SD308 Board of Education Meeting (8/23/2021)

001district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mrs doyle mr gatewood mrs johnson present mrs croner here dr marina present mrs simonton president mrs swanson president please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i

002ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback comments are limited to three minutes per person for a total of 30 minutes tonight i will read up to three email comments at the beginning with students if any being given the priority these will be prioritized in the order they were received starting with our meeting in september we will only be reading emailed comments that come in from our students should we have to restrict the number of attendees to meetings this would change no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow-up to your questions or concerns will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you we have

003an email from melanie mcallister dear board of education hi i appreciate you taking the time to listen to me about this topic i am very concerned about the children in this school district there have has been an issue over at boulder hill elementary school with the air conditioning not working in the building this is a very serious safety issue that needs to be addressed right now it's over 90 degrees and children are sweltering in their face masks at that building they said it could take two weeks to get temporary air conditioning units this is absolutely unacceptable the children are very hot without air conditioning this cannot go on much longer something needs to be done also there was a letter sent out to the broker preschool parents that they were delaying starting preschool by five

004days because of not having enough bus drivers this is absolutely unacceptable because the majority of kids are at brokaw preschool because they have an iep or they are at risk students these are their children that have fallen behind even more academically by the pandemic the iep students and the at-risk students and now you are planning to delay these kids getting access to preschool that's incredibly troubling to me it seems like you have not looked into other options at all such as sending letters out to parents explaining the situation maybe they could drive their kids to preschool the first five days or carpool with another family i also know that there are other elementary schools that maybe have one to two classrooms empty that could be used for preschool maybe there could be an email a

005list of parents that could carpool the other issue i wanted to bring up is you said there would only be three public sorry excuse me be three public comments per topic however last week you allowed seven comments about the swimming coach and then only three people can talk about eliminating face masks that's not fair you need to have the same rules for everyone you need to allow comments per topic and you are not following your own rules for public comment you need to follow your own rules and listen to everyone's opinion even opinions that are different than your own thank you and this is from anna bosco please view the below linked presentation regarding the mandate of student masking there is extensive research data indicating conclusively that mask mandates are detrimental to students learning capabilities

006and overall health a study at a german university collected reports from 330 plus doctors and found 26 000 complaints from children wearing masks they found that 68 of students reported adverse effects including 50 percent increased anxiety 40 percent increased of shortness of breath panic attacks facial rashes dental disease headaches and more there have been more coveted related suicides in children than coveted deaths i understand that the school mask mandates are handed down from the state at this time i implore the school board of district 308 to join parents in fighting to reverse this harmful and unnecessary policy masks for children in school should be optional to be decided by parents and students based on that student's individual needs and there is a link www.canva.com design slash d a e f t s h g six

007z y slash view thank you michelle trager good evening my name is michelle trager i'm a parent in the district i have four children in high school level junior high level entering kindergartner and my kids are students in special education gifted education and dual language so when i see one of the just one of the priorities for the vision 308 takes care of like all my kids right there but tonight i want to talk to you about next month being fetal alcohol spectrum disorder awareness month and all of you have received emails from me at this point about this proposed legislation the fasd respect act i understand that as a as a school board you may not be able to publicly advocate for that but every single one of you as individuals should be contacting

008your let your legislators we've already had productive discussions with aids from senator duckworth and senator durbin's office and we also need to talk to our representatives fasd is an invisible disability only 10 percent of students affected with it actually have the facial features that you might associate with alcohol exposure most of them have iqs in the normal range however their executive functioning dramatically reduces their ability to get through daily life without accommodations and support the prevalence of fasd is estimated conservatively to be one in twenty that's two and a half times the rate of autism and we have a lot of kids in the stars program in this district one in twenty means every single one of our classrooms every single playground every single sports team has at least one student who is impacted by

009prenatal alcohol exposure it it cannot be outgrown it's a lifelong disability when i see the concerns about sel and mental health i think it's important to know about a 2019 study of the us adolescent population that was 17.2 for suicidal ideation and two point four percent for serious attempts in the fasd population it's 35.2 percent with suicidal ideation and 13 reporting at least one attempt in that year people with fasd have nine ninety percent of them also have a comorbid mental health diagnosis when i look at envision 308 i want you to consider that success in your sbl and your professional development will not be successful unless you take into account fasd in the pandemic the rate of binge drinking by women of child bearing age went up 41 so when you are considering envision

010308 what does that look like in 2026 you need to be thinking about the incoming kindergartners who have been impacted by fasd thank you so much for listening thank you is that ill okay thank you board member comments i just wanted to um say that i'm happy that students and staff are back to school i know my kids were actually excited to go back to school which is i think a very common theme and i know that just like any other school year the first weeks can be a little rough in a few areas and there's some things to work out but i'm confident that those things will be taken care of and i'm hoping for a great school year with many positive things to come and just thank you for all the hard work

011to all of our teachers who have just i know they're excited to be back in their classrooms with students and i appreciate all of their hard work and wish them great school years i'm sure there will be some unique struggles this year and i hope that they would reach out if there's any way that even i personally could support them thank you i'll just piggyback on ruth here that i know as a parent seeing my own child's children's smiles when they've gotten home from school has been amazing and i did not realize how much we had lost really by not being in school and just how much happier and alive they they really are with being in school again and so i'm really grateful that we've been able to make that happen it has been

012really joyful even just seeing the buses in in the community again and i'm really grateful to our administration and staff for the around-the-clock work that i know you guys have put in to make this happen i know that some things have happened outside of our control with air conditioning and things like that but um i know we're working on it and that people are working on it around the clock and just grateful that we're back in school and grateful for all the hard work thank you um if everyone's had a chance to speak we'll move on to board committee reports okay so eugene would you mind telling us about the our first finance and facilities advisory committee meeting yes i can it was a great meeting just to get to know all of the new

013new members of the committee we had an opportunity to go over the expectations of the finance facilities facilities uh committee and we also had a chance to review even uh i'll call it finance one-on-one with dr pesky was able to go through that just to help us to understand and to know and to even refresh us on uh the school district's finances and what to expect so that when we're getting ready to make decisions we'll understand the context in which those decisions are being made and so we after welcoming everybody on the on the within the committee we're also still considering the was it 2020 plan for uh most of our facilities many of them being built around the same time so now we're working on doing assessments of all of our facilities to see

014what mechanicals or systems are at at a critical need to be either fixed and or replaced and then how do we accommodate that and within the budget and so we're also looking forward to dr pesky so i won't steal this thunder uh for the rest of for later on in the meeting we'll give an update on the proposed budget for uh for upcoming year thank you does the board have any questions for eugene about the committee okay over to you dr spartman well thank you dr moreno so good evening board as you all know we uh welcome back to over 17 000 students on august 18th uh and we we've as you said we've had a great start to the school year um it was great to have our students back after 18 months of

015either remote or hybrid learning on wednesday we had all of our district administrators uh out and about in the in the buildings uh helping out the administration in any way any way they could i had the opportunity to be at oswego high school where they welcomed students the staff welcomed the students with the band playing and the cheerleaders cheerleading and the kids walking through the big inflatable panther which was uh it provided a very welcoming atmosphere and i know all the schools did you know similar types of things and that was very nice as you know school district 308 and school districts across our nation are dealing with a shortage of bus drivers uh when we found out that the just before school was about to start that our service providers were not going to

016be able to provide or cover the routes our transportation department worked around the cloud around the clock to collapse routes and do their best to make sure we had transportation for the first day of school on august 18th and they did an excellent job we did have some delays and drop-offs on wednesday the team came back together on wednesday night and made the adjustments for thursday and the drop-offs after school were much better this past weekend we had to make a difficult decision to delay the start of the early learning uh students until august 30th as we work out our transportation needs and we sent out a communication to staff and parents of our early students on saturday informing them of the changes and we will continue to communicate throughout the week once we have

017those routes and packages all set to go last friday night at our high schools we had oswego high school had their annual pantherfest and here at oswego east they had their annual blue and silver bash and i think i know a couple of you were able to attend some of those events so if you had the opportunity to go to those events i know you had a very good time because they do the high schools do a very nice job of putting on a very friendly family-friendly atmosphere last week i had the opportunity to meet our meet with our student ambassadors and i can say that they are very excited with about joining the board on september 13th and today i along with elizabeth palatine and andrew gotthealth visited boulder hill elementary school as you

018know the air conditioning is currently out at boulder hill the district has installed portable units in all rooms and along with box fans in all classrooms a matter of fact when i was there they were they had another seven portable units that were dropped off so we have some larger classrooms or larger areas where we're putting two of those units in the in the in the in the classes the classes are warm you know the temperatures in the rooms range from 78 to 81 degrees while i was there i was there about noon i know in the morning it's cooler at night we're drawn in the 60 degree air um but part of the issue is we're we're maintaining the ventilation so the hvac systems are continually going so as the day warms up it's

019pulling in cooler air as we're trying to keep those rooms cool as we continue to ventilate ventilate the school the uh the gymnasium is air conditioning is working that's a standalone stand-alone unit and uh-oh i think my mic went off did it there we go okay so the air the gymnasium is a standalone unit so that's uh the for physical education the rooms are cool the room is cool and the uh that also acts as a cooling center for the kids when if the teachers need to bring them down and i saw a lot of different classes that were out in the outside under the trees they were didn't seem to be bothering the kids and the staff and everyone are dealing with the issue at hand as well as they can they understand that

020we're waiting on a part to be fixed and we're trying to expedite that arrival that part as quickly as we can i just like to thank everyone involved at the school you know the building engineer the district maintenance everyone that's put in all the good work to ensure that they're as comfortable as can be so as you can see there's a lot of things happening around the district and that is my report for this evening so thank you thank you can i get a motion to approve the consent agenda i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the august 9th 2021 board of education meeting open and closed session the august 12 2021 special board of education meeting open and closed session and 6.2 to acknowledge the foia requests

021received by the district second mrs simonton hi dr marino hi mr gatewood hi mrs swanson um mrs croner hi mrs johnson hi all right item 7.1 is an annual intergovernmental agreement that is brought before the board tonight's agreement is in regards to the kendall county food pantry and the school district are there any questions in regards to the agreement and what has been presented for the board for this evening for information i just said one question this is a an older agreement so we're just renewing correct that's correct that was all i had okay thank you any other questions with it all right item 7.2 is a recommendation of new board advisory committee members for the equity policy and legislative and teaching and learning committees the board chairs have gone through the applicants and are

022recommending the new members to these committees are there any questions on this informational item okay item 7.3 is an annual ten is the annual tentative budget presentation our chief financial officer dr pesky will be providing tonight's informational presentation it's important to note that we do have the september 13th board of education meeting to answer any additional questions the board may have prior to us asking the board to approve the budget on september 27th so with that dr petzke thanks dr sparlin board of education i'm very happy to present this my first tentative budget presentation to the school district 308 board members i do want to acknowledge up there two things that this was presented with a lot of help from folks in the finance department two of those key players were debbie smith who works

023as our district bookkeeper and carrie chamberlain who also assisted a great deal on this another thing to point out on the title slide this is uh talking about what eugene was talking about a little bit of our finance 101 and i think it's important to point some things out that i take for granted that maybe some new board members don't necessarily know and for that fact maybe some uh folks in the community but up here you'll notice it's just a little thing but f uh 2021 2022 that's this school year that we're in um some people don't necessarily know that fy22 this school year we refer to it as fiscal year 22. so whatever school year we're in the last year is the fiscal year we're currently in so even though it's uh it's uh

024right now august in the finance world it's fy 22. so i want to start off with the basic finance 101 and the the first thing is what is the purpose of the budget why even have one well number one it's required by illinois school code it also gives us the expending and taxing authority so without a budget we would not have those powers it serves as a financial plan for our departments the buildings and the district and more importantly it's used as a management and communication tool for our district i think it it really shows how we align our financial resources with our human resources and then more importantly with our educational programming and how those three pieces come together so the purpose of our budget it's it's mandated we have to have one but

025it's also a great tool to show where our priorities are and how we meet those so we have a couple budget requirements in that uh state mandate it's uh number one there is uh we need to have a final budget number two we need to allow as a public body we need to allow our public to actually look at it and see what we're doing and then after they do that we adopt it there are some budget filing requirements so the rules there are we need to adopt it the board of education needs to adopt it by the end of the first quarter of our district's fiscal year our fiscal year runs from july 1st to june 30th so the end of that first quarter is september 30th but before we adopt there we go

026before we adopt it we need to put it on public display for 30 days so they can see it the public can see it look it over and give us feedback the budget must be on display for 30 days and we need to let people know it's on display by publishing a notice in the newspaper that's circulated in the district uh we'll be doing that in the beacon news it'll go out tomorrow october 24th or august 24th so now we go back up to adopting it on september 30th we adopt it and then we have to file it so after september 30th once we approve the budget it needs to be filed with our county clerk within 30 days of adoption so by by the end of october the budget also needs to be electronically

027submitted on the official isbe forms within 30 days of being adopted through the illinois state board of education to help facilitate transparency we will be posting the budget on the district website so people have access to it it's also in board docs and then we will send a copy of the final budget to the regional office of education as well uh what does that specifically mean our calendar i this is a little repetitive but just to show you on august 16th we met as the board finance and facility advisory committee we really talked more about that education finance basics 101 some of the information i'll share with you today we did review some rough revenues and expenditures for fy22 and that's in more complete form today so i'm excited to send this to the committee

028members so they can really digest this and give us some feedback so to that brings us to today august 23rd i'll be calling for a resolution to hold a public hearing on the fy 22 tentative budget the board of education will review it today that's what i'm going to present here and then we'll place it on display i've got my folder here ready to go public display at the board of education office as well as our finance office so that people can look at it if they want to come see it in person and it's got my contact information on there so if anybody's got questions they can follow up with me and then on september 27th which gives us 34 days we'll have the public hearing once we close the public hearing we'll go

029right into our board of education meeting at the regular regular meeting of the board of education i'll ask you to adopt the final fiscal year 22 budget so now for a little bit of the finance 101 so sit back and enjoy revenue highlights we get our we get our revenue from three different sources the first one being local the second is state and the third is federal but there's a lot of different local federal and state sources so the first one is obviously we rely heavily on property taxes and the property tax extension later when we talk about the levy i'll talk about how we calculate that and basically you can see there this year's budget was based on the 2020 cpi the consumer price index which was in december 2020 it was 1.4 so

030we use that number but then we also use the 2021 tax levy so we calculated that december of 2020. this year right and when i'm done presenting this i will start working on the levy and i will file that in december of 2021 the levy that i will bring to the board in either november or december will be for our next school year so uh the life of uh the life of a finance officer in education we're always living in right now i'm auditing and reviewing last year's budget we're adopting this year's budget and i'm already looking at estimating next year's budget so we're living in three years so sometimes it can be a little confusing in addition to property taxes we have what's called cpprt corporate personal property tax replacement if you were around

031in 1978 you know that our illinois taxes were based on both income tax and personal property tax well in 1978 they no longer did personal property taxes and in 1979 they also canceled and suspended the need for corporate bodies to provide a property wealth tax income as well but to support that in the school systems they came up with the cpprt which allows us to collect revenue based on the economic health of the state we also have interest earnings we collect registration tuition course and athletic fees we also collect fees for risk facility rentals and e-rate and that's kind of all the local funds the state revenue there's evidence-based funding which is uh our major source of state funding we also have categorical grants or sometimes you'll hear them called mcats for mandatory categoricals it's

032things like transportation reimbursements early childhood block grant the special education reimbursements tuition reimbursements driver education reimbursements so there's some revenue realized in reimbursements and then finally in the federal revenue we have our participation in the national school lunch program we also participate in several federal grants such as title one 1 title 2 title 3 and title 4. we get some federal idea special education grant monies for both both our regular ed or kindergarten through through 22 years old but we also get some dollars for preschool special education we get medicaid benefits and this year federal revenues we realized in the form of esser 2 and s or 3. the one thing i think it's important to point out with the esser grant dollars that we got due to kovid they're reimbursement grants so it's not

033really revenue it's it's revenue to match expenditures due to the pandemic so it's not like hey you got this extra money you can put it towards your budget wherever you want it's you know we paid for ppe we paid for some of the we're paying for some programs for learning loss we're we had uh um we have the ability to do some things with air quality so it's it's not necessarily extra revenue it's a reimbursement some expenditure highlights uh salaries are a huge cost for districts typically about 80 percent of our budget is salaries and benefits benefits include both trs and imrf the trs is for our certified employees contributing to the retirements and imrf is contributing to non-classified employees teacher assistants nurses things of that nature and then benefits also include medical dental and

034vision but as well other expenditures include purchase services supplies capital outlay tuition things like transportation food services private placement we also have our utilities is a large cost in our financial statements every month on the board you'll see we have quite a hefty bill to pay every month a lot of that bill is electricity natural gas phone water things of that nature our internet connectivity we also have lease payments and capital projects so there's a basic way that we categorize our expenditures so the job the job of the school district is like i said really balance our revenue with our expenditures some of the challenges that we have in balancing that is evidence-based funding really started the conversation about what an adequate education looks like and if we were adequately funded how much would that

035cost well right now based on what the state has determined our adequacy target to be we only meet that about 62 percent so we need another 38 percent in budget and revenues to reach that level of adequacy that's a that's a lot of money 62 percent of about 240 million dollars so we have a heavy reliance this is an interesting one it's what makes our district very unique very special but it also has its challenges we're very reliant on residential properties we are very much a residential district we don't have a lot of corporate uh support for our educational program we're about 71 percent of our property wealth is all in residential so that's one thing that makes us unique and we'll definitely talk about that more when we talk about levying and what that

036means in terms of our taxpayers and the the cost of educating our students another thing is we are a tax cap district that translates to our revenue being capped at cpi or five percent i always get a kick out of the five percent because i can't remember the last time that we were at five percent way back years ago five percent it was like wow you know we gotta limit this somehow but who knew that cpi would go down and it's been down for quite a while the number i quoted just a little bit ago is our revenues are capped whatever we got in property taxes last year we can we can only get 1.4 percent more of that this year so it uh it's an interesting challenge some of the rising costs that we

037deal with obviously our we have annual increases in collective bargaining agreements we have increased in special education populations unfunded mandates vendor contracts and transportation and food service equipment and technology needs and facility and maintenance repairs so we have we have a lot of we have a lot of requests for our our budgets on the on the revenues the one thing i'm going to talk about today is very confusing i'd like to straighten this out there's there's a budget our budget is made up of nine funds and they're all listed up here but there are there are five of those funds that carry most of our most of our transactions and the largest amount of our money for instance in the education fund salaries and benefits operations and maintenance our facilities transportation imrf and social security

038and working cash those are called the operating funds so sometimes you'll say wait this says that our budget is 226 million dollars in realized revenue but over here it says it's 244 million why how can that be well the 226 million is in the operating funds the additional 25 million is in the other funds the debt service we do have the district does have debt we have debt payments to pay off bonds that's in the other funds we have capital projects we have tort which is uh workers compensation student insurance different district liability insurance is all paid through the tort fund and we also have health life safety so those are the nine funds that we have but today you're going to be hearing a lot about the operating funds which is everything except debt

039service capital projects tort and hls or health life safety so with that let me prepare so thank you very much i appreciate you guys entertaining my finance 101 but that's kind of my finance uh if you have other questions about basic finance don't hesitate to reach out to me but now i want to translate what that means in terms of dollars so if you look up here this is our fy 22 revenue by source and by source i mean local state and federal but it's only the operating funds so you'll see we have 236 million dollars and you can see how much of that is local how much of that is state and how much of that is federal funding so i gave you the numbers and the percentages on our revenue there's another way

040to look at our revenue very exciting let's look at that it is called estimated revenue by fund so rather than looking at it by local state and federal i can say in the education fund what what funds are bringing in revenue our education funds through like our property tax levy we ended up realizing 196 million dollars in revenue from different education funds the operation and maintenance fund we realize about 23 million dollars in transportation we expect to see revenues of 9.3 million in imrf and social security we'll see about 7.3 million and our working cash fund we'll we'll see about 168 thousand dollars working cash is kind of an interesting account it's one of those accounts where we have a fund balance so that we can cover our cash flow so if we're if we

041are having a cash flow problem we haven't received our revenue but we still have to pay our bills every month we can use our working cash fund to lend money to that account and then we have to repay that um out of our repay the working cash fund from our our dollars it's like a way to internally loan ourselves money so that's our revenues i'd like to talk about our expenditures how do we spend our money if you see here and again i'm talking about the operating accounts um what we do we our education fund we spend about 186 million in the operations and maintenance fund we'll be looking this year at spending about 23 million in the transportation fund we're looking at spending about 15 million and in imrf uh social security will be

042looking at spending about 6.3 million i can already see maybe some of you might have a question there wait john your your revenue fund was only 9 million you're going to spend 15 million we also uh some of that the transportation transportation costs were reimbursed by about 80 percent so um we're balancing how much we spend and how much we need to spend versus how much we get reimbursed and we try to balance that but we do spend about 20 percent of about 10 million dollars 20 percent 2 million dollars is from local funds and then the rest is reimbursed so another way to look at operating funds is by what we call the objects the object codes and finance are as you can see their salaries which is about 65 percent you can see

043that we've got our benefits which are about 13 so that's where we get our you know 78 82 of our funds are on on salaries and benefits you can see we've got purchase services we've got supplies capital outlay other objects and non-capitalized equipment so that's another way to look at how are we spending our money all of this is summarized in a lovely 30-page document that i would i would like to review with you at any time if you'd like to sit down this is just a snapshot of basically the information i shared with you in the previous slides in the document that we call budget at a glance but this information you can see if you look across the top you can see the nine funds education operations maintenance debt service transportation so it

044makes sense we've got our beginning balances for the year we've got our revenues and then we have our different expenditure sources and at the bottom we have how much money based on our budget and our revenue and expenditures how much do we think we're going to have in our fund balances at the end of the year fund balances are kind of a funny thing i'll talk about it on the next slide here this is another page in the in the 30 page document from the isbe basically what this is showing is the education fund the operations maintenance fund transportation and working cash so four of the five operating funds they left off imrf for some reason in this one so in those four funds you can see what the total revenues are you can see

045what the total expenditures are and based on the money we receive this year and the money we spend this year we are looking at having 3.2 million dollars in a surplus that surplus will go into our fund balance um just as a little background information most districts look to have it about a 20 to 25 percent fund balance the reason that number is so important is it allows us to pay our bills with the cash flow when do we get revenue and when do we have to spend it we have some cash flow issues that we need to overcome and a fund balance of 20 to 25 percent will allow us to pay that pay that cash flow without having to borrow money or what you guys have heard is tax anticipation warrants so we're

046trying to remove that cost from our budget but right now we don't have the fund balance to do it interesting thing here i'd like to point out that 35 million dollars on this page that says it's a fun balance that that's pretty healthy i would be very happy if we had that kind of a fun balance all year long the problem is with the way cash flow works this budget is a snapshot in time so we were we are we are realizing revenue but we need to pay our bills we're also separating and this is an unaudited number so once the audit comes in they're good the auditors will separate what did we receive in in june in our taxes because some of that money needs to be credited to last budget year and some

047of those june monies get credited into this year so when the revenues come where they're divided um that number will go up and down depending on where we are because we borrow money tax anticipation warrants those fund balances will go down to zero at one point we won't have any money but then we'll look at building those back up by borrowing and we'll hope we hope to get to a healthy fund balance so we can get out of that that need to borrow to pay our cash flow needs and that board of education is i think my last slide yes so i would like to entertain any questions that the board might have and i will definitely put this on public display and i will share with the board any feedback and comments i get

048from the public to share with you and like dr sparlin said we do have one more meeting september 13th so if there are questions needing to be addressed we can use that time as well so any any immediate feedback or questions i have two questions i'll leave so this comes up literally every year for probably the last 12 years um can we at some point if you look at slide five the revenue highlights yeah so in slide five you say registration tuition cost and athletic fees can we break those down i know that we say that every year but every year at the beginning of the year i got my 300 dollar bill this year for would you well 600 if you count athletics and but i guess what we're looking for is just kind

049of a breakdown how much of the athletic fees actually goes towards athletics yeah would you like the register where's the registration fee get disbursed kind of that's just yeah it's a question that comes up i am absolutely swimming in numbers and i have some of those numbers for you so i will give you a very 50 000 foot overview okay and i'll give them to you in terms of percentages okay so registration fees and i you're right i know as a parent myself in the district and having having uh students in different athletic programs you do wonder where is this going and were i not in the position i am i i have that same question in the position i'm in but i'm in a position to answer that a little bit so uh the

050the the initial answer to this is regis let's start with registration fees every parent who registers a student kindergarten through 12th grade pays a registration fee full day kindergarten pays a to a fee for full day kindergarten all of our registration fees last year we collected um we collected about two million dollars the cost to educate our students per pupil was about is anywhere our instructional cost to educate a student is about eleven thousand six hundred dollars and but if we add the operations the building side too then per pupil that breaks down to about twelve thousand three hundred dollars so the so if you look at that in percentages the registration fees we collected is only one percent of what it costs the district to educate a child now i know what you say

051some districts say hey it's only one percent can we just can we just look at um not charging i mean it's only one percent it's almost nothing that's why on this one i did want to share with you one percent equals two million dollars so we've been really struggling to maintain that balanced budget and we've made a really good strides the last few years so now what you would be asking the district to do if we wanted to provide a no registration fee opportunity i just need two million dollars every year so that's how the registration fees break down so any questions on registration fees or any other yeah no but my question sort of that's a good segue into it is are we looking at having to make any budget cuts this year that's

052a bigger conversation i think what i'd like to do is i'd like to get through this tentative budget um conversation and then i think we can entertain the idea of what is our what i would like to do and we'll we'll see in envision 308 a little bit one of our the main finance goal is to maintain a balanced budget so in that i will be providing five-year projections on an ongoing basis and i want the board to know where we are financially based on our human resources and our educational programming and our when if we want to do something different we need to move the money around or we need to look at making cuts so i'm not in a position to say if we do or not but i would look forward to

053having those conversations to say based on our based on our revenues and expenditures and what we're doing is that something the board wants to entertain i i will say and i do know dr sparrow and faith can definitely comment this a lot more i think you guys have really been taxed with making a lot of cuts recently and my concern is how much more can we cut without impacting the the students in the classrooms can i ask an opposite question so um in in the budget and in the strategy that you're creating given that the residences tax are taxed with 71 percent are there additional revenue sources that the district can consider use that would help bring additional revenue outside of the sources that you just you presented from state federal and local so number

054one in the envision 308 goal is maintain a balanced budget by following up i almost feel like i'm doing both presentations now goal number one two three four is this one was put on there specifically by dr sparlin so he asked that we need to review uh nope sorry it's uh goal number three not number four goal number three is explore ways to increase private and grant funding opportunities to allow for more educational uh more educational improvements not less so in five years that is a focus of ours so when we talk about envision 308 absolutely so eugene a couple years ago we had a director we we we talked about and we had a director of development and uh that was that person did fundraising and was working with advertising and as dr prescott

055just said uh private uh you know private funding and bringing things together but uh unfortunately with coven it uh that kind of that kind of dried up for a little bit of time and that was one of the positions we we cut but in the future when we're on a more financial stable ground that's another position that we'd probably like to bring back all right listen i don't want to get too far off that topic but athletic fees ali i was coming back to you i heard you the first time but that was good i appreciate you pausing because with registration those questions come out with just registration fees in general with the athletics again i i think it's fair to say that what what the fees we collect are just a fraction of what

056the programs cost so if we look at just the athletic programs at oswego east and oswego high school all of the kids who participate in athletics all of the kids that pay their i think right now the the cost is 300 per sport and those dollars add up and if you look at those revenues over the expenditures those fees account for of what the programs cost so if it's a million dollars to run athletics 390 000 comes from revenue from fees and 6.1 million is covered by the district the district local revenues or state and federal this comes from our revenue so i i do understand the the concern that parents have saying well where does that money go the truth is it's revenue that goes into the school district but i think what we

057need to do is have a better uh a better accounting of those dollars and actually i sat down and um with the athletic directors and with dr sparlin and they brought this to my attention and i think they came up with a great idea and that's why not instead of just giving an athletic budget from district revenues and then saying well we'll get the revenue somewhere and get these expenditures somewhere why don't we allow the athletics department and we did a we did a little analysis of what their budgets have been what we found out is that the budgets for each high school if we just let them have the registration fee and said the registration fees are their budget it is a wash the only thing that doesn't cover is the salaries the district

058then has to pay the coaches salaries and the the the referees and the officials and the transportation that's where the other one point or 6.1 million comes from out of a you know the fees cover um cover about you know 339 percent so i thought that was a really good idea and we're going to try to look at implementing that next year all right and then my my last question was on slide seven slide seven so i think another i i know that you kind of had it in small print but to me because i am also in this industry like i see unfunded mandates and we all hear about unfunded mandates but i'm not sure that everybody understands what they mean when we say unfunded mandates and how many there actually are you and

059i are on the same page i i went back and i took a look at this and because i i knew you know that unfunded mandates what does that mean it's little words but it's a huge impact and so what i'd like to share with the board and the community is uh since the year 2000 there have been over 130 new unfunded mandates things like requirements in special and physical education lead testing uh exams that are required in civics classes concussion testing suicide prevention and i think the important thing to note here is that a lot of these concepts are really sound they're really important but i think what the unfunded mandates does is it puts the decision-making power in the hands of the legislators as opposed to the administrators and doing that at a

060local level so if the legislators make a mandate like that that we can look at doing that but that costs money both financial and human it takes someone time to do that and uh program impact as well we only have so much time in a day so how do we meet all of this a perfect example faith brought to my attention on unfunded mandate it's called senate bill 0654 so it was just passed into law july 1st what it says is that all public schools shall provide daily time for supervised unstructured child directed play for all students kindergartens through grade through eight specifics further requirements that um it's uh it concerning play time this provides that the play time shall not count as physical education so no pe and that um that provides that the

061play time shall be considered clock hours so it's taking from the instructional day for the purposes of the code and provides for the inclusion of students with disability provides the public schools prohibit well the cost to this it doesn't cost anything except time and supervision because the the teachers in their contract are given a certain amount of supervision time and now they have a little less for unstructured supervised play so that's another example of an unfunded mandate a big one that mr miller and i were talking about ken miller we were talking about the affordable care act and the shifting of those costs to education and through states to education and the impact that that's had so like i said since the year 2000 130 unfunded mandates sound ideas but without without dollars it really

062taxes some schools i just had a comment you you mentioned discussion about potentially changing the way we are using our athletic fees and my i just want you to keep this in mind as you're discussing that obviously i know nothing has been decided at this point and my concern is there are some sports that are cut sports and some that are no cut sports and so some are you are limited in the number of students you are able to have on the team and thus limiting the dollar amount you are bringing in to cover the fees for that sport and with some it might not you know be a huge impact because there aren't maybe a lot of expenses but others that are no cut i know i just i'm concerned that it's not going

063to be i don't know if i want to use the word fair or acne right i mean i think about cross-country in the high school as a no-cut sport you can have 50 kids out for cross country there are very little overhead expenses with cross country i'm not saying there are zero but compared to something like football or hockey or something that has a lot of equipment expenses yeah you know they use a lot more funds um i that's a concern that i would have about if i could that's a really good concern with i think maybe to it's definitely a question that we will take into consideration i can only imagine when we have this conversation with our athletic directors that this is going to come up as well but for we are already

064funding athletics with a budget and it's running that program is running and so now all we're saying is that the expenditures can remain the same and will be what they've always been the difference is the revenue rather than just saying well we just take it from state local federal now we'll just say you know what the fees that were paid are being allocated towards those expenditures so we're not changing how we allocate it and who gets priority we're saying we're going to still continue the successful athletic programs we have we're just going to tell the public hey the register the fees you pay for athletics that's what pays for these programs at 39 percent the district's picking up the other 61. does that help a little bit so one pot i'm not part of sport

065hold on a second latonya yeah not her sport he was just you're just clarifying okay yeah i just have i just have a statement and then um so dr petsky and this just sticks in my crawl because we have been you know borrowing money to pay our bills for so long that we just think it's normal that that's what you do right um and i want to get to the point where we're not doing that and i know as eugene mentioned there are things that you know how are we looking to expand on our opportunities for revenues but also um when we get things like additional funds that doctor i mean that governor pritzker um you know included in our evidence-based funding like what what are we doing with that money and are we employing

066strategies like zero-based funding you know to to help in that regard yeah well and first of all you're exactly right so to your first point tax anticipation warrants or borrowing to pay our cash flow issues we've we've been doing it for a little while but it is a it is mostly seen as a temporary solution um when needed but we've needed to do that because of our fund balances and the the money we have in our reserve so that's why it's so critical to build those reserves um we need about 20 to 25 percent which is why in envision 308 that number we're really trying to hit that dr sparlin is aware of that in our first conversation that was one of the things he brought up we need to take care of our financial

067situation we need to uh we need to not have to borrow money to pay our bills so that is a priority um so we will do that and i'm totally forgetting what your second question is funding what's that zero-based funding yeah and not necessarily zero-based funding we call it uh zero-based budgeting yeah that's right and that is definitely uh some districts do incremental budgeting so they just say hey you had ten dollars last year you get two percent more you get 12 this year and they just grow it other districts do line item budgeting they actually go through every line and they say do you need this yes or no keep it cut it and then there's zero based where you take everyone back to no money and you have them build that budget up

068there is a fine line between needing to go totally zero based and going to line item incremental and just looking at how are we spending our money so we are definitely looking at all of those different approaches to budgeting and the answer to your question is yes we will be considering zero-based budgeting where appropriate some things it's not needed um because we do have leasing costs we do have uh internet costs we've got utility bills a large portion of our budget salaries things of that nature but when it comes to when it comes to the rest of our for instance the salaries and benefits alone are 80 percent so we basically have 20 percent of our revenues to use for all other educational operational uh uh purposes so that 20 percent we can go through

069we have a lot of flexibility there thank you thanks i would like to first of all just to touch again because latonya said exactly what i was thinking but the reason the tax warrants are an issue is because we pay heavily interest heavily on them and that's money that we can't use otherwise in other places so i think that's a very important distinction and why it's such a goal um for the district and something that i know myself and some of the newer board members were campaigning on so i think that's really important and if i i don't know if it's appropriate or not but the numbers are in there if you go in here this is going to be on public display tomorrow and if anyone knows what page to turn to i've budgeted

070for the interest or the the payments on interest on the dollars i budgeted two hundred thousand dollars and you love which is about one percent yeah when you look at that compound effect over the last year few years that we've needed to do it it's really um put some um strain strangle holds on what we've been able to do and what we want to do in such things as like in vision 308 yeah another thing and as a target while you're talking about that too just to answer that it's also that 200 dollars it's not yes or no it's how much do we need to borrow for cash flow right this year we had to borrow 25 million dollars to cover a couple months we ended up and uh we we were watching those dollars

071closely we just happened to get revenue in so we could pay it off in june and not july early and we saved twenty five thousand dollars in interest for one month on that 25 million so i think what we can do as a as a board and then as a business office let's balance let's really do a solid cash flow and know how much money do we need right now and do we have enough or are we overborrowing and that's a question we need to know i don't think we're overborrowing i think we know our cash flow pretty well but i've not done it in this district before i will definitely communicate to the board on what our borrowing needs are with a good cash flow analysis and i think sometimes we have to it's

072very hard especially with covid it was very hard for us to look ahead but i think that it's incumbent upon us to look to the future as current board members two other things that i just wanted to address we during covid did receive a pretty decent sized um grant for technology can you just give me a little bit of background on page i don't know i think yeah it's this page rising costs with equipment and technology needs and kind of what that entails yeah um and faith can fill in two a little bit that was the digital equity grant um we got i want to say it was like 1.1 million dollars in the digital equity grant to prepare for remote learning and faith i think you were asking more about what the costs and

073things are so some of the delays that we've been putting off as we've had other budget cuts in other areas projectors in all of our classrooms if you've gone to the junior high classrooms or the elementaries if you sit in the back it's kind of hard to see because things are fading and we're working on replacing all of that there were access points and things that needed to be addressed and i think there was a plan in place but there wasn't money at the time so difficult decisions were made about putting off some of those things now as more has been put off there is a kind of a snowball effect of what we need to do to even catch up and maintain the technology we have more or less advancing into new types of

074technology that we really need to look into to better instruction so kind of a combination on those rising costs are some of the maintenance and as like the light bulbs from projectors only have a shelf life of so far you need to replace all of those our chromebooks and those things only have a life of four to five years so they need to be refreshed and while the cost of a chromebook is going down there are other kinds of technology that are really adding to that cost okay thank you for that and then just it's one last comment more than anything is i know we have quite a few um openings in the school district and from the hr side of things that really also affects us financially because if we are not if those

075positions are not staffed we then have to sometimes contract them out at a higher price than we might need to so as we move into um this new school year getting those uh staffing positions solidified is going to be very important and helpful um for not only our current staff who are doing more than um their their fair share but also it will help us from a financial standpoint as well and can i add to that that if we are maintaining those that we employ um we're spending less money because if we're training people and then they're leaving then there's cost there as well so making sure that we're creating a culture where people want to be here thank you thank you dr petsky yeah well i really appreciate the conversation board so i look

076forward to more conversation i have one oh except here we go more conversation because i know that the community is often curious because so much of our education fund goes towards salaries and benefits can you just share with us how do we compare with other districts are our percentages roughly the same or you know that's i've been meeting with uh with mr miller in the hr department and that's one of the tasks that we're poised on right now it was revenues expenditures sr grant funding budgeting looking at what the impact has been on so i i honestly have not done that comparison yet and i think that comparison may change a little bit we'll be looking at collective bargaining agreements and increases and negotiations but i see um that is definitely an activity that we

077will uh uh ken miller and myself will be engaged in okay so it's an important part like you said it's 80 percent of our salaries is 80 of our budget is salaries and benefits so we need to make sure that we are we are providing enough in that area dr mourinho to answer your question a little bit um if you look at our instructional spending and our operational spending per child uh we're well below the well below the state average and uh dr petsky in the update this week's update he can provide those dollars because if you take that difference between what what it costs us to educate and what it the average cost is in uh for the state and you multiply that time 17 000 kids you come up with millions and millions

078and millions of dollars that we spend the west to educate our kids here in 308 right right and i just want to be clear that i um know that our salaries are lower than other districts so i but i know that it is a common question of our community as to when they see our budget it is alarming for parents to see that you know that much of the budget so just asking the question as to um are other districts like is that common that it's 80 percent goes to here yeah those are those are state averages so when i quote that 80 it's actually 78 to 85 percent that is an illinois school budget is salaries and benefits in that range so we are not out of the ordinary but i do like dr

079sparlin's idea i can give the board a quick update just by using the per pupil expenditures instructionally and then you know we don't have to dig through all the contracts we can just tell you how do we compare on our spending that'll give you a really good picture so a good idea yeah and i think it's important dr moreno and everyone to know that any company whether it's a business or a company or a school district their line item for salaries and benefits will always be the majority so in the business world we see like a 70 30 um and then in education because you have to have so many staff members per student you're always going to see it be a little bit higher too but what i think is very interesting is is

080the is as you ask breaking it down so people understand why it is that amount of money so i appreciate that comment and what the what the norms are right so that's what i was thank you are there any further questions or comments for dr petsky i i would be interested just the comment that dr sparlin made regarding we spend a lot less per pupil than the average but how are we performing in terms of the average that's you don't have to answer it just question yeah i think that would be a later topic but a good question okay so shall we move on we shall thank you all right uh item 7.4 is in regards to our are developing our five-year strategic plan and vision 308 so developing a five-year strategic plan is a

081process and tonight will we are going we are happy to share the next step in that process as you know the board had previously approved the one-page document that is divided into four sections so faith if you could click to the second slide please and those four four sections are student learning support for student learning finance and facilities and community partnerships within each of those four categories the board and administration have identified specific objectives that our work will be focused on over the next five years the first half of tonight's presentation shows each individual objective from each of those four quadrants along with what we've identified success to look like over the next five years the second half the presentation shows the work that will happen between this year and 2026 for each objective of

082the plan tonight is an overview of what success will look like at the end of five years and highlights the work that will be done to accomplish those tasks the details of the plan to accomplish what we present will be shared with staff and with you along the way we are happy and excited to be presenting our five-year strategic plan uh with the targeted objectives to accomplish our work and we look forward to the feedback from the board on tonight's presentation all right i think uh it's my turn to talk here a little bit really excited to talk about this with you i have heidi pajasik who's also going to talk through and i know dr petsky is also going to help out but there's a cast of thousands that went into this so there

083are lots of people to thank along the way lots of the statements that were in here were a team effort and then we took all of the success indicators to our whole admin team principals assistant principals district office maintenance everybody on august 6th and got some of their feedback on those pieces as well so what we're going to go through tonight is a real team effort with everybody thinking about where do we want to be by 2026. so as dr sparlin said we're going to start off with the student learning pieces and all of the things in blue there are the statements that we've already approved that are from those four quadrants and the yellow tan piece is what are some of the broad brush strokes of what are we going to see when we

084get to success because we really have to agree on what are some of the things that we want to have accomplished so the very first one improving literacy and math and going through what that looks like we've written math and literacy frameworks but we want to implement them that means new staff coming in it really becomes our way of doing business and instructing math and literacy we need to have data systems in place to monitor the effectiveness which includes classroom walkthroughs and we want to see the percent of students meeting expectations at least up 10 percent in both literacy and math and that would be on state tests the second priority focuses on the social emotional and behavioral development and wellness of our students by 2026 we will have social emotional learning curriculum in place

085early childhood through 12th grade that reflects the illinois state learning standards for social emotional learning but is also i think most importantly reinforced through our academic content area classes so we're taking those illinois state learning standards and we're applying them to every content class that the students experience throughout their day we also will have a comprehensive system of intervention developed for behavior and social emotional wellness for students and and most importantly a way to measure the effectiveness of both that curriculum and the interventions going on one of the pieces that we want to do is to have more choice and challenge which means you know the chance for success and personalization and instruction so some of the things we'll be looking for by 2026 is really that differentiation especially in literacy instruction and then we

086will be using administrator and teacher surveys to see how that improvement is happening and part of this piece is also making sure that our staff development models the type of instruction that we want which includes staff development that has differentiation and choice and challenge for our staff looking at the next piece for creativity and what that looks like we want to have more of opportunities for our students to problem-solve and creativity if you've heard my soapbox before we can't just be dumping curriculum into people's minds so that they answer what siri can ask us very answer very quickly so we want to have more examples of that and we will include specific examples with new coursework as we go along and have accumulated list of where we are going with creativity and problem solving a

087next piece that was very important as we made our rounds and vision 308 listening sessions was the inclusion of financial and digital literacy by 2026 we want to have new k-12 social studies curriculum that includes financial literacy and that's at all levels elementary junior high and high school and then have redone our high school courses to incorporate digital literacy skills among them the last piece is on k8 assessments and while we do want to reduce that time we also get need to get much better at utilizing that data so we want to have anna reports to the board on student achievement that include both the aggregate but even more importantly desegregating the data into student groups so that we can look at celebrations and plans for improvement based on that data we really want all

088of our schools to use that process as well so we are starting a district team to model that process and then use it at the school level as well then going on to the next page and it's not there it goes we also want to look at all of the equity statements that we will soon be talking about with the board and want to have annual feedback on those to identify celebrations as well as areas for continued improvement another key piece of that is looking at the recruitment and retaining for our staff and we want to look at reducing the discretionary turnover on that by 10 percent in all the different areas teachers administrators teachers assistants then we want to keep track of the demographics of newly hired teachers and administrators and see where they

089fall in different subgroups by those people that are graduating and are available for hire when we think about safe and nurturing learning environments for students we often focus on physical safety but as a district we want to also make sure that we are focusing on the mental and social emotional wellness of our students and in dividing safety in that way we want to make sure that all of our staff are trained in different strategies for supporting that mental and social emotional wellness of their students but also have allow students to have the opportunity to learn different skills and strategies that will support their own mental and social emotional safety as they grow and develop and also support that of their peers so that they're seeing themselves within that community often students are really well aware

090of the mental and social emotional well-being of their peers sometimes before we are as adults and it's important that we equip them with different strategies in order to support that as well along with this will need to be a lot of professional development for staff so we want to have not only an annual plan that shows that at a glance but a three-year plan as you can see all the different components of envision 308 it will have to be some parts of the training coming this year some parts coming at later pieces and again extremely important that the professional development we provide to staff models the type of instruction that we want to see for students with differentiation and choice the next piece is something i'm really excited about the vision of the future of

091instruction and what i mean by that is getting people together and talking about look at this year's kindergartners and predicting out what is the world really going to expect of them and what does that need in education sometimes we don't slow down enough to do that and yet we really need to look into the future skills that are needed have forward planning and then think about our technology purchases and our curriculum and instruction to align with that and then looking at the the next piece we really want to have our students and our staff working on this inclusion piece if people don't feel included in the community they can't learn at their most so we're looking at annual surveys and an interview process to gain feedback from students on how we're doing on that then

092the next piece is all about special education english learner services and gifted students and we want to go through in our special education pieces and look through not only for the academic but behavioral and the social emotional outcomes look at data and then having building based teams and administration to help out with the oversight of that we realize we need to look at the whole comprehensive english learner program and look at continual improvement and what that looks like and get into data on how effectiveness that is and then a big push from our community also was to review the gifted program to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement and that plan was part of 2026 as well all right i'm going to take a break and hand it over to finance and facilities so for

093finance and facilities we've got five priorities this year one we talked about is maintaining a balanced budget i think the big thing to know is a budget is a plan it's a it's a living and breathing document and if we just adopt it and don't monitor it throughout the year it's not going to do us any good so we will maintain regular updates uh we'll maintain regular updates and communication on our five-year projections as well as our uh we'll provide you financial reports at the board meeting to talk about our monthly spending and revenues again a huge focus on building 20 percent both jennifer and latanya commented today about our need to borrow money for cash flow purposes that 20 percent number will put us in a position where we hope that we will not

094have to do that so we'll report regularly on the update um operating fund reserves um and uh that will be built into part of our current five-year projections as well we're currently at about a 10.5 percent fund balance um on when you look at that throughout the year we really need to be up to 20 percent uh dr sparlin would like us to explore ways to increase private and grant funding i think he talked about we do we did we do look at different opportunities we're always looking for ways to increase our revenue um and we will continue to do that um through the business office and through teaching and learning and and wherever there's an opportunity we will gladly welcome that i think to start the conversations there really easily with our education foundation

095and uh and things of that nature there's a lot of opportunity there we also so the first three goals are really financial and the last two goals are really the facilities portion it's something we need to look at eugene talked about we do have a plan called the vision 2020. it was vision 2020 it was created in 2014-15 so that was five years ago we need to look at what did we do and what did we not have the money to do and while that we there are some things in that plan that weren't done there are other priorities that have been added to that so we've been working with we've been working to audit rob and i our our facilities and find out the major systems and and things like that so we will

096we will have that plan for the board and then the the uh we will develop that five-year plan to address those uh the physical capacity of our building and program needs so brokaw the transition center you can see there the end goal what we hope to see is that solutions have been developed to identify space for our projected enrollment needs our program needs and make sure that the solutions are carried out in a timely way to address those space concerns in our educational environments thank you now we're going to go to compute community partnerships and it will be extremely important that we continue to have feedback not only from our students but parents committees all of those pieces so we will continue to bring new plans and communication on division 308 and have that be

097part of the process as well so the work of a school happens with our internal resources but it also happens through beneficial partnerships with a variety of different community resources and stakeholders including mental health agencies businesses universities etc etc so by 2026 we want to have expanded our partnerships with a variety of different stakeholders within the community we want to make sure we have those partnerships published and accessible with information for all of the community and our staff students within the district and continue to analyze the work that we're doing within our district and then how i continue to identify new partnerships that are beneficial both to that outside agency and the district as a whole we are looking at developing our family engagement strategies so really expanding our opportunities for parent education for family

098engagement and for parent groups and meeting schedules and making sure that again we have an avenue and a vehicle for communicating all of that information with our with our families and that we continue to to grow those opportunities as our community needs change and then what i think one of the most important pieces of community engagement is having all of our stakeholders feel connected to our district feel that they are a part of the positive growth and development of both our students performance as well as kind of the school as a central hub to the community i think that's some we are a place we are our largest employer but we are also a place where we bring together large groups of people and so by 2026 we hope to see a variety of people

099with different backgrounds engaged in a lot of different community events that are housed and centralized through the school district and that those showcase the positive relationships that we have we'd also like to develop an alumni program and continue to honor those who began in our community and stayed within our school community and finally by 2026 and sooner but we want to have a dashboard and a calendar of reports so we're looking at measurable data but also reports that would be shared back to the community to build trust and to build collaboration and communication over where we're going by 2026. i was asked to really kind of pare down because i know this is a lot of information so i'm not going to go through every single slide that's about to happen but hopefully you had

100a time to look at it but we thought it would be key for you to see that we're going to break down each of the five years it's human nature as well as district nature to say either we're going to do it all the first year or we're going to put it off four years from now and it became really apparent because this is an enormous amount of work that we really have to prioritize what are we going to do the first year what are we going to kind of pump the brakes a little bit and not start in depth until two years from now just if you think about the amount of professional development with our teachers you can't do all of that in one year pieces will have to break down so i

101just picked two to kind of highlight some of the things for 21-22 so now i'm back to that improved literacy and math achievement and the things that we want to do this year for example is train all of our kindergarten through eighth grade staff on the frameworks we're going to be conducting walkthroughs and staff surveys to determine professional development needs we're utilizing our coaches to get in and look at what are the best practices in instruction and differentiate for our staff because some of them are already rock stars at some of this and some of them need additional help and then really build that professional development plan for long term of what needs to be done and then you'll see the different steps as we get there then the next one that i want to

102highlight and it's not getting there it's thinking about it slide 13 my clicker's not there it goes maybe all right so in looking at our assessment system and where we're at with that uh if you look at 2122 we want to and switch to fastbridge which we did for this year and that will allow us to spend a little bit less time on assessment but give us some richer data and then we really need to dive in and create training and the use of this data and some of that's coming out here in the next couple of weeks on how to use that academic data not only to identify students with interventions but even more importantly to identify the successes and the opportunities for improvement in our instruction and then create professional development that goes

103along with that we'll be creating a district improvement team we've had our very first meeting to go through and model that practice but also to look at the district as a whole and look at our data and identify areas of weakness and we'll press and repeat that several times throughout a school year and many many times over the next five years that was a lot i know i talk really fast because i have so much to talk about if we get all the way to the end of this it talks about next steps and we want to bring this back on september 13th and talk about that and then we want to show a dashboard at that point of what a mock-up could be of how we will chart our progress and share those pieces

104and get input from you all so that we can start on this journey i want to remind everyone that while we have these five years you saw that the columns the words became a little less as we got to 25 26 that's because we have to build that so if you think about a long journey what's right up in front of you there's a lot of details but what's far away we'll be adding more details and putting those pieces each year that we go in and updating those p those plans what questions do you have yes we're so my first one is it may be rhetorical but maybe not but what do you need in order to accomplish all that you presented thinking about time talent resources people money uh what do you need in

105order to do that and i'm going to give a second question because it may it may answer it okay and uh within the the assessment i'm glad you used that one as an example is it you said that the bridge is a fast bridge fast bridge gives you richer data and so what else will you will you will be used to determine student achievement and does this new system the richer data within this new system encapsulate all that's the data that's going to be needed to determine if we're being successful in everything you just presented that was a really big question i think i'll tackle the data one first so fastbridge is a k through eight it doesn't go to the high school level and we are instituting some new assessments at the high school

106level this year too uh and what fastbridge does its basics of literacy and math instruction and it starts you know all the way down at second grade and there are some pieces at first and it will tell us what standards in broad brush strokes students have mastered and it's an adaptive test so that it zooms forward if a student is answering a lot of questions correctly or it backs up grade level if the student is not making a lot of progress so we'll get kind of that as especially this year we're expecting a wide variety of way of achievement even more so than in the past you asked if that's enough data to determine that or really the right data is what i'm trying to fix so on the right data on basics of reading

107and math yes but there's a lot more to student learning than what can be answered in a multiple choice test so when we're looking at writing when we're looking at creativity and problem solving some of those pieces are incredibly important i would even say resilience is going to be a big factor on how our students will succeed but if you're looking at indicators for how we will do on future reading and math assessments yes i believe that fastbridge is a tool that will be very very helpful in that my background in elementary also says we really need to look at kindergarten and first grade on letter recognition letter sound sight words which will be things that we already keep data on but aren't part of fastbridge is we have to make sure that our students

108have those basic building blocks everything else relies on that all right so just one last comment i'll pass it so based on what you just said my my recommendation would be because the question is what else will we use to determine student achievement if we're only using that test everything that you presented is really good and i think it's needed in order for to determine not only if a child is successful will be successful because you got to of course we got to project future success the ability or capacity of future success but i'm just not sure that assessment will tell us that and if it doesn't then how will we determine if everything else we're doing is actually working so that if we need to course correct after a year or two years we

109can say yes this is working no it is not but then according to what so if we don't have the right data then some of our efforts we may put a lot of time talent resources money and people into it and not know for 10 years if it's working right and when you look at curriculum and instruction it's not only the assessment that you need to know whether or not it's working it's also whether people are doing the instruction that we are hoping they're doing right so how do we assess that so we have a system of classroom walkthroughs that we're starting this year where there are a team of us from the district office as well as district administrators and we've built a schedule to go visit classrooms and i'm having principals and assistant

110principals not from their own school but come with me to other schools so we can talk and talk about instruction where it's not necessarily their building and build common understandings what that would be and then they will model that process and go back and use that because um and dr sproul i know you told me to be brief but i get going on this for example i use my chocolate diet thing all the time so if i tell the doctor hey i'm going to lose weight because i really you know i'm going to lay off my chocolate but i never lay off my chocolate and he comes back and he's like your chocolate diet thing didn't work you haven't lost any weight well it wasn't the chocolate diet it was the implementation of that so

111we have to make sure when we put the literacy and math framework and before we would change course because the data doesn't look like it we'd have to make sure that we're actually doing the literacy in the math framework pieces uh you also asked me what i need [Laughter] a fairy godmother ah time but we don't really have that we have to get in and we have to do it um a culture and a climate that supports but also talks about a sense of urgency that builds on people's successes and positives and that staff and students but not to the extent of we're all good we're good but we can get better if we can set that climate and that culture that's the biggest thing that needs to happen in order to make all of

112this work we also need staff we also need money to redo curriculum we also need professional development we all need all of those things but that culture and building a sense of trust where we have clear expectations and we are really clear about where we're going and what we want to do and we support people that's what's needed to make this happen the most thank you so in addressing equity and inclusion and climate um i know we know that children students they want to see themselves in the classroom right and we know that um you know curriculum is a really big part of them seeing themselves and so what is what is curriculum renewal in in this process and where is it in the process is it is it going to happen this year is

113it two three four five down the road and then what do you need in order for curriculum renewal to be you know a priority as we talked about the social studies standards for example that are in here of what we're doing and that's one of the main pieces we are behind in having our social studies standards that's one of the things that because of budget cuts we've continually said will push that down the road so we need to get in and do that and the curriculum review process that i've been working with with the high school assistant principals and as well as our elementary and our junior high directors has a very big part of that process of creating the lens for things such as equity but also in differentiation materials also those pieces so

114whatever resource or tool we look at we've got an established list ahead of time that we believe has to be addressed and looked at not which book did you like or which materials did you like but these are i'm really full of bringing all the faith isms out to it these are the truths that we hold self-evident about curriculum and instruction that's something i talk about with my team all the time um and we need to get in and we've been pushing that off for a long time we have high school textbooks that are tremendously out of date and we had different difficult decisions just yesterday in dr sparlin's office about budget and where we go with those pieces but know that the social studies materials when you're talking about equity are one of the

115large area of concerns that we are working on and then we allocated some of our esser monies to providing more materials for our novels and for our libraries and level libraries at the elementary to include more cultures and more diverse perspectives and literature that's available to that and when you look at our literacy framework a lot of that is having student selected texts and being part of that where they have choice so that you're having a wide variety for people and students to choose books that reflect the characters and the people that they're interested in while they're trying to tackle and learn new reading material is that what you were looking for well i just want to make sure it's going to be a priority yes okay yes and if we with the teaching and

116learning committee and i know we haven't met yet one of the things i want to do with that committee is go through the curriculum review review process that we've been drafting and writing so that we have an agreement ahead of time on the types of lens and tools that we're looking at and so we've been putting it off because we didn't have the dollars right correct do we have the dollars now right now we have the dollars written into the budget for elementary social studies uh choice and selection this year and then we have put in money for the year after that and we've already started the process with the high school department chairs around science and social studies we already met in august to start that process because it has been not done for

117so long it's going to take quite a bit of time to overhaul science and social studies at the secondary level so it'll be a year process to get our social studies courses and curriculum where it needs to be but we've already started thank you one quick question if you don't mind jen sorry sure how long does that translate into actually seeing it in the classroom so um one of the things for social studies that we talk about and we part of the process in the state of illinois is you have to bring the tools to the board it has to be on public display for 30 days so when we are looking at social studies and we have that item in the budget for elementary that isn't a start until next school year so we

118would be piloting looking through things this year posting bringing it to the board in the spring training teachers in may hopefully we have all those materials and then starting that and then two years from now we might have a few courses at the high school levels before them but looking at a two-year process to get our science and social studies where it needs to be at secondary yeah the budget you just heard and the presentation here on envision 308 when we talk about new curriculum that those dollars are in the budget that john dr petsky just presented okay i have a couple of questions and then um just kind of a thought so when we improved this first this one page document now we're kind of seeing how it is drawn out and i greatly

119appreciate it and i don't know if i'm probably getting a little micro instead of staying macro but something um very important to me at least is student efficacy and as you know faith i'd love to talk hattie with you um are we when we're talking about um expand opportunities for students to have choice challenge and success or differentiating personalization is it is that also student-led student-driven when we're talking choice when we're talking meaning if i set my goals i'm more likely to achieve them with support for my teacher versus if my teacher is setting the goals and and so forth that student efficacy is so important and i kind of thought maybe it was included in there but i just don't physically see it so am i getting too macro to micro no we can

120we can talk all you want on those types of things but um we've just done uh learning target training with our junior high staff and are getting ready to do it we've done with the department chairs and a big part of that is sharing up front what we want students to learn and then building in time for them to reflect on their own to know whether they've mastered it so one of the key things that if we're not careful happens is that students sit back and wait until a teacher grades them or a teacher says they've given feedback but then as an adult you know if i sit through a meeting and i'm going to wait until dr sparlin says you know i'm going to give you a grade faith and i haven't been saying

121well wait i don't know if i understand this enough to get up and train you have to be monitoring that so we want to train our students to be able to do that as well and then you're absolutely right there's a big difference between differentiation and personalization differentiation is when a teacher provides a variety of opportunities to really match the levels personalization is i chose what i wanted to learn about and it's going to be important that we do both of those things it's it's so important and i think just student overall whether it's student efficacy in the classroom student voice through our ambassadors just really having the district driven by students is really important i think to our success overall um and then i i have a question for you and then i have

122one last comment but this is a lot to undertake and even if you have everything endless money and less time can we do what i prefer that we do is a few things really well versus everything at 30 40 50 so if there's i just want to make sure that when we're moving forward we're not setting ourselves up for failure so that's just a comment and then the thing that i don't think the entire envision 308 is capturing and i think we need to step back for a second is that what we are going through now and we're entering year three of the pandemic is going to become endemic this isn't going away covets not going away we're going to be dealing with this for the next probably 20 years until it becomes like the

123flu right i think we need built-in um processes for how we're going to handle school shutdowns um stuff like that really like disaster preparedness i think is very important and i think we need to see that somehow in one of those four um and i'm sorry i didn't think about that when we approved this it wasn't it didn't hit me until literally just tonight but this is something that's going to affect us for a long time we might see a specific elementary school shut down because it's going to take longer for them down the road to um you know vaccines or what have you so i think that we need somewhere in this envision 308 just some sort of idea that this is going to affect us more there's the things are going to affect

124us with covid then um then than just trying to be reactive to it we know it's here we know it's staying and it's not going away so those are just my thoughts thank you faith and and your team just done a phenomenal job um and i wish we could give you all the time and money you need to make it happen i got a real quick teacher perspective sure um i'm worried about over assessing i'm really worried about over assessing um i'm also worried a lot about reading and where our kids are at at reading and in particular now that we have the esser funds and i know that faith and i have kind of talked a little bit more at length about these ireland screenings but we got to start thinking outside of the

125box about how to get these kids to read because i will tell you that if they can't read the test our scores aren't going to go up so you know and faith is kind of more you know elementary but i think that needs to go across the board so i think we need to start looking at using our essar funds for that and then i also i have zero interest in buying materials that teachers aren't going to use like i know that that sometimes at a district level like those really thick language arts junior high books that my all of the swanson boys used one or two pages out of and i imagine that we spent a pretty large amount of money for those so in the world where we're one-to-one i don't know that

126we need to consider buying textbooks i think that we need to consider what's best for kids may not always be a textbook and the curriculum review process does take that into effect of what i'm what we're talking about is when you do need to provide that piece and i i've also heard the concerns about springboard that you're talking about when you said the overassessing piece we're trying to do some less of the big assessment pieces and have it be more off of for example with the literacy framework when the teacher reads with a small group of students really getting in and knowing for example which of the phonics they are able to do are they able to look through for context clues and but basing that instruction you know off of those pieces so i

127don't think it's an over assessment but it's about really noticing and knowing each student's strengths and weaknesses and then gearing instruction toward that right so that again from a teacher perspective when you guys are doing your walk-throughs if you're walking through and seeing a kid doing something on that one time at that one day i'm not i'm not sure that gives you enough information about those kids like i see where you're going with it and i understand it right and i don't want you to think that the classroom walkthroughs are going to give me individual student data they're not even going to give me individual teacher data and gone through and done this at a number of large districts now and you're going through and you're looking for levels of engagement you're looking and seeing

128and i asked the students you know what is it that you're learning today do they know what the learning target is and you know if i walk through and do 40 classrooms in the time that i'm there i get a pretty good sense of how we're doing and when i talk about the classroom walkthroughs it's really an evaluation of me and it's an evaluation of our team on how we're providing the professional development for teachers it's kind of like that formative assessment piece for teachers that they use with students of how am i doing with my instruction we're going to observe instruction to know how we're doing at supporting our teachers and learning what we want them to do so it's not at all and i know some teachers will be nervous because here comes

129the associate superintendent in the classroom but it's really an evaluation of how we're doing and getting a sense it's not well i think that's an important message and i think it's a culture thing too that we can build up to it and that's not something that's going to happen like a lot of teachers will not let anybody in their classroom right and that's i've already shared the message about the purpose and those things early on in august with the staff newsletter and met with the union going around and talking to the department chairs and key leaders so that they know the purpose behind that and we purposely when we do the classroom walkthroughs don't have the principles from those schools go with us so it's less of an evaluation of feel of for a teacher

130as it is an evaluation of the district on how we're moving forward in the instruction that we want but i your concerns are very valid i've done this before and some people are like i don't want her in my room you know not here yet but it's an important part of the process i can't in good conscience say from dak that i know exactly what's going on in classrooms without being in classrooms and getting around and seeing how we're doing i get to go next okay i have um some of my questions were already answered by other board members so i just i don't know if it's necessarily a question or more of a comment and a concern on slide through and it talked about using creativity i think if you look at the personality

131type of an average teacher you're going to have a type a but extremely creative person and i hope that we i love the words that i'm hearing and the things that i'm hearing it sounds great and i hope that we can do it i know particularly i'm just going to use an example at the junior high language arts level because it's something i'm familiar with is we're not doing that um we're telling my understanding is we're telling teachers this is your curriculum you have to get to these points at these times you have to do this book and you have you can't have any flexibility i remember when my oldest was in junior high before we adopted our new curriculum it was okay we're going to learn about dystopian stuff so you need to as

132a student pick a dystopian novel and read that and and the teacher provided instruction based on the topic they were learning and not like okay everybody has to open this specific book and read this book whether you like it or not too bad this is what we're doing because that's the curriculum and this is what we're not necessarily what the teacher wants to do but that's what they're being told they have to do and i just think when we're talking about literacy we are losing kids by the droves i know my children do not like to be told what to do and if they had some freedom in like here's the topic but you can pick if you don't know what to pick i i can help you i hope that we i feel like

133that's something we can implement now we don't have to wait for another type of curriculum we just have to maybe change right we have to walk the balance i i talk about it in tight and loose like there are tight that are standards that our kids have to learn especially in literacy and math especially at the younger grades it's not optional to teach fractions right now like you have to do that but in the manner of the materials even the resource that we choose isn't i don't think a mandate that all teachers have to use it i had a great fraction unit when i was a teacher i use a textbook at all but and you have to be able to do those pieces and allow for those teacher strengths and also student strengths and

134pieces so um it's harder to monitor and support that but it is the right thing to do i'm not a believer that on the second tuesday in october we're all going to be on page but uh like nobody wants to teach that way i don't think i wouldn't want to learn that way as well but we can't have it be so loose that somebody decides that they're not going to teach versions so when you talk about how do we have that choice in the literacy framework there's time for independent reading and small group that is student chosen text off of what that looks like in math when you look at what are those skills one of the greatest things that we can do is have students write problems that show that they understand the math

135concept behind that the new science standards with ngss is much more about inquiry than it is the actual content pieces and the social studies standards that we need to move to and getting into are not as much content have you memorized the capitals have you done all those things but can you draw connections so you can use a variety of ways like what you're talking about to get to the same mastery of skills for those pieces so some of that is allowing our staff to have some of that freedom but also keeping tight on making sure that it doesn't turn into just projects without skill mastery i i understand what you're saying and maybe we can talk sure outside of this about like more specifically what my concern might be but then i also had

136um i just want to make a comment at the last i used to be on the financing facilities committee great committee um at one of the ones we had last year towards the end of the year we did go over um a presentation an update of our facility needs and it included pictures and dollars so i'm hoping that you guys got that and you're not starting all over again it was very helpful yeah no we're actually uh we've got that from the architects and uh and rob put a lot of that together so we are using the vision 2020 plan to build on to that next wave pictures and all so you can see what we're talking about and what those pictures are and dr smarlin shared a powerpoint with me that included the same

137information yeah yeah thanks ruth um i guess it's my turn um first i just want to thank everyone for the enormous amount of hours that went into putting this together um it does seem like a very huge undertaking and um i think all my colleagues up here have asked great questions um i do want to say that as far as the the finance and facilities piece um i'm really eager for us to explore those new opportunities for revenue whether that's grants or businesses or par other partnerships heidi reminded me too in her presentation she talked about the alumni association we've had many alumni talk to us and say hey is there somewhere where i could donate i want to give to my high school alma mater so we are looking at that as well yeah

138and that's fantastic because i we are going to need um the continued revenue in order to make these things happen in order to have the the team and the staff that we need and um i do understand our communities feel about paying you know having 71 percent come from them so i i think that is something that does need to be a priority in order to make these things happen very excited to see the the literacy and math achievement on here i think that's crucial as well um and i just uh to to eugene's point i think it's very important that we have meaningful ways to measure and to report back to our community and obviously to to the board i'm wondering too uh and i'm not sure if this was included so i apologize

139if it was but what is the plan for reporting back this information about how we're doing to both the board and to our community so at the next board meeting we are going to be talking about a dashboard and that is not only looking at test scores and things but it is a piece of adding the calendar of board reports so every year there would be an english learner report every year there would be a professional development report and we would go through together as kind of the plan but we'll need your input as well and at the end of that say okay here are the things we said we would accomplish this year are we making adequate progress are we hitting it out of the park are we status quo and kind of color

140coding that so that as those reports come to be you can look on a one page from the community and look in colors are everything looking good is this an area that we really need to work on and it would be looking at some of the financial pieces with that but also looking at student achievement looking at our graduation rates but also some of the softer pieces of the implementation of the framework are we where we said you know where we would be so to tell the story i think you not only need numbers but you need the narrative behind that and then that dashboard we're thinking about having the links to the board presentations that we make so if somebody wants to really get in and see here was the literacy framework piece here

141was all of that so they see some of the supporting documents that go into all of the things that we want to accomplish by 2026 and have our mile markers along the way and that's the next meeting okay is the dashboard only annual or is that something so it comes out the dashboard we envision it being i'm using the word envision a lot envision on the district website permanently all the time and it would be updates if you think back to the calendar of board reports if our professional development report is always april that section of the dashboard would be updated every april when we're talking about the budget if that was going to be updated that part of it would be updated during that board report time all of the state student achievement comes

142you on usually on halloween so november you'd have a lot of that part of the dashboard updated so it would be a continually changing place that is permanently part of the district website okay terrific just one more comment because you you kind of hit my last comment or you mentioned it but um you're talking about the implementation of it and typically a strategy has a communication strategy that that overlays it and there are so many layers to what you're talking about and earlier you mentioned that if it's not implemented well then it may not work simply because it wasn't being done and so i think perception is reality not only for the the board the district the staff and so i think that it's going to be so important that we have a communication strategy

143so that every layer of this plan is communicated not only you know it's who needs to know what but by when right and so i think for the district the superintendent employees schools students parents and then the community we have to i think simultaneously as we're creating this plan we have to also outline who needs to know what by when so that as we're implementing it uh and what do they need to know because as we're implementing it that way people are getting information in a timely manner they can process it and then when it's when it's when they're ready or it's time to actually implement it we can ensure that they understand it prior to us implementing it and then finding out that they don't get it and now we have to do a

144bunch of rework so i just i don't know who if it's the communications department's responsibility but i think that we have to make sure that simultaneously while we're doing envision you know 308 that it's not something that is also on your backs to do that but that it's a partnership within communication so that we can have segmented communications for all of those uh areas across the district right i think one of the pieces that will help with that is the climate for learning framework because the climate for learning framework kind of has all of this in it it has the expectations around instruction the framework the sel pieces the equity pieces the amplification of student voice to have all of that in there so when we talk uh at the school level and the district

145level about school improvement plans and district improvement plans we're wanting everybody to tie that into climate for learning framework so as we update and provide that communication the more that we can have that one tool that shows how all of these pieces fit into doing that and then the budget and all about that will be very helpful but it is the hope to have that climate for learning really show all of these pieces how it how it ties together but you are exactly right that a huge amount of our job as we're trying to improve all of this instruction is communication communication communication because that goes to the culture piece that goes to trust and i could really spend a full time job just sending emails and making videos and talking about what it is

146we're going to do and what it is we've already done it yes well and i think it's just just to reiterate what eugene said you you live in this every day all day and parents can't always listen at board meetings don't always know where to find things because they have to go to that date having that dashboard and then a communication strategy to explain why this is coming out when will really help go we'll go a long way with transparency with the community with what we're trying to implement and again like you said eugene time to process even as a newer board member it takes a lot to process all of this and but when you're on the other side of it in the community it's even it's even harder because we don't they don't

147have direct i mean they do have direct access to you but fewer people reach out um so i think also if there can be a two-way part of that dashboard where people can send you whoever it might be if you click here it goes to the appropriate person to get their questions answered that would be helpful as well is there any more discussion on this topic good okay so we'll move on to action items we have 8.1 approval of resolution calling for a public hearing on the fy22 budget do we need to have any discussion on this no great can i get a motion for the approval of resolution calling for a public hearing on the fy22 budget i make a motion to approve a resolution calling for a public hearing on the fy 22

148tentative budget and place it on file for public inspection until the public hearing for said budget on the 27th day of september second mrs croner aye dr marino aye mrs johnson aye mr gateswood aye mrs swanson aye mrs simonton aye motion passes 6-0 8.2 approval of drivers education vehicles agreement is there any discussion needed on this topic can i get a motion for the approval of drivers education vehicles agreement i make a motion to approve the driver's education vehicle lease agreement with enterprise fleet management as presented second mr gatewood hi mrs johnson aye mrs swanson aye dr marino aye mrs simonton aye mrs croner motion passes 6-0 8.3 approval of building administrator contracts can i get a motion for the approval of building administrator contracts i make a motion to approve the building administrator contracts

149as presented second mrs swanson bye mrs croner aye mrs simultan aye mr gatewood aye mrs johnson aye dr marino aye motion passes six zero can i get a motion for 8.4 approval of personnel report i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented and discussed second mr gatewood aye mrs johnson aye mrs swanson aye dr marino aye mrs simonton aye mrs croner aye motion passes 6-0 can i get a motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn