let's get in gear and gear was the acronym provided to make a challenge to g grow both personally professionally it

031encourages to e engage in best practices and a advocate for children's access to mental health and learning supports they are implies resilience and renewal despite the challenges of the past so i think all of our 308 psychologists are very good examples of that and i'd like to thank them for their service to district 308. i'd also like to spend a moment just talking about our recruitment and hiring efforts the board knows that we have a number of positions available in our school district for in a variety of areas we've engaged in a very large media campaign to recruit people to the district and i'd like to thank teresa comedis for all of her work in getting the word out over the past 10 days we have held three open interview sessions in the evenings we've

032conducted approximately 60 interviews and have hired for many positions with that said we still have ways to go and tomorrow night from five o'clock to seven o'clock at the district office we will be conducting more open interviews as we continue this process uh filling our open positions and we will continue to do so moving forward into the into the new year by doing this it will help alleviate staff stress and obviously help in student learning so i'd also like to just thank all the community all of our staff members for spreading this word of mouth of our job openings and our open interview processes from five to seven at the district office because that it's everyone working together has made a difference and finally uh in our strategic plan in vision 308 each month we're

033providing the board with a presentation from the different district departments highlighting the work that is being done in october it was special education uh this month is student learning next month is budget and in january we'll be talking about social emotional learning so with that said i'd like to make just a couple comments uh my closing comments on seo the social emotional learning of our students in our district has always been important and probably never more so important than this year entering the 21 22 school year we recognized the need for additional support in the area of social emotional learning and student mental health planning began last spring or regarding the increased support in the area in each area for our schools as the school years unfolded we've continued to plan ongoing expansion of support

034based on identified student staff and needs we implemented updated seo l curriculum aligned to illinois state learning standards elementary has incorporated a time period for sel instruction on a daily basis into their master schedules junior high incorporates seo instruction twice a week during their student support time and high school is doing the same approximately twice a month during their student support time we've increased teacher professional development opportunities in scl and mental health supports we've increased access to therapeutic mental health support in a community and we are currently working on implementing counseling services that will come into the schools to work with student groups as needed along with evening events for parents and families to attend and we look forward to those evening events starting in january our next item on the agenda this evening is

035the student ambassador report and i'm happy to share that the student ambassadors along with dr waller are going to share the work that we've done thus far along with the results of the student survey that was given on october 20th as the board will see the first item the students have decided to research which they will also ultimately provide recommendations on uh will also help the area of students mental wellness with that said i'm going to give the floor to colton to start us off on item 6.4 colton okay a lot of data tonight so um the student survey uh included ninth through twelfth grade at the high school level um out of all our students we had just under 2600 respondents to the survey um the largest subgroup was white european but over half

036of our students identified as multiple backgrounds the groups created from the survey include asian asian white black white african-american and black chicano hispanic latinx indigenous middle eastern multi-racial indian afro-latinx and filipino 82 students did not identify race or ethnicity in addition only 30 students did not identify their gender the survey included students who identified in various ways with 1184 boys and 122 girls 101 other 14 transgender boys 7 transgender girls 49 binary students 10 gender fluid students 5 agender students 2 demi girl students 2 questioning gender queer students when responding to the question are you a part of the lgbtqia plus community 473 students identified yes and 189 students chose i prefer not to answer so some of the top responses we got from the survey and and really the beginning of our deep dive

037into the results the survey itself was broken down into four categories um it included an academic focus a school structure focused social climate focus and student-to-student interactions focus in the initial deep dive we looked at the most important and second most important responses to each of these categories from academic focus we found that most students were concerned with the amount of homework from school structure we found that most students were concerned with clarity on how administration handles discipline as it relates to race gender identity and sexual harassment from social climate we found that most students were concerned with teachers role in supporting students mental capacity feeling overwhelmed with school and personal responsibilities finally from student to student interaction we found that most students were concerned with sexual harassment these were the top areas however we

038pulled the top two to four from each category to provide an opportunity to dig deeper the data was then further desegregated by race ethnicity gender identity school and grade depending on the topic thank you colton so from those four categories academic focus school structure school climate and student-to-student interaction there were approximately 14 areas that were the largest and so from there we began to dig and pull from what was the most important and and breaking that down as colton has just shared so our number one concern for students was amount of homework and there were six subgroups who indicated as number one those students were asian asian white filipino no race white european and male students but seven more subgroups indicated it as second or third most important those are black white students chicano indigenous

039latinx middle eastern multiracial and female students the second top most important had four groups and as i'm breaking this down i'm breaking it down by subgroups so that the way that we went across with this data is looking at each subgroup and seeing which in the amount of subgroups that indicated that it was number one as anya will share as we further broke it down it is how we came to decide what we would end up researching so four subgroups indicated that sexual harassment was the most important issue that was black and white chicano hispanic and females 42 percent of females reported this being the most important issue eight more subgroups indicated it as a second or third most most important issue indigenous latinx middle eastern multiracial no race white lgbtqia plus and male students

040latinx and middle eastern students identified clarity from admin on how discipline is handled based on race identity and sexual harassment is most important to them other subgroups who indicated priority concern are asian african american black chicano hispanic multiracial white lgbtqia and female students this was a tie for third the second third most important that was indicated most important by multiracial and lgbtqia students identified lgbt qia and black indigenous people of colors representation in the curriculum as third most important other subgroups who indicated priority concern were black and white african american and black chicano filipino indigenous latinx afroland next and middle eastern students the next most important that was identified is most important is the indigenous students identified the representation of lgbtqia and black indigenous people of color in the school culture as most important to

041them other subgroups with priority concern were black white african american and black chicano filipino appalanex and lgbtqia students the final most important group [Music] that indicated racial and identity discrimination as most important were african american and black students this is from the student student interactions as most important other subgroups with priority concern were asians filipino latinx afro-latinx and multi-racial students at the last two advisory student advisory committee meetings we collaborated on the results of the administered survey and the concerns of our peers reflected within it we analyzed the needs of both the majority and subgroups of our collective student bodies marginalized groups displayed major concerns upon the topics of race identity culture and curriculum the common majority expressed distress about their mental and physical safety within the school environment one of the top issues the

042collective majority of our students indicated as important to them was teacher roles with students mental health and capacity in total 2593 students took the survey of this 708 students said it was the most important issue and 608 students claimed it was the second most important issue to them which totals to 1 316 students from these results the student advisory committee found it necessary to address this clear concern but we also understood the extensiveness of the topic of mental health there are various facets of mental health and various roots of the issue as they relate to the educational environment that must be addressed and by utilizing further results of the survey our student advisory committee is hoping to target these specific root causes we also recognize the leaders in our district that have prioritized mental health

043in our schools and have worked to address it our committee members and student ambassadors want part of our future focus to be centered around providing student voice to these existing projects to best address mental health as a concern among our student bodies the second issue that the student advisory committee noticed in the survey results was sexual harassment of those who took the survey 527 said it was the most important and 798 placed it as the second most important which totals to 1 325 students in our district the fact that so many students felt concerned about their physical safety was an issue our committee wanted to address directly this topic as well as mental health are two focal points to our committee's research in the future as we work to illuminate student voice and student concerns

044as we begin our journey with ypar or youth-led participatory action research we hope to create specific problem statements research questions and collect data on these specific issues thank you anya colton and dr waller reporter they just gave you a lot of information a lot of uh statistics from the student survey that was collected what questions do you have for the group i just want to say this is a bravo of work um but at the end of the day the opportunity for you all to come come um to us with um not just anecdotal information but data that will help inform us as to how we improve the culture and the climate of this of our of our district and so i'm looking forward to your your research and then you know the call to

045action that you'll bring to us as as a result of this data and putting this information in the hands of the students and then you know being the social scientist that you all will become as you go forward in terms of making sure that we as the community understand what the problem is and then bringing a solution because that is the beauty of all of this like you're not just coming to say what the problem is but you're going to bring a solution and then to call us to action because it's not the responsibility of the students to to bring a solution it's a responsibility of you to bring us the information and it's our responsibility because you're calling us to action so i just want to make sure that we all understand that it's

046our role as board members to be the ones to bring the action because that's what they're calling us to do so bravo excellent work all of you thank you i just wondered if dr waller welcome nice to finally have you at the table um what was the most um i guess surprising data that you received or was it more verifying what you've heard and what you've seen and so forth so what i would say two things um sexual harassment and the amount of students who shared that is most important and second most important was a bit daunting but it also kind of led us into some very organic awesome conversations about well where is this taking place is it on social media is it in the school and it kind of mirrors itself though to

047that clarity from admin on how things are handled so we've been able to really engage and dig and i think the second um most surprising was that 18 of the students who took the survey identified that they were indeed in part of the lgbtqia plus community which would technically make that group our second largest subgroup which means that there is a call to action and urgency that's necessary for them and so i'm just honored to be able to share the space with these two brilliant leaders in order to support them in bringing about change and i'd say for me the most alarming would definitely be the sexual harassment in the student-to-student interaction part of the survey that was definitely alarming to me whereas the response that was more verifying to me was the struggle in

048our students mental health aspect of their student life here at district 308 and i you know just recent events and just the world we live in now that was definitely more verifying to me that this is a problem present in i mean all across the country but specifically our district i completely agree with colton on the sexual harassment front that was such a shocking statistic to see i think that was just kind of that universal feeling within the student advisory committee and we saw the statistic and we realized how large of an issue this was going to be and we realized the steps that we would have to take to address that i think on my part one other statistic statistic that surprised me was definitely the call from the lgbtqia plus community and people

049of color within our within our student bodies that wanted representation in curriculum and the school culture i think that just creating that sense of unity within our student body and within that school culture that school environment and our climate uh here in oehs and ohs it's just so important i think especially like colton said in the world we live now things are changing and kind of adapting to address those changes is so important i also want to just commend you for doing really this these are the we've heard the phrase we can do hard things this is one of those hard things taking this information giving our students a voice and being the vehicle through which that voice is amplified thank you very much i really i really appreciate the work well i have plenty

050to say but i just didn't want to jump in because i don't know if i would stop talking so i'm just trying to give everybody else a chance to just speak up i want to say that i'm um very grateful that the two of you are sitting here with us and that we get to hear your voices and very grateful for all of the students that we have in the student advisory committee i can echo a lot of what latonya and jennifer have had to say and not going to lie that the results feel very heavy right i'm sitting with that heaviness right now and just um staying focused on finding solutions and what can we do to help our students and um just very grateful to have uh as they like to say boots

051on the ground right and for for you to be bringing this information to us and for us to to make some headway on the climate and watch this improve so thank you so i'll jump in just quickly i i can't express just how proud i am um and i really wish i know that all of you are expressing your gratitude now but to have have the privilege to be in the room as they're deliberating and processing the data it makes me just so proud the intellect the conversation the ability to work together even the deductive reasoning to even get to the point of uncovering half of the things that that have been uncovered within the survey to me is just you know it was pure brilliance and it gave me not only a sense of

052pride but but even hope because we have such young people and such young leaders that will go out and help us in our society another thing i was very proud about is that almost half of the student population took this survey that sample size is incredible and it cannot i don't think it can be ignored but it also it also speaks volumes to to the results that we have and so i'm very excited but also very surprised by the by the results and as latonya was stating and many of you were saying it becomes now our responsibility to do something and given the results not even to do something later like to do something like right now so we have to discuss almost effective immediately like what can we do in order to of course

053not to steal the thunder from the students um and to allow them to go back and do their research and to find out and to dig in but still i think that you know that is something that we should um to have a conversation to discuss but again uh just very excited about the work that they're doing very excited about all of the other committee members that are that of the other student ambassadors that are representing and then colton and aya for their leadership and i i think it's really important i just want to hop in here i think we've heard it from our parents um we've now heard it from our students the time is now like it this can't be lip service anymore so to the board and to dr sparlin dr dahlquist

054um it's it we know that the need is there we need to understand as a board what we need what you need and what we need to give you and how we need to do it the results were heavy but we now have to act and we we want you to continue to lead the way we want you to tell us what you need from us and we will continue to follow your lead so thank you i'd just like to commend the group they you know this group hasn't been meeting once a month they've been meeting almost weekly and to you know to be able to get to this point to create the survey to administer the survey to dissect it and be able to disaggregate the information that was provided this evening and i

055know they're very eager to i know they're meeting this week to to discuss the white power process and to begin start beginning the research so thank you for everyone's efforts i love the fact that this is you know student-led yes it is it's not this adult-centered notion of what we think is absolutely is what should be done but it's their work it's them reading it's them saying this is what we need because adults have a different perspective but your perspective is the one that allows you um and us to make sure that the decisions that adults are making are not just what you're consuming but that it is what you have told us is where you want to go and what you need in order to get there and just to make one last point

056based on that based on your question was you asked what was surprising that was something that we discussed in the meeting and and that's what led to a lot of the dialogue and conclusions that they came to was based on the data they don't they don't allow themselves to to go off and to think you know to to insert public their opinions they are so focused on the data and i just appreciate that thank you thank you okay so um sorry can i get a motion to approve the consent agenda i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 7.1 minutes from the october 25th 2021 board of education meeting open and closed session the november 1st 2021 board of education public forum item 7.2 to acknowledge the foia request received by the

057district and 7.3 to approve the following board policy references and legal updates section one student district organization one colon one zero section two school board two clone two zero section three general school administration three colon three zero section five general personnel five colon three zero section six instruction six colon one seven zero six colon two five five and section seven students seven colon two three zero second mrs simonton can i ask a question about one of these items on the policies can i so on page two um one of the says the superintendent shall ensure that the district does not engage in any investigation or inquiry prohibited by law income complies with each of the following so number eight says the district provides equal and which policy are you which number is it number does

058this yeah general personnel 5.30 yeah that's under hiring process and criteria okay i'm reading right here number eight the district provides equal employment opportunities to all persons see policy five colon ten equal employment opportunity and minority recruitment and i just i'm just wanting to make sure that um i asked the question like what what other committees are reviewing you know this policy for input um you know like i know that when i was in when i was there there was the recruitment and retention committee and obviously we have the equity board advisory committee and i'm just wondering who else is putting giving input what other committees are getting giving input to the to these kinds of matters i think maureen or donna can correct me if i'm wrong typically it's just the policy committee that

059reviews the policies based on suggested changes for this one which is in section 5 for personnel that's correct it would be the policy committee and then the board and if you scroll all the way to the bottom of miss hamilton you'll see the prior times that the board has considered changes to that policy and if if there are issues or concerns the board asks for the policy committee to consider them right and i think that we could as a board ask another committee to review a policy if we wanted to we felt that it was important yes we we have done that before because i would like to see what our equity board advisory committee the retention and recruitment committee what do they think of this and you know what is what do they think

060of five point or five colon ten um in terms of minority recruitment because when you go and look at that there's a lot there to unpack in terms of how what you know what do we how do we think about our minority recruitment i know that those were things that we were delving into um you know last year and i'd like to unders i'd like to know what they think of that what what does our equity board advisory committee think of of those things so i think we i'd like to see some some um you know input from from those two committees from the equity committee in which which is the recruitment and retention committee we all have a board recruitment and retention committee that's a internal communi uh committee i know that's all are

061you asking for that latonya just so i'm clear on on five colon three o or five colon one oh that's colon ten five colon two five colon ten okay with this one but you'd like to dive deeper into five colon 10 with those other committees yes okay just wanted to clarify thank you okay so you're talking about the ones that are coming up for information not the ones here to be approved correct because these are these are okay there's no changes to this right other there's legal references in the legal reference right but i would like yeah but i would okay so we'll cover that when we get to the information section okay yeah mrs simultan aye dr marino aye mr gatewood aye mrs croner aye mr storial aye mrs johnson aye motion passes 6-0

062item 8.1 is regarding academic student achievement test data associate superintendent for educational services faith docquest is going to take us through the information for tonight's presentation faith thank you if you'd like to take notes by slide number that might help there'll be a lot of time for questions at the end of this so it's always exciting to get in to talk about student academic data and look at some of our opportunities for improvement as well as some of the things that are causing a little bit of our success i want to remind everybody that this is testing that is done through multiple choice answers so this doesn't measure creativity problem solving sel all those types of things that are also important but are not easily measured on this type of test interesting data presentation one

063very different than what i would usually give because we're going to be looking at some very old data on which we made some hypotheses and then look at new data so the data that i'll be looking through this evening is from our state test iar as well as sat and the last time we had all of our students in the building to take those tests that was 2019 so that was right as i started and that was data that i came in with and started looking and because of what we saw in that data we started some of our work with the literacy as well as the math frameworks and now you'll be able to see whether our new data that we just got in the fall also showed those same things that we were

064concerned about in 2019 or not the state data i'll be looking at this evening we're going to desegregate it by female and male as well as by the state codes of black white and hispanic there are many other data groups that we could desegregate this and if anyone is interested you can go to the illinois interactive report card site and see many more different subgroups of data just a reminder about some of our demographics and this is just looking at our percent 27 percent of our students are from low income families 53 percent of our students are white around 10 are black and 24 hispanic and then the numbers underneath that are the actual number of students in each of those categories so the first thing that i want to point out is this state

065data and if you're not used to looking at this this is something that anybody across the world who has internet access can go look at from the illinois report card and what this shows again is from 2019 and i'm going to first go through all of our reading data then i'm going to switch over to math the green chart there shows the opportunity or achievement gap between female and male and then the blue represents that from the state so if you look at that the very top line of female means that we have 51 percent of our females that were passing the test in 2019 compared to 36 percent of our males then the state was at 44 and males were at 32 and showing uh actually 31 with that gap now this is the

066aggregate this is the aggregate of grades three all the way through eight our gap increases as the years progress at grade seven there is a 22 percentage point split between females and males if you look at this next piece this is the opportunity gap between black and white students and also hispanic and white students and it compares the gap between the district which again is in green or the state which is at blue and our opportunity gap is smaller and looking at those but you can see that there is still quite a big opportunity for improvement it's also important to know how income affects student achievement and this is looking at again the district comparison and achievement gap with that top line being non-low-income students percentage passing and the bottom line being low income our

067opportunity gap there is 24 percentage points while the state is at 30. and the reason that i bring that up is it does really impact the different race categories in different ways 12 percent of our white students are from low income families 43 percent of our black students are from low income and 39 percent of our hispanic it's also important to note when you look back at the hispanic and white piece that a higher percentage of our hispanic students are also english learners which impact their achievement on these tests as well now let's fast forward this is the test that our students took in the second week of september so some of them have come off of being at home and not coming into school and we started to look at and this is a

068brand new test for 308 so there is no trend data on this piece but what this says is the very first column 56 of our second graders were on target and at low risk grade 3 at 67 grade 4 and grade 5. in other districts when i've used this particular test that second grade number is pretty low i'm optimistic that by january after those students have been in school for a while we can raise that up but that is going to be something that we really need to continue to look at then the next two columns are again just the girl boy comparison and what i've done on the slides is if there was less than a six percentage point difference i'm not as concerned about that so i did not color code that at

069all if there's a six to ten percentage point difference it's color coded in yellow and then if there's a 10 percentage point difference that's highlighted in orange and you can see definitely with the different races we have quite an opportunity for improvement that was elementary now let's go to junior high you're looking at those percentages of 67 63 and 53 it is important to note that usually across tests and across the nation there is as students get a little bit older and into eighth grade a decline but this is more than your average piece we're also wondering how those students who may not have been at school for most of their junior high years have now hit eighth grade and are close to that high school proficiency level and have some catching up to do

070just like the slides before this there's the difference between a girl and boy performance and then difference between white black and hispanic this is looking back at the high school level now this is the sat and the reading state comparison again our opportunity gap is eight percentage points between females and male in reading and the state is has a six percentage point split this is the difference between our white and our black students and our white and hispanic student scores and the opportunity gap within there this is more current this is our sat from spring 2021 we this happened during remote and during hybrid instruction but we did have a high percentage of our students coming in so it is a relative to look at this it is important to note that the cutoff that

071i'm using for these scores is the state cutoff which is higher than the college board cutoff for proficiency so i want to be really careful that i'm not saying that all girls learn this way or all boys learn this thing or even that there's just a binary system there but when you look at the learning preferences generalized for girls you'll see in general auditory over visual is that way and then boys more tactile visual preference competition correct or incorrect answers and if you think about how you were instructed in reading you may see one side of the column be more apparent than others there is absolutely brain research out there that girls are not better readers by brain than boys it is the type of instruction that is given it is human nature to teach

072the way you learn most of our elementary teachers are female so without getting in and diving into knowing these differences there are some preferences and some learning style things that are overlooked in curriculum and in materials if you do not see yourself in the materials that you are learning or reading from it is not as impactful students also need to see themselves in school staff to make that connection we also need to make sure that we are holding very high expectations we also need to make sure that we are responding to student voice responding to what our students have told us whether it's race whether it's low income it's just knowing and reacting to what your students need also by income research would say explicit vocabulary instruction is the way that you are going to

073really help our students that come from low-income families same types of things students not feeling included in a classroom setting are not being held to high expectations we also need to worry about not having enough resources or technology or books at home or to access and then one of the leading things that we can do to decrease this opportunity or achievement gap between low income and non-low income is more sel and instruction and support for our low-income students but i would say that it's really what is good instruction for all so we started out back in 2019 when we saw those gaps to work on a literacy framework and at that time we thought it was important we worked on it with a committee and brought it forth that one of the key things is

074we needed to have choice in during independent reading time so that students can choose from many genres and characters from backgrounds and experiences and also at just right texts so that all students are challenged but all students also have success we've added an interventionist to each elementary school to help assist with this and we also added coaches in professional development to support teachers in this literacy framework and if you remember part of the literacy framework it is also a statement about diversity equity inclusion to make sure because if that climate for learning piece which is the second half of this slide is not in place all the best reading instruction in the world does not make it happen we have to have positive learning environments we have to have social emotional skills taught we need

075to share learning targets have responsive teaching and we have to have more ways for students to have choice and voice in their learning math so i'll now i'm going to go through almost the exact same set of data but i'm going to talk about math and there's not as much of a discrepancy it's like between black and white and hispanic and white student performance and an opportunity to really raise those scores in all areas this is what it looks like for our fast bridge data again this is just what happened in august in september and the differences between girl and boy performances white black and hispanic it is really important to note that some of our schools do not have this gap between girl and boy performance at all some of our schools have as

076high as a 36 percentage point split this is junior high big disparities between races as well as gender but some of our schools do not have these gaps one of our junior highs has a 21 percentage point split between our girl and boy performance this is what the sat looks like back in 2019 this is the opportunity gap between the races again back from 2019 this is the difference between low-income and non-low-income it plays a factor across many of our different groups this is the sat that was most current from the spring in 2021 again the state cutoff is higher than the college board cut off i'm going to put up the same chart and say there is absolutely no brain research that says the boys are better achievers in math it is the type

077of instruction that we are given there are ways to fix this we'll talk about those in a little bit there are also ways to address the differences in race achievement some of those are students feeling included in the classroom how do we have more diverse staff how do we make sure that we're holding students to high expectations how do we make sure that the math problems and the textbooks are relative and meaningful to all of our students so some of the plans that we started back in the first my first year here and then pandemic hit is we created a new math framework and it includes time for collaborative structures where students need to discuss math it includes explicitly teaching precise math vocabulary to diminish that achievement gap between our low-income and our non-low-income students

078it includes making our math problems relevant and engaging to real world problems while we've just started that work at the junior high level we will begin that work in elementary after this because elementary is a lot of where those initial foundations happen and then the gaps grow from there i'll highlight again how important the climate for learning framework is because the best math vocabulary in the world is my belief put on a learning environment that does not support all students or doesn't help them out with their social emotional learning will not have as much impact some additional district-wide plans is we need to really model the process of using data so we've started a district improvement team this year with building administrators that come together with district administrators to review district-wide data we've also shared

079the desegregated data that we've just gotten from our testing in fastbridge as well at the high school level with school teams for them to review and help them create plans to address discrepancies but again some of our schools do not have this big of a gap we've also created a system of classroom walkthroughs we want building and district administrators to visit all the classrooms to monitor and support math literacy in the culture for learning frameworks and then we need to use the knowledge that we see from when we are there as well as getting information back through surveys about professional development to design trainings and communication moving forward we also want to hire educators from diverse backgrounds we also need to be partnering with parents to make sure that they know about resources and information

080and that we've heard their concerns about what needs to be addressed so i thought long and hard on this next slide and i've given this to two board committees as well and some feedback is faith we're really tired there's a lot going on some feedback is faith you better double down and stop sleeping because we've got work to do both opinions could be correct with where we're at so what we're suggesting is let's not stop the work that we started before the pandemic we had created a literacy framework and a math framework and in april we created and finalized the climate for learning framework and that was before all of last year we really need to continue that work and we'll have to temper it with our staff is tired and and hear that and

081maybe take some smaller steps but i do not feel that we can give up and say we can't move on and we we have to do that we need to continue our efforts to recruit and retain diverse staff as soon as that fast bridge data comes in in december and january i will be desegregating it and looking at what are our new opportunities and what are some of the things that maybe we can say we had success with here in the first few months and then we already have all of our walkthroughs scheduled for january and february to walk through the schools again and then it's going to be really important that as we support our student sel we also support staff sel and listen to them and try to find the right balance of

082when we push forward and when we also celebrate some of the things along the way because i know very very well our staff and our admins are working exceedingly hard i would say that we don't need to work harder we just need to work smarter questions there's so many question i have faith is you've um you said several times throughout that there are districts i mean schools that have no or minimal discrepancy and then others that have these really large ones can you can you explain that to us sure and i could use an anecdote even when you go through and you walk classrooms and you walk classrooms and math instruction is very here are your 16 problems you can get them right yes or no move on those are the schools that our girls

083aren't performing as well in we tie that data in that structure of the collaboration and and the structure of those pieces sometimes it's not as easy to really get in and figure out the why and we have to ask those questions and those are some of the things that we're doing during our school improvement plan times or district improvement plan and it's it's especially diff i'm usually better at it but right now with data being two and a half years old and the data that we just had from august with some of the students not really coming in the door it's harder to draw those conclusions it's better to ask questions and get in and talk about the type of instruction and then i can solidify those things more in january but are you noticing

084that it's the schools with more low-income students or more minority students that are having if you look at the aggregate yes if you have if you look at certainly our student our scores that are from schools that do not have a higher percentage of low-income students usually do higher but when you're looking at gender they're coming from the same families they're coming from the same pieces that doesn't that doesn't make the gender gap easily excused by anything other than instructional practices and that's where i like to start having the conversations because it isn't as complex you yet you know it then we can move to the complexities around low income around race but we first have to realize and know our impact as a system and as teachers on our instructional practices and our decisions

085thank you that was very helpful so oh you you spoke often about students not being able to see themselves in reading books at school or students not building including the classroom students not seeing themselves in school staff those kinds of things i know that you address recruitment and retention of staff so regarding the items regarding the reading books at school and things like that what what are we doing regarding curriculum renewal or how does all of that fit into sure support one of the things that we used uh some of our sr monies for uh and to support the literacy framework because a lot of our schools libraries needed new books or they needed just right books and we made sure that we ordered these leveled libraries that we had diversity both in author and

086characters and different cultures in mind so we've started that in flux especially at the elementary level then we also pushed in some more copies of books and materials that are from more diverse backgrounds at the junior high and a little bit at the high school you'll see some more of that later on but i'm getting to do curriculum review work which i hadn't been able um to do for a while and we've written a curriculum review process that has diversity equity inclusion as far as materials as far as assessments high on that priority piece and we're using it as an equity lens as we are now redoing the elementary social studies curriculum revising the junior high and doing all of the high school social studies curriculum simultaneously so yes it is much more of a

087forefront based on this data and based on those pieces of what needed to be done is it fast enough no is it in entirety enough yet no but we've started some really great crucial conversations and we're past just talking about it we're actually taking action and so just let me focus and so regarding um books in the classroom are they going to be given options to read different books as opposed to just reading one type of book we've definitely put that in place at elementary and junior high we're making some inroads toward having more choice and voice in selection of text at high school it's not uniform across the board yet okay thanks i just want to say thank you for those questions latonya because those are questions that i've asked faith at the last

088two times she gave this presentation to me and so she knows that while i appreciate the efforts to encourage diversity in independent reading topics i think it's much more important that we allow for a little bit more choice at least in those areas where the students are actually being assessed and assigned grades because we're talking about real data here in test scores and numbers things that they're expected to answer questions and and and get things right and when our only choice options are with independent reading and again i'll share an example that faith has heard from one of my children whose choice independent reading was calvin and hobbes because that's what he liked and that was great that he got to read that but i he's not getting graded on that and asking deep questions

089and i feel like when we're requiring all the students to read the same novel we're not doing them a service i understand like we can cover a topic of study and have different you know choices in title within that subject and i feel like i hope that that's what we're moving towards because i think that that will go a long way if it's something that they're being assessed on it's going to help us be able to know are they comprehending what they're reading where can we meet those gaps in also helping them actually read something that they care about and want to sit down and read instead of they're forced to read chapters one through four tonight and it's like so is having more choice in that and that is a piece of envision 308

090that is more of a focus for next school year i know you can't do everything at once and i and i fully appreciate and i want to say this to all of our teachers and support staff and at building admin i know that you know what we're hearing is not one more thing for the love of all that is holy please we get that and we and we don't want to continue like pouring pouring on and then we see numbers like this and it's we can't just stop like you said we can't just do nothing out of an effort to not add one more thing but we also really need to be taking a look at is there something we can you know step back on in order to improve in this area i think

091that's important that we find that balance because we do recognize the social emotional needs of our teachers are critical for them to be able to address the social emotional needs of our students so i would love to piggyback off of that because it's like the perfect segway can you go back one slide where like what we're yeah like the next steps no you were right yeah right there here's where i struggle with this slide um and it's very hard not to put my hr hat on two percent of black male of teachers in the country are black males and about 20 to 25 percent are males so for me it's really hard because bullet number two is going to be a lot less attainable than some of the other bullets on here so for me

092this is this slide is slightly misleading and i apologize i didn't think about this sooner but it kind of popped into my head tonight and then when i also think about what we can do for our staff which is we can take things off of their plate and focus my if i were to look at this i would say the number one thing we can do on here is support our staff social emotional health and their well-being with doing that can we take something like the the walk-throughs off and i understand the purpose of walk-throughs i think they're incredibly important is this the right time to be doing them is this the the place where it belongs like i i if if covet haven't hadn't happened i would totally agree and i understand but i

093guess when i'm looking at this chart these things are not equal and so very two two is going to be very tough number one is our our kind of our overall overarching um i can't even think of the word right now but our overarching idea is that we have our frameworks and sticking within our frameworks obviously we're going to monitor fastbridge to be able to review what we did earlier but the last two are where i where i'm struggling like we could let's support our staff by taking things off their plate are there other things that we can take off their plate so that they can focus on math and reading right if i may i just want to clarify on the walk through piece um from my vantage point walkthroughs are the most stressful

094on time for my staff and a few building principles but it is not the intent to evaluate teachers we don't even give feedback to a specificity i know it's nerve-racking like they're coming into my room for five minutes but without us being there and i got lots of positive responses that we were there i did not receive one negative email or don't come back [Laughter] i have at a different district so it's okay to you know look incredulous but i was kind of expecting at least a couple of emails of like you picked today but we share ahead of time we say this is the date we're coming the dates have been published since august we do never go in and talk to the principal about this is what we saw in this particular teacher's

095class we don't give a checklist it is for me the assessment of how i'm doing okay so when i go through and i look through are is the literacy instruction that we're asking for am i starting to see glimmers of it are the learning targets there it's it's my formative assessment okay on how i monitor whether we're being effective in changing instruction so that when i give this data presentation again in a year we see a difference so if it's coming across as really stressful to teachers i hope that they'll call me or email me because that's not the intent the intent is for me to get an assessment of how our professional development and our communication is impacting change that's the question on this slide i'm sorry i've just questioned on this slide it's

096really this slide or several slides the the solution and the cause that has been stated uh bullet point number two higher educators from diverse backgrounds it's been stated on all the slides is that you know representation of course uh for the for the sub populations that we're discussing it would help so a stated solution and cause so my question is is really what proactive strategies and jim was just saying that that's really hard so what proactive strategies are we actually deploying um to actually to do step number two versus waiting on those qualified candidates to actually apply like what are we doing to go out and find them and do we have a strategy for here are the ways that we're doing that because i think that at this point if we're still waiting waiting

097for it to happen it's going to be difficult it's not going to happen yeah and and that goes back to five colon 10 exactly so i'm saying okay what are we doing yes that's exactly what that's where where we should be going so i have a couple questions responses thank you sorry um so most of the work has been done on trying to retain and keep the administrators from diverse background and the staff that we have from and we we brought together groups last year to talk about what were their concerns uh or also what were the things that kept them at 308 and make sure that we didn't get rid of that that group also felt strongly enough that they worked on how do we go out to different colleges what are the pieces

098that we need to do i will also freely admit that we're working really hard through hr just to get staff right now so that hasn't been the time that we've done that yet some of that main hiring things for next year and those pieces would be happening but i also want to comment and compliment hr as i've been sitting in on the interview nights we've had a lot of staff from diverse backgrounds and different races applying the people that i have been interviewing were much more diverse candidates than what i'm used to so we have been seeing that the efforts through social media through the publications that dr sparlin was highlighting today that that has been working um and we're not sure why that caused those pieces to come in but we'll definitely have to

099keep that as a word of mouth piece seems to be helping quite a bit yeah and and from a diverse standpoint just men as well uh yes i think that you know that's something that we need in the district right and then what gets measured gets done and so how are we measuring or how are we setting goals around that because if we just continue to say we're going to recruit and retain them but yet we don't have any goals or measurable indicators to how we're going to and in envision 308 there are some measurable pieces that mr miller had put together of percentages of new hires compared to those that are graduating from colleges and universities so we weren't setting ourselves up as totally unreasonable because they're to your point there aren't as many

100students from diverse backgrounds in color graduating but we want to be at that percentage or higher and forgive me that i don't remember the percentages off the top of my head but we do have those goals and indicators in envision 308 on this particular piece well who do we hold accountable for them getting done though that's i guess like are they in somebody's goals are they in somebody's like evaluations or because how how does that work then so dr sparlin is nodding yes um and i would say that i mean i feel like in vision is all of our even if it's not written in um i want to do everything we can to get envision 308 accomplished whether it's directly tied to goals or not yeah and just to speak to diverse staff obviously

101diverse could mean a lot of different things it's not just race it could be your lived experience or your different perspectives and so but yes we we do want you know more males and we do want people who look like our student body reflected um but we also know that they could you know they can still be of a certain ethnicity but still reflect and represent something diverse yes you know laurie's been waiting so i'm gonna give her a chance when i'm looking at your climate for learning framework i'm looking in here at a lot of discussion about creating an environment that will allow children to absorb what you're hoping to better teach them we're talking about a different kind of books different opportunities different styles of teaching different styles of learning [Music] but then

102i also heard from our student ambassadors that whoa there was a big surprise on the radar in the data that they recovered for what was really hampering student comfort levels in the classroom at our high school level how are you going to be using this kind of data from our students to adjust what your plans initially had been for this climate for learning framework to now address what they've offered yeah so part of the climate for learning piece is having behavioral expectations and having a way to monitor and support them we need to dive in obviously to the sexual harassment issue about are there rules in place or are is it being proactively taught how is it being addressed and all of that supportive discipline piece is built into climate for learning we need to

103pivot and address a specific issue but that climate of having everyone feel accepted having social emotional learning to be able to have confidence address the data have a system of discipline and the consequences that go with it all are part of climate for learning so i don't while i don't think we need a new framework we just need to zero in on this particular issue and address it through the climate for learning with tier one instruction what does it look like for staff what does it look like for students and then i'll move all of that so i don't think it requires a redo of all of that now that we have new data we need to jump in and address that when we look at office referrals and we get to a place that

104we have a common place in office referrals and it pinpoints whatever it does we'll have to jump in and address that too so okay a couple of things one how how do you ensure and how do you look at is it just just through office referrals and discipline issues that you'll determine whether or not this climate for learning framework that you you're implementing is taking hold and being successful or is is there another measure by which you will know that students are feeling comfortable in the classrooms sure so this survey that we're talking about that was referenced earlier of how to create that that's something that we're creating and would give over time also doing walk-throughs it's a very palpable sense when you're in a classroom whether people are feeling comfortable and addressed or not

105when we have student ambassadors and they continue to say is it better or not i doubt if this is the last survey that this group is going to do and then we can give similar questions and see whether it has gotten better or not i think as something as complex as a school system or about how students feel yes you're going to need to have some data yes it could be surveys it could be office referrals i always talk about triangulating data and then adding a narrative on top of it to try to address those pieces because it is so complex no one set of data or one set of narrative is going to give you the direction that you need or be able to celebrate that you've gotten where you need to be thank

106you for answering that i'm literally looking forward to those updates i guess my my only other question and i've heard a lot of very specific questions on what we could do and what we should do as a board it's it's our job to to make sure that the direction that we have set that we want to go in this envision 308 is able to be accomplished what do you need from us to be able to better support staff social emotional well-being if it's not removing walk-throughs what what can the board provide within our role to be able to make this more likely to occur sorry that's yeah that's a lot it's a big question it's a big question but that's the that if we want to succeed i fully believe that as a board we

107need to not get in the way of that progress through decisions we made what do we need to do if we are bought in and that this envision 308 and we are looking at data showing we need change there's nothing clearer in this presentation than that we're not doing good enough and that's not through lack of hours put in by teachers and it's not through lack of custodial supplies or support in recess and it's in it's not through lack of bus drivers we're trying really really hard at things that are not helping and i know that that's what you're trying to change but as a board i feel like i'd like to know i i can't be in a classroom and change that i can talk to a lot of people but it won't be

108enough but what i can do is my job as a board member to give you what you need so is it are you looking at things like class sizes reducing the amount of case loads are you looking at providing more social emotional professionals are you looking at more disciplinary professionals are you looking at staff numbers are we looking at a higher level of education providing more education for the employees that we do have what are we looking at for us that we can help with so i'll launch some of my opinions but i think i also would want to talk with uh obviously more than like a faith question this is like a whole different thing but short term and i know we're working really hard on it and it's it's nobody's but we need

109the staff that we've been allocated to get that would cause a lot less staff and we've a lot less staff stress and we're making some inroads on it we're not the only district but definitely if people weren't trying to cover one and a half jobs day after day after day after day that would alleviate some stress i think trying to find and and i struggle with it myself so i'm here i'm gonna ask something of you all where i'm like i don't even do it very well myself but i'm better at that i was 15 years ago finding the right balance between patting people on the back and saying you are great because that's true and then holding a common vision and saying but you got a little something right here and we need to

110help you fix that there is no teacher i think i'd almost say no teacher that is saying today i'm going to teach so that only 62 percent of my students right today i've decided that even though i have a son and a husband and whatever i'm going to teach so only the girls will understand but they need professional development once i put this data up and they're like well great faith now i have a guilt complex you know right it's that mom thing you know like you're always like oh i haven't done everything i should have done but you have to equip the system and equip staff with bits and pieces of things that will do and then i've seen this happen in districts before once you build on success and you have people who

111get it that they own that classroom they are not victims to what comes in the door it isn't because their parents didn't teach them or this or the it's the awful feeling that it's really us that can make that impact but it's that great feeling that it's really us that can make that impact and trying to find the right peace between building us up but not saying we're good enough and that happens conversation by conversation and it only happens when you have a lot of trust and i need that sense of trust and assumed positive intent but continued question more than i need lower class size more than i need those other pieces if parents and admin and teachers and community could all have a common vision and say this is what we're all assuming

112positive intent but really get in and dive in and have crucial conversations when we can that's when the magic happens thank you for for that i appreciate it but i didn't give you the answers you wanted no but but those are the answers that there are i mean and the answers that there are are always more important than the answers anybody wants to hear um but the reality is trust climate culture dr sparlin i'm going to pivot the rest of this question to you for for this which is given that what i'm hearing is that trust climate culture these are the most important things how has our negative budget situation over the last five years where we've reduced administration we've increased class sizes we've reduced staff we've gutted our infrastructure as much as possible to

113keep bodies and classrooms how has that negatively or positively impacted where we are at now a year and a half into a pandemic it definitely hasn't helped it positively that's for sure it's uh you you just i mean you just you like you just said worry i mean when you talk about the administrative piece we've you know we've cut 33 percent of administration over time and faith said it people are doing jobs of one and a half people sometimes more than that and uh you know you if when you have when you make those type of cuts it's going to make it's gonna it's gonna it's going to affect the rest of the organization now we had to do what we had to do to get our ship straight financially which i think in the

114next couple presentations we're going to see a little bit a brighter picture on the in regards to the dollars but you know i agree with what faith just said we need to there's there's a lot of variables in this equation of how how what we need to do i think it's uh knowing it's it's the data that you just presented is very important because you have to have you have to have a starting point we we're putting in we're putting in the foundation when we talk about the climate for learning the uh literacy framework the math the math framework we're doing we're doing those right things but when you also talk about staffing when you talk about class size these are also things that we have to consider to make the whole make it all

115come together and gel so what i'm really what i'm really looking forward to is the winter fast bridge data because this data that we just looked at was kids and after a pandemic for two years for a year and a half and they were back in school for two weeks and i'm really looking forward to where i think the winner data will show us a little bit better clear snapshot of where we are what that what the true opportunity gap or achievement gap looks like and then allow us to formulate further plans to be successful thank you for that i i just want to make sure that i'm being clear in how i'm asking this because it wasn't that was really really good information it wasn't quite what i was looking for i guess if

116i rephrase it how do you feel in your position i've asked what the board can do to support this how do you feel that your role as a superintendent will support the success of this and start to build this trust climate and culture that we're hoping to have you know i uh dr marino and i've had a lot of conversation in regards to this over the last uh few months you know as superintendent i don't have i when i became superintendent i cut the position that i vacated because that was beginning at the time beginning at the top leadership by example and that's what that's what we did i don't have that person to do what i used to do for the former superintendent when it came to running the daily operations of district faith

117does an excellent job but i need her i need her fully concentrated in the area of educational service department and the information that we just provided here so if you're asking for if you're asking me what type of help i need then that's that's that's that's that's an area but you know what when we talk about offer what do i offer what are you offering to your employees as we start to talk about rebuilding this trust so that we can have the buy-in to create the better climate so what do you offer the employees meaning like our administrators right now is that is that the piece we're talking about because what are uh maybe i don't even know if this is the right maybe i'm just getting off topic i'm just asking as a superintendent

118what can you do to help this i know that your job isn't to go into the classroom and tell people how to teach and and i think i have a lot to do with the climate and culture of the school district and i think that having given i need to be i need to have the opportunity to be in schools a whole lot more than i've had i mean the last 18 months has been hard but the i need to be back in the schools building those relationships working with teachers i really want to sit down with teachers almost do do a like a climate you know a learning a tour of the school district just like you would if you would start over again and to have those conversations with the teachers and and

119i think a climate survey of our entire school district asking all stakeholders what you know what what's going well what can we do better and then to build some plans off of that i believe will help thank you i i'm gonna i'm gonna add to this because i think we're also it's kind of like looking at the forest through the trees and so forth one of the things and actually my nine-year-old really was the inspiration for this comment um but he said to me something this weekend that really stopped me in my tracks and he didn't realize that he was ever going to not be able to walk into a classroom without a mask again and that was very sad to me i think the other thing that we need to do is to understand

120what the metrics need to look like and give our students hope again and i don't know what that means i don't know what that looks like but when your nine-year-old thinks that he's going to go to school with a mask on his face for the rest of his um his um his under whatever i don't know school k through 12 career that's pretty that's pretty depressing and i think we need to give our kids hope again there's there's never going to be a normal like we had before but there is going to be a new normal and we are going to take our masks off at some point it would be helpful if we could talk about what that looks like and give them that hope again um and if if we could start to

121look forward to you know some right ahead i think that will help as well and i think that that is weighing heavy on all of us so i'd like to look at that information in the future it's like as a future topic of board discussion and open session say that again you mean in regard to this information here just like as a future topic at a board meeting like a future as a future topic we haven't really addressed that but we're looking at all these things that are going to help both with our assessments and with our student learning and data one of the things that we haven't addressed is kind of the elephant in the room and so i'd like to see that i i think that we will see a little having that

122hope we'll see just a lot of um positive i agree that i think that would have a big impact on the social emotional yes for our students and our teachers yes students how do you how do you feel about that when you hear that sort of thing and when you talk about what kind of hope what what do you feel that you hear from from your fellow students is that something that is a major concern that's really just kind of weighing things down the uncertainty or is it more feelings of other things i know it's big sorry um i would say i mean it's a combination of both points that you brought up um i know that from just interactions with and myself personally interactions with other students that that does help to have that

123kind of like you guys described hope or kind of um what to look forward to because there's a lot of dwelling on the past 18 months and and i would say not an overall looking forward kind of attitude um it's more so getting by kind of attitude um so yeah no i i could definitely and i've heard that from students that it kind of changed the aspect of what school feels like as we come back to the new normal i like what you said about that that getting by kind of feel that's certainly not the climate i think that will be conducive to helping with some of these things especially when everyone's experience has been different thank you for sharing that did you have anything you want to add yeah um i totally agree with

124everything you said colton i feel like sometimes like maybe it's because we're older like as high school students but i think we're more adapted to change so i feel like it wasn't some sort of like oh my god the world's ending sort of thing but you forget about it one moment and then someone brings it up right you'll be going to lunch and you forget your mask when you're going in there and they're like take your mask and you're like oh yeah this is what school's like now it's just kind of a constant reminder and i totally agree i think having a little bit of hope that things might go to like some aspect of normal would feel pretty good i think it might give people a lot of hope because i know the kobets

125situation depending on how people are feeling right now um it really affects them differently affects them in a really wide range of ways and i think just kind of telling everyone that it's going to get better eventually at some point it would feel really good thank you for sharing that can i piggyback i know we have to move on but i think you do but this is very i think this is i think it's important but i just want to make i'm digressing slightly but when we talk about climate for learning and this drop dropped on me as we were talking and we moved past the survey but i think for for for an example out of everything that we're saying something very heavy dropped on us that that many that 1326 students 1325 students

126are dealing with sexual harassment i think one of the things that we can do for client and climate for learning is to respond immediately to let them know that we see them and so you know it's it's my recommendation of course we can talk about it as a board but minimally we should make a statement um stating what is sexual harassment how we feel about it in our district and that we will not accept it and and of course maureen you could can chime in on that statement but i think that given that this is something that our students has brought have brought to us we're talking about uh climate for you know learning we have 1300 students that are saying this is how i feel every day when i come to school so minimally

127as a district and as a board we have to respond faster especially to issues like this because then as in the conversations that we're having one of the other main concerns is administrative cons administration's response to when i feel a certain way they're saying they don't know how i'm going to respond which also contributes to the climate so my recommendation is that we minimally have to make a statement while we're in the process of figuring out the excuse me deeper dive into the data and even you know what we need to do moving forward i just think we have to do something i totally agree that psychological safe you can't ask students to learn successfully if they do not feel psychologically safe we do have to move on but i do appreciate everyone's comments and

128i know this is really important topic and i'm sure we'll come come back to this many times so thank you thank you thank you um all right that takes us to uh 9.1 yes financial statements does the board have any questions on what the board has been provided regarding the financial statements hearing none we'll move on to item 9.2 item 9.2 is the annual tax levy presentation our cfo dr petsky is going to present to the board this evening so dr petsky the four is yours perfect thank you and good evening uh dr sparlin members of the board of education i really appreciate this opportunity to share some information about the 2021 tax levy so for those of you who are new to the levy process i just wanted to share a couple key ideas

129um uh key terms and definitions here so one of the things that we'll talk about a little bit is p-tel the property tax extension limitation law some of you may hear of that referred to as the tax cap and that just means that our district and the the counties that we're in are limited in the tax extension to either cpi or five percent whatever is lesser and uh historically cpi has been less so we haven't really come close to that five percent mark it's been about three two two and a half this year's 1.4 so what exactly is cpi you'll hear us talk about that quite a bit too cpi just refers to the consumer price index it's just kind of a measure of the health of the economy based on consumer goods and how

130those prices are trending we use the cpi that's published in december so the cpi we're using now came out december of 20. and in in just a couple weeks here we'll get the cpi that we'll use for next year and also one of the key terms that we talk about is eav so the equalized assessed value or that's the property wealth of our district and that's one-third of the assessed value of all of the property in our district and the interesting thing about that is with the levy we're asked to file that as a school district the last tuesday in december but the eav that we need to use to determine our our property wealth isn't finalized until january february or march of the next year so that's why when they refer to the levy

131the levy is really an estimate what we think based on the information that we know at the time what we're going to be asking for so the last two terms i will talk about here are exactly what is the levy and what is the extension the levy is simply just how much the taxing body or the school district requests we often ask for a higher amount than allowed under ptel in order to make sure that we capture all new property and we'll take a look at that through this example so there's the levy what we ask for and then there's the extension which is what we actually receive on the tax extension what we actually get from actual taxes collected one of the reasons why we're talking about the levy as it directly relates to

132the budget as you recall in my previous presentations sources of revenue for the district come in the form of federal state and local funding and levying is that is directly related to property taxes and that local local revenue source of which our district is about 61 percent of our our revenue is from local sources so here just real quick a few uh a few factors that are used when we calculate the levy so the formula is at the top there you can kind of see we look for a limiting rate so we use our prior year's extension what what did we get last year from taxes that were collected and then we multiply that by either five percent or cpi and then we divide that by the total eav minus new property so you can

133see why that's kind of a it's an estimate at this point because unknown we don't know everything um below that formula we don't know what the new equalized assessed value is we can make some estimates and we can check we don't know what the new property or new construction is in our district we can estimate but we won't know and because we don't know those two things we don't really know what the limiting tax rate is the two things that we do know we do know last year's extension when we levied we did get 106 million dollars and we do know the previous year's cpi which is 1.4 so to estimate what we do is we take a look at historic eav and current county estimates so here's just a chart to show you we

134tracked that you can see what the eav was last year and you can see that the total eav in 2020 was 2.2 billion dollars you can take a look at what that eav was in each of our counties so kendall will and kane so we keep a list of how that is increased or decreased over the years and i also listed on there the cpi so you can kind of see remember we get uh from our previous year's extension we can either get five percent or cpi whatever is lesser well that kind of shows you what our increases have been over the last few years there so 1.4 2.3 1.9 and on and so on um the reason the kendall will and kane for 2021 are orange those are currently estimates so the we do

135have that information um from uh we do have the estimated eavs from kendall will and kane counties but again they won't have those total numbers until uh or the final numbers until january february march after we have to file this so if our 2021 levy assumptions are exactly right what are we looking at and here you can see we've got a little calculator that we use for figuring this out we've got our consumer price index which we know 1.4 we have our total eav from last year which was 2.2 billion dollars but what we don't know are the next few items what is the estimated new property and we don't know that yet what is the total estimated eav for 2021 we don't know that yet so we're going to make some guesses and if

136we're exactly right if it is 2.4 billion dollars and if new property is truly 35 million dollars then we can take that and plug it into the formula and if you look at the bottom there our limiting tax rate is 4.5 so um that's the first part of our calculation determining what is our what is our limiting tax rate another important thing on this sheet and that's one of the reasons why bob lewis from pma is here is if you look on there it says that the number of tax levied bond interests or bond issues that are outstanding there's nine of those so i'm going to talk in just a second we levy for both our operating dollars and we levy for our uh debt obligation or the bonds that we have outstanding so i'll

137talk about that relationship here in just a second so let's say using that limit in tax rate we take what our previous year's extension was 106 million dollars and we plug that information into a formula and we come up with what we feel our extension will be for next year that comes out to about 109 million dollars the one thing that i'm showing here that i haven't seen in other levy presentations is i want the board of education to see remember when we talked about budgeting and the school district has nine different funds we've got like the education fund the operations and maintenance fund transportation fund i wanted you to see how we take that 106 million dollars and actually put that in those funds so where do we get the revenue to pay teachers

138for our capital projects for busing and transportation so you can kind of see where those dollars are plugged into this levy calculator but there's one other thing notice at the top of this slide what if our 2021 assumptions are exactly right if they're exactly right we should see about 109 million dollars in revenue next year through the levy process but what if our assumptions aren't quite right so that's where we we follow the truth and taxation law where that is we're going to levy or we're going to ask for taxes but we're going to ask for more since the numbers that we have aren't set in stone yet they're just estimates so if you'll notice there in the blue column i'm asking for 109 million dollars but i'm gonna increase those a little bit just

139in case our calculations are wrong how much well less than five percent so in this total i'm going to ask for 111 million dollars which is 4.99 over and beyond what we had um but the truth of the matter is we're really not going to get 111 million dollars we're going to get what we are what we are legally owed based on the estimates or the final numbers that the assessors and the clerks come up with so that's this slide here we are going to put in a 2021 levy request for 111 million dollars broken up this way and we expect to get the final numbers once those uh once those are firmed up more closer towards 109 so there's some some websites there you can look at for some more information so that's actually

140the levy process but there's one other item i wanted to share with you and it always comes up well wait what does that mean to the homeowner and this is where i wanted to just take a couple slides to explain there's two key points here number one is for the homeowner it's that relationship of eav and tax rate what do those mean do we high tax rates low tax rates and then the second thing that we'll talk talk about as well is the tax rate for our operating fund versus what we have in bond and interest outstanding debt that we have so the relationship here is as your property or as our eav increases or gets higher the rate the tax rate actually goes down what stays constant or the same is our extension so

141the the uh the money that we will be getting through taxes so if if we hold that as a constant if the eav goes down in order to get that current extension the tax rates actually go up so there's always this kind of little seesaw of of what the extension is what the property values are and what that tax rate is and i'll show you an example of that in just a minute but before i do i want to show you this this is an actual kendall county home portion of the tax bill i found a house whose value was three hundred thousand dollars the last few years when we've talked about the levy process with the board of education we've we've used homes that are worth about two hundred and fifty to three hundred

142thousand dollars to kind of show what does this mean to the taxpayer so i found a house that was worth three hundred thousand its eav then is one third of that assessed value so about a hundred thousand dollars and when i talked talk tax rates remember i said our limiting tax rate for the levy was 4.5 percent well but you're wait a minute my taxes aren't 4.5 percent they're really 9.4 percent if you look at this bill you can see yes the total tax rate is 9.4 percent when i say 4.5 that's just the school's operating levy so if you look you know we've got the oswego township the village of oswego the interesting thing about the tax bill is the school district is the largest uh taxing body so it gets a lot of

143attention so if you look up there compared to all of the other taxing bodies the school district the tax rate wait john you said the tax rate was four and a half percent and i'm saying on my tax bill it's 6.4 where are you getting that number well the 6.4 tax rate is actually in this tax bill the operating tax rate was 4.8 and the bond and interest the extra money that we levy to pay our outstanding debt is 1.6 percent and this actually works out pretty well since the eav is a hundred thousand dollars you can pretty much you know look at that the school tax rate is six thousand four hundred eighty dollars of which four thousand eight hundred and thirty seven was for the operating levy and and forty 1642 dollars was

144for our outstanding debt so i think that's an important point for the taxpayers to understand and that's why bob lewis is here today from pma he's going to talk about our debt our outstanding debt basically he's going to talk about that bond and interest tax rate the 1.6 and what we're levying for and when when that's going to be paid off and we will no longer have to levy that 1.6 percent and when you say debt can we just clarify that the debt you're talking about was for what purpose the referendums uh from 2004 to 2011 when we were building schools and we also had a couple other issues in there from 2017. so the bonds that we've issued for the referendum correct they paid for our buildings they paid for our buildings you got

145it um and i won't steal bob's thunder but he'll talk about how much debt we had and how much debt we have now and uh and where we look in in projecting that into the future and then the very last thing what i did is i broke out those numbers to kind of show you how that eav property tax eav seesaw works but here you can see in 2021 if we have a stable eav i said that our limiting tax rate would be 4.5 percent but then this next year in order to pay our 33 million dollar debt payment we're going to issue a bond and interest tax rate of about 1.4 percent so on the tax bill for the school portion of the homeowners tax bill you you would see a total tax rate

146of about 5.9 percent on a three hundred thousand dollar home one third of that is uh the eav so about ninety four thousand dollars so if you take the ninety four thousand dollars times five point nine total tax rate percent you're looking at about fifty five hundred dollars now if your eav goes up the tax rate comes down notice it went from four point five to four point one percent so now your total tax rate in addition to the bond and interest tax rate is now 5.4 it's almost a half a percent lower but your home value is worth more your eav went up 10 percent your home value is now worth 330 000 so you're paying a lower tax rate on a higher eav because you have more value in the home so you

147do have a lower tax rate but you're still paying a little bit more in taxes because of that value on the home it's about i think it was like 72 or so and now if the eav goes down the tax rate goes up so here you can see your eav went down the tax rate went up to 4.9 our bond and interest tax rate went up to 1.5 the total tax rate is about 6.5 but again you're paying a higher tax rate but your home is not worth as much as it was so you're paying a higher tax rate on a smaller eav small amount so you just pay a little bit less in this case about 82 dollars less so that's kind of uh that's kind of a quick little tutorial i hope it

148was a little informative for homeowners or for board members i know that our financing facility board committee advisory committee really wanted to stress that point about our borrowing levy in addition to the operating levy as well so i hope i did that some justice here and based on that i am open to any questions you might have about the levy um oh you know what forgot two things forgot about dr sparlin dr sparlin had a question here so i've included uh three slides to show um with our projected our our finance projections and i have to i want to state these are unaudited because i have not gotten the audits back about two weeks i'll get the 2021 audit back and i can update these numbers but the question that was posed to me is

149in our normal projections which typically are levy we project that we're going to grow about two percent and with our evidence-based funding we've been projecting about a four percent increase so based on those increases what does our financial picture look like so i've highlighted an orange here the surplus every year and that's that middle orange line so the surplus in 2022 is about 3.4 million dollars the surplus the next year 2023 is about 7.5 million and you can follow that line in our surplus dollars the reason we're trying to accumulate those surplus dollars is if you follow those lines down to the next orange line the projected year-end balance we're trying to raise our fund balance and here we currently have a fund balance of about 21 million dollars and we're trying to get that

150up to about that 25 26 so we no longer have to issue tax anticipation warrants to cover some of our daily spending so if we project a typical levy with typical evf if you notice in the lower right hand corner we're looking at a fund balance of about 68 million dollars in the next slide dr sparlin asked what if we didn't levy for one year just 2023 but our evidence-based funding assumptions of four percent stayed the same so if we just took one year of not levying follow those numbers across and in the lower right corner we're down 12 million dollars in five years we have 12 million less dollars because the the accumulating effect of again keep in mind the levy is based on our previous year extension so if we don't collect all

151of our revenue that we we are entitled to through the levy process that accumulates every year so just without levying for one year 2023 but then going back to levying like normal we only have a fund balance of about 56 million dollars and then dr sparrow asked the doozy what if you don't levy one year and you don't get evidence-based funding for one year or an increase of that well following those numbers now you can see we went from 68 68 million dollar fund balance in that fy 26 to now 40 million dollar fund balance so we lost about 28 million dollars in reserves and fund balance that we would have otherwise had so i appreciate dr sparlin giving me this challenge and allowing me to present this to you and like i said i

152look forward when the auditors have our final numbers really updating this and showing you a little bit more clear picture of some scenarios with our financial future so on that note if there are any questions i'd be happy to take any thank you dr pepke my only question is what is our timeline on the levy process i know there are certain things that have to be done on certain dates yeah so on december 6 i'll come back to the board between december between now and december 6th i'm going to be going back to the assessors to get more accurate assessments and i'll use their latest numbers and estimates to plug into the calculator and i don't expect it to change that much but then the levy needs to be filed with each of our three

153county clerks by the last tuesday in december or that's december 28th so we'll be hand delivering those um to make sure that we you know the levy is basically our authorization to say we need you to collect these taxes um and we also need to make sure that we collect our levy for the bond payments for our outstanding debt thank you i've watched these five-year projections for at least five years now and i think what gives me so much pause and a little incredulity but hope as we talked about earlier is looking at this slide on 15 looking at even if we don't count on the state giving us any new funding like they should even if for whatever reason we chose not to levy we're looking at a 40 million dollar you're in balance

154with the budget cutting that we have done in the past i have looked at these five-year projections where we were in the negative 10 millions where we were talking and for real for years have been talking about not having enough money to cover our bills this year right now we get about 25 million i think in tax anticipation warrants which is basically to cover our cash flow because we don't have it to pay our bills i'm looking at fiscal year 2024 having enough to maybe not need to do that and and i'm which will save us even more i mean i i'm a little in shock and i've looked at this three times now myself and i love this slide but it it brings about an entirely different phase in what we can look to

155do for our kids we've spent the last five years taking away we we even if we don't get any state extra money we can still do some things and still have the money that we need to to be able to set ourselves right financially and i am just really impressed at the moment by the fact that we are in this position this year it's a first for me and i'm very excited about it i i appreciate you saying that i'm really i'm getting chills right now thinking about if you're reacting that way to that wait till bob comes up to share where we are with our borrowers but i appreciate that because the one thing that we've been talking about too is like in education we're a cost neutral revenue expenditure and i think when

156you start comparing districts and eugene and lor you guys in our last finance committee we were talking about when you compare districts you need to look at our operating tax rate levy that 4.8 percent compared to other districts and what they do and what we can do with those revenues the one thing that costs us more right now is that the bond and interest the tax rate that we've had to do for them for our buildings yeah so it is do we pay higher tax rate here we do but we also borrowed a lot of money and since 2004 and we're now seeing i just i can't believe 2034 is we're looking at a whole new picture actually in 2027 when we start looking at our first uh our first major uh debt payoff so

157that i'm excited to have bob here and really share that picture for you guys thank you thank you i want to say two that two things that may sound like they're opposites of each other but i also think it reminds us though that we have to remember where we've been so that doesn't mean we can just go start spending wildly as dr sparlin's predecessors may have done so i want to be cognizant of that but the other thing this that we need to do collectively as a district is start to change the narrative that i see over and over in the community which is district 308 broke district 308 is broke it affects our realtors it affects people that want to move into the district it affects um the the narrative that we don't have

158things that other districts have so i look forward to that narrative kind of moving forward out into the community with these numbers but also at some point it makes me wonder are we going to have to pay for all of that pandemic relief money that trickles down from the federal government and knowing that what if what if ebf is not funded it gives us a little bit more confidence that we're going to be okay we hope that we're fully funded but we also know we haven't been for years this gets us to a position where we can still take care of our our students so thank you thanks jen we've needed to see these numbers for a really long time and we've asked for him so um i know that ali will agree with me

159where it's finally nice to see he's been looking for him for a long time it was a five long five long years of a lot of hard discussions and a lot of hard work and uh but as you can see five years from now we could be in the best financial situation we have been in this decade yeah actually in this century okay number 9.3 is our debts uh item 9.3 is that overview presentation along with information on debt service extension bonds we've done this a handful of years ago to pay for our capital projects and tonight we have bob lewis from pma to present to the board and bob i know when we sat in my office we we went through about a 45-minute presentation i think you can cut that and cut that

160down by 66.6 percent i'd be happy to well thank you for having me here tonight and oh i'm dancing on my screen right here okay uh before i delve into the presentation uh i just want to give you a quick market update and some of you've already seen this before showing the finance committee that the main takeaway from here is you have two data sets the gray area represents the federal funds rate gives you an idea of where monetary policy stood at various times in the last 20 years and then the lines represent an index and municipal bond market which gives you an idea where municipal bond rates have been at over the last 20 years and from what you can see on the far right side the municipal bond rates are near historic lows

161that have been trending up here a little bit here as of late reflective of some of the news we've seen with inflation but from historical perspective we're still at some of the lowest rates we've seen in history the only time they're lower is the all-time low is there in august of 2020 right after the pandemic had started so let's advance to this next slide give you an idea of where we've been and where we are at today as it relates to the district's debt profile the the district had implemented a multi-phase restructuring plan to bring down the slope of its debt service and to flatten off the overall payment the gray area represents what the debt looked like just before the final phase it already been adjusted somewhat in the first couple of phases so

162in the final phase those peaks that we saw uh in 25 and the next successive years were refinanced and and brought forward mostly to fill in the the valley that was here to create that level overall structure which the the district had been trying to achieve for you know several years and also in the process of creating the level overall structure the interest rates were low lowered and significant debt service savings were achieved uh the overall levies were reduced by an aggregate of 15 million dollars or 11.3 million on a present value basis this refinancing occurred about a year ago from now as part of that discussion the board began to review the options that related to non-referendum bonds for capital projects because the last non-referendum bomb for capital projects was done about five years

163ago and that's represented the payments on that are represented by these green bars and the discussions are last year's center around well how do we want the blue bars to look so that when if the district decides to do another non-referendum bond how will that non-referendum bond impact the overall payment because right now this just reflects your current debt picture not what it would look like if you did another non-referendum bomb so after much discussion the board shows an option where we lowered the payment from levy year 1911 or 20 for the bills that came out this year with the intent that if it did do another non-referendum bond there would be an increase in the the overall payment i have some numbers and a couple slides here what the impact was but just wanted

164to give re view that his recent history that occurred last year so let's look at those new money options that dr pesky has been referring to before we delve into the graphical representation we just have to review one concept that comes out of the out of ptel the property tax cap law which impacted the operating side which uh dr betsky just went over in great detail but there also was an aspect of that law that impacted your ability to do borrowing on a non-referent basis not just your ability any school district community college park district non-home rule village that are in a a tax cap county they're impacted by this law so in 1997 when tax caps were voted into kendall county they already existed in the other two counties when the tax cap law

165was originally approved but in 1997 uh kendall county voted in tax caps and what the law says is whatever an entity was levying for in the year tax caps uh came into existence for non-referendum bonds only not referendum bonds but non-referential bonds only became something called the debt service extension base and so that creates an annual limit on what the payment can be on your non-referendum bonds so it's not the amount that you can borrow it limits the annual payment that was tied to cpi so the new debt service extension basis 3160 which is tied to the cpi that came out in january of this year the 1.4 percent that you heard about in the last presentation so that debt service extension base is represented by the red line that you see on slide eight

166and you'll notice there's one blue column at the beginning that the last payment on those bonds that you did five years ago and the board has the opportunity if it would uh choose to do so to issue a not another non-referendum bond for capital projects to impact levier 21 for bills payable and 22 and that deadline to establish that new levy is february 28th of next year so there's a couple more months that you have on the debt side than you have on the operating side and then the dash line you may be wondering what's that represent well because c the d sub is tied to cpi that that shows what it could be over time for average one and a half percent so this next slide here shows you the scenario that we're presenting

167here tonight along with some additional information that hopefully you find valuable so in this scenario we did a six-year debt service extension-based bond that is represented by the green dark green bars right here or columns and you notice those go right up to the red line which is your debt service extension base and that what is the impact then the overall debt levy well that raises the debt levy from where it was in 2020 bills payable in 21 and even over what they were in 19 bills paid in 20 because remember the board intentionally lowered the levy for one year to provide some acknowledgement of the impact that we're feeling as homeowners in the the pandemic so that decrease from 19 to 20 represented about 54. on a 250 000 home now it doesn't mean

168everybody experienced a 54 dollar reduction bill because other in things that impact your bill what it means is your bill if you own a 250 000 home would have been 54 higher than whatever it was if the board chooses to do the another non-referendum bond uh up to the debt service extension base that would increase bills on a 250 000 home by about 108 dollars from where they were in levier 20. but if you go back to where they were in levier 19 before the the decision to lower it for one year that would be about a 54 hour increase now this six year borrowing would net proceeds of roughly 17 and a half million dollars the reason i say roughly is because what's pale paid out of the debt source extension base is not

169just principal it's principal and interest so as interest rates go down you can get more principals interest rates go up you get less principal well in this analysis we assume current market interest rates plus a half a percent so actually if you sold them in today's market rates we would expect that you would net something a little more than 17 and a half million dollars so the other thing that we want to highlight in this picture is that six-year financing maintains that payment for six years at which time there's a substantial decline in the overall debt levy which mr pedski or dr petsky was referring to a little earlier and that decline would be about 8.7 million dollars or about 37 cents of tax rate so one question often comes up when people when board

170members community members see that type of decline in the bond rate and they naturally want to know well can we just move some of that into the operating funds to help fund classroom education because you know they're using people are using what they know as individuals if you pay down your car well it gives you more money in your your budget for other purposes well the same thing doesn't work with the tax levy the the levy for the bonds can only be used to pay the bonds because when the voters authorize the via referendum they authorize the tax to only payroll's bonds so when the bond levy falls you can't just move those dollars into the operating funds now it a future board has the opportunity to consider you know that obviously provides substantial tax

171relief but it's also an opportunity maybe if the board wanted to ask the community it would be able to put some of that reduction back into the classroom but only with the approval of the voters at a referendum so that's not something that is obviously a decision point today but something that's not too far down the road that does give the district and a future board some options um for uh future decisions so this is a good news that delved or that ties in with the good news that you're giving on the operating side so this next slide just gives you the detail if you're into the numbers of what goes into the non-referendum bonds and you can see the blue column would represent the new bond issue and then the debt source extension base

172is represented by the second to the right column and you take the difference between the bond payments and debt service extension base you can see that's pretty close to zero meaning you would be utilizing most of that margin that you have available uh you may be wondering at what our your rate would be on this borrowing or the estimate when we ran this back in late october was a 1.78 but that was with the cushion of a half a percent added to it so um i can't predict what rates would be like next year when you would be able to sell these bonds if you choose to proceed but it's likely to be below one and a half percent which would be probably the lowest rate you borrow that for a an issue of that

173length so what is the the process to go about and i think this is my last side there oh no you haven't slide here john but what's the timeline of the key events if the board chooses to proceed because there is a there's three different items that the board has to do in order to gain authorization to sell bonds the first would begin with the passage of what's called a notice intent resolution and that's to issue working cash bonds in an amount not to exceed x x would probably be around 18 million dollars not that you get 18 million dollars but we want to be somewhere around 17 and a half 17.6 17.4 but you you can't go more than whatever you you approve you can always go less now you may be wondering where

174does this term working cash bonds come from it's because remember the d sub the debt service extension base is a it's a tax cap concept you then have to go to school code and say what type of non-referent bonds are we permitted to sell most school districts sell working cash bonds payable from your dsib and the working cash bonds get deposited in the working cash fund and then they get abated over to the capital projects fund for those projects also what would occur perhaps as early as december 6 is a board president signing an order calling for a a bond hearing or binary hearing as we call it uh both those documents separately get published in the paper uh the notice intent we estimate would be published on december 8th that kicks off the 30-day

175petition period in which 10 or more of the registered voters signed a petition then that that bond issue would have to go to referendum the order of calling for the hearing wouldn't get published to the 13th because the hearing has to occur within 7 to 30 days from publication so your next board meeting wouldn't be to january 10th so that's why there's a slight difference in the publication dates uh we estimate the petition period in on january 7th assuming it got published on the 8th we would have to refresh your credit rating a credit rating is provided by in this for your case by moody's investor service just like we're providing we have our own individual credit scores that determine the rate that you'll borrow at this determines the rate that you would borrow at

176the the the la the third and last item that the board would have to do is approve what's called a parameters resolution authorizing the sales that would set the not to exceed principal amount not to exceed term you know six years not to exceed interest rate and that names uh delegates to approve the sale delegates of the board which typically are the board president and the assistant superintendent of finance or the the superintendent and the reason we do that is just provide the flexibility to enter the market on a date that makes sense not a date of a board meeting which may not make sense um you know because there could be certain economic reports that come up day for example and then the bonds would be sold on the 25th as as early as

177the 25th with the closing on the 22nd which is a date that you would receive the proceeds and the bonds would then come into existence and you would meet the filing deadline then of february 28th so john i'll go ahead and turn over to you here yeah thanks bob and just this i know we started talking about our outstanding debt and then our our new revenue um opportunities but one question that's come up is and it's it's been a matter of timing you know in a perfect world i wish we could have had the the new uh facility master plan done completed and show you what that what that would cost and what what that would look like over time but um what we do have is our last the deferred maintenance plan that we

178did issue d sub dollars for to fund and we ended up selling about 14 million dollars so what i've got listed here is just for you to take a look at there's each of our schools and you can see priority one in that last plan we had about um we had about 13 million dollars in priority twos we had about 11 million dollars worth of projects and in priority three which was a little bit lower priority or perhaps some improvements to the schools we had about four million dollars so we had about 29 million dollars worth of projects and with the sale of the dsub dollars in 2015 we were able to spend 10 million dollars on those projects and then we also were able to use four million dollars for technology improvements as well

179so i think one interesting thing to look at here is is well too we've got about 19 million dollars worth of deferred maintenance projects that we were not able to complete that are still outstanding but also if you even just look at the priority ones what we had that first year we have 13 million dollars almost more money than we are able to sell in just priority one projects so uh rob is here tonight too and he's been working really hard on in addition to the deferred maintenance plan what are some of the projects that we have been we took a look at every school and we're looking at like athletic fields and playgrounds and kitchen equipment and what are other projects that are needing to be addressed in addition to what was not done

180in the vision 2020 uh deferred maintenance plan and so far rob is up to about 15 million dollars in just projects that he himself has had been able to identify so we with that said we know when we do this engagement with kluber and our new facility masters plan that we are going to be looking at quite a few uh capital needs capital improvement projects so i just wanted to kind of put that out there and allow the board to ask some questions of bob lewis myself and put that information out there well bob dr petzke thank you so much for that presentation board what questions do you have for these two gentlemen i only have one only um in one of the earlier slides you'd showed the end of the debt service payment being

181around year 2020 or 2034 five 34 and then in slide nine it was 2037 so can you explain that change well i think what's happened there's a formatting here i yeah i i think you're right about that too i just wanted to make sure that we had at least acknowledged that that's not actually a change with dsub out to 2037 2038 in the debt service extension yeah there's no change in that okay that's what i figured thank you so much i don't know why that did that just an image from excel so dr petzke are we going to have to move forward with i just i'm tired so i apologize um move forward with approving this before we get when do we expect the maintenance facility plan you know we we've just got the invitation

182so we're starting the narratives uh the end of november beginning in december with all of the buildings but in order to do a in order to do the assessment we're looking at about february to march before we get that final product to the board so that's why i wanted to put this in there to kind of kind of show you that you know we do have information on where we were with just deferred maintenance we already you know rob already has a list of projects that he's got in addition to this and that's without even the architects going in and doing an official assessment i think it's important for the board to realize too when we talk about dsub this is kind of a new idea for this board because or for for this district

183because prior to this where we got money to do capital projects was from the referendum bonds when we sold bonds to build schools we also recognized we had capital improvement projects to do but then we stopped doing that and then we needed some uh we needed some capital dollars to continue to fund the projects we had so that's when the board in 2015 sold their d sub bonds and we're kind of in that same area where we have capital needs but we don't have referendum dollars to meet that to meet that expense so the only comment i'll make based on the conversation that we had uh quite extensively during the um facilities and uh commun facilities and finance meeting is that we show that there's 19 million dollars in projects that were not completed from

184the last plan and this dsab would only net us about 17 million and many of our buildings are 20 to 25 years old and so we're not even talking about or considering the critical failures that could happen right to some of our mechanicals in the buildings and so that when i say critical failures to the mechanicals we talked about boilers chillers the roofs um parking lots etc and so when we think about our own homes we always want to have that nest egg set aside for that emergency and so if we did not do this um we would have to tap into operational funds in order to fund it and we just don't have it operationally so we just wanted to make sure that everybody the community understood the importance of of having the ability

185to not only take care of what's already that what we have not done which is 19 million but also just making sure that we can position ourselves that if an emergency occurred we would be in a position to take care of it and i'll just piggyback off of that that the things that were priority three and didn't even make the list in 2014 2015 because time passes now have to become priority one and that also that 10 million dollars also doesn't encompass the emergencies that we've already had because that's actually happened more than once already because we've stretched stuff so i i would be really shocked if we came in under 17 million with what we need to do to our buildings that's not want to do that's need to do need to well and

186from 2020 that we didn't finish and we're going into right 22. that 2 million is compounding right that we haven't been addressing it's just getting worse yes and those were that's i can rob's probably itching and scratching right now so i'll speak for him i don't see any scratching in his in rob's defense rob has been making it very clear to me the last time we went out to bid we expected it to come back on some cool or some chillers and boilers about 700 000 and the bid came back 1.2 million almost twice as much so the other thing is you're talking about critical failures and this plan is predicated based on projections that were done in 2015 to what current dollars were we don't know until we go to bid if that is

18719 million or more based on current covid crises and we had the option to delay a little bit but now we're getting to the point where critical failure is definitely a reality and this i'd rather let you talk but this goes back to all of this stuff is also a part of the climate and culture of our buildings and our students learning when our boulder hill kids didn't have heat or didn't have air this summer that is that affects their learning ability sorry right climate for learning is a whole different world for me but also a sidebar note on costs we have seen unprecedented cost increases because of coving the 15 some odd million dollars we got with the last d said will not go as far in the next two to five years as

188it did rob i in my industry i know there are a lot of also product shortages because of covet and silicone chips and all this stuff are you seeing the same kind of things and it's difficult to get your hands on items that we need the the biggest problem is shipping delays availability is problematic we're able to keep ahead of the curve on our consumables but when you talk about hvac parts they're hard to come by and it takes longer for the manufacturing process to to get the parts we need and get them on the shelf right i have one last question i promise we want to go to bed the technology does that that does that represent the numbers that we got for co for colvin from okay so this is above and beyond

189okay thank you this was things like upgrading the telephone lines this was way back okay um and adding and i mean one to one like getting oh no okay so none of that this was this was servers and switches and more infrastructure not so much student devices no that was 20 million extra okay thank you mr lewis for sticking around the entire meeting and i'm talking over here i know you can't tell who's talking because we have our mass on but we appreciate you being here tonight and presenting this in a way that is at least relatively understandable so it's a lot of numbers speak so thank you you're welcome thank you so the hundred you're too rough a year for our taxpayers for how long uh those six years but i would caution all

190of us that people still need to be able to afford to live here so as much as i could appreciate all the money that we need to spend we also have people in this community who don't have kids in this building in these buildings or grandkids in these buildings who still need to live here i would argue they also probably had kids or grandkids in the buildings back when we had to build all the buildings which i can appreciate and they were also probably not on fixed incomes at that point yeah that's totally true are there any more questions on this topic i just wanted to check in with everyone because we're on four hours now does anybody need a five-minute reset no we need to go okay i'm just checking all right item 9.4

191is the first reading on board policies that are in need of updating the policies that are being presented to the board this evening have gone through the board's policy committee and are being brought forth as a first read prior to board action does the board have any questions on what has been brought forward this evening well i think we know latonya has requested for five colon one zero to be reviewed actually it's on the agenda for the december 13th board policy committee meeting and it can also go to the other committee men but i would recommend that you contemplate there's a minor change in here that you could on first read and then second read approve and then future consideration of anything else okay thank you all right any questions on the policies that have

192been presented right that takes us to action i haven't talked to marina okay i didn't know that one was going to be so quick all right okay sorry so um 10.1 approval of bills for payment can i get a motion for the approval of bills for a payment i make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of four million seven hundred and forty thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars and twenty seven cents as presented mrs croner aye dr marino aye mrs johnson aye mr gatewood aye mr swanson mrs doyle aye mrs simonton aye 10.2 can i have a motion to approve the 2022-23 school calendar please i make a motion to approve the 2022-2023 school calendar as presented second let's go sorry mr gatewood hi mrs johnson hi mrs doyle aye

193mrs swanson aye dr mourinho aye mrs simonton aye mrs croner aye motion passes seven zero uh 10.3 can i have a motion to approve the proposed new high school courses please i make a motion to approve the proposed new high school courses for the 2022-2023 school year second mrs doyle aye mr swanson aye mrs corner aye mrs simonton aye mr gatewood aye mrs johnson aye dr marino aye motion passes 7-0 10.4 approval of superintendent contract can i have a motion to approve the superintendent contract please i make a motion to approve the superintendent's contract as discussed and presented second mrs croner hi mrs swanson mrs doyle aye mrs johnson no mr gatewood just want to make a quick statement i do support the superintendent and i'm willing to provide an extension however due to some

194due to some terms in the contract i'm going to have to say no dr marino aye mrs simonton i'm going to say no due to the terms and conditions of the contract motion passes 4-3 10.5 approval of building administrator contract can i have a motion to approve the building administrator contract please i make a motion to approve the building administrator contract as presented second mr gatewood aye mrs dorel hi johnson hi mrs simultan aye mrs croner aye dr marino aye mrs swanson aye motion passes seven zero 10.6 approval of personnel report can i have a motion to approve the personnel report please i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mrs croner hi mrs johnson hi dr moreno aye mr gatewood aye mrs swanson aye mr storyal aye mrs simonson aye

195motion passes 7-0 can i have a motion to adjourn uh make a motion to adjourn all in favor