001408 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman here mrs doyle here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer yeah mrs swanson please rise for the pledge of allegiance one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay item 4.1 public comment on behalf of the board of education i welcome you to tonight's meeting due to tighter restrictions for public meetings we are not able to to allow community members to be present this evening in person as stated on the agenda community members were invited to submit their comments by email to the board of education secretary to be read by the board of education president or to request a zoom link to make their comments virtually we value the feedback we receive from our
002residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system thank you comments are limited to five minutes per person and no discussion of personnel matters including names or specific job titles 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 you provided tonight we'll be alternating uh between myself and mr bauman for our four email public comments and then we have one zoom public comment john demarco i'm a senior at oswego east i would like to speak for high school students when i say this has by far been the worst year i have ever experienced this isn't just because my senior year has been washed away before my eyes nor
003is it because i am experiencing a delayed season for my sport in which i have committed to compete in college it is because of the stress that comes with this form of learning this is not a healthy environment it doesn't feel right it doesn't feel good we are sitting in front of the computer for six hours a day getting a small break in the afternoon for lunch i sit in the same chair doing the same thing staring at the same screen over and over again for six hours a day at least four days a week then i sit at the same table in the same chair and stare at the same screen for however many hours it takes for me to do homework my eyes hurt my head hurts i have to type a question
004during class time to maybe get answered or schedule office hours after school to get back on the computer with a teacher to ask a question teachers included with the students nobody is happy here the mental wellness of the majority of students is low and going downhill students who used to once enjoy learning are disliking school not seeing the purpose students who were stellar students are now seeing their grades falling even if just a bit i have experienced this there have been countless studies i'll name a few that show how damaging this way of teaching and schooling is on a young and growing person according to the american psychological association students are today are more stressed than the kids in psychiatric wards from the 1950s today add to that no social contact no school no sports
005no outlets add kids who find school to be safe place or even the only place they are guaranteed breakfast and lunch all of this due to a pandemic with about a 99 survival rate stress is growing in students and the district is doing nothing to help with these issues another article from north texas daily shows results from a pool of students and how they feel they will fail how stressed they feel and how unmotivated they are these are all issues that online learning exacerbates i'm just a student but this is my opinion masks work let's get back to in-person learning thank you maggie lager hello my name is margaret lager and i am currently a junior at oswego high school i would first like to say thank you to the board of education for taking
006the time to listen to my concern i would like to start off by introducing myself a little bit i am a straight a student i take honors in ap level classes and i play competitive soccer year round i like school i enjoy going to school and i work very hard in class but this year i have had zero motivation while doing online school there is zero motivation to do homework after already spending six hours on the computer there is zero motivation to pay attention and engage in the material that is being taught to us now take into consideration a kid who has a hard time in person and has zero motivation to go to school in person now that student is most likely failing or not even showing up to class those kids have zero
007interest and they are not being supported the same way they would be if they were in person additionally it is hard to get help when you don't understand something the last thing i want to do after sitting on the computer for six hours is to get on another google meet to get help with whatever i don't understand honestly i am so tired of sitting on the computer by the end of the day that i would rather just not understand the topic the student fail rate at ohs was significantly higher last semester than in the past i strongly feel like my personal education is being put at a disadvantage by not being in the classroom every day i especially feel like my learning is being put at a disadvantage because other schools in the state and
008across the country are in person learning every day for example yorkville high school has been in person learning all year and so have many schools across the country this also affects me while i'm applying to colleges and for scholarships i am not learning the same things as kids who are in the classroom so when i go to apply for a scholarship kids who are in person learning have an advantage now not only is learning being put at a disadvantage but so are the students social skills melanie mcallister dear school board thank you for all your hard work and effort i believe the kids need to go back to school asap i have two special needs children and they had to get counseling for anxiety and as a direct result of the remote learning my youngest
009in second grade is just not motivated to learn any more on a daily basis i beg him to do his in-class work and homework this morning he said mom i hate remote learning is this the type of message we want to send to second graders i hate school the special needs children as a group need to return on their own first to in-person school this should be all the special needs iep children not just the self-contained iep students all the kids with ieps are suffering and they need to go back to in-person school the schedule for hybrid simply doesn't work very well do you have small children my kids are tired and brain fried by 1 45 to 3 30 for live teaching on the remote days three hours in person two days a week
010is not enough hours to really help the kids and doing homework in the morning doesn't make sense either my kids do better and are much more alert having a structured schedule of live classes in the morning already it feels like such a long day with remote learning on the computer six and a half hours a day plus more homework after that enough is enough people are simply going to move and buy houses in other districts that are around here and this school district will be even more broke or enroll their kids in private school come on school district 308 let's help the kids i care about the kids mental health and social skills too sincerely melanie mcallister rebecca shower our system is definitely broken the fact that my son is a junior has adhd has
011had a 504 plan since first grade and now failing classes because he cannot go to school in person is ridiculous all my son wants to do is go to school he is quiet sweet boy keeps to himself and doesn't get into trouble teachers tell me they wish he'd speak up more well it's better than hearing he talks too much or he's being disruptive his doctor wants to put him on antidepressants do you know what one of the side effects are of antidepressants suicide i just want my fun loving son back we all want our fun-loving children back a sense of normalcy back in our day to day lives i constantly watch over him making sure he doesn't become another statistic thank you elizabeth palatine she's not on there and the phone call you did email
012okay okay okay well then we'll move forward and close public comment as the the fifth okay will we see her can you hear me yes hi my name is elizabeth palatine and i am the co-president of the oswego education association well then we'll move forward and close public comment as the fifth okay uh there's a little bit of a lag can you see me can you hear me i still need to turn off your youtube channel hi my name is and i am the co-president of the oswego association elizabeth turn off your youtube channel please i think she's working on it all right can you hear me yes yes thank you so i am elizabeth palatine the co-president of the oswego education association 2020 was like no other year in our lifetime and the new
013year begins with us continuing to adapt to ever evolving circumstances and events teaching learning and every other aspect of life including in-person board meetings continue to be in flux it projects to be a dark winter but hope for a return to normalcy is on the horizon with a vaccine seemingly within reach teachers in our community have worked hard to innovate connect and educate students in a very different environment working tirelessly to provide the best opportunities for our students all teachers want to be back in person teaching interacting and helping students in the classroom we set up to be welcoming and comforting and some feel that time is soon but others do not the oswego education association supports students returning in person as long as the guidelines set forth by the ibph cdc and an appro
014and the approved district safety plan can be followed and maintained staff and student safety must remain a priority and following and enforcing these guidelines as more students return is essential the oea believes all learners on-site and remote deserve the chance to benefit from equal educational resources and opportunities all learners need access to the time opportunity and attention they need to make the most of what they are working to become we strongly believe that teachers should be part of the planning for changes to the school day as our highly trained and dedicated teachers bring unique experiences and insight that can help ensure both safety and learning needs are met to the highest degree possible for all learners members of the oea look forward to continuously working with all stakeholders to provide input that will help provide
015every student the structure safety and opportunity they deserve throughout these challenging times as difficult decisions continue to be made thank you that's the last public comment so now we'll close public comment moving on to item 5.1 board member comments we'll start on tony's end today you have anything you'd like to say of course there is um i think for the first time tonight when we're saying the pledge of allegiance i actually heard that three times you say united you say one nation you say indivisible means everybody together right everybody's going to work on this and solve the problem together so we're in the middle of a time where we have a lot of big things happening in this district as we all know we do not have a lot of money as we all know
016we have people that really want the kids to return to school full-time and we have people that really want the kids to stay home and learn remotely so tonight we're going to have a lot of discussions and i just want to say that there's different parts of community there's that first part of community that's just you and that second part of community which is your family and it goes up from there like nesting dolls and i teach you know that i teach and i teach second and third graders and i teach about community and we talk about what everybody does in the community to help out um it was very um it is very important to note that when we hear from the community in whatever form that is emails community comments talking to people
017in the community that we hear everybody we hear these people that are desperate for their kids to go back we hear the emotional and social needs and we know that that's huge and that's very real um but i would be remiss in not saying this at board comments that as a teacher when i look at some of these kids it's not special needs it's not emotional issues for some of the kids they have poor habits they get on zoom they refuse to turn on their camera whether or not that's a problem for their house i don't know but some of them refuse to turn on their cameras uh they're not participating they're not attending and this is what i want to say as a community as families and as people in our community even though
018we feel compassion for these kids and we feel compassion for everybody in the community and i do we have to address the issue of building habits that will get us through our education education can be very hard to get in different parts of the world and in different circumstances and some people persist and they get it no matter how many things are difficult and what i want to say is that this might not be the last pandemic this might not be the last time that we have to address these issues so we really have to think about how we're going to support a good attitude good activities creating things for our family that make this endurable things for our students that make this endurable things that um the social connections keeping those going in whatever
019form they can happen but i'm not going to let everybody off the hook because i think that some of the struggle comes from just blame somebody don't work it don't fix it just blame somebody and that really bothers me and so whatever happens tonight i hope that families will take that to heart and look at their own situation and say what could i do to make a better social life for my children what could i do to keep those social connections going what could i do to make sure that they have a good attitude about learning because that's super important and that's something that is going to help us no matter what happens to the school plan so that's what i wanted to say and now i set it and i'm all done friend anything
020to add or to state i guess not ad but well this is not a a critique tony because i appreciate that's okay comments i just i i think we're straying a little a ways away from the original intent of board member comments i think that the things that that that we're talking about and are important for tonight will be discussed when we get to that subject um obviously we don't have a lot to report on about visits and activities and things that are happening in the district other than i think we're all happy to be back at least learning in some fashion here we got lots on the docket let's go that's my comment okay um brent as you said we haven't been anywhere there's no buildings open to go to no events no music
021christmas concerts no plays no musicals um which is a little on the depressing side however i will say i just want to acknowledge all the communication that is taking place at least that we're receiving a lot of emails coming through i won't say it's one-sided there's plenty of emails from many different perspectives within the district so there may not be a response to every single one but i want people to know that i do see them i read them i value what you're saying i heard those that came in to greeted us at the board meeting this evening saw you heard you and i again just appreciate the the participation via the communication that's occurring nope nothing for me i think i'll kind of echo matt's comments and i appreciate all the messages mostly via
022email that we have received and communication from community members it's important that we hear what the community has to say and so i appreciate that and i have other comments but i will reserve those for when we discuss those items tonight so so the only thing i'd like to comment on tonight is is the concept of the fact that we get to have an education and that we get to express ourselves freely as part of our country we saw less than a week ago how divided our country has come be it through whatever means social media or through just a natural polarization or for whatever cause that's not for me to decide but what i have seen is that our community is is pretty representative of that we have a very divided community but i
023think the thing that i would like to ask for our community to think about and to focus on going forward is that what we all care about is our kids education and that the fact that we have different opinions on what is best for our kids and what our kids need individually is what we're trying to accomplish by creating plans that give parents choices so i would like to just invite our community to take a moment to think about the flip side of what your belief and your your fear or your concern or your situation is and think how that might be different and try to find something that is understandable about it and try to find some ways to make sure that we are able as a community whether we're learning in the building
024or whether we're learning remotely that as a community we continue to value the education for all of our kids despite what they need and that we continue to value each other as fellow neighbors and members of the same community so that we can when we get through these steps be able to still appreciate each other and celebrate the things that we have like freedom of speech that's all i have to say item 5.2 board committee reports policy and legislative you want me to start well i mean i guess my first question would be do you guys have any particular questions we had a pretty good meeting um a lot of people there got a lot done revisited some stuff um there is oh let's see oh i wrote down um in particular six colon three
025nope sorry seven colon 100 which was health eye dental exams because i know i just got a meeting or i just got an email from my kids building that said make sure as we start to think about going back to school that you have all of your shots and your shot records turned in and your and i i think with kovitz some of that kind of so just to kind of put that out there again that parents should keep an eye on that and make sure that you have all of your medical and dental and vision and whatever else you need turned in but i think as a general rule it was a good meeting um you guys have any questions i know brent has one is that for the committee conclusions or for when
026we talk about the information items for consent i think it's information brent would you like to i'll i'll say my questions for 7-3 okay thank you anything to add map no um the the meetings have gone very well we have so many uh the policies that we go through our legislative updates the legal updates that um just normally have to and must occur uh but the dialogue that we've had has been good dialogue uh it's been good conversations everyone's bringing up valid points and um it's just it's a it's a productive committee we did we do have ones the six colon 280 the grading and promotion that um miss patterson kind of led us through the our versi our policy piece of it but we wanted teaching and learning and i i can't remember if
027i sent you guys an email to look at that one take a look at that yeah okay so i may have to do that that was six 320 or uh it was six two eighty six two eighty oh okay yeah i do have one request i think this is the appropriate time for that this is something actually lori and i had talked about um i think we immediately need a policy that defines the boards or the district's position on impact fees land cash fees etc the the finance committee uh meeting or finance committee has been looking at this i think the legislative and policy committee can start drafting the language and i and i know i was going to give you some ideas and i still will do that does that seem reasonable for you
028guys in your next meeting to to talk about that and even if we don't have numbers to drop in at least we could point to a policy for the government entities in the district to understand what our current positions are positions as far as not waving for example we we might have we might decide that we want to adopt a policy that says we will not negotiate away impact fees we may adopt some different language in there but the point is if we remember it was a couple years ago another government body made some changes to the fees that were coming into the district they claimed that they had reached out to the district they did they didn't get a response from the board they got um some information but they never gave the board
029an opportunity to respond before they took action to lower those fees and i'm just saying i think it might be helpful if we had a document that had that information stored so that anybody can access it so i was actually going to address that when we talked about 73 also so just in the interest of keeping things where we want to for committee reports what our board agreements are is that when we go through these information items we'll take a look at which committees we feel should take a look or which committees would like to take a look or ought to take a look at these things so i think that we've got a couple things on here already that we're going to be looking to ask some other committees to do which is good
030and that's the whole purpose but i think for right now let's let's try to keep moving forward so we can get to our guests that are waiting to speak and to our other work item 5.3 the superintendent's report well good evening board and happy new year i hope that everyone had a nice holiday season and it's good to see everyone this evening at the december 7th board of education meeting i stated that i would be informing the community by january 11th if we would be moving forward with our return to in-person learning plan on january 19th as you know i sent a letter to the community on january 2nd stating that i was happy to say that yes we would be moving forward with such plan and that we're looking forward to welcoming our students
031back who have chosen in person instruction so as you all know later this evening we have we're going to have a work session regarding our return plan so more to come on this subject in just a little bit also in my letter to the community on january 2nd i shared that we are currently still in a pause regarding sports i was informed that the illinois high school association executive director met with the illinois department of public health director along with the deputy deputy governor on january 6th it's good to hear that the leadership of these organizations are coming together having those conversations the next ihsa board meeting is january 13th and i know that many athletes and parents are awaiting updates and we will continue to communicate that information to the parents as we receive
032it i was also informed last week that ohs alumni and teacher michael yowie uh will have his first young adult novel published in summer of 2020. the novel is the civil war of amos abernathy in his debut novel so please join me in this exciting accomplishment for one of our very own 308 uh school teachers congratulations to my michael [Applause] and that is my report for this evening thank you item six approval of the consent agenda any questions can i have a motion i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the december 7th 2020 board of education meeting open and closed session 6.2 to acknowledge the foia requests received by the district and 6.3 board policies references and legal updates section 3 general school administration 3 colon 4-0 section
0334 operational services 4 colon 1 0 4 colon 5 5 four colon one five zero four colon one seven five section five general personnel five colon three zero five colon one nine zero five colon two seven zero section six instruction six colon one five six colon two zero six colon four zero six colon three two zero section seven students seven colon one four zero and seven colon three two five second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes seven zero information uh information uh item 7.1 lincoln prairie subdivision discussion christy thank you so i'll start with some background information before i introduce our guest that will be joining us via zoom in december the district received a letter from mr
034mr russell whitaker who's an attorney representing pulte homes that letter outlined poltay's proposed plan to develop approximately 500 acres near bednarsec junior high and wolf's crossing elementary schools but i'll leave that to our visitors to describe that uh project to you but included in that letter is a request from paultay for the school district to waive any land cash fees on the age restricted portion of that development um shortly after that the receipt of that letter i had a virtual meeting with representatives from the city of aurora to review that plan in more detail including any uh some potential commercial and retail opportunities along route 30. so we've also invited representatives from the city and then finally i've had a conversation with the fox valley park district about the project and we also have a
035representative from that organize organization here with us tonight so with that i'd like to introduce our zoom guests uh representing paultay homes we have mr matt brawley who's the land entitlement manager and mr mr russell whitaker who's their attorney from the city of aurora we have mr alex alexandra who's the chief management officer mr trevor dick director of development strategy and facilitation mr david dibo director of economic development and ms tracy basic who is the senior planner and then finally we have the executive director mr james pilmer from the fox valley park districts so we'll begin by letting mr burley and mr whitaker provide a brief presentation about the project and i can't see them so gentlemen we'll present that on our screen here and then you can begin hey good evening this is russ
036whitaker i'm an attorney at the law firm of roosevelt whitaker uh 127 aurora avenue in uh in naperville um just wanted to clarify real quickly as we get going i actually have rob gutz with pulte homes uh with me this evening uh matt brawley is not in attendance so um the the request before you uh was was submitted by myself um i am working uh with polti and helping to lead the project uh the lincoln prairie project through the process with the city of aurora um and various other governmental bodies that have approval rights with respect to the project i don't want to spend a bunch of time going through all of the details of the plan uh but this is a very large and complex development parcel it's the far south end um of
037the city of aurora uh roughly 530 534 acres i think it is um we're developing we're planning to develop the property in phases given the size and scale of the project we anticipate this being a 10-year project um there are commercial components of the project um there's a residential component of the project which would be traditional single-family homes like you have in much of uh your district but the the sort of core to the project is a del webb age-restricted active adult community this is a very unique product something that's not offered generally in in well it's not not in district 308 there's not a a similar facility in the city of aurora many of you may know del webb by name uh del webb huntley is uh is certainly a facility that many people
038know there are a couple there are a number of dell webs throughout illinois but um pulte homes actually owns the dell webb brand um and would be building this project comprehensively with the dell web being centered on uh the dell web is the the is the critical element of the dell web brand um is the age restricted component of the project so rather than this being traditional housing where i might live in under rob might live in it this housing is restricted specifically for folks that are 55 plus that's that's a little bit unique traditionally you might think hey how do you get away from that or get away with that you can't do that because of fair housing laws um however a number of years ago uh the federal government passed the fair housing
039or the housing for older persons act which is actually an exception to the fair housing act and allows us to specifically discriminate if it's based on age and if we meet certain metrics so that's what we plan to do here um it's a model that's very popular in some other regions of the country giving the aging demographics in aurora in the surrounding community we think there's a dramatic need for this sort of housing type um we've been working closely with aurora fox metro some of the other planning bodies to get the project rolling um and excited to be able to initiate the conversation here with district 308 you can see in the in the powerpoint presentation we put together there's an overview of the land plan kind of color coded to show you the uh
040the various planning areas um if you want to just i guess kind of shift forward a couple of slides i don't want to get into a lot of details about all of the specific project product um but here on that last slide you can see the the core of the community which is the dell web um that is the that is really the heart of the community and why we're out here developing this property if you go to the next slide there's a couple of commercial pods that we're reserving um you can see a 30-acre pot of commercial to the north that could be a like a a grocery store centered commercial center something in that it'll get 30 acres and then there's a smaller community shopping center area to the south the parcels along
041route 30 are future development parcels we don't anticipate being there for five six seven eight years even uh so we're not necessarily planning specifically what those would be um they might look like traditional single-family housing they might be an expansion of the dell webb community we're trying to maintain flexibility you go to the next slide please just kind of going over the same uh the same areas i just discussed this is the next slide is what i what i think i really wanted to talk about so when we look at this slide what you see is the extraordinary value that we would be creating with this project so what we went that what we did here is we evaluated the eav which is obviously the basis of the tax revenue the district 308 operates on
042you can see the type of revenue being created at lincoln crossing which is the traditional single family product you can see the tax revenue being created at the lincoln prairie del web and you can see the taxable value being created at the commercial we've broken this down on a per unit basis if you go to the next slide you'll see the aggregate values uh and so here you see this is really small on my screen so i'm going to have uh have trouble getting you exact numbers but i think the the total eav at lincoln crossing is like 21 million dollars um i i don't know if it's 48 58 or 68 million dollars on lincoln prairie del web but then the commercial segment has an eav of about 10 million what you see though
043is the the actual tax revenue that's being generated off of each of these components of the development what you'll notice is that the dell web is the real generator of tax revenue for district 308 you're looking at over 4 million dollars a year in annual tax revenue from the dell web in total the this development project would generate over six i think it's about six and a half or six and a half million dollars annually in new tax revenue to district 308 so there's an extraordinary win here for district 308 i think that's part of the reason that um we've been working so cooperatively and i think city or brewer has been excited about the development opportunity if you could flip to the next site please so the ask from us is relatively simple and
044you know it's interesting because i heard i was on the youtube channel and listening to the board meeting um in advance and being recognized here and i heard a comment that you might um talk at a committee level about not negotiating away impacts this is a unique scenario because impact fees are something that were created under state law and the supreme court has weighed in uh the supreme court has said that impact fees are appropriate and can be charged by a by a government not as a taking when they are specifically and uniquely attributable to the needs that are created by that development we pay impact fees to the school district when we generate kids because there is a need created by our project so of course on the lincoln crossing project where we will
045be generating students we will be paying impact fees which are specifically and uniquely attributable to the needs created by our project however at lincoln prairie it is an age-restricted project we will not have children residing in that project there will not be any impact to the to the school district we anticipate that the proposed or the the required fee would be about half a million dollars we're asking for a waiver of that half a million dollars not because we're negotiating not because not just because we're generating six million dollars in revenue in this project but because pursuant to supreme court law it's not appropriate because there is no impact to the school district there is no cost to the school district associated with educating kids therefore it is inappropriate by operation of law to charge
046an impact that's not negotiating a way that is following the law and i think that is something that is absolutely critical and appropriate for a school district who is educating the the the kids who are supposed to step in and follow our democratic rules and i think the the reason i included the lincoln prairie commercial on this slide is to show that where there is no impact you do not collect an impact so lincoln prairie commercial center will generate no kids and we recognize in ordinances that we don't collect impact fees there so it follows just the same way on the dell web because there will be no kids there is no impact for you so that's that that's the position we're taking on this this is something that we've done in many other places
047if you look at naperville the school district 203 school district 204 have waived impact fees um really without question and it's actually been adopted into the code in the city of naperville and so this is something that happens by operation of law because naperville has seen a number of developments similar to this so this is an educational process i understand this isn't something that you've seen before we're look we look forward to working with you where our goal is to work cooperatively with you have an educated conversation and get to the point where we need to be at the end of the day we think we're bringing a project here that is huge win for 308 and we look forward to working with if you have any questions i'd certainly be happy to answer would
048anyone like to begin with some questions matt um could you estimate or guess how soon some of the commercial development would begin once the um 55 and older community is starting to establish yeah i mean we're our goal is to facilitate that development happening as soon as possible um we're under contract to buy all of that property that that we had planned um so if we can find a commercial development partner the sooner we can move on that the better that's that that just helps our bottom line so we we want to see that move as quickly as possible the bottom line is this is not an area that has a a huge number of rooftops that traditionally would have supported uh commercial development uh by adding rooftops into this area we think there's going
049we're going to be creating additional demand for commercial and the commercial becomes more viable right if i'm a commercial developer if i'm a commercial operator if i'm joule i'm looking at how many rooftops there are within service areas and if there's not enough rooftops then i'm not building additional commercial i'm going to serve from a dish from a different facility by us we're planning 700 roughly 700 homes on this site that's the type of development that's not generating kids for you but is generating the rooftops that is going to support additional commercial development i have a question um sir you gave us the example of district 203 and 204 that they've waived the impact land cash fees is that what you're saying that is correct okay do you have any examples of districts like oswego
050where we do not have a big industrial base of a district that did that same thing but they don't have the same circumstances as naperville i i don't think well one i don't know i don't know if 204 has a huge industrial base but i don't i don't think that's relevant it's because it's not a question of negotiation the those districts have recognized that by law by by order of the supreme court they do not have the right to collect an impact fee where there is no impact to their district so they're not doing it because they don't think they need it they're doing it because they don't think they have the right to do it can i ask maureen do we have the right to do it the impact fees are as mr whitaker
051says is is a tied to the impact to the school district of having to educate those students and the lag from when you're going to start getting that money um through the levy so if there are no students there would be no impact i would i would ask differently about that just a little bit thank you maureen for the clarification because i think there's one other way that i think we typically see that is heard of and that's the impact of the fact that the del webb is right behind non-age restricted homes that normally could be considered walkers to the schools that are attached to that they would fall within the 1.5 mile range but very likely because of the amount of traffic brought in because of the dell website um that might be considered
052too hazardous and it would likely be considered too hazardous for students to cross that road which would incur transportation costs for our district that's my one concern is that the second concern i have is that while you're age restricted maybe you can answer for me if a student has to move in with their grandparents due to financial hardship there are things like the mckinney-vento homeless act that would require us to educate that student if they lived with their grandparent even if it was short-term and if it's age restricted to the extent that you've demonstrated would that student that student would have to qualify as a homeless student in order to live there i would imagine and that can bring pretty significant costs to our district moving forward if we then have to educate that student
053for the rest of the year so i'd like a little bit more information on what you've seen especially in this time of financial hardship where families are having to move in together if you have seen this happen and how how is this addressed so it's it's addressed up front in our covenants um i i don't know specifically where you live but you may have a set of declarat a declaration of covenants conditions and restrictions which governs your property that you own those covenants you voluntarily assume and agree to comply with those covenants when you choose to buy a home in that subject so we will have a set of covenants that are recorded against the del webb those covenants say that someone under the age of 19 may not reside or may not spend the
054night in the community for more than 90 days in a year so there is no basis for someone someone registering for district 308 with an address in our dull web community they could be prohibited by the homeowners association from libya right which is what my concern is would that consider them a homeless student then because they cannot list that address and if they can reside there and they can reside there for up to 90 days and they enroll in school as a homeless student because they reside in a dull web neighborhood that's close to a good school we would incur pretty significant impact so i guess yeah and there is if i could just say there is a distinction between the covenants prohibiting them from living there that is not something that the district can
055point to the district would be obligated to take that child if they in fact are sleeping their nighttime abode rightfully or wrongfully under your covenants if they are there the district would have the obligation to take them in as a student for whatever period of time that they are actually physically there on a nighttime basis and then they would be required to be educated for the rest of the year no matter where they then reside after that so i just sorry ruth speak i reside in a planned community in oswego that has a 55 and older portion to our community that has similar covenants so perhaps we could take a look at what i mean it's not brand new so the community would be happier than that community paid an impact fee um it was
056is there an impact especially what we're seeing now with families needing to kind of move to grandma's for a little while so not that i'm aware of but i don't my kids don't go to elementary school anymore so i um i but i think we could maybe look to that as a example and a resource of information of what has been done in the past and what how it played out too because i believe that we have restrictions on you are not allowed to have children living in that community at all which is why i'm concerned i do also want to say thank you guys i i know it doesn't sound like we're grateful to see you here but we really are for a variety of reasons not the least of which is that you
057have no obligation to be here and that this decision on impact fees and land cash does not reside with us as a school district no matter how it impacts us or not it only resides with the municipalities in which those developments are addressed or reside so i really do appreciate you considering speaking with us educating us hearing what we have to say about the things that are just a little bit different for us right now and the things that we would be needing to look at when we're looking at what we find as an impact and again to the city of aurora thank you for even asking and for showing up especially via zoom to do that um because we really do we really do appreciate it even if it doesn't seem like it plus
058bringing growth thank you very much because that's what we need and it's much appreciated can i just ask one question things on but oh no i'm not i just forgot to say that at the beginning and i feel bad um del webb the only dell web community that i'm familiar with is del webb huntley up on 47. and if you have traveled 47 at the onset of del webb and huntley and today it is immensely different the the commercial impact that del webb has had on that community and a community that at that point 550 units whose discretionary spending is different than our our household they have generally the discretionary funds to spend and that commercial follows with them and that's one thing that we've always struggled and pleaded with our local governing bodies to
059work with us on we need more commercial yes this is households yes there is a possibility there may be a few out of the 550 homes that might have ace that might have a student at some point but with those 550 homes is commercial tax revenue that is what we're always asking for we're not always going to get commercial without without any risk we want commercial here's commercial being handed to us as part of a planned community i think that's something that we really need to consider and even though as you said this is something aurora can do but i think we have to look at the positive and and how this is going to benefit district 308 i agree with that can i just ask a question as a community member not maybe necessarily
060as a board member so um i'm looking at where it's at on route 30 there and wolf's crossing and i know that that kind of housing plan or business plan will come with an increase in traffic and we already have kind of a big traffic hold up here right at us we go east which is really right down the street from where you're planning on building so are there any i didn't i i looked at your roads right i looked at the aurora website has something on theirs tonight too and but they didn't mention it there either yup uh good evening everyone uh if you don't mind if i try and take a shot at answering that trevor dick uh with the mayor's office of economic development the city of aurora uh thank you very
061much for the opportunity to be part of this this evening i just wanted to add to that i think i could help address that so we have actually at the same time as this project has been moving forward we've been concurrently in the process of updating our comprehensive plan for this area the area is zoned and planned for decades to be over 500 acres of industrial land we think that even if this poultry development didn't go forward that the rate use is low density residential with commercial as uh as some of the of the members have stated uh especially talking to the school district the importance of over 30 acres of commercial would be fantastic um in terms of senior housing we think that would be a win-win but i'll get back a little bit
062more to the transportation uh we updated the ola heggs intersection i'm sure you're very much aware of that and uh the city of aurora went out and got federal grant dollars thank goodness to pay for that realignment in the hopes of improving the transportation flow in this area if any development comes through in this area they would be required to widen eola to be a five-lane cross-section they'd be required to widen 111th street and we'd make sure that we work with the village of oswego to make sure that the improvements to wolves crossing are in place as you mentioned uh trustee the wolf's crossing is very narrow from this location to the high school and i'm sure you've seen the villages plan to widen and put in roundabouts and we'd make sure that we support
063them as much as we can and encourage them in terms of traffic flow we we hear you i also live in this area and i want to make sure that no matter what happens the traffic flow is very minimal and i think from talking my transportation engineers i'm pretty optimistic that if the roads are widened and there's an interior road system put in place that has a lot of access and egress and i think we can overcome that transportation uh but that's definitely something we're going to keep in mind you know and i would just to add on to that i having worked on a number of age-restricted projects in my career one of the things you're going to find is that seniors do not act the same as my family does right they don't
064have kids that they're running to soccer practice or running to school or after school activities and so when we do a traffic study what you're going to find is that the senior development is going to have a very different impact on roads because seniors aren't necessarily going to work at the same time they're not picking up students they're not coming home at the same time they have more life flexibility and they're using that to be smart and avoid the rest of us that are all traveling on the roads at the same time so there's there's so many ways that this project is is beneficial to 308 to the fox valley park district to fox metro to the city of aurora that you know we're just beginning to explore and explain all of those things so
065i'm not looking to end the conversation here tonight and we wanted to introduce it let you know that we're here to be partners with you um we we think that this is a partnership that's starting here you know and we started six months ago in 2020 but it's something that's going to be going on for the next 10 years you're across the street we want to be working and working cooperatively with you guys so we're happy to explain a lot of this information as we keep moving on in the grand scheme of things we think the overall request we're making for the waiver of the half million dollar fee um is minor in comparison to the the four million dollars you're going to get annually out of that dell web you you want commercial development
066and i understand that it helps your property tax base but look at the numbers we gave you you're going to get about 10 million dollars in eav out of that commercial parcel you're going to get seven times that seven times that you would need seven new commercial centers to equate to our dell web that's extraordinary it's an extraordinary opportunity but you do understand there's a huge difference between eav and what that money can be used for right that's tax base that goes into our general operating fund that is welcomed and encouraged but when we talk about i'm not and i'm not talking about impact fees i'm talking about land cash fees specifically that is money that the district sets aside that can only be used for bricks and mortar buildings and i hope you've done
067a little bit of research on the district our problem is i don't know seven-fold ten-fold right so we're under-funded from the state that impacts our general education funds so an increase in aev is a good thing for us thank you the issue is that we have very little money right now in our land cash fees and at some point because and and i don't mean this in a negative way even though it might be sounding that way at some point down the road maybe 10 years from now maybe 15 we're going to have to build another building currently the district literally can't borrow any more money because of the size of our debt load and so when development comes in that's why we have to do our best for the taxpayers in the community to
068ensure that we're getting land cash fees so that when the time comes to build a school we have the money to do it not that long ago we ran into this very issue in the city of aurora we had to immediately build several schools and the money wasn't there and so what happened was neighborhoods in will county in aurora that are in district 308 are now under part of an ssa and that was a way to get money um to build the buildings because we had students coming in and we needed a place to put them so i guess i want to clarify some of your comments here because i i think you know i think you're right but i think some people have have gotten mixed answers here so you're asking for a waiver
069of impact fees and land cash or just impact fees for the age restricted community hey well hey and i'm not i'm not sure how i i i group those those things very similarly together um they're they're to me they're both impact fees but it's the land cash um which would be generated off of the new residents that that we're creating i think the the yeah [Music] the pricing of our homes i think would put us above the threshold for aurora's payment of the i mix up the names but the other land cash what are the other impacts yeah i just wanted to interrupt sorry russ i didn't mean to but i think you're absolutely right yeah and tracy basics on the line too but and you're right uh so there's two different things of the
070land cash fee that i believe is what you're asking to waive the impact fee which is on that real i don't want to say sliding scale but it's on that scale that's based upon home value from the price the homes that you've been talking about russ i think that that would that wouldn't be an issue because you'd be so high what are your what do your homes go for i i think we're looking at like an asp of uh roughly 400 a little bit over 400 on the del webb so that would remove that impact fee number but that land cash number is what is the big number that you're asking about just because can i can i ask one more question yes so i guess what i am wondering is if there's some sort
071of guarantee that you guys don't sublet this out to let's say some other projects because the mill and orchard project was originally going to be 55 and over and then it was going to be veteran housing and now as you know a significant part of it is low-income housing and that was all with yeah we'd have that that's not an issue we would have no we would have absolutely no problem tying a waiver of that fee to our obligation to move forward with this if we if we don't do what we're seeing then i would not expect you to live up to your end of that part tony do you have anything you'd like to ask just i just want to say that i think as far as impact in the community anybody who lives
072in the community is impacted by the school district and i know that's not a legal thing but everybody who lives in this district benefits and i think that we get a little too much into this idea of i'm only going to pay for what i get and everybody benefits when that ambulance shows up it might have an oswego high school student in it and that's the person who saves your life so i really hope that we always think about how much we can give to the community to make it possible for everybody to have a good um quality of life well and i just and i don't have to get it tonight but i still need some clarification so it it it sounds like there's a little bit of and and i'm not i think
073you're trying to explain it correctly but there's there's still confusion between land cash and impact i understand that we cannot charge an impact fee i get that because there aren't going to be students and we would of course work with you guys to try to put some language in there to protect us to the points allie made about what happens if you can't sell homes and you need to change directions um but again my question here is are are you asking to waive only impact fees or are you also asking to waive land cash because i can't live with that yeah we're only asking to waive impact fees i think what we were trying to clarify is if you look at aurora's ordinance they have uh they have a long schedule and the impact fee
074that you pay is based on the sales price of the home and if you look at their existing schedule and you plug in our anticipated sales price of homes the impact fee would be zero so that's not a waiver that's going to happen by operation of the fee schedule as it exists today no fee would be due um it's the impact it's the land cash that we're looking for a waiver the impact fee you mean no the landcast oh the land cash okay so what he's saying is the price of the homes would be so high it would not warrant an impact fee because of the sliding scale so they are asking for the land cash so they are asking for a fee land cash waiver yes well i think um does anyone have anything
075else they'd like to ask of these gentlemen who've been here and um ma'am who has been here as well and i can't see all the other names because my eyes aren't that good to read that far um that you'd like to ask of our representatives here this evening regarding this i think that what you're hearing from us is that um we are very grateful for the development we appreciate it um the experience that i have seen from dell webb i i agree it's it's definitely a benefit to add to the community it's same with the residential and the commercial however um i think we'd like to to give this some thought and i think that our finance committee is going to explore what you've been able to share as well and we appreciate you taking
076the time to hear our point of view of the impacts and the land cash that we feel that we might need and we'll kind of head it out does anyone have anything committee wise they'd like to discuss this topic on as well or do we want to discuss this just at the finance facilities kind of area financing facilities would be my thing but i agree with a lot of what brent was saying yeah and and i think that that's that's where we fall is that you know for for our schools there there isn't anything that doesn't impact us in some way shape or form here so we would be concerned with waiving land cash we would be we would be concerned with that and we appreciate you taking the time to ask for our opinion
077on that i was just going to ask uh brent ruth is there any representatives that you would like to attend your next finance committee meeting so we know that or you know nothing if you don't know now i think i i don't think i think we have all the information that we need so i don't i don't know yeah and if we could share these slides too that would be helpful i think our community and role what's going to happen because city of aurora we don't have to whether whatever our action item is whatever this board we don't have we don't have a force a say it's a working relationship with the with the city of aurora how well we want that relationship to be and to continue to strive to bring again tax revenue
078commercial into our district so all the work the effort these guys you know coming out to it or do you intend to have a motion just a a a vote for for record or what is the intent no the informational item that we have tonight the intent is that we get the information we choose where we think we need more information on this and then we take it to the committee so that they can look at this in more detail since they have that background um and then we need to just decide as a board and that's part of what we're talking about with the 7 coolant 30 for policy for later is is this something because in general all the representatives i don't mean to keep you on this will end up being more
079bored things do we have anything else for our guests or can they sign off oh i think we're good no okay thank you very much for attending tonight we appreciate it do they somebody he looks like he's got something else to say oh i think he was i mean yeah go ahead like i said we're we're interested in sharing information with you i mean there were some questions that were asked if there's a follow-up finance committee meeting or if this is coming back to the board i would just ask that you communicate with us like we've communicated with you let us know when those discussions are coming and we'd be interested in seeing what kind of information you're responding to we obviously have a lot of information at our disposal and we'd be happy to
080stop it so um we we appreciate you reaching back out to us as this moves forward i'm sure we can definitely make that happen and i appreciate your willingness to continue to work with us and i just wanted to add really quick uh from the city of aurora's perspective we value the school district as a partner and we want to make sure that no matter what happens in this area and throughout the district in the city that we create win-win opportunities together so thank you for the opportunity thank you thank you thank you adam 7.3 your board policies for uh first read we weren't quite we were just letting them go ah okay very good because they didn't get up while we discussed what happened next um i think what we heard from our representatives
081here was that they would be happy to assist further so i think that this will probably be developing rather than anything that we can make any sort of decision on now and it's just important that we acknowledge that we have a municipality in our school district that has chosen to come out and talk with us about this at a stage where they can hear our perspective in a timely fashion so i think moving forward what we have will be up to what we decide we want to do i i i do think i'm going to disagree with you a little bit i do think we need to have a non-binding resolution that's voted on by the board so that we have something that we can send to the city of aurora other than just comments
082and feedback does that make sense matt that makes sense to me brent i think it's just having a consistency of a message and like this is our kind of standard response to these types of requests instead of having to go back and say what did we do last time just to have a well i i we're going to talk about that in 7.3 yeah a little bit more so we'll inch our way through there and we can have that dialogue sounds good all right now we can move on okay item 7.2 uh financial statements does the board have any questions regarding item 7.2 all right hearing none item 7.3 our first read and board policies presented uh what questions does the board have regarding to any of the policies presented this evening i've heard a
083rumor we have some questions about 120 5.2 5120 six point colon 280. and colon 280 just went to we just wanted to send it to teaching and learning yeah but this so let's just get all of these together what um when you guys have all looked at these policies are there any of these policies that you feel your committee ought to take a look at so that we can make sure that we've considered the various aspects such as credit for alternative courses and programs and course substitutions grading and promotion graduation requirements things like that are there are there anything like that that maybe our equity committee our teaching and learning committee um maybe our finance and facilities committee would be interested and feel should be appropriate for them to take a look at besides five
084or six colon or 6.280. it would be nice if the if the equity committee maybe because i know they're they're kind of raring to go on something then the six colon 310 um we talked a little bit about volunteer service credit nice and how to get that and i think that would i mean that might be something that they could that could be good for teaching and learning and for our equity committee too yeah same for um i'd imagine graduation requirements with grading and promotion would be teaching and learning and equity as well maybe i don't want to ask if anyone wants to do a lot yeah no i don't think it's appropriate right i have a specific question on six colon 300 let's go with that graduation point number two and i think i'm
085just not understanding it says completing all courses is provided in the school code according to the year in which the student entered the ninth grade however we allow high school credit correct if you take honors algebra or spanish one or language arts or language arts in junior high school so doesn't that have an impact on number two because those are a couple of well at least algebra is a graduation requirement no i think it just meant that whatever the school code was the year they entered the ninth grade not when they took the class correct okay okay i just want to make sure that we weren't makes sense counting only high only classes taken in high school is towards high school graduation although the cool thing about this one was because we have so many
086kids that are taking classes in eighth grade that were formally freshman years that instead of it instead of being able to graduate at three and a half years you can actually graduate in three years so you could actually start college sooner which i thought was cool um can i ask a question about five colon 120. i'm sorry not a question i have a statement sure um so this is like the second time or the third time we've looked at this i got sent back to committee i want the babysitting child care removed from this language i understand why it was asked to be put in there by our director of hr i disagree with us putting rules and regulations into place that impact our employees outside of their contracted and scheduled time there are good
087reasons why a teacher with a high in a in a high needs classroom and that person is very familiar with care of that particular student and i could see where that could be beneficial for the family if they can if the teacher so chooses to work as a babysitter out on their personal time and i guess i disagree with the addition of the additional language that essentially says case-by-case basis we can you know grant or deny that request i i think we're wasting time on creating rules on things that don't impact the district to try to prevent a disagreement that has nothing to do with the school district i actually agree with with brent on this especially when we start to look at how many teachers teach in a school that their home is districted
088to attend as well this becomes an area where you know fairness and impartiality is always a concern but it doesn't seem like this really falls under what we need to be doing and i know in many many circumstances we encourage our teachers to take on tutoring i i know that one of my child's teachers not directly but had then later become a tutor to my child and because they were aware of that situation they were able to provide more help and they were willing to do so um it didn't have any effect on what happened at school it was totally separate completely different thing so i would be very concerned about limiting that and when we look at things like um private lessons or tutoring or things like that or babysitting for severe high needs
089where there's a real need for parents to be able to have people that are trained and able to take care of their children for them i'd really be concerned about limiting that and i'd like to see that removed as well well the only one that i do see a problem with is the tutoring because it could be a conflict of interest if you're a teacher and you don't somehow do everything you're supposed to do and well not that makes the hope of you know right that well then maybe i can get a tutoring job and earn more right but no that's not what for babies sitting in for uh what was the other thing you mentioned uh private lessons private lessons i don't see the problem i think i just don't want to just apologize
090the policy is is very distinct it says in their class on their roster or their their their caseload and i think that is very protective if you have a a teacher tutoring a current student in the classroom i think that there can be a very gray line that gets crossed very fast especially if that teacher is in the home there are relationships that are created which are very positive in some instances so this policy is just for that current class it's not prohibiting this language i'm not reading it as prohibiting them from babysitting it goes on to say a student who is in their class on their roster or their caseload that's that's very specific we're not disengaging or not allowing them to go out and do something on the side it's just not with
091that particular group of students at that particular time i agree with matt in particular to tutoring and private lessons it could be construed as if that is your current student in a class are you buying a grade like but if you're being paid to give private lessons so they can be more successful in your class i just don't think that's so what i'm talking about is things that it does talk about in here any person that has a close personal relationship with an employee that may compromise or impair their fairness and impartiality say you're a principal in a school and you have and you're at some level of school and your child attends that school so that's the kind of thing that does happen and we do allow teachers to go bring their kids into
092their buildings to learn even if they're not districted there so since we do already allow that sort of thing we wouldn't put that child in the teacher's class however they might be with another teacher in the same grade level that the parent teaches and i'm just concerned about limiting those kinds of things inadvertently i think if it's something that would could potentially directly impact that student's grade academic performance then that is a problem so what happened at pot this is what happened in our committee let me just ask this question so does it create an issue for the district if god forbid something happens like a kid's getting tutored and some because i guess for me the the if i want it if it creates an issue where somebody could sue the district because they
093were getting a private lesson or they were babysitting for an aide the reason districts put this type of languages is to prevent that conflict of interest either that um you know it the appearance may not be the reality but the appearance of um getting a great a better grade if you pay for the services outside of school and or um that the teacher will only help you if it's outside of school you know doubt that that happens but it it just prevents that conflict of interest that's the purpose and i mean so a little bit so i see both i see everybody's i see everybody's perspectives but but i and i think in my mind i think the addition of the um in special circumstances a waiver could be requested and i think in that
094um in that instance there is a little bit more oversight and a little bit more oversight management and um you know knowledge that the district has regarding you know some of these you know instances if it's a really um key and critical you know piece for our students kind of success and for our you know employees to be able to have this option i feel like the the language is pretty clear and then and there's also you know a waiver that would be allowed so i'm comfortable with the language as is just as we're having you know this conversation but if i'm just if you're if you're gonna have a waiver process right then tells me that that we know that we're gonna allow this to happen so then why is the language there that's
095my point i i would i i get that we need to have some way of accountability but for me i'm i i just don't agree with it and i do think that if we're going to start to put this kind of language in this really does affect things like are we going to allow principals to have their kids in their own school that they're a principal of because that does affect teacher selection which may affect their child's ability to get a better grade we're talking employment i mean talk about outside employment here right we're talking about outside employment but this is also inside different not really though because it's talking about the conflict of interest because a student is under their care do you know what i'm saying this is for pay right this is
096a family hiring a character so no i get it down deeper it was really about the the care the child care of the babysitting as it relates to some maybe a high needs student and their aide is hired to to do babysitting skills bathing things like that at home in addition to their aid at work and where that could be a very gray area it can be but speaking from a different perspective i would argue that if that's occurring it it generally from what i understand is because there's no one else who they will be able to handle those needs in a child care setting so i would hate to not only limit the employees but limit the parents they do have a waiver which is good but we don't know anything about that process
097and i do think that that then leads into we have for example maybe teachers say over the summer here's the people that will tutor you or give you a private lesson and there are other employees in the school and maybe in a different school maybe in a different level but that still does happen and that's something that all of our students are able to take advantage of so i would i just really don't want to put any more limitations on appropriate things as necessary i would and i'd rather see it kind of flipped where i don't know i don't even know how you flip well since this has come back to us several times do you think we're what what what would be our next and clearly there's i think that where we're at is
098that we can take um we can is there anything that we want to do this isn't an information item today um is there anything that we think would be gained by any more discussion about this or do we feel as a board that this could be moved forward since it doesn't seem like there's going to be any change in can we take a strap pull because it's nine o'clock and everybody's way at home what's happening let's move this policy through yeah somehow well it's information there's nothing we got to do right now so i think what we're saying is there's no more discussion that's needed on that one for to bring it to action oh it's where i'm going yeah yeah fabulous all right so real quick um the rest of these on here are
099there any other questions that you have about these or is there anything on here that you'd like to have a specific committee look at and we'll just i'm just going to go through just to make this very quick i'm going to list each number if you can follow along please and then let me know if your committee would um be able to do that and then we'll be able to check for the minutes can i just ask a question though about that the purpose of that because clearly there's several that could come to teaching and learning but but do you want them to as a but given the fact that there hasn't been much debate on cert because we can re it's up to the committee chairs to choose that's what our board agreements for
100this year have stated is that each committee will get the choice to do that so let's just run through these 4.80 any committees want to take a look at that 4.90 5.120 6.235 6.280 i think equity take a look at that one anyone else teaching and learning we were talking about you guys good with that um i'm sorry can 6.235 i think could be might be one um tony what are your thoughts on taking that one to teaching and learning since it is if you'd like yeah since it's a i think then let's just have that go to teaching and learning so 6.235 teaching and learning will look at 6.280 equity would look at and teaching and learning i i don't see any need for teaching and learning it's 6.28 i don't have any tony
101uh no but 6.235 well we're not quite there yet hang on well we had moved on and then oh two three okay so we're moving 6.235 to teaching and learning already 2.0 2.280 to equity 6.3 graduation requirements policy do we want to i no i don't have any um outstanding questions related to that 6.310 credit for alternative courses and programs and course substitutions tony do we want equity to look at that one too i would like you to i think so i get to say um teaching and learning do you want that sorry my i got one off my screen it's the credit for alternative courses and programs and course substitutions i don't think we need to do all that i don't want to do anything that we're not nothing nothing to be gained by
102taking it over there right 6.340 student testing and assessment i didn't have any questions okay 7.1 health iron dental exams 7.3 extracurricular activities 7.340 student records all right i think we can move on i did warn you to take a nap huh even if we took a nap it's getting late item 7.4 is an informational report on drivers education vehicles christy i've provided a three-year cost comparison for three scenarios for securing driver's ed vehicles for the school district and some pros and cons for each scenario currently we do rent vehicles at approximately a cost of approximately dollars over three years school districts usually rent vehicles as a method of only paying for the vehicles when they need them which is primarily during the school year and not the summer however we do use our vehicles
103all summer because we offer summer school driver's ed and we also try to get in the remaining required behind the wheel hours in the next option presented is a traditional three year lease on vehicles with and without an optional buyout a three-year lease cost is about 79 000 or if we were to exercise the optional buyout option at the end of the lease that would bring it to 165 000 uh leases are generally used for a variety of reasons primarily there's no capital outlay to the district there is a built-in refresh cycle and the lease term may coincide with the term of the warranty last option is to purchase driver's ed vehicles at a cost of 160 000 over the three years uh purchase has a one-time capital outlay but then the district will own
104the asset where there may be some resale or trade-in value when the time comes to replace the vehicle and we could potentially own that vehicle for more than three years in addition the purchase expense can be charged to a non-operating fund so in december i asked the board to reject the driver's ed vehicle bid as we only had one dealership respond with the proposal uh for only leasing not for leasing and or purchasing of the vehicles so i would like to release another bid to be open in the beginning of february to bring a recommendation to the board at the february 8th meeting and then approval at the february 22nd meeting any questions that i can answer i only have one question and that is can i assume that we typically put less than 10
105000 miles a year on these drivers at vehicles because it's just local driving uh anywhere from 10 to 12 and we rotate them so we keep those mileage lows so if one's getting high we park that and use another one or not park it but we use it for the more local okay christy what were the limitations that allowed us to can you refresh my memory real quick on was it because the the incentives change each month yes so the dealers that we spoke to recommended that we do the whole process in one month open the bid information approval because every month the incentives change by uh manufacturer so this way closing is february 1st through february 28th or march 1st through march 31st no i'm proposing we would release a bid it's got to
106be on the street for 10 days we would open it at the beginning of february so that we can bring the recommendation to you at the first board meeting in february and then adopt it or approve it at the second board meeting so the whole thing is happening in one month and the bid will be to provide cost estimates on all three options renting leasing and purchasing uh not renting most dealers will not rent vehicles anymore in fact the one that we work currently work with they really want to get out of that game anyways so just leasing and purchasing anyone else have any questions on this or anything you'd like to make sure was included or discussion that you'd like to have a hat on this i just think it needs to go because
107of the time situation in order to get a good response as good of a response as we're going to get we have to i get it but i also don't want to just fly through discussion items that we've asked for just for to save a couple minutes when this is a time sensitive issue which is the only reason it's still on the agenda for this evening i just have a quick question and and i don't mean to jump ahead but i have to so the the first item on the budget reductions talks about leased drivers education vehicles which we're talking about now and there's a red no on here so does that mean the administration is not recommending no that meant we couldn't talk about it in closed session okay not clear but okay thank
108you thank you made sense to me now okay anything else on the driver's ed vehicles that you need or can we um kind of agree that we have what we need and we're all in agreement on that bid that christy is planning to release did we save time if we were leaning more one way or the other i mean i'm i'm leaning i don't know let's see i'm with brent i don't see why we would purchase instead of lease personally we can ask well i think let's let's find out both and then take a look sure um because last time when we were just looking at leases um there was some interest in purchase instead yeah let's compare that's fine all right all right item 7.5 is an informational report on a resolution authorizing the
109issuance of tax anticipation warrants in anticipation of the collection of taxes levied for the year 2020 christie so it's time to start this process for that short term this short term borrowing that we do every year to help the district's cash flow leading up to the spring tax receipts uh this year we are keeping the amount the same as the previous two years which is 25 million dollars uh the estimated amount of interest on this short term borrowing is hundred and twenty thousand dollars uh and that is if we pay on schedule before the end of the fiscal year any questions so you'd like us to authorize five million more than we have been the last few years no 25 million 25 million same thing okay thank you and then the general caveat that we
110wouldn't need this if we had enough in reserves and all of that correct yes does anyone have anything they need to address as far as the timeline that's been presented or is this timeline an acceptable one okie dokie 7.6 and so part of that process of issuing the taws is to uh transfer funds from our working cash fund or other operating funds to those funds that would dip below zero before we receive those spring tax receipts so this is just kind of um not just kind of it's just part of the process of issuing tiws you basically have to empty out your working cash to those funds that are we'll dip below zero working cash is kind of like our savings fund any information that anyone would like to have additional to what's been provided
111prior to seeing this on an action item okay item 7.7 all right item 7.7 uh is our return to school learning plan what we'd like to do this evening is gauge in a conversation regarding different aspects of our plan uh what our next steps will be and get some direction from the board in a recent conversation i was asked what i felt to be a strength of our school district and as i've reflected on that question i believe that we obviously have many strengths in our school district but if i had to provide one a one-word answer to that question i would my answer would be passion um over the course of the past week and a half since i had made the announcement on january 2nd that we were moving forward with our next
112steps in return to learn learning plan i've received much feedback from a lot of passionate people and i appreciate that feedback that i've received i've heard from people that believe our students need to be back in school i've heard from people that believe a hybrid option that we presented as a good next step for those who want to be back at school and i've heard from others uh who feel that we should stay in remote learning for at for this time and even stay in remote learning for the rest of the academic year as was said earlier the 2020 has been a historic historic historic year for many reasons throughout this pandemic there have been many unknowns there have been many a changing opinions and the recommendations from the state the health departments and from
113national experts have continued to change and evolve throughout this journey during this process we've received criticism we've received praise the choices we've made for our kids have been hard one thing that's always remained consistent is that the choices that we've made in the decisions that we've made have always been on the uh on the for the students and staff of safety with the information and guidelines that we've been provided at each part of this journey uh during the start during this process i've stated on a number of occasions that i'm proud of our efforts and what we've been able to accomplish uh during these uh times which many have titled unprecedented times and i continue to believe that we've now come to a point where we need to make some decisions to move forward uh
114none of this is an idea is ideal no plan that we put together will be perfect no plan is going to make our all of our people that we serve in the seventh largest state a school district in the state of illinois that serves over 17 000 kids happy so tonight i'd like to thank the board in advance because we're going to engage in some authentic dialogue uh in the following work session and in the end we will have a direction that we can all agree upon to the best of our abilities that are the best next steps in moving forward so i remember someone once telling me that uh leadership and governance isn't easy it's tough and it's important work because what isn't what uh what's right isn't always popular and what's popular isn't
115always right so with that let's go ahead and begin all right i didn't know if um ruth and heather are you going to be okay or somebody could move over to my seat if you didn't want to keep you know if what you're if what you're showing up there is the same thing i have on here i'll just it should be okay all right so i also wanted to thank the board um for serving the public during these really times of dramatic change if you look up at this quote up here i wanted to remind everyone that's listening that these people are volunteers they've given their time and skills to help govern this organization and they've taken the heat during all the changes of information and as well as changes in community opinion if you
116look at the next slide i think this is important enough that i'm just going to take a second to read it the more we run from conflict the more it masters us the more we try to avoid it the more it controls us the less we fear conflict the less it confuses us the less we deny our differences the less they divide us and i want to applaud the board tonight for taking the risk in having a public work session as my belief the leadership involves being vulnerable and talking about your opinions and also i hope that everyone realizes that when this group gets together to talk the open meetings act requires that this discourse happen in a public setting this conversation would be difficult enough for seven people to gather in a private room
117and come to consensus and agreement on this but that is not allowed through the open meetings act so that is why we're having this conversation in this forum today the process that i would like us to use is we're going to agree on some group norms there are norms that a lot of our students would be familiar with we have the opportunity and i would say the obligation here to model the type of civil discourse that we want our students to participate in i would like us to agree ahead of time that we'll provide our opinion and we will work to consensus but we'll move forward when we have at least four members in agreement on a given aspect yes i'm just saying that i strongly agree with that oh yeah that's the number i
118will i will be pausing at different places when i need you okay but that's can you hold up one of those finger maybe like a 10 when you're ready for us to do a number i i will i will i will give you a cue all right so as you um as we work through this this is going to be your first opportunity these are the avid norms that many of our classrooms use and i would like you to consider and in a moment i will ask you to give me the hand signal with one finger being strongly agree two fingers uh just agree three no opinion and you've got the chart there to go along with it so the norms would be we want to ask questions we want to engage fully integrate new
119information open your minds to diverse views and then utilize what you've learned so with the hand signal where are you with these norms my boy doesn't count okay i agree with the dorms or no that was the index fingers the one index finger is what i heard from or saw from the broom there you go okay brent is a three okay it's neutral what do we like about him so before we begin a lot of this process i wanted to share some really important information we'll talk about our current percentage of students choosing remote and hybrid we'll talk about some parameters set forth by the state as well as changing guidelines from the local health department this slide was updated this weekend with all the current choices of what our parents have said as you
120look at the different levels between early childhood elementary junior high and high school you'll see the level that has the least percent for hybrid is early childhood elementary and junior high tie that 61 and high school has 63 percent of students electing to come to the hybrid piece and these are the updated numbers sorry yes those are updated numbers uh and then i wanted to talk about some of the parameters from the state obviously students and staff have to be wearing masks while they are coming to school on school buses while they are at school a totally remote option has to be offered that is a given by the state also idph guidelines should be followed as much as possible and then just because some of the plans that have reached my desk and suggestions
121i wanted to make sure that people knew including members here that we can't have students at school longer than five hours without giving them time and a space to eat lunch i now want to talk about changing local health guidelines if you recall we were in this very room in july we talked about several in in-person options but at that time there were different mandates about quarantines and how to respond to symptoms and for that reason we did not start in-person instruction this changed in october which then made in-person instruction easier so we began those plans at that time the we were looking at coveted rates and positivity within the community as you recall unfortunately in november those rates were so high we had recommendations from our health department that suggested very limited in-person instruction
122and i now like to talk a little bit about how the recommendations of what we watch as far as metrics has also changed the new metrics that we will be looking at shift from exclusively monitoring the community spread to it in in addition focusing on the consistent and correct use of mitigation strategies at each school such as social distancing hallway paths those types of things the cases connected to school transmission which is very different than a community transmission staff availability and also our ppe supply i'd like to add that these new metrics as well as the community metrics will continue to be modern and will be reported on our district website as we begin to talk about the next phase of in-person instruction i also wanted to remind everyone that anything that we are talking
123about this evening as we go forth is a working draft if there are people that are following along at home and they see a slide this is for purpose of the board to discuss this is not a finalized plan so if we look at the priorities of where we were back in july these were the three we wanted to make sure we minimized health risks for all students and staff we wanted to maximize the end time in-person instruction and we wanted families to have some choice we were a little bit ahead of the curve because two weeks after that presentation the state said you have to allow choice what i would like you to consider is a recommendation that we have this evening to add two more priorities and i will be asking you to
124again give the hand signal for how you feel about these these two things were not as important to discuss in july but i think that they are critical now we need to minimize as best we can the disruption between teachers and students i we do not think it's a good idea to redo class lists make all of those new students especially at the elementary level lose their peers or their student during this time of great anxiety the next one that we would want to is much more of a junior high high school issue but we feel it's important that our students still have the ability to continue in their current courses we would not want students who have been working through a course or have already started a semester to have to change their schedule
125at this point so i want you to think about adding those two so that we have those five priorities and think about where you are at with strongly agree no opinion those pieces okay we have a disagree i'm sorry i didn't see ally uh ellie's still trying to decide allie thinks the last one's important but what do you think is not ellie also doesn't teach grade school okay so i get it so we we have mostly an agreement that these would be our priorities but not everybody okay were there more than four on that correct yes there were okay so then so i would suggest that we keep going um we may all of this is fine yes can i ask a question about that if we go back for a minute so here's my
126question i know that at some point we have some staff who shouldn't be in a building who can work from home and we have staff who could be in a building so and again i you know like i always revert back to what i know we have the same situation where i'm at and those kids who chose remote are still taking physics for instance for my kids but they're taking it with another teacher and they're gonna be fine it's the same course it's gonna be a little bit of a change but at semester we change a lot anyway so i guess for me the current teacher is less important if we have outstanding factors like i have some teachers who can't come in the building and who really will not be in a building and
127can those teachers take those kids who can also not be in a building and then they have their own little group of kids i don't mean to say it that way but i would agree that that's more important that specific bullet point is more important at an elementary level than at a junior higher high school having it be a priority that it would be a mandate across all decisions that we make but they're key things that we would need to consider as we move forward to build schedules and we'd want to guard against and try to do this as much as possible even if it wasn't possible all the time right i'm just wondering if building schedule wise if you have like you know 26 kids who are strictly remote and you have a teacher
128that teaches that grade level maybe even at the same building who is also going to need to be remote could lead elementary and then i think we should probably um keep going if we can but the the elementary piece once you pull that teacher you will also you won't have all 26 students that are also wanting remote and it then becomes a domino effect i wasn't and we weren't as concerned um i'm getting feedback that my microphone isn't on it's on maybe i just need to talk louder yeah okay i will now talk later louder um so at that elementary piece that it's very rare in fact i looked through all the numbers today i don't think it happened anywhere that all of one class picked the exact same choice so then you begin to
129move all kinds of people around in order to make that happen well like the reason why i was strongly in disagreement is because of that new additional bullet point there that this is a process like a good better best scenario and i don't want that to have any impact on the decisions that we're going to make about how we're going to try to get back into the classroom more often and for more kids and that's my comment on that is that i understand you'd like to minimize i don't think that can be a consideration at this stage so i think it that if i take just this list of priorities and then i apply it to what i've seen us do like in boundary conversations in years past we always start with a list of
130priorities and that doesn't mean for example we won't split a subdivision we won't bus kids when they could walk things like that that's that's the tone i think i'm taking this in rather than this subdivision will you know we won't boundary because we might have to split a subdivision it's more if we can we should right so what you're saying if that if that point is the only thing that would prevent us from moving forward with this specific plan we would not eliminate it only because it doesn't meet one specific point on this that's my understanding anyway is that what you meant intended faith just ideally where do we want to go that doesn't mean that we have to hit all five of these but what are the things that we really want to attempt
131to do as we build schedules okay if there's no other questions we did have more than four in agreement so some of the key factors that we need to consider when building schedules is whether or not to have students eat lunch while at school as we talked about in some of the state parameters we can have up to a five-hour day without that we also need to look at how large the group of students or class size should be and that is the dilemma between splitting between a and b groups or having the whole school of in-person come in instruction and we want to talk through those so as always and we had the scale back in the presentation in july finding the right balance between maximizing in-person instruction opportunity and also minimizing the health
132risks for students and staff one of the big deciding of factors and there's not real order of that but we need to as we build schedules and my team and i have built many many schedules look at what our beliefs around having students take off their masks at school in groups you know it doesn't we can socially distance as much as we can but if you think about an elementary classroom they would some of them would need to eat lunch within their classroom and take masloff and those things we need to figure out where we're at so i'm going to talk to you about what our recommendation is and then i'm going to also be asking you by hand signals whether or not where you are with an agreement on this we have talked at
133this at length and we believe that we should not be having students take off their masks and eat lunch while they are at school we want to work within the five hour parameters to build school days maximize that amount obstruction but moving forward we want to know where the board is at in whether or not we should be having students eat lunch while at school so again i'll say where we're at we believe we should move forward in not having students eat lunch at school with and taking their masks off but maximize as much possible that time of that five hour day where are you all with that i have a question real quick so we're talking about um the eating lunch of students at school but we also have staff that would necessarily be
134eating at school that maybe don't have a classroom such as tas or like bus drivers or like custodians or things what is the current balance that exists there we do not have all of our staff currently coming to school to be able to do that the staff that is there are separating into different spaces not being around each other when they take but there will be spaces provided for our staff to eat yes those spaces are somewhat limited if all students are also there eating lunch you know i gotcha thank you sure i can't i can't answer this question until i know the numbers right so if we're 70 30 right well 60 40. i'm sorry 60 40. so that means we've got 60 percent of kids in you don't have to go back so
135we're if we're 60 40 on average that means we've got 60 percent of the kids coming in if you're telling me that a schedule is an ab day right so now it's not 60 of kids it's 30 of kids so if you're telling me there's 30 percent of kids in high school i'm gonna tell you yeah let them eat lunch and those are those two areas that i'm going to be asking about this kind of chicken and the egg which one of those do we talk about first of the ab group versus lunch so i think we need to have a discussion about this go to the ab group come back and revisit i didn't know with certainty which one of those to put on first because some people also would say if i split
136into a b group i want to know if lunch is there right or i want to know no and you're absolutely right when you say chicken in the egg this is this is where we are so correct what if we put it so that like let's say there was an a b group and we went the five hour days for two weeks just so that the buildings could kind of manage and see where they were at and then we could right we could do like just to give up right just to give kind of a two week like here's here's the five hour days okay now we know where because you can only have what 50 people in one space so like i i realize that both of our high schools are not like my
137high school there's not extra spaces all over the place um and we don't have i mean you could the field house is on the opposite side of the building and there's lots of so i think for yes i agree with you it's very like so for me if you're asking me can i do an a b split with five hour days i'm willing to do that for two weeks like i'm willing to do that on a trial basis like maybe you bring in the health department and you say hey can you help us figure out how we can get the 60 of kids in this building for a full day and eat lunch and because they will do that they came out for us like like can you come out and show us where we
138can put kids so that we can like i'm i'm obviously i'm more concerned with being able to have more time in school or more concerned with having masks on 100 of the time is that's what i think we're being asked is that we'll bring well just looking forward are we wanting to build schedules that it's okay with half or full of the all students coming in and it's a very different scenario at elementary versus high school as you look forward of how comfortable are we having students take off masks as par and eat as part of their instructional day knowing that we can get up to five hours of instructional time without that happening how does how does how do our minutes change like what are we getting now instructionally versus what are we getting
139getting to the egg right is that what you're going to ask in the egg well can we come back to this whole lunch i think situation after we talk about some potential schedules yeah and i realized that i'm going to go with a three since you just asked for a number i'm going to go with no opinion yet okay well i don't know what we're asking because we did it both ways so we're asking what we're asking you to react to is our administration our recommendation that we work within those time frames of a five hour day so that we do not have to have students eat lunch and take off their masks while at school so i'm saying i think that is very important that the children wear masks at all times at school
140so i'm a one i'm just being clear i think it's i think it's imperative that we maximize the number of time in school in education and that if we need to have the kids take the mass off to eat lunch we remove masks at lunchtime so then your vote would be you would do a five though he's got a five right he's got a one heather's got a one i'm still gonna stick with the three because i think for me it depends on one the numbers that we're talking about if we're talking about a b or not and it also depends on space available which i don't have any information to make a decision on it so ability to follow social distancing and other guidelines really yeah i want to see the egg okay yeah
141and i'm sorry where was matt and ally tony was that a one ruth you're out of three matt it's based on what our programming options are i think our focus needs to be on the time in the classroom the instructional time that we have um not on the lunch period yeah so i'm going to say that um i would i would rather the instructional time in the classroom uh rather than the lunch period yep that's where i'm at sounds great sounds about where i thought it'd be i don't know which number that is but that's where i'm at yeah so next okay so then if we go one of the next key considerations is finding the right balance of the number of students in the classroom and at the school as a whole and really
142looking again at maximizing the in-person instruction and having as many students in as possible but also minimizing those health risks we spent quite a bit of time looking at this and we have different opinions based on whether it's different uh whether the level that we're looking at so i am going to go through and talk about high school junior high and elementary and kind of be getting a sense of where each board member is at and we'll start with high school so again here is the percentage of students but it shows you the range within the different within the school of some some schools as you can tell especially at our elementary have as many as 50 percent uh wanting remote or as few as 27 i want to add on to that that it's
143a little more complicated it's not like every single classroom within that school is at 50 percent you would have some that are above you know and some that are below that and then our range there at the junior highs and then the range between our two high schools uh if you look around at what other high schools have been doing in our building and you look at how many students would be coming in our doors at once as well as our high school students with some of the schedules that we're looking at if they ran their entire day and went through their eight periods that's eight different groups of students that they are interacting with and we would our recommendation is that we split the students into a and b groups and then maximize the
144amount obstruction that we can do within those that is what a lot of other districts have already done of splitting their high school by name so let's start off with high school you've heard our recommendation where are each of you at so what your hands are you're saying similarly to what what we had before is still splitting the high school into a and b groups in an effort to minimize the total number of students in the building at one time are we still are we gonna allow um i know with that original hybrid schedule we had it split up the first like half the day are we still going to allow students who have uh like my one of my kids has study hall first period so would that mean that he doesn't actually have
145to come to school until second period he will be thrilled to hear that information um on the days that he would have first period in person um you know obviously that's just one classroom you know not every kid has correct or not half the kids have study hall first period most of them don't but um is that transportation dependent i just want to make that clear for people that are listening so your son would have to provide his own transportation yes right yeah i just want to make that clear because people are listening right oh i see like if they change them they want to come in right if he's a bus rider and he depends on the bus to get him to school he would still have to go yes first period and there
146would be a study hall room provided for them correct okay and then we have kids that have late arrival early dismissal those kind of things too with the late arrival early dismissal typically those students don't ride the bus i think is that correct okay correct i'm hearing i'm seeing nodding heads yes so i guess my question is so we're talking about you know again approximately 60 percent of our high school students are planning to attend in person in whatever the hybrid model looks like and like brent said if we split that 60 roughly in half that's 30 percent of the students so what is that total number of kids in a building just out of curiosity i'm sorry to put you on the spot like that i think heather's doing the math behind me so
147that's right on the i also want to as we talk about high school at elementary it's somewhat easy to have an a and b split and move those students around at the high school if you divide by those by alphabet you might have a very balanced class and second period but have a very imbalanced class later on so it's not as easy as a breakdown so we're just looking at less total number in a classroom than in the building and in the overall building because if we and one of the recommendations is to limit the number of students or that bubble that students are exposed to because we're going through a high school schedule and one of the schedules that um we'll show you is going through their entire day while they're here during that
148five hour period so they would have eight periods of students of which to mingle with and then the hallways um too as well doesn't matter if we split about eighteen hundred to two thousand so like my my one of my classes for example next week my smallest class will be three my biggest class will be 12. okay how many students are normally in your class list 28 to 32. we have about this about the same percentage-wise can you repeat the numbers that um heather had given you related to heather if we split alpha at the high schools it'll be between 900 and 1000 if we do not split alpha it'll be between 1800 and 2000. is there any other practical way to split other than alphabet probably not i'm guessing but i'm just asking not
149that i've seen other schools do height well no i meant by like freshman sophomore junior senior you can't do it that way that's difficult because a lot of the classes tend to be all freshmen so it doesn't help make smaller class sizes but again like i think i think the nice part about doing an a b split is that again like the biggest part of this puzzle is is getting people in the buildings and getting them wearing their masks and washing their hands and staying six feet apart and being comfortable being in a building like i think for me that's the biggest part like the teachers in the building when we first went in in august everybody was you know like my hands are still super dry from washing them 15 times a day but
150like it it you know what i mean like it gets better it's better for your sanity and it's been a long time since they've had to get up and get ready for school really right but you know like i'm i'm all in for the a b split but again like i'm i'm kind of leaning towards brent like i want to i want i don't want i don't want to say i'm on a navy split for the rest of the year like that's not my intent my intent is that we do an a b split we'll try it for two weeks we'll work out some kinks and i should have clarified what we're talking about for in person does not mean that this is what we're it for the rest of the year the world keeps
151throwing us curveballs we have a vaccination that might be on its way this is what is the next step for us but i i also think it's important because there's you know people on the i'm on both pages right and you have both sides and we have people who are you know they're listening to the people who want our kids in school and they're listening to the people who don't want our kids in school and what we're looking at is numbers that say 60 of the kids want to be in school so i think what what i'm picking up on that and i actually do agree with elian is that this this is not something we can do for the rest of the year this needs to be something that we're doing for a specified
152period of time for me for it's all about having an expectation that we can follow that we know that the next time i'm going to have to think about whether or not this is right for my child is in x number of weeks and this is what it will look like so for me getting the information as specifically and as quickly as it's available is going to matter a lot in this so that'll be kind of on rollout but i guess for i i don't think i can give an answer until we finish the presentation on what i think about the recommendation for the split until i know what that means and what i'm saying i agree with and my question on that is about instructional minutes okay and we have all the minutes i
153want to kind of keep going on the next couple of pieces and then and then we'll get there um and looking at the high school piece i just want to i know we've got some people that are at a i don't have an opinion yet but we also had some people that already had that had an opinion of where we're at and i kind of lost track of where we're at because i know my team is helping me keep tallies so i'll ask again our recommendation and it's understood if you need to say that i don't have an opinion at this point but where are we with we want our high school to at least start out with a b groups uh and maximize within the time frame that would be there i'm gonna go
154this way okay and tony i don't think i had heard what your objections were well i i have delayed on purpose because i wanted the discussion to go and i just i have the belief that we are at a unique opportunity as a board to keep people safe and save money and so my stance is that we should stay with full remote until the end of the year i am looking at all this i am keeping an open mind but i believe that would be the safest option i believe that's an option that maintains a lot of the integrity of what's been built as students and teachers up until now and then i think also it's not about being comfortable it's about being safe so that people make it to the future that's my stance
155as a board member thank you for explaining that because when you agree or disagree sometimes people agree or disagree for very different um reasons and and that helps so then i want to pose the question around junior high so junior high and high school share some overlapping students we have students that take math classes at the high school level that are part of junior high we also those those schedules i think it is in our best interest to move forward with them together that what we decide for high school we also decide for junior high so it would be our recommendation that the junior highs also be split by a and b at least to start so that we would be able to have that smaller amount of students that are in there at class
156size the junior highs have nine periods so if we went through their whole schedule in a day that is nine periods of students that they would be interacting with so what i need you and i'm i'm i don't know if it will be the same but it could be the same of where are you with junior high in wanting to divide the junior high by a and b groups okay did were you guys fast enough to get that all right do you would it would it be easier for you to for us to go around with and say a number i don't not really that's that's what you want us to hold our arms up high yeah really tall hold it in front of you so people all right all right we'll hold our arms
157up higher because i don't want this to come across like it's voting i understand yeah it's just exception okay okay thank you now let's talk elementary so at elementary we have a different approach and if you think back to your days in elementary school most of the time is spent with those same group of students in our district there are some students that leave class to go to gifted instruction or go to an intervention or to utilize some of their special education resources but for the most part that's that group of students we also have quite a range where we have some of our elementary schools that are up to 50 percent remote already we our recommendation is that we have all elementary students come together as groups a and b and if you recall
158our earlier recommendation but not having them eat lunch so it would look like all students coming together for half days i need your reaction to that so again i'll state the recommendation the recommendation is that we would want elementary students a and b groups to come together that does mean that there would be less chance for social distancing at a full six feet but they would be around much fewer students than what junior high or high school would be i do have one quick question and i realized that this question doesn't necessarily just a numeric answer because different school buildings have different sized classrooms but what is your the largest in-person number does that make sense i poured through each and every class of elementary i believe today uh and we have one classroom that
159um right now would have 22 students coming in person and what would that that's a little rare there most of them are less than that but we do have one class that would be at that level so if there's a building where that is potentially a concern what would be could you move that classroom to a larger space right that's what i'm saying like could you temporarily move that specific classroom to a community room or you know obviously they're not having meetings in the community room right now i might be able to do that and also remember that a lot of times during the day not all students are in that classroom even though that they're in person they're being pulled out for an intervention they're being pulled out for gifted instruction they're being pulled
160out for her speech therapy so it's not necessarily even if there are 22 students that are coming in person that it's 22 students the entire time that the class is there and i realize that while i'm saying this this is going to go way bad but i'm assuming that they're coming because they love that teacher i'm gonna but what could we also offer like hey you have 22 sections but we have another section over here that's only got at that school that i looked at that because it was three i want to say it was three second grades at the same time we had one one classroom that had that many more we had another classroom you know of second grade at that wasn't as high so you could see if some people wanted to
161switch having been a former elementary principal that doesn't usually go super well but that could be a possibility in trying to balance some of those if there were students and parents that were interested in doing that to go to a classroom that had smaller number of students but we could kind of leave it up to the building and the to figure it out those grade levels and do you so but the number can i do this though the numbers that we have related to parent parents choice for hybrid or remote is based on this idea that we would be um able to pretend you know have some social distancing this a b split that had been presented previously so so knowing that that might also change potentially is that right so thank you heather because
162as we build these new options i think it would be imperative to let parents choose again because we would have dramatically changed the options in front of them we would have changed the social distancing so the numbers that i'm talking to you about might change but didn't we just in our announcement from last week say hey you can choose again and we specifically said we are planning to make changes to the plan that would increase classroom time but people don't necessarily know i know i understand that they didn't know exactly what that would look like but i think to then say okay well now you get to choosing it like what was the point of last week if they were going to do it again i don't it's just my opinion i kind of like
163the idea of getting to choose at each level of increased in person because some people might be comfortable with two days a week but if their only option is four days a week or maybe they've been in those two days a week and their kids are like man i'm good i'll go remote you know what i mean i have that option to say i don't feel comfortable with my student being in four days a week i guess my only concern with that was information i saw that would delay these things even further okay well i think absolutely there should be information that is clear and that the parents should be allowed to say based on what i'm seeing this is what i want to do because i think any one of us if we were
164involved in any situation whether it was staying at a motel or something you'd want to know what's going to happen so i agree with lori that you have to show them and then you have to let them choose based on what is in actuality going to be offered let me ask this can you have is that something that a building principal could do because the building principal would know how many kids are per section because like for me at the junior high i'm gonna just assume that it's gonna be somewhere between 10 and 20. and i'm still gonna i'm still gonna send him and he's gonna wear his mask he's gonna wash this i would argue you might be a little bit more informed than necessarily every parent being a teacher but yeah but you
165know what i mean like like yeah and there's sixty percent of people maybe fifty percent of people maybe forty that are like me that i nee i need my in three weeks or whatever length the numbers might look totally different or a vaccination thing might have totally rolled out and people are like oh well i had it i've i'm no longer as worried about the risk because it's done for me now so now i feel okay well but or there's people who are you know like leaning more towards me but are thinking you know what i'd put my kid in school if it didn't have 22 kids in that class right well i think we're a little too worried about micromanaging a class of 22 when we should be but what i'm saying is it
166shouldn't be a district level thing it should be a building level right and that's that's what i think ruth said she said let's have the discussion with the building principal and some other people right and that's you know have that discussion figure it out and then if you can move them or i just give them a bigger what we're asking putting back at the building principles because i oh we're talking about the classroom of 22 kids you would have a discussion and you either move them to a bigger room like a community room oh no that's not what i was talking about at all i'm sorry i was talking about parents getting a choice at the next specified change or the new phase right that they could then choose if they wanted to be remoter
167in person that's that's what i thought that's what ali was talking about but laurie's talking about something different i would be fine letting the parents knowing this new information choose to go remote because that's not really going to impact what any plans if we suddenly had nine more percent of families that decided oh well i like this better let's go in person well then we won't be able to do that necessarily in person can i have almost yeah sorry man i need to jump back to slide five number one agree on group norms because everybody is talking over everybody and you're right about that virtually impossible to follow along so if i can just encourage everyone take a breath for a minute because it's it's really i'm having a hard time following the discussion i
168can't imagine what everyone at home is trying to follow along with so if we can just take a minute find some way to look around the room see who's ready for a question who's finished talking who's not talking because it's we're really talking over each other too much thank you sorry madam sheriff i overstepped you no you're you're absolutely right we all have an obligation to self-govern thank you then i bring us back and we're having a great uh discussion so where are we i felt like i needed to get a response around elementary on where we were at uh as each board member on the uh proposed recommendation that we have students come together not divide them by a and b and build instructional schedules based on that assumption i um i'm just i'll
169just say um you know when we talk about um how when we when we talked about our priorities my goal would be to i think there's a lot of benefits to the schedule that you're referring to but thinking about the idph guidelines and following this health and safety strategies as much as possible the mitigation strategies and so that's why i'm a five for this one i had not heard how long these groups would be in the building as one full group versus an a so we and and that's later but this would be i was still working off and we are still working off of the assumption that it would be five hours or less so they're not eating lunch in their classrooms understood and then is there a consideration to the bus routes so
170many families and parents kind of plan on the high school and junior high leaving early and getting home early and the younger kids getting home after the older kids have arrived is that still that's another layer that you'll see later in the presentation as we move forward we have to work with dawn and she's been great at transportation most of our bus routes have to run not only a high school route but a junior high and an elementary route so you have to have lead time and lag time in between all of the arrivals and dismissals to work within the number of buses that we have and i will be talking you know what that elementary schedule looks like um and maybe we're at same that chicken egg sometimes when we're creating schedules you get
171so far down this and you're like well what if we went back and did so i'm just trying to get a sense of how comfortable we are at having groups a and b together at elementary school so we had two um i'm not sure i was posing the question over here um for our elementary classes how comfortable are we as uh moving forward with having our a and b groups together at the elementary level yeah it looks like you don't even have anything you go with three no opinion yeah i'm so far removed from elementary that okay i'm having like i would like them socially distanced apart oh yeah so i lost track of tallies do we have more people on agreement or disagreement we're on agreement we have barely barely yeah we'll need more
172information okay um so at this point i'd like to go through and mock up some of the schedules so that you have some of the answers that you had talked about but again these are very much a working document if people are looking at these from home or these things we can slide some of these minutes we can slide what are these pieces i'm trying and we're trying to get broad brushstrokes of where we would be on this and then depending at the end of this of when we decide the timeline i do think it is very advantageous for our still to work with our teachers our specialists to fine-tune some of the details when you think about how complicated to push in special education and other pieces we're trying to come to consensus here
173on where we're at as a board and then build schedules accordingly so for example going with the recommendations that we talked about and having a junior high in high school in person this is what it could look like students would be divided by last name into groups a and b students could come to school then two days a week or we could look at wednesdays of having additional in-person day but alternate every other week if in-person instruction was indeed our highest priority each group would also then have two days of remote instruction we would not have students eat lunch while at school each school day would be five hours long very similar to what we do on a regular school year when we have a five hour school improvement day or parent-teacher conferences at the
174elementary level where secondary would have a five-hour day those schedules have already been built we could still have additional support time for students and then wednesdays as i said could be additional instruction either in person or remote or it could be intensive student support time what that looks like or could look like at the junior high level you could run all nine periods they could be 30 minutes long with transition time built in so that when students came they would see each of their teachers and that would be the benefit of that is that they would see their teacher in person twice a week we do lose a little bit of instructional minutes by doing it this way but we gain in person instructional minutes to continue just to see what that looks like at
175high school and there's two different mock-ups of schedules here one of which is eight periods long where they see all of their eight periods in one day where there would be 34 minutes or 33 minute periods transition time in between same type of thing where they would see their teachers twice a week running through their entire schedules with wednesday still up for discussion or you could maximize some more instructional minutes by doing a block schedule and having block one you know be their first four periods of the day and they have double up of periods and then moving and i we have not yet taken this to a whole group of teachers because we want to know where people are at but there there are pros and cons especially depending on the content level of
176each of these this isn't for you to kind of vote at this point of you know which is better blocks or periods is to give you examples of what could be done within those parameters yes okay i do can i ask about the block though real quick as it relates to junior high students taking freshman courses yes so we have worked out how we would be able to do that uh and have our especially our students at the junior high that are taking high school math classes still work that out okay but so i'm sorry what is block one i don't so it would just be you'd see for example um maybe monday would be your first four periods block one would be seeing your first period for double the amount of time okay so
177monday would be periods one through four and you're just there double and then tuesday would be five periods five through eight the downside of that is you don't see your student every sing you don't see your teachers every single day but you do get more instructional minutes because you do not have as many times in passing periods and you also don't see as many different interactions with students right so you're limiting the number of passing periods and you're increasing instructional time which it looks like by only about four or five minutes right it's not a significant increase but they're not losing instructional time if we did that so my question then also would be because i remember way way back many many moons ago we had a presentation to do something similar at the junior
178high um and it had something to do with doing pe remotely and still blocking the schedules is that something that we would consider or has that ship sailed because it also had something to do with the number of in order to redo all of the schedules and like take out lunch take out pe those types of things we would no longer be able to offer all of the courses that we would offer at the high school level because you will have redone schedules and we have we have classes that are only offered once a day um for example things like world language at the year three or year four you might only have one class that it's offered once if that student was also in a math class that's only offered once and now we
179have to offer those simultaneously we wouldn't be able to get that done so if we did the block schedule at the high school we may have to totally redo their schedule no the black schedule would be fine but one of the drawbacks is is if i had fourth period lunch i now have fourth period for 71 minutes on a day as opposing to go through the entire schedule okay see i don't know if i think that that's enough extra i mean we're talking about like three to four minutes yeah i mean that's not you know work to do to me the pro of that would be limiting the right number of paths and periods and that's the strongest pro and i'm not sure if that would outweigh some of the cons that you're right and
180we are slightly toward let's do all periods in a day but i just wanted to demonstrate right different possibilities that you've been thinking about different options right i appreciate that yeah right okay so i just want to continue the conversation at the secondary level of what remote by choice would look like that would mean that students would participate in their classes four days a week or five days a week if we had wednesday but it would all be remote and they would be following the same schedule as in person and participating you know via google meets and those things while the rest of the students had class right they're live streaming the classrooms correct yes so it's not like we're asking the teachers to teach something twice or that the remote by choice kids would
181be missing out on something other than being in person they're getting the same information at the same time correct i feel like i jumped ahead too far because i see something different on the sample schedule and so with that topic way back when the summer we were trying to put something together and go live was the remote option i remember the conversation being it was go live those video courses because we could not do what you were just presenting we could not have a classroom being taught with another eight students logged in remotely at the same time what we had talked about originally was having the remote choice even go by edge annuity and take classes differently than that we also have talked about the um that option of having them all push in for
182those times i'm not recalling the exact conversation that you're talking about of having all remote be since we've been in remote well when when we were looking at how this again this was a summertime conversation when it was either it was either an in-person choice or it was the edge annuity go live i forget what we called it but it was basically you you chose your classes and you watched the recordings for those classes i think that was because we didn't have everything because they could not we could not have live in person and remote going on at the same time in the classroom and some of that is our technology and where we were at the beginning of the year compared to where we are now yep that's what i was meaning i have
183lots of tech questions when we get there though let's go should i keep going to elementary yes guys okay elementary again this is a working document if we were to increase to five half days a week of instruction having both a and b in-person groups combined what this could look like is that students would come to school for five mornings a week for math reading and writing instruction they would go home and then the afternoon we would have go live or digital sessions for their specials as well as pe and independent work time along with that could be small group instruction that are for our students that are struggling for our other staff that are available to do that i want to remind everyone that that would be classes not divided into a b and
184all students for in person would come at once if you want a mock-up of what the schedule would look like that could be 8 40 to 11 25 in the morning and then students would go home and have those types of things in the afternoon that i already listed what that looks like then for our remote learners is they would have the reverse or the reflection of that with students would have live sessions with their teachers five days a week in the afternoon for math reading and writing instruction with the student with the teacher that they already have the mornings would be digital instruction with specials like art music and pe small group online instruction would be scheduled in the mornings for students that are struggling what the schedule would look like there is they
185would have student support time and specials in all of those pieces in the morning and then the afternoon would be go live sessions with the teacher which could also include small group time like they have now faith the assistance or help for the struggling students that's coming from reading specialists and people who are not classroom teachers correct correct okay this would be a dramatic increase in instructional minutes in both the in-person and the remote options my i have a couple of questions about this is i'm seeing so when i'm just calculating my head 8 42 i feel like i need a little clock in front of me to eat i'm a visual person 8 40 to 11 25 is 2 hours and 35 minutes 45 right 44 45 minutes there's a 15 minute difference between
186the in person and the remote if that's what you want because 12 40 to 3 15 is what two hours and what 30. is that because like to account for arrival and dismissal or so that is looking at the teacher workday the because this there's no you know we have to build in lunch and planning period because there's no like break for art music pe like what we would do during a normal day um we do want teachers of course to have the break and the lunch that they would need to have and still be within the contractual day okay but still part of that in person like they're not getting really an extra 15 minutes of instructional time because they still have to deal with arrival and dismissal a rival dismissal distribution of materials
187all of those types of things slow down a little bit more than remote right right okay because i think that that would be a concern of parents like am i getting gypped these 15 minutes but realistically it's not it just takes a little bit longer to do things in person in almost all of our classes that afternoon sessions that are go live with the teacher are much smaller groups than what would be an in person as well okay and the um specials and stuff with that you said that's go live so they're not just sitting there watching videos all morning or conversely all afternoon they're they will be interacting with the teacher okay it's not their homeroom classroom teacher right but it would be their specials teacher or an aide or someone else who would
188have normally potentially done pull out at school for extra services as well correct okay can i can i ask one more question about the go live yes in the elementary so this will be different than the like 15 minutes on 15 minutes off right this would be yes two hours like there's a very big difference between kindergarten and fifth grade of how much breaks and time you would need to give and to have those opportunities so i'm painting that with broad brush strokes and the teacher would need to react to the students and the age and be developmentally appropriate you know for the students that are there yes so way back when on slide 17 when we asked about sending all the amb at the same time and whether there was launch or not lunch
189it was for an extended period of time correct longer than two hours and 45 minutes correct as as what our outside limit would be i don't and if when we talked about how long you want to build the day we felt like it was important to have some equity between the amount of minutes available for remote choice and also in person and we're also working with that priority of keeping students with their peers that they've been going to class with and the teacher that they're with so we're looking at taking the that day and then dividing it so that we can offer the instruction that we need to to both of those groups if you were to push and i also if if you were saying that we should go five hours for elementary school
190students and add their bus route on the beginning and the end and not have them eat i think that's also a very long day it's a long day and this is the this is the the piece i think from the beginning that i struggled with when we talked about a hybrid choice and when my statement about finance really got misconstrued out there you know the expense of the busing and everything that goes into it for two hours and 45 minutes which we know is not going to be a solid two hours or 45 minutes of instructional time especially at elementary by the time it could settle down there's stuff going on there's a lot of activities and um i i just really wish or would hope that we could find more than two hours and
19145 minutes of instructional time i i i just really really do for all of the work all of the effort uh but matt how are you going to do that how are you going to find more time when and say you have to have if you're going to preserve the teacher having both sets of kids you're either going to start chipping away at the kids that are in remote right or chipping away at the kids that are uh coming by bus i just for two hours and 45 minutes what how how much how much are you going to get done in two hours no i i completely agree with you as far as that two hours and 45 minutes is not adequate it's not a lot of time it's very complicated there's this dismissal and
192arrival but in the world of trying to create remote for all plus something else there's only so much you can shift one way or the other because you have to accommodate both groups i understand that i just it's so we're doing this because we're doing it just to do it and to get kids in the building yeah what thus the chicken and egg from earlier busting and everything else and that's the price you pay for getting the kids in the building is that some things get uh reduced as far as instructional time spot on junior high in high school it just seems like we're really falling short on the other well i think a lard i'm sorry to interrupt god that's it i'm good i just i think largely it's because we don't have do
193we not have the capabilities to live stream the elementary classrooms correct like the the reason junior high and high school can have more in-person time is because their classrooms are being live streamed so the teachers aren't having to i mean in essence we're asking the elementary teachers to teach the same thing twice it is our sense that especially at the younger grades that listening into a live streaming with the teacher is not affect as effective of having the teacher right here with a small group and working on early literacy and early numeracy skills that it's a different type of learner and a different type of skill that would be involved in listening to live streaming and you know from my elementary teaching days you know working with i have a group of students here 14
194that kind of thing and i have 12 that are remote and i'm managing and balancing both at the same time absolutely i have to say big time i think that that's a huge consideration i think it's actually a shame that we have our junior high and high school kids set up in a kind of luxury world where that's possible because that's not the best kind of teaching but it absolutely wouldn't work to have the go live with the elementary kids because the way that you do what you do doesn't work for kids that are on zoom at the same time you have live kids and you know i've been doing it all year remote and i can just tell you that if i had to do live kids as well there would be even more
195disruption so what else does anyone have any specific questions regarding the sample schedules we are at so far is that um not some well i guess not so much of the sample schedules i guess i'm just wondering you know when we looked at some of the first slides and we were talking about finding the right balance and there's the maximizing in-person instruction and there's the minimizing health risks for students and staff from with the proposal for elementary of combining the groups um a and b um just can you tell me a little bit more about your that rationale in terms of thinking about that balance because it is different from the upper level when you look at some of the research that's out there especially with our younger learners there's not near as much transmission
196in between students so pushing those groups the younger students together we felt even more confident about being able to mitigate and being able to keep that transmission from going we're also looking at having much smaller amounts of students interact with one another throughout the day as compared to junior high and high school so that was the rationale that we used to talk about pushing the elementary students together and bringing them in for five days a week in in what we know about our youngest learners too having that frequent interaction with the teacher to build upon what was just happening the day before does cause more progress and instruction and i think everybody gets that we would love to have everybody in five days a week and get back to what we were doing we're just
197trying to find what is the next step to help us get where we eventually would like to be okay and i have a question and i hope this is a good time to ask it if i'm a teacher no matter if i'm elementary junior high or high school where do i go to look up what i what i am recommended to do with children when they are with me live in the classroom and what kinds of things can i not do and this of course depends on if you're a science teacher and you have to have an experiment are you allowed to do that are you allowed to touch a lot of things and have other kids touch them or have them face to face in a certain way where do teachers go to get
198guidance about what they're supposed to do on that very specific level so we have a lot of those things that are already published and i'd ask for people to look at the website or what that looks like but we are talking about social distancing in classrooms having them as far you know as they could having them you know face forward as much as possible all of those different pieces but having six foot distancing if we were to have 20 students in an elementary classroom will not be realistic right but the choice about whether to have them play a card game or whether they're not allowed to touch a pocket chart but and everybody's touching the same set of cards or something like that that's outlined for the teachers somewhere so that they can get clear
199guidance on what they used to do in person but now they have to change for a covet environment correct okay because that's a safety issue for me to know that teachers know how to be safe with their particular calling or particular classes and that's training that has been and will continue to be ongoing right as people bring in there's going to be different scenarios that we're going to have to address that we haven't possibly thought of all the different scenarios and different things that we would need to think about okay and faith can you go over again what the difference is in right now today the number of minutes that kids were getting as opposed to what i look at this i see this as the most generous schedule it can be that's the max
200it's maxed out for elementary we would be going from 8 hours of instruction a week to 13 hours and 45 minutes a week for in person and for remote we'd be going from 6 hours to 12 hours and 55 minutes that's for elementary we'd be dramatically increasing the amount of instruction available to both groups of students if we were to move to this model compared to what is on the dockets to start january 19th and this model clearly does not allow for them to even think about having lunch in school so there would be no need for worrying about how to safely allow them in small groups to remove masks and social distance for a lunch period correct so is the concept adding more complexity once you get skilled at what you are able to
201do like we have not been in person we don't know our our teachers don't know the answers to those questions because they haven't seen how many kids are in their class or whichever so i would really hesitate to put on to our schools the extra burden of now let's add not having masks for half an hour while we have 20 kids in this space that we don't know if it's a classroom yet i i i is that the concept here is that we don't make it too complex at first well and knowing that while students are wearing masks the transmission rate and those things are so dramatically reduced that we wanted to build that day in also to talking to tony's point of there's only so much amount of a day and to split that
202into in person and remote this is maximizing the amount of instruction for both groups it dramatically increases both live in person and the remote piece because now it's five days a week and it's less complicated correct yeah what about for the junior highs in high school for minutes so with junior high in high school it gets a little bit more complicated because some people are very interested in overall minutes some people are much more interested in the amount of in-person instructional minutes so at the junior high level where we have 132 minutes per class period a week we'd be going down to 120 to go to this option but there would be more of those minutes to be in person which we hear loud and clear is as a priority if we were to add
203wednesdays we could recoup some of that time that is lost at high school we currently have 150 minutes per week per period it would be going down to 132 with this piece obviously if we went to block it gains back a few minutes of that and that's over that whole week of time and if we were to be putting in some more instruction on wednesdays and that type of thing we could more than recoup that amount of difference could we just on the wednesdays do full go live like what they're doing now yes well not like they're doing now on wednesdays but going go live sessions on a wednesday right so we're thinking wednesday would follow the same schedule that they're doing in person it just would all everybody would be remote that's one of
204the options yes what's next just a sample of early childhood schedule where we'd have an am group and a pm group and a remote by choice and that is a mock-up of what a sample schedule could look like and then just wanted to make sure that we're still talking about our students in self-contained programs coming four to five days a week depending on the different level and the different program they're in we want to make sure that students and parents understand that if they're having resource services or 504 plans they would attend in person on the same day as their peers would do in general education and then work around that transition and eva the programs have separate schedules as they do currently and we'd be sharing those out there we just and goal would
205follow a separate schedule as well just didn't want parents to think we had forgotten about them as we're moving forward and talking this evening so the the early childhood they're they're they're teaching three separate groups they're correct and they they're used to teaching an am and a pm already so this is adding the adding my choice option in as well for for our self-contained students when are we planning to bring those students back into classrooms can i assume that any changes potentially that we would discuss here would not affect the start time for those students like i know it's so that's kind of coming because it depends on there's another question that's coming of you know do we start on january 19th with a the current plan that we have do we wait and i
206have a recommendation but i want to also see where we're at with the next phase before we start talking about what is uh the timeline of which we could do the next phase is there anything you need from us to move forward to your next section so i believe that i have we had general consensus here on some things there was no option that it looked like we did not go completely against what the recommendation or the suggestion from the administrative team was so with those broad brush strokes then of looking at what the different schedules would look like where are we at with schedules such as with those now that you've seen the details and the pieces of where that goes for us to build uh those schedules and then go to the next
207decision factor which is when we could start those okay sorry yeah i just like so i know ms paltein spoke at the beginning of the meeting and i know i've gotten the emails too about teachers wanting input but i also feel like we have to shoulder this at some point you know and i'm speaking as a teacher too like would i like to have my opinion on what my district is doing 100 but i also feel like we're kind of at this point where we keep asking faith to do something and then we ask her to change it and then we ask her to change it again and then we change the metrics and then we have to change it again and like i appreciate all the work that you did 100 and i appreciate
208100 that teachers want more input and i appreciate that you are freaked out right now at the possibility of having to do something brand new again for the umpteenth time this year but i also feel like as a school board we have to it's got to be done like we have to make that decision right so i just like i want to put you know like again i appreciate everybody but at some point we have to say this this is our plan we're gonna have to we're gonna figure it out we're gonna figure it out together we're gonna screw it up a couple of times along the way i know i say this every time but it's we gotta start somewhere but we have to start i would like to add on to what ally
209said in in an ideal world we would be able to just pause time and get everyone's and figure it out and then go forward and that would be the end of the changing of decisions but the only thing that has been consistent in the last 10 months is the inconsistency and the constant changing of metrics and guidelines and we i'm with you allie we just ha we cannot wait any longer we the longer we wait the longer our kids are suffering i know i don't know if dr sparlin you were going to mention my request that i had made about students failing and it's heartbreaking to see those statistics and i would love to be able to share that but i know this is working fine for some kids it's working fine for my kids
210they they're fine but the number of students that this is not fine is not acceptable so if i think i want to go through the next few slides to point um kind of a center direction and have things to react to and then we'll come back from there so one of the big things and we're still i feel pretty good that we're in agreement but not consensus on some of those big broad brushstrokes about lunch and those pieces but we can go back if we need to and revisit this so then we begin to talk about so if we built all of this when could we do this we feel strongly that the parents should be given a choice because we will have changed the amount of social distancing we will have changed schedules as
211to what people are able to do to work around their their current work lives and those pieces we will have changed the dramatically the amount of in-person instruction and remote instruction that would slide t students and parents to a different decision so we feel strongly that we will need to do that and that also with that risk causes that we may have more people go remote we may have less people go remote and we also with any of these different changes we would have to create new transportation routes now we've worked with dawn to make sure that with all of this we wouldn't adding on huge amounts of bus routes from where we're usually at or having to hire an inordinate amount of bus drivers to get that done but it would be a change
212she would need to then write the bus routes re-bid so that bus drivers know which of their routes they would have communicate those out have that be as that practice run so that we make sure we know we're going when we're picking up especially a lot of our elementary students so it does take time when we look at this new option of timeline that if we started tomorrow this is what we need to build and where we would need to be our recommendation is that we would not start this that doesn't mean in person instruction wouldn't start but if we were to flip and say all of this is brand new we would need to publicize that out to parents we believe it would be good to start with having a few of these in-person
213pieces for people to react to see how that's going then have parents make their choice by february 5th that means that we would meet that timeline that we shared back in october for our elementary students that at the end of second trimester which is february 12th that would all be decided when the third trimester started in february 15th there would be that new option if you recall our timeline in october for our secondary students was more toward march where it was the end of the third quarter we can back that up and have this done earlier before you react to that i also want to show the next slide because it's what could we be what could be done to move up when we could do in-person instruction currently that is on those pieces so
214now when we get together and we talk about what is the best thing to do for students we're weighing out starting as soon as possible which is that january 19th time for elementary or do you minimize the amount of change and wait until february 15th our recommendation is that we do not want to wait until february to get our students in but that does come at a price that means we would start one way which is a week from tomorrow and get our students in what that would look like we could move up high school of our current plan by a week so that we would have our in-person instruction for elementary following what we've already shared with everyone that the 19th would start the hybrid model junior high was scheduled to start the next
215week in high school after that we can move up high school so they start at the same time as junior high we would do that for a few weeks get the information from parents as after we work with teachers to solidify the details have some of that input that you talked about about what that would look like and then move to our next phase of instruction questions or comments about that yes so today is january 11th why would we not ask for like we already have schedules here that we've looked at tonight why we have to wait until february first to publicize a new instructional plan we that is uh up where we could get p more of that but we have a lot of decisions like before tomorrow that need to go into all
216the details about those different plans i what we have learned a little bit from when we asked this in october if you ask way too early before the start date the world turns and then people are not happy with their decision so we could get the information out but if we're not able to get bus routes get all of the attendance centers the way that they need to be until february let's ask parents closer to the time of that instruction so that we have a more accurate information and parents have accurate information of what is the latest with covert rates all of those pieces as they start is the rationale behind why you know why we wouldn't launch all of that immediately and seek some of the input look at you know what that looks
217like make sure the all of the intricacies of how special education plays into that and give that information out to parents at a later time for those who are looking and watching the board me they're already getting a feel of where we would be going so it's not a secret and we could push information out we have talked with dawn and we would not wait to build the bus routes based off of those what we would build the bus routes off of is having as if all of the students were coming so that we're not waiting for choice and then doing the bus routes as we've done in the past to be more economical it is not the most cost efficient to just build the bus routes as if everybody comes but at the junior
218high and the high school level that allows us if we do that to eventually you could go to four days of a and b combined and having more of those pieces of what all that would look like and allow that flexibility and what those those pieces would look like right so i have a couple of maybe not in i have some i have some questions um so my my first one is about the a b together and the trial period like i would i i would ask the board to say look we're gonna try this for two weeks work out some kinks and then maybe give parents a two week warning and then we're gonna you know add more kids whatever like i like i really kind of feel like we need some kind of
219timeline even if that changes because everything changes but i really feel like we need a timeline for that and my second timeline um is another question that i hear a lot from some of the some of the staff in the district um so most of these questions go around tech right so my first concern is that not every teacher is in every building right now um i know that we did some upgrades to something yes yeah yeah the internet we did yeah but um do all of our teachers have devices do all of our teachers can all of our teachers connect to the proximas can all of they have enough chords to connect things to other things do we have the little dongly whatevers do we and like i know i i kind of in
220passing said this to john but like i think that the more we teach with technology like i realize not every kid has a chromebook yet and again teachers that's going to throw a huge monkey wrench in for you a huge and and and we know that and we know that going in and i know that there are some parents who you know like me for a long time he was using dad's chromebook or macbook or whatever it was right um until he broke it then we finally had to get him a district laptop but um so what happens if they don't have a laptop and they're in a classroom and i know that there's some work grounds and faith and i kind of talked about them and i agree with you totally i'm a you
221know i it's not ideal but realize that there are going to be kids in your classrooms that don't have chromebooks and you know i would encourage you to reach out to faith she's got some really great ideas that i didn't even think of and i've been teaching for 21 years right like there are some workarounds and parents there you you're going to be a little frustrated sometimes too but i you know like so those are my big questions like devices how many when can we get them i would like tech to go into each building and just and we've we've set up demo classrooms at each of the secondary schools where teachers will need to have the skill of teaching in person and to students you know at their homes at the same time to
222do that we have not had all of our staff in uh to view all of that we need to and very much want to have all staff in to even do a go live meeting where we can say okay everybody is in their classrooms they've connected to their access points we know our bandwidth is great but we have staff that have not picked up the device yet that we've offered to them to know how it would work how it would connect and i don't want any staff member to have to do that on the same day that they have students in person with an audience oh no so i so i when we're looking at dates like i would like teach i i'm not saying i'm you got to do this like a week or
223maybe even two out like i you know like ideally i would like the teachers in the building i would like a tech at each building and i realized we don't have enough for a tech at each building but just for somebody like some of the inside classrooms that don't get good wi-fi some of the things that people in buildings know that we couldn't possibly know sitting up here as a board like there's some quirks to some technology pieces that are gonna have to be worked out it so and like even the seating charts like your seating charts are gonna well and they're gonna i know and i know that you're thinking with a teacher brain on this one i get it and and i i really do sympathize i think i heard at one point
224even changing the word and to or is just that overwhelming especially with all the changes that have happened so we want to minimize that but we i definitely want to see what we're looking at for what you need for teachers to have for time before students are in acknowledging that they're still teaching remote while they're learning these new things too right and and some that's huge some of when i we feel strongly of when staff would come in also depends on when we're starting these so what do you need from us to so one of the things that we would need is you know where are the where are we with this piece of we are supposed to start in-person instruction a week from tomorrow with elementary and we will not be ready to go
225to the next phase where we're talking about five days a week for elementary and having those different periods and offering choice and i i we cannot get off that off the ground by next week so we need to be thinking about where are we with causing yet another change for families and staff and having in-person instruction you know as soon as possible so are you asking us if we want to do a february 15th start on this change and go with what you currently have now until february 15th is that what you're trying to gather or can you start it february 5th or 1st or whatever february 1st only gives us a couple of weeks to ask all parents to make this selection this choice and redo bus routes i think we just asked parents
226we gave them two days to make a choice i think that's not an outrageous i think i think that's what i could yeah aren't there um already geared for the 19th start they're geared for the 19th but they would be very different if all of a sudden we were running bus routes at different times and five days a week for example at elementary and had different amounts of students on them can she do that in two weeks and two weeks to do that and hire the bus drivers and redo the different bus routes that need to be and do practice routes when i talk with don at transportation that's just not a possibility to have a two-week turnaround i would just like to quote george michael of wham when he said if we're gonna do
227it do it right and i think we need to give ourselves enough time to do this right i think it needs to be get there in good shape because we're doing a good job now with the remote the teachers are doing a great job it's working as well as it can and i completely understand that a lot of kids are not doing as well as they should um but i think we need to be honest as a board that the people involved in the logistics and that's what i always go back to is like what are the logistics how can you roll something out if they came to our house and told us in two weeks you need to have everything ready for you know my my nephew's bar mitzvah or somebody's wedding you'd be
228like i can't do that in two weeks and this is much bigger than a bar mitzvah or you know a wedding so we have to be honest as board members and say how much time would you need to make this thing roll out in a way that is professional and is well thought out and i have a question faith when you talked about getting all the teachers in it doesn't sound like there's room for teachers who are not able to come in in person is that something that's being addressed each time you decide these things we've already gone through and looked at um staff that would require telework or for medical reasons can't come in and at the elementary level that's really looking at if they are still able to teach from home but there
229is a reason that can't happen we're co-teaching and having a person that manages the instruction there but also having their teachers still remote in so she's providing he or she would be providing those pieces at the high school level and the junior high level where it's not you know three hours a day or those types of things and it's only one or two periods we could have a teaching assistant or other people be able to provide that instruction and that teacher would remote in to the students that are present and also teach the students that are at home okay thank you for clarifying that again i i feel like like we're two weeks and four days if you're just counting the that's 14 working days like i i feel like we could make some significant
230so are you asking for us i i would like basically we need to we need to first decide on what date we're looking at if we if we would like to see these plans be built out if we can come to consensus of four board members in agreement on a start date for whatever this new option would look like on what that if we would like to approve what that option would look like what level of board involvement do we want any changes that come down the road what will that look like um and we just need to get to four so yes ruth i would have to say i like these plans that were presented tonight much better than the current hybrid plan they are more simple they provide a lot more instruction time
231it doesn't give me a headache to look at the schedule i i think it makes sense i don't like the idea of start this crazy town plan a little bit it's a little bit kooky um because we didn't have information and numbers start this this and then in three weeks you're gonna move to this one that is a lot nicer i think it's especially at the elementary level a lot of change for young kids to deal with but at the same time i do not like the idea of waiting until february and i would love if it all humanly possible to move that up i mean the high school kids were already not originally going to be starting until february anyway so it's not a big deal to just say okay we're gonna i just
232well idols are my opinions so i just but so i just wanted to say that um i think i don't think that the original hybrid plans were um uh i think that they achieved many goals that we were hoping they were achieved that we would they would achieve in terms of some of the obviously looking at mitigation risks and whatnot challenging schedules to be sure for sure i also agree that i like the simplicity and consistency of some of the other plans that we're looking at um that doesn't for me you know and that's okay that doesn't for me outweigh those health and safety um things that i i really think are so important not just for our students and our little students um but for our staff who are at a greater risk for
233um you know for covid um so um but but and i also agree though too that um i think getting them i think switching around you know the plants having them start one way and moving to another way um certainly does have some challenges one of the benefits is a you know we're dipping our toe in the water we're getting kids who you know let's say for elementary you know they start they go for two day two half days for a couple of weeks this is a big change you know for um you know for kids who um lori and i had talked about who may have not have been putting shoes on you know for the last 10 months for real this is real i i just i just want to ask are we
234looking as a board to each offer input on this only because it's 10 to 11. we have a few more things to do including a closed session so while i do want to allow everyone to have an opportunity to share their thoughts on the whole thing i'd like to have us consider the time and what we need to do to be able to make a decision on what we think because let's be honest none of these are easy and there are pros and cons to all of this i don't think any of us have spent less time on this than on our jobs in the last little while and it doesn't make it better um so i what i would like to try to focus on is what do we need what pieces of information
235not anything else only pieces of information we need in order to be able to give faith an answer of something other than three so we can see where we're at for i think the answer we need is you you said you can't do it by january 19th you could do it by february 15th is there any middle date between those two dates when it could be ready really looking at when i talk with dawn on transportation it's a four week time to do bus routes figure out which buses are needed bid for who's writing junior high high school elementary it's that time frame that's driving that deadline and this has been true on my whole time on the board that the buses drive a lot of what happens at school i have seen where it
236takes five days for buses and and i know that some bus routes don't change not trying to push push back too much here but at the same time i mean the the bus routes don't change too much and it's a computer program that just kind of runs through and routes them from what i understand and then there's a few days for bidding on changes and what usually gets bit is the changes that people would make to their routes from what they have now which is much less intensive process and then they run the routes a few times to make sure they actually work and then adjust it so i i'm not trying to say that that's wrong that it would take four weeks but i feel like that's a lot but that being said i'm
237looking at our calendar and we do have this president's day thing happening where the district is closed on february 15th and we do have a three and a half hour day already scheduled on february 12th so the number of extra days of school we're talking about between the fifth and the fifteenth what what number of school days is let me pull up we're talking about an extra three and a half school days so i think for me the balance i wonder if we need to have that balance be something different so i guess i i just want to hear faith if if you feel that that three and a half hours or excuse me three and a half school days in person is worth the level of stress that what that would put on the
238system but four weeks is february 8th so they should be able to get it done in four weeks the number of school days between the 5th and the 15th is what i asked that's what i'm so you're looking at the 5th through the 15th for like the change in the high school time between when we would be starting in person with the current plans versus what we would start for no i'm just asking i mean i'm just saying that to me it doesn't seem like very many days are gained by putting all this stress that we're talking about on the system and and i wonder what your thoughts are on that if you look at the original timeline for our high school there's certainly not that much difference between what that originally was and what
239we're talking about and starting early february if you look at our elementary students they're talking about more instructional time this is where it's a really difficult decision i know that there are lots of people that are just like please please please can we start something can we start school can we start you know on what that looks like and then also not putting the system whether it be our students or our teachers through yet another change and that's a really difficult decision that we have to wrestle with right um but we do need to come to at some point a closing discussion correct what what other questions do you have so what we're hearing is i'm thinking she's recommending the 15th um of course if the board directed she would look for something sooner is
240does the board want to direct for something for this new phase sooner than the 15th can we faith would that work if we tried to i might suggest we have dawn on standby that we could call her um she knows that we're listening because really a lot of this is how soon could we do busing and i would like to hear it from dawn okay so yeah and she's been texting me and part of the problem is also and i'll call her right now is working with the contractors as you know when we when we re-bid and we approve those contracts back hey can you hold that one second so you're talking about the first student routes that need to be added right uh we we agreed to a 40 so you know they wanted
24180 us to pay for while they were well we were close so that they would keep their youtube off yep so they would keep their drivers and we negotiated 40 percent with the agreement that we were taking on the risk that they may not be fully staffed so they have asked also for a month to to get their staff back in okay so okay that's more information thank you okay so the reason why we're looking at a four week time out at minimum for transportation is that we do have to change bells we will have to combine the a and b schedule that we will be running starting next week for elementary all of those things require more than just flipping a switch in our computer system our system does handle a database but it
242has a lot of manual manipulation to make those changes once all of that is done we'll have to make sure the packages can stay the same way they are right now for the 19th and the 25th start dates that we have scheduled if that's the case then we still have to bid those out because the hours are potentially going to change and then the drivers will need to do a practice run to make sure times are correct so that we can communicate new bus routes on the website and then we also will still in the midst of all of that unless there's a change from cdc idph and isb we will still have to create a seating chart for each and every one of those buses so all of those things um even going with
243a four week time frame uh we'll be putting my staff our office staff our routers our supervisors our dispatchers working extra hours during the week and probably weekends from now until the 15th if that's our start date had a question don we're a little under four weeks if we get to february 8th is it realistic if the calendar starts counting today that we do this by february 8th so as you're looking at the calendar and i realize i'm putting you on a lot of pressure so if you're like i need a few minutes and to figure this out four weeks you know would start from today would be february 8th is that timeline possible so i think the only way that we could say that would be if we were not doing the 19th and
244the 25th start because we are still finalizing student lists and all of those things that we need to get to the school this week in order to prepare for next week and the 25th um and if we have to do those things those are going to pull us from being able to start tomorrow right on working on these routes for the 15th but we could start every route and everything by the 8th if we put off the 19th start date and 25th right and we have to acknowledge that part of the reason why we might have to do that is because of what we've decided in the past i think it's time to own it as a board and say you know because we're not sure and we haven't set up an absolute idea of
245what we want that some of these shifts that we've asked for are there was the reason why we might have to wait a little bit why do we have january 28th as a date on here if that's not even possible it's possible for her to do the buses that way but then to not chew two different plants this is for the current timeline of what the current hybrid options that are out there of moving the timeline this is not fair that's something you're not ready for so to change everything that we talked about tonight and to change pretty much everybody everybody in the district to start on february 8th which is just one day short of four weeks we could do that with the new option with the busing i can't see why on earth
246we wouldn't keep the option that keeps kids going in in in a little over a week or wait two weeks a week a week yeah it's the 11th um i can't see why we would postpone that if we know that we're going to have to postpone it for long enough whether they come in or not i i don't understand why we would add that confusion tony i actually i know that that as a board we've had a lot of discussions we actually haven't changed the plan all that much we gave a hybrid plan we chose to go remote as a board in october we voted on a return to school plan that was paused because of mitigations and now we're back to being able to do the plan that we approved last october so what
247i've been looking at this as is that we are looking at what happens next does it make sense so i don't i don't think that we've been wishy-washy and i don't think we haven't owned it i i don't want you to get all wrapped up in criticism i don't even mean to criticize it's just that what we decided on that was supposed to happen january 9th we'll call it plan a what we saw faith present tonight plan b each plan that we ask for takes so much logistical time and effort is there anybody in this room who does this stuff who thinks that's not true i don't think anyone doesn't think it's true so for me i'm just saying that we need to acknowledge as a board that the fact that we are now on
248plan b means that we might have to wait till february 8th which i think is a pretty good offer if you think we should do both plan a and plan b that's for the board to decide isn't it that's what i'm asking for us to make a choice about um because we need to make those decisions and as much as these are hard decisions and for some people all the discussion in the world wouldn't change what they chose when it came down to it we still need to have the conversation which we are having and we but we need to conclude the conversation and there's never going to be a time when that doesn't leave things unasked in something like this because nobody knows the answers to all of it every single iteration is huge
249but at some point i think what i'm catching is the philosophical difference of are we staying with this for the rest of the year or not and i don't think i've heard from our administration that they would have been planning to stay with this hybrid plan the rest of the year anyway i would just ask that we go with their recommendations on this because let's be frank bored and everyone really involved this is pretty similar to what they requested we approve in the first place um and and we're all these months later and it doesn't look a whole lot different so if we can i'd like to make sure that we've had a chance to ask the questions i think that at this point unless there's something you need to know for information we need
250to make some we need to make some ideas to cobble this together so we can take a vote at some point this evening so are there any tangible informational items not philosophically based is there anything tangible such as is xyz possible is there anything you need to know to change what you think you would be willing to vote on because that's going to be a big enough process heather mike okay so i don't know i i don't know if the board decides to go with plan a and b as the essentially as as recommended so the elementary could start the 19th doing the a b schedule if um uh if parents don't want want their child to be in person but don't want to deal with another change can they start their child with the
251in-person option with when phase two starts whatever that date might be before the trimester though like if we're looking at february 8th or february 15th so whenever we would roll out here are the new options prior to that we would have to offer parents choice in our opinion to do that so whether that was the february 8th or whether that was the february 15th we would need to ask our parents where they're at with that and make a new selection which is new bus routes new right would that be able to happen would those options be able to happen before january 19th because i might not want to start my child january 19th you could be remote january 19th and then whatever we decide as the next day in person in person or you may
252we i don't know we may have some parents that are like oh both a and b groups together i'm no longer interested in in person right right so does that answer your question yes thank you all right so the first thing i think we need to decide and we should do this via our five finger and again let's remember that one is the index finger the first thing we need to decide is would we like to go with the the proposed new start time for high school new start date for high school being the same date as junior high is that the only change to the a plan that we would be talking about that is correct so by a show of the proposed fingers what is your level of comfort with moving the start
253date of high school to be the same as with junior high all right so that is that so we've got that taken care of yay good work next are we as a group interested in moving to a second phase for lack of a better word for this as it is demonstrated by faith's presentation of what it could look like with the different junior high in high school and then elementary and early childhood are we in agreement with that can you please do a show of fingers if you're in agreement with both of everything those we're going to talk about the date next we just need to know if you like the plan first because if not enough people like the plan we got to talk about that before we talk about when it starts does
254that make sense all right show fingers on do you like this proposed phase two plan will you be in agreement with this the early child or the elementary five half days a week the junior high in high school the basically the five hour day schedule a b as well five are we deciding on block or period no no no just the whole package elementary junior high high school all right every you were able to count fingers all right very good now that we have chosen on that as a next phase are we in agreement at starting this on what is recommended at february 15th fingers hold on wait starting what on the phase two that we just agreed we would like to see on february because that's now the given now the new variable is
255is are we in agreement that february 15th should be the date all right are there enough ones and twos there to move forward four very good all right so the next thing we need to determine is employees returning to the building because we know that they need to be in the building to make these things work faith do you have a recommendation on when employees would return or is that something that we need to discuss still and and it's a little bit more complicated than just the date so one of the things that we need to determine here is the staff workday parameters there is at the spectrums of that where staff would be in school for the entirety of their contractual work day and be that that's the one end then there's also staff
256is in our schools on the days or the parts of the days that they are doing in-person instruction but would have the option to be teaching elsewhere on times that they are doing remote instruction for a lot of student staff that's half days then there's the piece in between of staff in schools for in-person instruction and student support time and we build toward that for a little context for the board the current mou that is out there is that a our staff is would be allowed to work their days of in person and then if they chose to and they live close enough to go home to teach the other part of the day so that is our current staff understanding of what they are returning to when they come back however does that uh
257maureen can you provide clarification or is that a closed session that can be closed session thank you okay so we don't need to determine what we can say is we would like to have them back as soon as you need to have them back whatever that day is which we can discuss later right or we can talk about those days but we've got kids coming on the 19th well okay so right that's a problem right so well that's not a problem that's it's a great point of school but ideally what i have liked to have had more lead time with our staff in person to try out all of those things that we need to do we are running out of time if we are starting on the 19th we also need to be very
258cognizant of a change to our staff as they are figuring out their own child care responsibilities all of those pieces so to dramatically change their week by friday and what that would look like i think would be inconsiderate and difficult to do at this point do you have a recommendation on the date so um if we are starting the 19th and it sounds like we are elementary is already in you know for those days the 20th uh so monday of that next week is martin luther king day so we're off that monday um tuesday we were doing a remote planning day for our secondary st our secondary staff anyway because they had not had that wednesday is you know not participating we already have an agreement that uh our staff would be coming in on
259thursday to do trial runs of teaching from in person do all of those pieces so the really only day left to say you need to come in that they aren't already coming in for at least part of that time is that friday now that we've moved up the high school start time so high school staff was thinking that they would not be coming in yet for another week so we would have to start high school earlier coming in obviously because we'll have students there in person so i think we can look at the having our high school staff and junior high staff come in on that thursday and friday add that additional day so that we can have more time to what that looks like now that we've moved up our timeline but to move
260it much earlier than that with what we've already shared with staff i think would would not be wise to be considered of what they need to do for their home life okay so there's nothing you need from us right at this moment on that no then the next piece would be determining what how much of the day we would want staff to be at school okay do we need that as part of the action item for approving that phase two plan or do is that something that can be a board directive as we enter our second closed session it can be a board directive on what that looks like all right let's do that then um anything else that we would need to do to be able to move this to the action item that
261we are looking to have no i'm looking at taking a quick break or typing quickly while you go through the next action item so i can put up a slide and say exactly what it is that we've agreed to may i have a motion to move item 8.2 down to item eight point four let me finish the motion first real quick okay let's just move the item that's what i was in the middle of asking 8.2 can we please can i have a second to approve emotion thank you second i never get to sorry ursula that's okay mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye mr bowman aye mrs croner aye miss morgan hi thank you so that will give you a little more time i'd like to not have a
262a break until we go back right before the closed session if that's at all possible i and i think what she's usual um yes that's what i'm thinking yeah that's what i wanted because i think there is yeah that's why we're giving it some time right so i was also unclear i just wanted to make sure that we were just moving everything to the 15th and that was no oh no that's the way it had it sounded because no that's not what we were talking about everyone in favor of the plan starting on the 15th the phase two part of the plan as so she titled some of those slides yeah i think matt's right because that was not clear i apologize i knew what you meant yeah we i did i didn't hear that
263i just wanted to clarify that junior high in high school junior high in high school are going to start yes january so we'll have it all the gym 26. summation but then on the 15th they're going with the phase two right yes that's my understanding that's what i understood but then i thought maybe he said something different that's what i'm saying so let's move on to action item 8.1 i'm going to go ahead and just move this a little closer it's just for you item item 8.1 approval of bills for payment are there any questions can i have a motion to approve please i make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of 1 million three hundred 765 ten dollars and forty nine cents as presented mrs swanson aye mrs doyle
264aye ms morgan aye mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye motion passes 7-0 item 8.2 approval of the building administrator contract make a motion to approve the building administrator contract as presented miss morgan aye mrs croner aye mr storyal aye mrs swanson aye mr bauman mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye motion passes 7-0 item 8.3 personnel report i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mr lightfoot no miss morgan aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye mrs swanson hi mrs toriel aye motion passes six one do you need a minute or are you just a moment oh i'm so sorry all right let's pause for a moment to let them get that taken care of yeah i'm gonna turn into a pumpkin in
265about 40 minutes no [Music] i warned you to take a nap a few years well maybe not that long i think the beginning of this ah she have so many emails though but we've not yet hit one till one or two and i do believe 239 was what i had in my head is what the record had been back in 2009. no we're not pretty much all right so what i've done is just added slides at the very end um to make sure that we're capturing what we've agreed to and ruth are you clear on what you would be listing as your motion once we go through this one more time i ask one other question that might be for some people behind you maybe so the 25th and the 26th were scheduled for orientation
266would they i'm trying to outweigh the benefits of actually having an orientation because you can't really walk around a building and you can't really meet all the activities and you can't or you could just go and start your classes so this would be them running through their classes as orientation for sixth and ninth graders so they have an opportunity to figure out where their classes are have a chance to meet so students would be coming by a and b groups and actually going through their schedule to meet their teachers for the sixth and the ninth graders who have never really stepped foot yet in the junior highs in the high school and that's because last year's walkthroughs had to be canceled as well which they normally would have done at the beginning and the b
267group doesn't actually start till february first so they would start the b group starts that week because monday and tuesday our a group is for sixth and ninth would have one day it starts that week it would be the a group that starts the following week i think they need to have that orientation i mean that's pretty important okay so we're we're at the thank you for the question i think we're at the point where we can run through this faith if you would like to summarize just so that everybody is on the same page with what it is we are talking about when we ask for a yay or an or an iron a okay so um what we've agreed to is that all plans you know through to that february 12th would have
268the same two learning options that our parents have just decided from so we would not be changing anything on parents for what's coming you know january 19th and the weeks that that follow the in-person instruction would start at the same dates as previously published for elementary and junior high high school would be one week earlier and of course we'd have to explain the orientation of sixth grade and ninth grade and those pieces moving forward to what we've talked about with our phase two that would start february 15th it would include a and b groups by dividing the junior high and the high school at elementary it would be combining those for five days a week of in-person and five days a week of remote instruction students would not eat lunch at school i don't think
269that this group was giving me guidance on blocks and nut pieces i would work with staff to figure out what is the best determination on that we would break down into like how many minutes of reading and math in those pieces and have teacher input on those pieces in the next few weeks but these are the broad brush strokes of the parameters of which the board has given us you ready does this look different than anyone thought it would look then no before okay good so we've got everything in as we believed it would be all right these two parents are going to be able to change correct phase two parents can change and that the parent survey would be february first through fifth ish something like that that will give them some opportunity to
270experience some of the hybrid piece too and to be clear this won't be the last change we likely see this year it might not be correct good times and to that i know we don't have to make that decision today but i'm just i'm just thinking out loud here that because things are going to change i think for bus and transportation should plan on what does it look like if every student is going to every building every day as though it were a typical year and if later on we can figure out how to make some economies great but otherwise we we just need that locked down and know that when we make changes we're already covered on that and we're not playing catch up well i hesitate to say that brent honestly because i
271want to get back to i think don knows her business i think she knows how she's supposed to do it and that's why we hire people and i think that we can say that as a board but we probably should ask for more information before we say that we should have dawn address that as a possibility are either of these comments thoughts concerns going to address an information item that will address whether or not you vote yes or no if not may we address those via our normal board agreed email or future conversations i would like to add to the action plan just that we revisit how it's going in two weeks just to see if maybe we could like maybe sixty percent of the kids want to go but um then we lose a
272couple of kids and all of a sudden now we can fit what's left okay so faith when is the next practical time dr spell on which board meeting would be practical to revisit you work on phase three phase three the great thing of the junior high and the high school schedule is you very easily could switch to four days of combining the groups if we saw that that was a possibility so we will revisit this at our do we have a second board meeting in february that will be enough time to have given at least a week in i believe we do have two in february i just don't have time to talk and put the calendar out i have two we have the 8th and the 22nd so the 22nd uh on the february
27322nd and i'm comfortable if the the board is comfortable putting on that we will revisit this on february 22nd that this will be what we're looking at until that february 22nd meeting and i'm sure in preparation for that we will have some information on how things are going and where things are and the vaccination status of our all the all the stuff yes phase two vaccine okay okay are you ready that work yeah cool yep i make a motion to approve the return to school learning plan for students and staff as presented second mrs croner aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer no miss morgan no mrs swanson hi mrs doyle aye mr bowman aye motion passes 5-2 thank you everybody i know that that was ridiculously hard for parents staff teachers that have been hanging
274in there i i want you to know that it is appreciated that you've all shared thoughts and considerations that we've all used when looking at this this is not an easy time and if we could take all those changes away we would um but we have to move forward with time that being said anyone else have any final thoughts they'd like to share with the group before i ask for a motion to return to closed session after a short recess nope okay may i have a motion to enter closed session i make a motion to enter closed session under statutes 5 ilcs 120-2c1 the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of certain employees and individuals 5 ilcs 120-2 c2 collective negotiating matters between the public body and its employees or their representatives or deliberations
275concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees second mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye motion passes seven zero we'll take uh is everyone okay with five to ten minutes