SD308 Board of Education Meeting (11/16/2020)

001we go community unit school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman mrs doyle here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer here mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of to the allegiance for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all as we have no public comment we can move directly to item 5.1 board member comments would anyone like to go first i can go first i actually have comments tonight i attended the 2020 resolutions committee for the illinois association of school boards virtually on november 14th it was a unique experience for me i'm sure i don't know if it's any different in being in person to be perfectly honest so we had several new resolution

002items that districts had proposed a couple of those had been not recommended and so we didn't even vote on those um so if you would like information on how those the results of those votes i think it was emailed so i just thought that was very interesting there were at one point the highest number of attendees was 289 out of how many school districts 852 52 yep so that was interesting as well but i actually yeah enjoyed that experience surprisingly but it was good i was glad i was able to be a part of that and participate and recommending things to recommend basically is what it is so there you go those are my comments anybody on that end sure um just because i thought it was fun and it involved our students i spent

003two 12-hour days uh last weekend in this building helping to officiate uh swim meets and the reason why i wanted to share this with you is not only because it was it was good to see kids from the district competing and doing things within the building but it was more that they were doing it safely and with masks and we had the two teams they were separated one in each gym and what i really wanted to share was i i can't count the number of times that parents that are officials from other teams said to me they can't believe how great a job our district does in staying safe and being able to prepare for and execute events and activities under covered restrictions the coaches went the extra step of recording a video on here's

004the door you come in here's where you're going to get your temperature checked here's where you're going to have to fill out this form you're going to go there and you're going to stand here and it went really well it was a couple long days but kids got to do what they've been training for so that was a good thing so kudos to our staff custodial staff and coaching staff for making these things happen thanks for sharing that brand appreciate that anybody else have anything they want to share just that i wanted to give a shout out to litany hamilton and heidi jezek for planning some parent coffees that are virtual um i think it's very hard on parents right now and these are things that are talking about handling e-learning self-care mindset for parents

005and mental health and i think we've talked a lot of times about how the students are fragile and how we have to watch out for that during over but parents are also fragile it's also a struggle for them so these coffees are a great idea i'm glad they're offering things like that i think the parents have to let us know if they need more and i know they need more and then i just also want to say that i'm hoping that we're going to make sure that all of our staff has the right equipment that they need during this time to stay safe no matter what they're doing especially our special ed teachers because they do a very hard job i've watched teachers that have to get up close with kids to carry them some

006of them diaper some of them do other things and we have to make sure that they have the equipment that they need to be as safe as possible and we also need to think about whether or not as the numbers change we're going to keep them in the schools or take them out of the schools to keep them safe because they're precious people because they do something that is hard to do are you also going to talk about the food pantry oh he's got that one yeah okay um so i the only thing i want to add in here is just um i wanted to kind of give a shout out to our director of communications tonight um teresa comedis has been kind of working 24 7 7 days a week to be the point

007of contact for every piece of information being filtered down from the department of public health from the governor's office and as we know that is now changing again every day at 2 30 and the amount of work that this one person is doing who also volunteers in her own community as a school board member and is e-learning with several children at home as well um not that it's not happening everywhere but what i have seen over the last week is just something that as a as a board member i am intensely grateful for but as a parent i'm even more grateful for because i still have the opportunity to find things on our website and i understand that they can't get changed instantly um but she does a pretty darn good job with her team

008of making sure that our entire website gets updated just as fast as it can even though the stuff is changing every 24 hours so i just wanted to give a shout out to theresa who can't be in here because we again are limited to 10 people but we we don't necessarily deserve her and she is very appreciated so i wanted to make sure i made that comment because the amount of information that i've been reading through the last few days is enormous it's it's it's great work mrs doyle i appreciate you saying that we uh i probably spoke to teresa 10 times this weekend and hershey faith and i and dr hildebrand were on the phone for a couple hours regarding different situations yesterday and she is she's doing a absolutely wonderful job and like

009you said she is working seven days a week so we appreciate everything that she's doing for 308. item 5.2 all right well good evening everyone i do have a few items i'd like to share with you this evening the first is a congratulations to three of our sd 308 employees who are contributing authors in a new book published by brutledge titled the new teacher's guide to 10 common challenges so congratulations to dr sarah curran who is a teacher at homestead elementary beatrice dillman principal's administrative assistant at wolf's crossing elementary and dr amy howerton teacher and english department chairperson at oswego high school the book released on october 30th was written for new teachers induction mentoring programs teacher education courses and those in high school teacher cadet courses and the content will be used in rural

010urban and suburban school settings so congratulations to sarah beatrice beatrice and amy we're all very proud of you can i add one more author that i don't know that you were aware of that i just received my copy of our staff author's book from amazon called the adventures of super jake mask of power by josh edwards one of our teachers who wrote a story for young children on how to wear masks very neat congratulations that's great and the next item i'm very happy to report is the food drive fill the bus fill the bus to stock the pantry was the seventh annual food drive for district 308 and we collected 139 000 items for the kendall county uh community food pantry and over the last seven years we have donated just under 1 million items

011over just under 1 million so next year we will break the million mark today i visited all the winning schools handing out the traveling plaques and trophies to the schools which brought in the most items and the following schools won this year's challenge so at elementary churchill elementary wanted out they had 300 items so congratulations to churchill uh junior high plank junior high with 6 327 items and in high school oswego high school with 16 175 items you know it wasn't as exciting today handing out the trophy as it usually was at the crosstown and the 50-yard line in front of 8 000 people but nonetheless people everyone appreciate it and ultimately it's what what the kids with the staff of the community is doing for our our community and that's uh and that's providing

012this this food so and the all-around winner obviously with what i just said was churchill elementary school so congratulations to the entire community on that one because it is a community event i'd also like to say congratulations to uh teacher cynthia niles who teaches fourth grade at prairie point elementary school cynthia has been in the national guard for 27 years and was recently awarded a military patriot award which acknowledges an outstanding military member who has shown correct courage and determination to fulfill their duties so cynthia thank you for your service to our country and to our students of sd-308 and finally yesterday was board member appreciation day and uh we would like to uh on behalf of the community this you know the staff the administration thank each and every one of you for all

013of your tireless efforts uh for what you do as board members uh most people don't realize how much time each of you puts into this job and uh most people everyone should know it's voluntary with no compensation so on behalf of administration teachers students and parents of our community i'd like to say thank you for all that you do because what you do does make a big difference so thank you and we'll give you i'll give you a round of applause there and that is my report for this evening thanks okay are there any questions on the consent agenda may i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the october 2020 board of education meeting open in closed session and 6.2 to acknowledge

014the foia request received by the district second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot mrs croner hi mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye item 7.1 financial statements um item 7.1 is financial statements does the board have any questions regarding the financial statements as presented no during nine i'll move on to item 7.2 which is our rsp demographer presentation item 7.2 is an update to the board from our demographer rob schwartz from rsp as you know the district has worked with rsp for some time now in 2016 we worked with them on redrawing our district boundaries and in a district such as ours it's important to keep an eye on our continually changing demographics so rsp provides highly accurate enrollment information and projections and is here to provide the board with information in our five-year

015enrollment projections as well as to answer any questions the board may have regarding future building usage so with that i'd like to introduce rob schwartz from rsp if we're if we are technology ready are we ready to go mike all right rob it's all yours all right awesome i've heard that i look angelic and since i can't see you i will assume you also look the same this evening what i'm going to talk to you about is a little bit with the enrollments demographics some of the things that may be happening with new developments and then we'll get into the projections and what that means as we look at your capacity and i'll talk a little bit about capacity as it relates to those numbers so that's the agenda tonight and a little bit for

016those that are tuning in thank you dr sparlin for that introduction i wish i could be there in person but your community like my community is experiencing a influx of new coveted cases and so being safe in this environment is what we're choosing to do but we have done a lot of work with you guys over the last seven to ten years and we really do appreciate the work we've been able to assist you with um a little bit about what i'm gonna present to you this evening so there's a full report what i'm giving you today this evening is what i would call an executive summary there's a lot more information that's in the report that goes into details specifically more about let's say the elementary or the middle school so definitely refer to

017that what i'm going to talk to you about tonight we'll give you the gist of what we think is going to happen over the next five years so in order for us to do what we've done for the district there are a lot of entities that have worked with us from the counties the villages the cities townships so like every time we do this study a lot of data comes to us a lot of verification a lot of understanding of what we think could happen based on some of those data sets those conversations that we have with the villages and cities so from this hundred thousand foot perspective here on page seven um what we're indicating is that first off your kindergarten is going to be in a range of that 11.50 to 12.50 that

018will be important when we talk about enrollments down the road here in about 10 slides we also are anticipating much like the last time we did this study and enrollment decrease i'm going to take a moment to explain something that we did with your enrollments moving forward so we believe there's an instructional modality and that's based on how school districts brought their students back into the learning environment at the start of the school year what we've gathered here early on is that there's a difference return to learn or this instructional modality based on whether it was in person hybrid or a virtual online environment and so what that generally means is for kindergarten students we know there may be students that elected not to come into your programming this year so what we're trying to

019factor in moving forward is next year will they be kindergartners or will they be first graders and how many of them return the other component is when we look at some of your enrollment data is the students that left the district or did not attend your district this school year how many of them come back and so we'll talk about that when we get into the projection so we're still showing generally an enrollment decrease you see the breakdown on this slide of the bulk of the decreases are happening in your secondary but we are going to see some enrollment increase at the elementary so it sounds like a mixed message of your projections we'll show you how that's playing out capacity so one thing and i will talk more about this when we get to

020the right place but with capacity everything that we've used has been focused on the instructional capacity and our reasoning for the instructional capacity that was established i believe three or four years ago was that is the space that's available for the gen ed programming that occurs in your buildings and more specifically at the elementary level because there's differences in the capacity when we get into junior high and high school that's important because some of these other spaces in each of these buildings they are being taken place with special education ell different pull out spaces so those instructional spaces are needed but just not as gen ed so that's an important thing to think about as we move through this development we know there's a lot of potential for development some of the things that are

021going to impact our development is really the timing of wolf road how quickly are they able to bring that up to the standard that's required for some of these developments to happen specifically in that oswego aurora era area we also have developments that are down in plainfield and we'll show you that information is as we move through this so in general enrollment's going to see overall a decrease we're going to have some capacity challenges at specific buildings overall we have available capacity throughout the district at all the levels and we know there's great potential for some new developments as we move forward that's 100 000 foot view when we go through the next few slides these are some visuals for you to understand your district i apologize for the size when we take a portrait

02211 by 17 map and dump it into the presentation we're shrinking that 17 inch height into eight and a half inches so it's kind of small but generally what we're trying to describe on this map is the city limits or village limits of those entities and how that pertains to the purple line your district boundary we then break that district boundary into the existing elementary boundaries which in this map are represented by the solid colors we do the same thing for the existing five junior high boundaries and of course the two high school boundaries so again the solid color is always representing what that current boundary is we then further break that district into 500 planing areas we've condensed a lot of this is early on when we were working with you we had a

023first plot a second plan a third plot of some of these developments now made them all one subdivision to decrease the number of planning areas that we look at and so there's about 500 of these that were looking at what changes with enrollment development and demographics of course we have a statistical forecast model again that's just regression um simply stated we're trying to understand these 500 planning areas and what does that mean with even greater detail with that instructional modality that i explained at the beginning some of the information that we look at is contained on this page just to let you know that we're looking at census data different county data sets village data sets really trying to understand what's happening in your community one thing that we really have tried to focus on

024is live birth data and so if we look at in the instance here on page 15 of kendall county we're trying to understand i'm going to change my pointer so it's a laser so you guys can see some of this stuff that i'm pointing out so if i'm looking at 2010 i had 1789 live bursts and then when i come here to the kindergarten we had 866. so it's lower than what we've seen the last really all the years that we're showing here i'm going back to 1516 but we also know this instructional modality had an impact on the number of kindergartners that we received so again we're trying to understand with live birth data and knowing that it's decreased you look we were in the 1900s in 2007 and here in 2018 it has

025decreased to just about 1500 like births that impacts the number of kindergartners that we can have in five years we do the same information with will county so i didn't want you to to unders once you understand that we're looking at this for both of the counties in your district when we look at enrollment by grade what's interesting about your enrollments is the fact that we have larger senior classes that are graduating in smaller incoming kindergarten classes that naturally leads to a decrease more going out less coming in and this year it was exacerbated even more because we have one of the smallest kindergarten classes we go back to 2017-18 and then we have to go all the way back to 2004-2005 to have a comparable kindergarten class we're anticipating some of those students come

026back mostly as first graders in our projections another way to look at that same data is what's been happening year to year with this cohort change where we see red that's where there's been a decrease and you can see the impact of your instructional modality with that choice negatives every single grade all the way through and so what's beautiful about this information is i mean it's bad news that you lost students but as we look at this uh one of the conversations we've had with dr sparlin is that we can now use this and as you move forward and with any options you have with how the students return to learn or if we start to feel more comfortable with pfizer and i can't remember the drug company today that indicated they as well have

027a vaccination that's that's going to be rolled out that's going to impact what we see and so that's why i keep going back to the instructional modality we don't think you're going to see these type of decreases when we look at into 2122 this is an anomaly and we are planning in everything that we do that students are going to be back in your school buildings for the 21-22 school year a little bit of positive thoughts to that we look at your current situation within migration all we're showing on this map the dots would represent where there are new students that were here in this school year for 2021. we look at this table here on the left you can see it's just plummeted we only have about 738 new students where we're averaging probably

028about almost 1200 students so again the covid impact we look at the out migration of students these are students that were receiving services last school year but not receiving them here in the 2021 school year so again we saw that increase so that the new students in migration decreased out migration increased giving us this horrible number of 506. so again this is part of it when we then now take the senior class that's larger minus the smaller incoming class that's how we come up with that 750 roughly number i think that you saw as a decrease in head count k to and again we're not looking at the early childhood we know they're there but they're not in our forecast one table that we put together from the data the district provided us was reasons

029for withdrawals and just for you to get a sense of the choices that families made and how that may impact how we look at the future enrollment of your district we do have a map here that's showcasing what's changed over the last five years green areas are a decrease orange areas they've increased the darker the orange the greater the increase so we can see if you see my pointer down here around plainfield all those developments are many more students than what there were five years ago we come up into the core area of us we go look at all that green so this gets into another component that we factor in the subdivision life cycle not all of these areas will decrease not all of them will continue to increase there's there's things that that

030impact that if we look at this heat map this starts to show you where the concentrations of students are so the red areas are where we see the greatest number of students so up here on the northwest part of your district we have a lot of kiddos and we come down here off wolf road over by um oswego east high school you can see a lot of kids around there as well going to play this heat map on this one so here's a video hopefully our internet's good enough that you can see it kind of move its way through starting back in the 2009 2010 school year and you can see how things have changed over time as we're now into the 17-18 18-19 we start to see where the new developments and we start

031to emerge into seeing students so really kind of a fascinating way to look at things so in the complete report we have everything related to the intra transfers so these are students that are in the system the dots representing elementary students that chose to go to a different building other than where they would be assigned based on that attendance area so there's there's choice that's happening most of it's related to the programs we've been talking to district administration we know this happens and they're monitoring it and in many cases this act actually positively impacts what you see for staffing or class size in some of these buildings we give a breakdown of what that looks like and so this is really helpful for administration we look at this from the top side this is where

032the students reside so we know with the intro transfers if i just go in the middle and i look at lakewood creek we have 125 students that reside in lakewood creek that are going to another building and you can see the breakdown where the bulk of them are going to hunt club so again this is just a way for you to see some of that map data as a table it starts to help the administration understand is this related to programs is it a prolonged impact of some of the boundary changes that happens i believe four years ago when we look at developments that are in progress i'm here on page 26 we're just going to list the ones that we know that are active and you can have a place name which we've listed

033here with the planning area name the paid represents something that we're focusing on with those 500 planning areas the type of developments what elementary is currently assigned to the existing units that have been built and then those that are potentially able to be built over the next five years and maybe even longer depending on some of these developments so we have over a thousand units in queue without any new infrastructure going in place with active developments that are in your district boundaries so it gets a little bit into some of the developments what i added to this table and i think it got to you and your board packets we have three things on here the green line represents the census population estimates it's above zero so that means more people are moving into your

034community that's a positive we look at the blue line these are certificate of occupancies and you can see it swung highly up here as we went from 2019 to 2020 this is really the multi-family units that came online we look at the red line this is what's been happening with your enrollments and when we're below zero that's where we had decreases and i added this dotted line in because covid the enrollment just dropped off and one of the things that we statistically started to see and we talked about this on your last study is if we follow the building permits or the certificate of occupancy this blue line and then we follow the red line we see that they kind of are following each other and i put this dotted line of where we likely

035could have ended up where we'd be close to zero or just a little bit above zero with our enrollment change but covet happens and so this instructional modality had a negative impact on what we see so again just trying to give you some explanation of some of the data sets we do look at each of these 500 planning areas on the type of developments so in this case it's single family with the existing elementary attendance areas i focus on that bottom row with the district k5 back in 2007 we averaged 36 k5 students for every 100 single family units you can see over time it increased we got to 39 and that's been steadily decreasing to where here in we're down to 29 k5 students for every 100 units in your district we've brought on

036about almost 2 000 units since 2007 but this is pretty typical of what we're seeing when we have a little bit of developments but we're seeing a subdivision life cycle that as people have their kids go through the system we're not seeing the turnover that's regenerating students that come into your system the same as when we were going through those years with lots of building activity we do the same thing with the multi-family development you can see back in 2007 we were at 13 k5 kids for every 100 multi-family units in multi-family units is town homes duplexes apartments mobile homes so basically everything is not single family you can see that it increased and then again we've decreased back down to 13 for every 100 units in 2020 and you can see that we've brought

037on a little over 1700 multi-family units here's a video that i told dr sparlin i would play and it's down by hunt club this is pretty fascinating as we look at this in 2010 as the buildings came online those little buildings um you saw that there was a little bit of delay when we saw enrollments and then as we move into 2018 and 2019 we have a lot more students and what we're trying to show you here is as these developments specifically the number of developments that we have in plainfield as they get belts we're going to start seeing more kids in this area beyond when they actually come online so i thought that visual is kind of helpful in understanding why sometimes there's a delay in what we see for the number of kids

038with the type of development that's happening all the information that we put together generates this map here of many multiple colors we've highlighted in the table the green areas that are current activity areas where we can see almost 1 000 units that could come online over the next five to seven years if the building environment is conducive right now it's pretty awesome if you can buy a house 2.3 percent interest zero points that is phenomenal if you're in the market to buy but again it has to be something that fits within the financial constraints of the community so not all the variables match up to being a bye bye bye positive again this is a map to help us illustrate what's happening in the district with developments now when you go to the full presentation

039you'll see a breakdown by each of the junior highs i'm just focusing on binarcik with what information we have been putting together and this is new to your community so table one we're showing the single family development so the orange line represents the orange bar represents the number of units you can see from 16 to 17 we had a whole slew of new single family developments that came online the blue line represents the number of students you can see that's been consistently decreasing really back from all the way down to 2020. we're over students we're now down to just a little over 2050 students we go to table two this is looking at the multi-family units which is the orange bar and the blue line representing the students that lived in those multi-family units so

040we can see it's steadily increased it's been pretty stable over the last three years in this junior high boundary table three is the aggregation of both the single family and the multi-family so all those units all of those kids that are residing in this junior high boundary and you can see what's been happening with that enrollment table four looks at the balance of development in this junior high boundary and so we basically have about 65 percent single family in about 34 multi-family and you can see it's been pretty consistent over the last decade you'll see this for each of the junior high boundaries we thought this was kind of a fascinating way to see how things are changing now i'm going to segue into the projections so as every year the primary colors represent the

041past and current boundary so the red is the elementary the blue is the junior high green is the high school and then the purple line is the aggregate so you can see we were in this great growth all the way from 2006 07 all the way up to about 1617 then we kind of stabilized saw some decreases and then here we are going from 1920 to 2021 the the table just just fell out right then as we move forward what we are forecasting is you know we're trying to be optimistic and we told dr sparlin we'll circle back around we'll meet with you in the spring to see hey are these vaccinations are they actually moving out are they having the positive effect that we want are people actually taking them what does this mean

042as we look forward to the 21-22 school year what we're anticipating is with students being back in the buildings we're going to be able to capture a lot of the loss that we had from 1920 to 2021. so we're going to increase from the 16 to almost 16 900 kids in the 2122 school year but unfortunately the amount of building activity the change in the inventory that we're seeing with that subdivision life cycle the greater number of secondary students than the incoming kindergarten classes we're going to still see some decreases and when we went back and looked at that last forecast that we had we were actually when we got out to 24-25 we actually were at about 16 900 kids so it's even worse than what we thought last year but a lot of

043that is because of what we have this decrease what we do know with data when we look at some of the early childhood when we can capture these kids earlier the likelihood of them being in our system is much greater so now that some of these students have moved out and they're in parochial private school or home school we know that we've probably captured the maximum of what we can have with parochial and private school what we don't know is the home school that could be any household that chooses hey i'm going to stay we think once you go back to school and kids are in person that's going to be a little bit different it's going to be more positive for the school district that's why we're showing that uptick from 2021 to 2122.

044we do show your enrollments by building i'm going to describe all of this you're going to want to come back to this page to understand what's in the next three slides basically we start out on the left hand side we have each of the buildings listed we have the grades that are being served there for our projections in this case it's elementary so it's k5 we have this instructional capacity that i mentioned to you and again the huge note on this instructional capacity the programs that are taking up the gen ed space they will need to be somewhere so if i move spaces out of boulder hill that are taking up those gen ed classrooms they're going to go someplace else and impact what that instructional capacity is in that building that's why we switch

045that instructional capacity to align with the gen ed as well as the special programs that are needed in each of these buildings based on the space based on where the kids are and so on as we move to the right we show the past enrollment the last three school years three different ways the bottom row the blue font is attend says based on the student data did they actually attend that building the middle row green font is reside and that's based on the attendance boundary the number of k5 students that are actually residing in that boundary the res slash att is reset reside slash attend so it's a subset of the reside it's that purple font top row it's the subset they reside it's and they actually attended the building so what does that mean

046when i look at boulder hill we had 454 k5 students in 2021 that were residing in that boundary but we have 616 that are attending that building you would naturally think that we grew by that roughly 150 kids from the reside to attend what's different than that it's we lost students that went to other buildings of that 454 they went to one of the other elementary buildings to get to that 420 but then the other buildings uh moved into this chose to come to this building to get to this 616. that's important because as we move into the projections we've always said follow the reside but we know there's this attends and this gets at the students in seats but you can see that we were at ironically 507 students in 1819 1924 reside we

047dropped to 454 we're showing that you pick up in boulder hills up to a little over 500 students um over the next five years then you can see how that corresponds with the attends where we see the shading this is where we exceed that instructional capacity so you can see what that means in the past and then as we move forward with fox chase grant park we've known this i think we've had some conversations even last year about hey are there some ways in which we look at this is there a boundary change is it because they're so far on your southeast what can we do do we look at murphy a little differently so there's some different things that we can address with grant park um that's something you as the board can have

048more discussion on but again this is how the enrollment plays out over the next five years again wanted to state we'll come back to this can i have three or four slides that really delve into this but this instructional capacity at the elementary level we have a little over 8 000 capacity for gen ed students you can see our enrollments we're at roughly we might as well just say it about 7 500 kids so we have about 500 capacity throughout the district based on this instructional capacity for elementary students we look at the secondary same deal with the junior high buildings and the high school the only challenge we have early on is the continuation of trauber junior high but again if you go back to that table we're showing smaller grades work their way

049into the junior high which will then work their way into the high school so we naturally as we look at this junior high capacity we're at almost 5 000 instructional capacity but you can see we dip down to 3 600 students we look at the high school capacity we're almost 6 300 students you can see we're we're right now at about 56 hundredths and then we're going to dip down to about 53 hundreds this kind of segues into kind of the meat of some of the things that dr sparlin asked for us to delve into in this study is how do we look at our existing inventory and our enrollments and how does that relate to our capacity so in specifically the instructional capacity so our team put together these really cool slides the next

050three pages for each the elementary the junior high and high school so let me show you what's on this data so first off we have this blue arrow that separates the past enrollment with our projected enrollments we then have this red line and this is the instructional capacity for elementary so this 8025 i then looked at 85 percent of that number and i looked at that number because we ideally want each of our buildings to be at about 85 percent utilization that's where they're at their best place where we have the ability if there's an additional section we have space in the building to to be able to provide that in that building but also to look at do we have the right number of buildings or can we look at something different where maybe

051we have a building reduction or a building increase and so what's important about that is if we're district-wide 85 capacity we would need to have at least 6 800 capacity for our students for all this to work and you can see where above that through the projection period we dip below that here in 2021 but we're expecting to come back this is where we start to look at these these numbers where we've been decreasing in the elementary we're going to start to see some increases so we want to make sure we have the right space that's the elementary we go to the junior high um the same information with the blue arrow that separates the past enrollment with the projected enrollments this red line is the instructional capacity for the junior high so that's the

0524971. we did 85 of that to get 4225. now i will tell you straight up if you're a math person this 425 is really a percent of the percent of this 4971 because there is innately a inefficiency with junior high and high school use of the spaces so if we have seven hours in the day we can't ideally use each of those spaces all seven hours it's just something that is almost impossible with the way the spaces are used and how teachers would have to move around in those classrooms we can do it we've seen it done in many other places but it's really really challenging to do that so we have this range and you can see that our junior high enrollment is decreasing from what it was here and a little over 4

053000 students you can see we're anticipating a decrease to about 3 600 students so we get under that 85 we have the ability to start thinking about what this would mean and so i took the liberty if we're going to have this type of discussion what could this mean and so i created this junior high capacity scenario what i did it just took the average size of instructional capacity for each of the junior highs that's 994 students and i said okay water let's say we made the change in 2324 what would that look like with the ultimate instructional capacity of that building coming offline and it's one of the buildings and so it's an unnamed building so we dropped from 4971 to 3977 you can see that 85 capacity with that dotted line is 425

054drops down to 3 380. so we're right in between that 85 and what the 100 is so yeah we could we could maybe think about doing this we're going to be really really tight with how the programs work so can we move some programs can we utilize some of those spaces differently or or better more efficiently absolutely that that could be a possibility um and that's why we're saying yeah you could look at this um we're saying with this ball point you probably couldn't reduce the inventory unrealistically without doing some of these other changes until 25 26. again just trying to show you how this this meets up and how we look at things with all the districts that we work with on whether it's increasing inventory or decreasing inventory we do the same thing

055with your high school obviously you couldn't go from two to one that would be an impossibility um but we show this that you can see there's there's some inefficiencies in the high school specifically as we move through the projection time period other things that we've spoke about with dr sparlin with things we've learned things have been expedited because high schoolers and with the virtual world that we're living in there may be some some ways that we can utilize the high school buildings even differently than the way we are today and the way we maybe even imagine them being over the next five years so we don't think there's anything you can do with your secondary high school capacity and enrollment so with that i'm not going to read all of these ball points um i'm

056just going to probably zoom down i think there was one i wanted to focus on and i think was this here this where you see my highlighter determine if and how to address capacity issues and the timing for future school construction remodeling repurposing or new attendance areas so we're saying with the forecasted enrollment change there's going to be likely a need to something with the elementary boundary you know is there some sort of alignments um that we need to do um there's several buildings where we're right at that point where maybe we have to consider that and then we also know there's some significant limitations on how we would go about if we were to repurpose the moth ball for a certain amount of time reduce whatever that is there's going to have to be

057some other things that we look at in order for that to be an objective that we successfully can implement in your district with that i will listen to your questions comments if i can answer your questions i'll do that this evening if i don't have an answer that i can back up with data or something that i know i'll get back with dr sparlin on an appropriate answer or visual to help you guys with what that means you know it's interesting i was after rob and i were talking i had a conversation with the executive director of the luda the large unit district association and we were talking about the you know the dip in the enrollment this year and uh we were talking about that what does that look like for the 52 luta

058school districts which are the 52 largest school districts in illinois and he shared that there was over an 18 student reduction in those 52 school districts so you know we're looking at what i was talking about what rob was just talking about with our school district it pretty much coincides with uh the data of the other large unit districts due to i think the reasons that rob mentioned i just thought i'd mention that because he and i just had that conversation all right i'll start um hey rob how are you thank you for the presentation tonight you know what when you talk would you uh maybe you want to just the first time you talk maybe just enunciate your name because he can't see us we can see him but he can't see us then

059he knows hey rob this is brent lightfoot thanks brent hello um could you jump back to page uh 41 for a second so i look i i i understand how you get your numbers and so some of the data was provided to you but i wanted to kind of question um the percentage what i'm seeing is a percentage on top of a percentage and what i mean by that is we have numbers for these buildings that were um buildings were designed to a certain capacity level right and i understand the difference between design capacity and functional capacity and so tonight you've been sharing with us basically functional capacity i understand that i have another comment about that in a minute our junior high capacity is five thousand four hundred and seventy five okay so if

060we're at five thousand four hundred and seventy five and we take ninety percent or 80 percent of that isn't that then your dotted line and so the 4971 on the screen here really should be the true capacity and then you're showing functional capacity below that because otherwise you're taking a 10 about a 10 reduction from true capacity to the capacity number that you're using and then you're taking 85 percent of that so now you've cut down to rough math 75 of the capacity of these buildings and what i'm saying is i don't think that that's good data for us to use and to make decisions on does that make sense to you i mean yeah let me let me give you an understanding of how capacities evolved in your district and first we we can

061put in what i would say is that design capacity or that architectural capacity which is greater than what you see listed on any of these slides so that's the first thing if you as a board want to see that the reason we've evolved to this instructional capacity is because the way in which the building is being used some of those spaces that went into when the buildings were built or how the architect turned that over to the district it's evolved to those spaces are being used for other things that would not be classified as gen ed so it could be for special education it could be for pull-outs for different things let's say english language learners but those spaces are no longer considered part of the gen ed student experience in those particular spaces and

062that's why we've gone to the 4971 that matches up with the programs that you desire to have in each of these buildings and the 4225 is saying we know we have if 4971 is the maximum for that instructional we can go as low as 4225 in this conversation of where do we reach a point where we can keep the same programming and utilize the space in which the way it's currently being utilized and say something maybe could go offline in order for it to go offline any sooner if that's a consideration we would have to re-examine how those spaces are being utilized meaning that those special programs would have to be put someplace else maybe consolidated maybe more efficiently looked at in how they're distributed across each of the five junior high buildings but good

063points that you make but there is a difference between what i would call the architect capacity or the building code capacity and then how we're actually utilizing these facilities for the student experience right now i understand and you know my second kind of comment or point here is that i understand your rationale i guess i don't agree with it and the reason why is if we decide that we must close a school then we need to find another school with the same build capacity that can be adjusted to accommodate whatever programs are needed that that's what you basically said and what i'm saying is is that if we have a building that was designed to hold 750 students but it's currently only functional at 595 because of special programs i need to find space for

064all of those programs which is what you said but i can't be looking at another school that has 595 i've got to look at the total potential capacity and the other thing i would say that we must unfortunately consider is given the budget constrictions that we have in this district right now and the fact that we must find cost savings that might mean that we make some choices that we wouldn't normally make at for the advantage of being able to not cut staff and not reduce services but maybe we decide we have to close some buildings and maybe that isn't at the optimal less less design i'm sorry the optimal function capacity but we might choose to make that trade-off because the alternatives are worse have you ever have you worked with other districts that

065have been kind of in the same situation yeah unfortunately this is becoming the common conversation that we're having in 2020 going into 2021 so that everyone's in the realization that budgets are going to be different and so how do we use spaces and everything you said i i cannot disagree it's more if this is an objective the board has what we established here is there's more that has to be looked at with some of these other spaces that aren't used for gen ed and can we move them around can they be used differently in order for those programs to be successful right now we know with this instructional capacity we're getting the progress academic success that could occur based on how these spaces are being utilized but you may have to use them differently so

066i recognize that and if that's a direction we most assuredly can work with your administration on what could that look like and it may not be anything that any of us want to look at but maybe can i jump in real quick because i want to piggyback off something before you move on to a new one i was just going to make a quick comment okay go over it and the last one is just a comment for the for the rest of us specifically when we look at the high school numbers um when we did the additions of both of the high schools we built both high schools to a functional capacity of um uh 3200 right and that was at 85 percent of total capacity so all i'm saying is i don't think we

067should be reducing again the high school capacity from 64 to 62 because 64 is already a reduced number so that's kind of the question i wanted to pay back off of rob this is lori doyle how are you good to see you again even though you can't see us we do all look angelic you're right so my question for you is um it's the question i think i seem to ask every single time we talk which is um how how was the special education data presented to you um where did you come up with the utilization was it how many classrooms were taken out of the mix how was that data presented i think for capacity that came from the district administration and it was was led by the idea of how we're using those

068spaces and i know dr sparling can go into the details of class sizes and how some of these other programs were being utilized in those spaces to get at what these numbers are thank you um so my next question and this is actually my last one is is if we were looking here at if this was and this is not this agenda nor is this a decision to be made at this exact point if we were to look at this what i think i heard you say and i just want to make sure i'm hearing you correctly that even though your recommendation in a normal time might be what we were looking at which is that you didn't feel that that was something that would be considered you have seen other districts doing this because

069of budget constraints and that you do feel that you could work with our administration on creating a workable plan with the capacities we're talking about it looks like at the junior high level absolutely and we would want to work with administration and come up with kind of a checklist that you the board would be able to look at and say yeah this is a direction because what you could literally move different programs and basically put them in a closet right but is that going to be how you want those programs to operate so there's there's some things that we would want to recommend things we'd want to work with administration on how some of those things might look and getting their expertise with special education your ell what are their thoughts about how we're using

070these spaces to be able to say hey this instructional capacity and let me go back a couple slides of let's say boulder hill elementary we have an instructional capacity of 714 and if that building was designed for 750 we clearly have a couple classrooms that are being utilized for something well if we utilize that for gen ed where are we going to put those programs and do those programs have the right space for those kids to be successful so absolutely we there's room to look at this but i think there's an understanding what i'm hearing and i don't get the the benefit of seeing your facial expressions but it's sounding like everybody understands that we ideally want to keep the way things are but in order as we move forward with some of our budget

071challenges we're going to have to do things differently and it's going to be different with gen ed it's going to be different with the special education programs it's going to be different altogether i have a couple more down a different track so i'm going to not go down that one but i'm going to come back to it but we have some more over here for you hey this is ruth croner i just had a quick question about the projected enrollment numbers are these projected numbers only for gen ed and i asked that because i think we have seen particularly with our special education programs significant increases in the numbers of students coming into those programs beyond what had originally been projected so i'm just wondering if this is total number of students including all programs

072or if this is only projections for gen ed my assumption and i'm going to verify this and i'll get back with dr sparlin is it's all students because the students would be in each of these buildings but i think we have the ability to break out that data to know are they a student that's receiving a particular service that requires the space that's in that building for that program use okay thanks who would like to ask next questions i do have another path that i want to go down that's not related to what we're currently on as a discussion path i don't know if anyone else would like to do that before i completely go down a different train of thought okay so here's the other aspect of this that i'm looking at and you're

073coincidentally right on that elementary projections page i'm seeing here there's there's two things to be talking about one obviously we're looking at budget reductions uh rob this is lori doyle again um and we're looking at cost benefited why not the other track here is that i'm looking at an elementary school that's got two orange bars going all the way across and then another one that in a couple years is going to have a lot of bars too so the other thing here that that i'm seeing is that regardless of if this plays into our budget conversations and trying to figure out what direction to head there i'm seeing that irregardless we're seeing some elementary shifts that may need to occur anyway is that what you're kind of saying rob that's correct there's some things whether

074we look at this based on where students reside or where they end up attending clearly grand park that was something that was illustrated last go around fox chase we're starting to run into some challenges potentially at 23 24. one thing that i do make sure that i caution everyone is with the attend number the administration has a little bit of control over how that gets to or exceeds the capacity that's identified for each building based on being able to say no that can't occur for that student to come into that building so there's a little bit of wiggle room there look at fox chase where it's a 615 capacity and if you look at those attends we're just slightly there or within 15 students in each of the projection numbers so dr sparrow maybe this

075is a question for you on that data i don't see it split out here so for me looking at these enrollment projections particularly at grand park elementary school um the attend number is the wiggle room enough to make a difference to those two orange bars you know what i'd like to actually go back to that one uh that one uh slide that has the tables where it shows which uh school which schools have kids going to different schools what what the what page is that rob is that the intro transfers i think so reside attend page 25. thank you because that was an is it a new page rob that you haven't uh had shared with us before i haven't seen too much of this in your previous reports and so this one's just again

076another way to look at how we're seeing the students move around how they reside because when you look at grand park you can see that we have 54 kids uh that is it i'm reading that right for grant park 54 kids that are attending there from other schools is that correct i show one student who does not reside in grand park that attends grand park good question this is a great slide rob i really i really appreciate seeing this slide i have to tell you and can we clarify the there's two elementary schools where we have the dual language program and that is hunt club and boulder hill correct well actually well at the elementary and then there's bank at the junior high yeah right but i'm just saying i'm looking at specifically at the

077elementary slide so that would account for a lot of those numbers for those for two particular schools being higher on the attend you know students who attend there but don't reside there i would assume that a significant number of those are in the dual language program that's correct as opposed to just requested to go to a different building for whatever variety of reasons and you see those two largest numbers uh both at boulder hill and hunt club right 264 and 196. yeah that's why i thought this slide was a powerful side that i just don't remember seeing in the past so no i really like that one i think that that helps us determine just the question that i asked so i appreciate you reminding us of that fox chase what what program what special

078programs are at fox chase instructional skills okay what else faith do you have that list i asked you to have in regards to the different schools so we can just go off of it so again we are limited to 10 people in the room and with the people in the room um faith has uh been participating via phone so that we can maintain proper limits of number of people we're going to give her a call and while you're calling her i'll throw something out too that is a consideration so working with rockford some of this information where you know where programs are so if we reduce inventory and we know where these kids are the type of programming for this dual language is different than other programming right so where these kids are could become

079part of the conversation of if we have to change boundaries what does that potentially look like and are these the right two facilities where this program should be maintained skills program okay skills okay because that's obviously an area that is a challenge um in terms of housing yeah in terms of where because you know when you it's interesting when you talk about these different capacity numbers it's like you know you could think about like south berry state south berry has a stars program right and they have six sections of stars and you can only have 10 kids per section so that would be 60 kids that could be serviced in those in those six classes as compared to the general ed kids you would service 168 kids in those same six classes well alongside that

080i do have one question regarding preschool so particularly at the two elementary schools prairie point and long beach where there are a number of the classrooms being utilized for preschool because there's not enough room in there as we have been shifting things around it to kind of adapt to that i know that this year our preschool numbers are about in half of what they've been the year before how rob had you accommodated the functional capacity of a school and picking this because i know at long beach there are more classes that are taking up um classroom space was that were those numbers already factored in as taking that out of the possibility of being functional capacity because they're being utilized for the preschool program i believe your latter statement is correct that the instructional capacity

081you see on our data is just for k5 so if there are rooms being used for early childhood in those spaces that's not part of that capacity that's something that dr sparlin could validate if that's truly the case so dr spartan so let me just make sure i'm understanding this right because i can get this backwards in my head and i want to make sure i have this right and again a prairie point as well so for example you're saying instructional capacity at long beach elementary is 550 students that has already accounted for the fact that we don't have access to all of those classrooms because of preschool but if we did not have preschool in there the functional capacity would be higher than 550. i believe so okay and do we have can is

082there a way we could find out to what extent that is only because i know that prairie point in long beach and maybe south berry had south berry had a pre-k or was that old post south berry had pre-k last year i know i don't know what's happening this year but i know they had some preschool classrooms last year so that's that's the other consideration i would like some more information on is how is our functional capacity being reduced by having preschool in elementary school buildings if i could make it i think that's kind of what i've a more eloquent way of stating what i was kind of pointing out so maybe if it's as simple as taking these tables and including building capacity and functional capacity on the same line so that we understand

083what could the building do if we were to move programs out yes so like for example if i think i'm understanding you correctly i've seen in the past and and i might just be pulling this out of many many many many many years ago lakewood creek has been built for 900 students as an architectural capacity um and instructional capacity is listed at 700. um so what i think i hear you're saying brent is that what you would like to see is also architectural capacity at 900 instructional capacity at 700. or i think fox chase had had an addition this was probably well you guys were here before i believe they had an addition to that school building to bring them up to either 750 or 900 as a possibility yeah fox chase is 900 but

084just stepping back lakewood creek in 2011 2012 had 981 reside and 770 attend well so and i'm not saying we repeat that right i'm just saying we've we've had issues that we've resolved over the years and um we found ways to do it but it was using those those larger numbers to kind of get to where we needed to be so go ahead what's the next question no just like so as we're talking about it yeah um specific enrollment related to um the you know whatever special programs and populations are in specific schools would be i think interesting and helpful information to have numbers as well as then i'm interested in like the classroom so we might have the number of classrooms and or space space utilized as well as number of students sorry when

085we do number of classrooms can we also because like some of the reading rooms at boulder hill are only hold you know six kids and some of the classrooms would hold some would hold 20 some would hold 32 on long beach they're pie shaped which is never going to be a great big number um and i think you're right that's a nuanced thing you know you we may have made i think a lot of creative use out of space in our schools and so you know i think as rob even said you know we might have closets being utilized for some instructional space but that would be helpful information to know that as well right so if i can kind of unless anyone has questions still that they want to ask i'm going to make

086a suggestion for as a board what i think we could do with this presentation and see where we fall the first thing would be do we want to explore the idea of convening a boundary committee for elementary redistricting to alleviate the growth at grand park elementary and all of those facets that we've talked about would have to be included as part of that discussion process are we as a board looking to explore that idea the second main track that i see going on here is mostly part of our next conversation do we want to utilize this data as a potential savings if our enrollment would allow is that something as a board that we would like to see data manipulated to show in a more concrete way which could be two parts of one boundary

087committee or do we feel that we would like to leave things as is and not explore that at this time with this data i i don't know i'm sure other people have thoughts i i think those are two separate they are almost two separate conversations yeah yes they can both be handled by a boundary committee but i think i think the board needs to kind of make a decision um are we is the outcome the goal of the boundary committee reduce the number of schools being utilized and balance enrollment in each building right and if it's yes to both then we go in that direction if we say no we're not going to consider taking a school offline then we still have to address boundaries for certain schools and if that's probably going to affect

088multiple buildings because of all the dominoes and start moving right that is that's my take on it um if if i were to give my opinion my take is that i think that this is going to be necessary regardless of what we choose to do that is completely two separate conversations however what i feel like i see here is that that aspect of things is are we going to ask rob to look at the data that we've just asked for in light of the intention of elementary as a chunk and then i think what i'm seeing was junior high where we wouldn't look at high school necessarily we would just look at elementary or junior high and leave high school off or do we want him to focus on all three or does anybody want

089to not do that at all that's all i'm asking gloria is this part of the next presentation when we're looking at a cost analysis i know everybody's yeah that's the yeah you can see um if we were to take an elementary offline or if we were to take a junior high offline what the potential cost savings would be to do a you know a comparison is this right do we want to go down this road because it's you know this is the money we can save or well that's exactly what i'm saying so but regardless of that train which is about the savings analysis i'm looking to get a feel for the room if everyone's seeing this the way i am because i don't want to just assume um that we think that we will

090probably need to rebalance at least elementary at this point i think what we want to do it's not what we need to do necessarily um but just as a regulation i mean i think just looking at these numbers it seems like certainly we're we're gonna have to take a look at the elementary boundaries as much as we don't want to have to do that nobody wants to do that but that's where we're at right i mean it's clear looking at these numbers that we need to figure something out um so i would say yes for for that for sure and for the at the elementary and then we'll talk about the rest yeah going down maybe after the does anyone have anything substantial they want to include in rob to ask for at least rob

091we know that at this exact moment in the discussion that we want to have you take a look at the elementary projections we'd like to have the architectural capacity included the number of classrooms and this will be administration getting the data to you as well and again thank you very much for these excellent projections as always i i have to admit i i really worry about you guys this year having to make these predictions based on a a situation we've never had before where where all of a sudden we have 560 less students than zero from the year before so thank you very much for the extra work that it takes during this time um and i think that that was the only thing we wanted to add in those two things was there anything

092can i ask something administratively what happens when we take a building offline like what are the costs associated with that as well we're definitely gonna cover that one next yeah that's in the next presentation yep exactly when you're writing any any other pieces you'd like to see looking at this or not quite yet um this is the time okay i'm seeing a lot of people saying blank stairs going lori just get on with it so i will um okay uh 7.3 goes right into that next presentation are you asking rob to hang on for this no yeah i'll listen to this okay there we go stop my share if that works for you guys okay that would be great thank you all right item 7.3 is an informational presentation to the board and mike you're

093going to pull that up the administration was asked to provide the information uh that we're going to be providing in just a moment here as we start the conversation to beginning the discussion of mitigating our deficit for the upcoming 21-22 school year and so we're going to begin the slide so you can go ahead and move to the next slide please so as we all know in 2016 we were projecting a combined operating fund deficit of 15.9 million in uh 2020 and since 2016 we've cut over 15 million dollars the budget read up made may i should say made over 15 million dollars of budget reductions and revenue enhancements and it's always been the goal of the board to do our best to stay as far away from the student educational experience as possible the

094budget deficits due to unanticipated expenses and changes to funding that have again placed district in in the situation that we're in and uh it can largely be contributed to the deficit of uh due to evidence faith evidence-based funding being flat as well as the additional expenses uh in regards to govind and uh as i just mentioned there are uh the administration was asked to provide information in three areas so the three areas that we're going to talk about tonight there's one is the cost savings to eliminate uh or eliminate or how much do we spend in all after-school activities athletics and clubs so that's one area we're going to talk about the second is to provide associated cost savings with taking one or more of our buildings offline and just what we spoke about a

095minute ago and then what would the savings be with a 10 reduction across the board and and personnel we were also asked to provide the pros and cons what those would be what we felt those would be for each of the three areas that we've been asked to provide information and the next slides will highlight that information that we've been asked to provide so christy you want to take it from there thank you so i'm going to start with um the most current five-year projections and i know you can't see those right very well on that screen but this is if the evidence-based funding begins getting back on track in fiscal year 22 so you can see and i can't even see it so let me pull it up here um if that was to

096happen the one thing you can see let me find my pointer we would be in a deficit for next year fiscal year 22 which is about 1.5 million dollars and then going forward if evidence-based funding again resumes we would begin seeing surplus budgets again and increase fund balances however if evidence-based funding is flat again next year in fiscal year 22 we would experience deficit budgets through fiscal year 25 before we i'm sorry fiscal year 24 before we begin seeing a surplus again so that's assuming that the evidence-based funding would resume in fiscal year 23 so that we would have another year next year of flat evidence-based funding so we'll start with um looking at eliminating all clubs athletics and ex activities and we're starting with a high school here and i'm sorry the i'm just

097gonna scoot over because the tv's stipends for high school athletics is about 1.4 million there is an athletic budget at each high school and together that's combined at 490 000 we're estimating transportation to move teams around to where they need to be is about 390 000 and then an estimate on the grounds work that comes with maintaining fields and things like that at about 150. that brings athletics to 2.4 million in expenses but that is offset with athletic fees and gait uh collections um and that brings athletics to a net expense of 1.88 million activities uh stipends for those are two hundred and nine thousand dollars we do have uh some theater workers that we pay time sheets um and then that expense comes to 223 but offset by activity fee collections so the net

098expense is a hundred and eleven thousand clubs we pay about forty thousand in high school uh club stipends but we do collect some club fees and that results in a net expense of about seventeen thousand nine hundred so for the high school level our total extracurriculars is uh just over two million dollars in net expenses moving on to junior high we have stipends for athletics for three hundred and ten thousand dollars offset by athletic fees of a hundred and thirteen thousand which nets out to just under two hundred thousand for junior high athletics activities at that level i was about eighty five thousand in stipends less activity fees nets out at forty nine thousand and clubs about twenty thousand in stipends and less the club fees collected uh just comes to about seventy six hundred

099and the grand total for junior high extracurriculars is 254 000 in net expenses at the elementary level uh there's no athletics but there are activities um and that nets out to about sixteen thousand eight hundred we're just over uh ninety four thousand in stipends and then activity fees collected and then clubs 63 000 in stipends and 28 000 in collections that's out of 35 000 which brings total elementary extracurriculars to fifty one thousand nine hundred so now as dr spelling said we looked at some pros and cons of each of these and starting with the um extracurriculars the pros really center on eliminating the impact to academics so it voids cuts to instruction it minimizes cuts to staff and it maintains class sizes cons reduces opportunity to expand on curricular interest kids who get interested

100in their students who get interested in something in their academics don't have the opportunity to expand on that after school puts students at high school students at a disadvantage when they're applying to college and university so colleges look at their applications and see what they were involved in and also that does could impact any scholarships that those students may be eligible for it lessens school engagement you know as students become more involved in their school they feel a better a bigger connection to that school and it also limits opportunities for social and emotional growth so we'll move into closing an elementary or junior high school and on the left side i have elementary and we looked at the the staff that would be reduced if an elementary was to close and that would be the

101administration clerical nurse custodial extracurricular and crossing guards and a webmaster just kind of some miscellaneous so the staff savings are about 433 thousand dollars at the elementary level in addition there's some uh savings to the building itself as we wouldn't need to use as many utilities and or supplies for custodial supplies so cleaning supplies and things like that and that comes to just under a hundred thousand dollars there would be some additional transportation costs as those students would now need to be bused to another school so we did offset the grand total with that amount which is about 150 just about 154 000 so our estimated savings to close in elementary is just under 380 thousand dollars at the junior high level same thing we took the staff that would could be potentially reduced by

102closing a junior high and this total staff savings comes to 667 000 again the same building uh savings with custodial and utilities custodial supplies excuse me and that is about 162 000 offset by additional transportation costs of roughly 188 000 brings our total estimated junior high savings to close a junior high excuse me to be about 642 000 what uh what about buildings where and i don't know that this exists but i think it might if we had one of these facilities that we had say 90 percent of the kids were bust already does that is there's still additional transportation costs because of additional distance or is it just the cost of having a bus on the road and a kid on the bus i had that question too how many of these are new

103transports and how many of them are already getting transported we're just shifting them to a different building well we didn't pick a specific building we really took averages to calculate this so some of these kids could already be could already could yes could already be on a bus and just would be so the potential savings could be bigger correct so again looking at the pros and cons the pros there's a potential to absorb the population at another school building uh it would also reduce eliminate or reduce excuse me future cost for improvements or maintenance obviously if the building's not being used by students you wouldn't maintenance projects may not be as urgent cons connections would be lost to the neighborhood school you know families have a big sense of community with their neighborhood school it

104would increase bus ride time for students who are moved it raises student to admin ratios we obviously need to redraw boundaries if we were to close a building and while it would have a large impact to students and families there would be a minimal impact to the the budget the savings are not as large as the impact and then finally looking at reducing staff by 10 percent so the numbers here you see here for salaries which is just about 135.5 million dollars that's positions only that doesn't include uh the stipends and extra work and things like that just everybody's uh physician salary employer trs imrf contributions estimating that to be about around um well for trs i'm sorry imrf it's just about just under 10 and trs it depends on the employee and then health

105benefits we have about 65 percent of our employees participate in our medical plan and that comes to about 18.7 million so take those numbers and work it out to 10 percent and we have 13.5 million in salary savings uh about 650 000 in employer contributions to retirement plans and then about 1.2 million in health benefits so the grand total of the savings would be about 15.4 million dollars there and then we'll go over the pros and cons uh the pros reducing staff by 10 does keep all schools open and it allows us to maintain our current extracurricular opportunities the cons it does increase duties and responsibilities of those remaining staff it increases class sizes and there is a potential to overlook a specific task or responsibility as you divvy that work up there are some

106timelines you need to consider if you if we move forward with reducing staff if it is a certified staff member the rift notice the reduction in force notice must go be delivered to that staff member 45 calendar days before the end of the school term which right now is april 9th of 2021 and for non-certified staff that are working under a collective bargaining agreement we do have to give them 30 calendar day notice okay thank you a real quick but critical question what is the target number that was that was that was my question very first question to the board brent what is the target number because if i heard you correctly uh christy did you say uh it would be 1.5 million would they have a balanced budget next year if we are fully

107funded with evidence-based funding and if it's a flat if it's if that if that comes again comes back flat it's 5.8 million that's what i was adding up in my head is that correct or no so it is 1.5 million and let me just i just want to get the big the full size because i can't read it on my screen either but i think it's 5.8 million yes if we don't receive full funding or increase evidence-based funding in fiscal year 22. so you were you and i were thinking the same along the same line there brent i think that's the i think mrs doyle that's the first conversation is what is what is the target number that we are going to be looking forward uh for the to mitigate this deficit for next year

108so i think that's where you that's where i would start the conversation well i appreciate your thoughts on that um i agree we kind of need to know what we're aiming for before we start taking a look here so i i have just a couple questions for you about this target number because i want to just reiterate as this is always a great time to do when we talk about budget cuts is that how how much of this how much of our budget comes from local property tax and how much of our budget comes from state funding um just as a rough average and i'm not expecting a perfect number i'm expecting the the rough average we're about 62 percent of where the state thinks we need to be funded but what percentage is property

109and what percentage of state funding i can tell you that in two seconds thank you and and that for me helps me decide what kind of gamble i think i want to take on whether or not we get money because we can more accurately predict our property tax revenue then we can predict what any particular state budget might do so we receive 53 percent of our revenue is from local property taxes and other local revenue but primary 53 and then 41 just under 42 from evidence-based funding and other state funding and other state funding is free lunch and early childhood is part of that though federal really federal funding that just looks federal funding separate so six percent then is federal uh just about five percent oh cause those are rough yeah rough numbers 41.

110yeah thank you you're welcome i was gonna guess 37 so it was pretty close it was pretty close yeah well it you know it changes how much it comes from where each time they don't fund us the way they say that they know we need right so it's good to have an updated number on that i feel like our governor had made it fairly clear that if the proposed amendment regarding how we do our state income tax did not pass that our funding situation would be not great um i did hear him say education wouldn't be what we would necessarily want in his statement about that the day after i don't know if anyone else heard that but that was listed as it was as a distinct area of something that they wouldn't cut as

111something that would be affected by the fact that that uh change didn't happen but i would also but i don't know what that means yet i would also expect that given the financial situation that the state is in that they will still be looking at a tax increase i would agree with that as well i would agree with that assessment as well are they going to be able to generate as much money as they wanted to under the proposed idea probably not but i think either way we're looking at a tax estate tax increase i think you're looking at a state tax increase and some cuts to make up the eight billion dollars that they're the state has the state deficit okay so basically i get you know you you feel like you kind of

112want the odds what do you think the odds are we're going to be one or the other because there's a lot of difference between 1.5 million and 5.8 million what what do you think christie and your best guess what do you think the odds are that that we're going to get funded at what we're supposed to next year and i know that that's kind of unfair and i'm totally accepted and do not hold you to that because nobody can predict that accurately but you're you're the person in the room with the most expertise in school finance um i would say based on everything i'm hearing about state revenues and how they have been impacted by covid that we would be um we would should not expect an increase in evidence-based funding however the federal government

113has bailed out the state last year last fiscal year i mean not last calendar year and you know there was talk that that could happen again what what if you were asking if you were just to get the opinion of the expert first um what do you think what do you think is the most likely number that we really need to hit to be in financial health in our district if we needed to reduce to create a more positive trajectory what's your best what's your best estimate i would say then that i would have to go to not receiving it until fiscal year 23 and that's that 5.8 million so in your and you i'm i'm i'm sorry and i know that this but you know that i mean we're talking about budget money and

114we're relying on your information to be able to do that so i'm so sorry but at the same time i gotta ask you don't think that that will be in any significant way offset by federal bailout even a couple million you don't think that three would be enough it could nobody knows that's the reality but the problem is we've not been here before ever yeah it's never been done before right we haven't it's trying to predict the unpredictable right yeah which is what we've been doing for unfair months now but so here's a question that i have then if if you can't answer that if we decided tonight that we need to look at the 5.8 and we ended up not being in as bad a position could we then could we have like an

115if then type situation like i don't even know if that's yeah i i don't think that anyone has to go through with every single thing if things that's why we get to do a budget every year i think right right i think i think i see what you're saying and what you're saying is if it turns out that it's a better situation it's it's prepare for the worst hope for the best right so that's what your recommendation would be as well as prepare for the worst hope for the best i mean i mean the good thing is one positive is that our um you know we we budgeted for opening november first and that's not happening so every month and i don't want to use a closure as a cost savings but it does end

116up to be that way so that will impact i'm sorry it won't impact budget next year but it will impact fund balance okay and that leads me right into my question which is i've been wanting to ask this question for a while when we look at the monthly pills for payment who is it that's responsible for making sure that we are cutting back on monthly bills for payment as much as possible and looking at what goes through there and saying some of this stuff needs to slow down or stop who is responsible for that that is the budget administrator so all you know all purchases are going through a requisition now and that is eventually approved or at some point approved by that budget administrator so they are looking at that and i think because

117of where we started the first slide that we've been through many years of budget reductions i think every administrator is well aware of the you're shaking i i'm shaking my head just because christy i see when i look through these i'm like why are we buying post-its we have posted somewhere in the district why are we not sharing well i i see many many items on here that i'm just i cannot believe that we need to put that money out to that degree there are some things that look very legit like things that are for repairs for the schools and stuff but there's other stuff and i just i i cannot sit here and look at those things and not wonder about some of this does that make sense yes and so let me office

118supplies and classroom supplies and things like that are bought at the building level and stay at the building level so there's not a it's not like custodial supplies where we do have a warehouse of cleaning supplies where we just you know that's how you restock your building those kinds of things though office supplies are managed at the building level yeah but i i really feel i don't know who can make this process tighter but if i had to choose between going through that bills for payment for the month with a fine-tooth comb and saying goodbye to athletics or after-school activities there's things on here and i really really have been looking at it and i just well i don't know what the board can do about that but if there's anything that we can do

119about it we should i have a thought which i would hope that they've been doing that for the last five years i would hope because well i know where you're coming from i really really do i really do i am a long time follower of the bills for payment myself um that being said my understanding and i might be completely wrong is that even with that that wouldn't come close to making up this kind of dollar wait but it needs to happen anyway that's every elementary school activity so to me we've got to look at that part i i don't know why we have never had that discussion at a board meeting we have it just was at the beginning of the budget cut thing that was the first thing we'd looked at and that

120was also part of and it was i it might have been done before i i was on the board but when we created the central purchasing department and i remember that and i remember that that increased efficiency as far as purchasing of some of the things but what i see is money going out that is money that is not for things that you could not live without but i don't think that that i think that our part is to approve the budget and have the administration decide those details yep i get that i get that but we've got to tighten up that process whether it's just the board saying somebody somewhere needs to look more carefully at what they're putting on this thing tony you know you know over the last four years we've we

121have cut the building budgets at least once if not twice twice twice in regards to the number of dollars that they receive to purchase the items that they do need to have at the at the at the building so i mean that's i mean and can i just put in perspective so we overall all supplies that would be for ed fund transportation fund and operations fund we budgeted 13.1 million this year and that's about six percent of our budget our overall operating budget so and i i would say the bulk of those are in the operations fund i'm just going to say that if i see it and then but i look at the flip side of that also and i go at what point do i want my teacher to be so frustrated that

122she can't get a post-it pad of course you can though because there's all kinds of stuff hanging around and in a year where we're not supposed to be using paper because we're doing so much electronically some of this stuff should be way down way down in cost i saw stuff on here a billion things for a bulletin board why are we doing bulletin boards when nobody's in the school because we've been planning for kids to go back i did bulletin boards it's cool and it made people happy well i would like people to be happy too but here's what i'll say again if i have to choose between happy because you got a bulletin board and happy because you got to have a sports team or an activity which we have had tons of kids

123in here speaking before the board talking about what a lifeline that is for them in their school experience and so i'd rather have that experience than a million post-its to be honest you can just use scrap paper i can totally appreciate what you're saying i can totally as a sports parent i know i'm not the only one in here can appreciate you know like i kind of i kind of looked at this as kind of a jumping off point like how much do i need to cut what else can i cut where else can i make and you know i'm going to say something that's going to ruffle a lot of feathers but in my jumping off point i know that in my district we took a freeze and i realized that we just passed

124and i don't know the ins and outs of their contract i know the doubts of my contract but i guess i mean if i was a teacher in this district and i was looking at a school closing and my class size is increasing by eight kids per section i might consider taking a freeze for a year you know maybe we'd take a freeze for a year and and put one you know instead of what did we give them a three-year contract make it a four-year contract but this year we have to take a freeze because we're in such trouble so i think that that's something that actually is at this more macro level that i think is our responsibility to stay a little bit more toward i think that what i'm hearing from tony is

125that you'd like us to consider as part of the reduction not just a reduction in staff but a reduction in operations budget yeah and it's not to us to decide if they spend it on pencils somebody somewhere has to go through but what you're what i hear you're saying at the board level is that you're thinking operations uh operations budget yeah and i don't want to say completely because i know that some of this other stuff has to go on honestly right now looking at it i would reduce staff sooner than i would reduce student activities because even though i know those are extra i also know from the testimony of a billion students well maybe not a billion many well i'm gonna go down that path too soon but i i would say i

126completely agree with you especially right now well is the pandemic has shown us how much more than academics right but really the past too soon when we're i thought are we at the stage where we're discussing i think we're looking at how much address the budget we think we want to do and then which way to go so let's try and agree upon a number are we saying that we need to go for the 5.8 or are you would you rather go somewhere in the middle i say in the middle like 4 million because the thing is realistically you're not going to get the money all right let me keep track of this yep i agree with you on that i'm i'm with tony um and you say 4 million ruth heather where would you

127be at um uh four million yeah like a split the difference kind of a situation four million ally brent i'm i understand why you would want to split the difference but i also think that times are tough and i you know i think you prepare for the worst i would go the whole thing would you agree ellie to something like 4 million plus some ideas of how it would get to 6 million if necessary i would struggle with it but i i mean again i'm only one vote right no it doesn't matter if you're one vote the idea is i mean if you're asking i think i'm just asking to get yeah if you're asking for honesty we don't have five people here looking for one and a half million right i mean i don't

128have five people here looking for the full 5.8 or six um obviously you know this is just where it's great to have an odd number of people um when we're trying to get a straw poll but i think that where we're at with this is that i also feel like preparing for the worst hoping for the best is how i feel most comfortable right now but we don't need to decide for sure because we're not going to decide for sure we're not voting on anything tonight this and so obviously mr bauman will need a chance to weigh in at the final presentation and i'm sure he's following along if he's able but for me i think what we can safely say is we certainly want to look at something that's big enough to encompass at

129least one of these choices if not a fourth choice or some combination thereof can i can i ask a couple questions about this real quick though so on um i think it was slide 11. site 11 talked about building savings and i know we're kind of kicking around several ideas about this but this one closing a school yeah so maybe like slide 14 stuck out to me where you put potential to overlook tasks or responsibilities and i as i i'm not sure where we were headed down that road or what we were thinking about when we said potential to overlook specific tests are we going to ask teachers to do more we already are i think that's an example of cutting the administration by 33 what we're sitting there well it's you know it it

130can be you know it can be anywhere but one of them students i would imagine yeah well i think it's also i think an example of that is we've already experienced it from cutting 33 percent of the district administration and the you know and the uh the issues that we've gone through with having so so much fewer people and noticing well so and so used to do this and making sure that for where everything that needs to get done is getting done and then reallocating all the different responsibilities because there's so many things that different people do that you just may not know they did and it and that's that's kind of an example of what we're doing along those lines that's where i got on slide 11. so where we talked about closing buildings

131or or you know running savings and running minimal gas and electric and like maybe it's because i'm married to a guy who does this for a living right but like my fear would be closing a building and having a pipe burst and then a simple fix is now a catastrophic and this is not the entire um utility bills for those buildings it's a reduction right and you know when if if you were to go down that road to l.a you do a building check on a building every day well you would hope yeah no you do you do to make sure just in case those types of things right just like we do on the buildings when they're closed for the holidays right yeah yeah um so i think it's safe to say we're looking

132at at least four million yeah i have one more question oh sorry go ahead sorry slide seven so um again sports mom kid in college wrestling like i'm all in sports however i i guess i have to ask the question since rob schwartz is here what marketability for our district if we cut all sports and activities like that's obviously going to affect our market analysis for rsp i mean that's obviously going to have some kind of impact to our enrollment right i don't think you have to be a professional right i would like him to factor that in it's his professional opinion on how everyone's housing is going to tank i see what you're saying what you're saying i'm not but i'm not even lower in his projections if we did not have those is

133that what you're asking i'm just like obviously he's dealt with it like he said he's dealt with this in other districts so i guess some of my questions are like i so my fear is and i can't remember the district that did it that said they were going to cancel all sports and then all the parents came out so first of all yeah so first of all um sports parents um petitions for the school board are due soon i'm just saying like real soon you should go out and get your petitions um and but secondly like i don't i have a i have a problem with saying we're gonna cut it and then it not happening and then and also the retribution from that i guess is what like so i'm looking we're not looking

134to be theatrical i think we've had enough theatrics this year so i just i my question as far as him doing it in other districts how does that affect project like obviously people are going to be like i'm out like several sports families you know but like i i think it's safe to say uh anecdotally yes it would have an impact on that how about i don't know what rob would say if he's available i can't yeah i think he would agree with that and he's popping on here and uh and he's just he's got his hand on his head and he's like sorry you still look angelic wow that that that would be that would be interesting there's some things we can look at that definitely will have a negative impact for sure for

135sure but i just i i guess my question is i mean have you dealt with that in other districts like what could we expect just so we have a handle on as a board because i think you should have as much information as you can have i would say honestly every district over the last 17 years we've never had to talk about cutting programs the way you are it's usually been buildings so this would be new ground i think it it answered the question yes it affects so it affects a lot of different areas and i think you know that i think tonight too a lot of this was to show you this is the cost of what we spend on the total program and after for after bel de bell and uh you know

136when you cut those types of things as well um you do you see more discipline problems you see more other issues crop up over time because kids don't have uh that you know they don't have things to do with as much to do after school and they're not as connected to the school anymore and doctors following i think laurie also briefly touched on the fact that this year in particular we have seen academics is not everything we talk about the classroom and yes i i hold my own children to very i have very high expectations for them academically because i know what they're able to do but i also recognize that academics is not everything it is does not make up their complete person if they didn't have other activities outside of the classroom they

137would not be the people that they are and the fact that our district has tremendous activities and clubs and sports and they these kids are work really hard to find themselves and find their people and i i think when you're talking pros and cons that list of cons to me personally cutting these things particularly at the high school level while i also think the activities are very important at the junior high and elementary level is wildly irresponsible and would be devastating not just to our students but to our community as a whole this is what i'd like to say ruth about our community our community said twice with the referendum we want you to cut back on costs it is as clear as it can be we are not getting any new money we need

138to cut back on costs so while i agree with you about the activities and stuff if we have to cut a building that is the community's wish if we have to cut people and increase class size and increase burden that is the wish of the community because if you don't give people money then what you're saying is we want you to cut and i hope everybody who's watching this meeting is listening and saying i said that because that's what it comes down to you either are for the spending or you are for the cuts and we're going to have to make these cuts and even though i don't want to go to athletics and activities at all if we go all the way up to 6 million there's no way to get to 6 million

139unless you cut those things i don't think i don't think so right very difficult we have to we have to really think about what the community is saying to us tony i agree that the community has said they want us to cut things and i think that it that's why we're sitting here talking about how much and what are we going to do we're not sitting here talking about do we need to try and pass another referendum i don't even think that's across any of our minds right and i just i think that we're like what i'm saying about with you is that while we agree that we don't want to cut athletics and we don't want to cut activities we're going to get there because that number is not going to happen unless we

140go there too we'll do the building and then we'll do the people and then we'll probably still have to do athletics and activities if that's the order we do it if it continues it covid continues into years and our state economy continues to be shut down over and over again i agree that i mean all kinds of changes the state economy is likely i don't know about covid i can't say but the state economy is not good heather um so i have a couple questions related to the presentation i also think we're spending a lot of time and i understand why we're spending a lot of time talking about how it would be really hard all of these decisions are really hard cutting athletics and activities really really hard having 35 or 40 i don't

141know you know kids in the classroom really hard not going to also also not going to reflect wonderfully on our you know school district when um you know when we're trying to compete with neighboring districts who have excellent educational systems um all of these are just terrible and hard and it's heartbreaking to sit here and do this again i know that's how all of you feel um it is what keeps me up at night um will continue to keep me up at night i have a kindergartener and a fourth grader we're in it for the long haul these are things that will affect my kids just like they will affect your kids just like they will affect the kids that for you know all the parents and community members that are watching today it's awful

142um but i i do have some questions um one of my questions is when we're talking about closing a school potentially you know as an option what's this what is the timeline we have a timeline related to like staff cuts and when we need to inform people what is a timeline related to you know making that decision and making that call is that something that we achieve next year is that two years out what does that potentially look like i think that was the route we want we chose if that's the route we want to go for next year obviously for for cuts um i think that's something that we need to need to discuss and uh because to be honest this will be a first time for me for closing at school and you

143know that'll be a conversation with rob and others to get that feedback and come back to the board with a this is a you know a timeline in regards to that is one aspect of this of this equation there's a lot of variables in this equation and uh really i really like to nail down the sooner than later a dollar amount that the board wants us to uh wants us to get to and look at because i'm you know i i don't look forward to this but i i do look forward to getting you know involved in the conversation you know faith and i and christy and some of our team we've obviously already been talking and uh we have ideas there's gonna be a natural um reduction of staff this year you know rob

144just talked about 700 fewer staff i mean that equates to you know a large dollar amount now i know uh he's built into the model that we will have uh people coming students coming back so that reduction is uh is is less but there will be a natural reduction in staff that will occur that uh when you talk about uh staff if you're talking about 20 25 people you know that's a million and a half dollars right there um so there's you know there are a variety of things you know mrs doyle and i talked and she and i went back and forth in some conversations and you know we're talking about this is an all or nothing right now and i i don't know necessarily that it needs to be an all or nothing

145i think there are options and depending on what the number is that the board lands on um i'd like to be able to start putting together some ideas to share in the in the near future i think okay so so i'm just i guess i'm surprised i so i'm just i'm surprised that you're saying that we could pro possibly we would be ready to if we if again we went down this path and that's what the board just said we're going to close the school whatever that we could do that between now and next school year that's that's a reality like we're looking at okay to your question i i think i think the reality is if we're closing the building that the decision has to be made by april yeah because because it affects

146personnel right well right but the massive but yeah well i understand that the undertaking the undertaking of thinking about a boundary committee or a come in and or a committee that looks into you know that looks into how this would take place and then the massive amount of administrative work that would take to to manage this i i just had no idea that we would be able to do something like this in this amount of time i'm just so boundary committee work actually usually takes less time than one would think um the process that we followed the last time was very efficient and was in a very short amount of time where um even um in our regular time frame and we said this is the date we're gonna we want to present to the

147board for decisions i trust your answer and i trust your sense i'm surprised i'm just saying i'm surprised but i but i hear that you're saying that this is a possibility for next year so that's okay you know good good to know when we talk about um when we when we talk about potentially just closing building it does have um do that does that not have um a significant impact in terms of class sizes like a ripple effect of class sizes it was not listed as one of the cans and i understand that we're doing more around administrative custodial you know related to the to staffing putting them in different classrooms and other buildings what the functional capacity is is the number of classrooms not necessarily the class size it's that there are classrooms available

148so you would basically i don't please stop me if i'm getting this wrong but what i envision in my head is say you could pick them up in a basket the 28 kids or whatever that are in that class and the teacher you pick them up in the basket out of that building and you would just put them in a classroom that was available in a different building does that make sense yes that's that's that look at functional capacity and that's what functional capacity means and looking at the ability to reach that functional capacity versus the architectural capacity versus the programming capacity um all of those things equate right down to what you asked for before which is exactly the thing that matters how many classrooms do we have how many places to have classes

149happen are there yeah but that doesn't necessarily reflect on a change in class sizes so i actually did note so the class sizes that you'd mentioned before moving to 35 or 40 that's not what we're talking about at all we are in no way talking about increasing the class sizes to 35 40. no they're not it's not doable actually well like closing a building but that's by closing a building i am also talking about the option of reducing staff by 10 and and clearly that's a big number 10 is a 15 million dollar you know we know we don't need to get to 15 million i understand that we also i yeah so our questions are answered thank you i'm sorry to interrupt you are we saying then that do we want to just say

150here's the number we want you to get to here's some ideas of areas that we think you should be looking at and you figure it out so what we're talking about is picking the areas so we wouldn't be necessarily in the way i had it that i understood it is that what would be the best for our district since we don't necessarily know which positions we would need or not need that's that's not something that as a board we would pick um we hire superintendent to take that one on um so what we're looking at is do we want to have a number that we direct him to say we expect you to cut staff by 10 7 you know um that's what i have been taking it as uh dr sperlin is that what

151you're trying to convey to us yeah yeah again i think you know if you can provide us with a number and uh and you know and this is to you know these are some possibilities where things could be they think things could be cut and you know the idea of closing a school is obviously i mean that's a big big it's a big decision so you know is that is that a road that the board wants to go down you know to save you know 400 000 or 650 000 a year depending on if it's elementary junior high and if so then then we know that's part of the road that we're going to go down and we know if we're going to redraw the boundaries and we're gonna there's six hundred fifty thousand of

152four million that's there's there's a chunk of it right and go from there so um do are there questions about the presentation that are outstanding before we get into the discussion about what as a board we would like to start to head toward and again not voting on anything but this is where we give to administration i where we would like to see more information what we would like for them to come back on so that we are able to vote with the complete information that we feel we need i did have one other quick question because on here it was my understanding that we had already cut junior high athletics that was number one question on my list so i'm wondering where this number comes from most of those numbers are old numbers because

153we don't have a full you know we don't have a full year so that was last year but this year we are not paying any junior high stipends so so why is it on here right i just i mean i just was very surprised to see that because i thought it had already been kind of because we did have it last year so that's the interesting 196 already don't get a stipend with doing not not the 300 000. well okay but if you if we're doing intramurals right at the junior high for sports i think that's where we're still at that had been voted on right maybe that's what that is right and so what i'm wondering about that is um it's so what how much how much yeah like so then how much are

154we paying for the intramural stipends if we had if we had school this year if we were in normal school with athletic i mean we would we we would have gone to a robust intramural program that still costs to cost money right christie that's where you're getting at it okay right okay and so if we were to cancel all that that's where you get the savings that you just put on the on the docket i assume correct okay thank you for clarifying that thank you any other technical questions of that sort of nature um i have one left that didn't already get answered so it sounds like we're all kind of asking the same thing um the regular staff numbers that you used in your projections both for the five-year projections of financials and for

155the projections of savings is this based on like the regular levels of staff or is this based on in some areas the increased levels of staff that we had discussed due to covet needs that would be probably that we had talked about might be temporary needs um did you use the number we're currently with the expanded number or did you use the typical number i i use current staffing levels so i i'm not so without the additional um whoever was was on staff at the time i ran these analysis so no not projected staff just who is currently on our payroll so not like the extra janitorial and health uh what are we calling them how screeners health aides yes but then that also doesn't include and maybe it's nominal um dean is that the

156the dean's a dna payroll right now yeah they are in the payroll okay um but other you know like the monitor bus uh bus monitors are on payroll i think the only thing we rift were um um recess recess senator recess that's something that was very small right it wasn't coming out okay okay that was that was my question there again i'd like to reiterate i think that this pandemic has shown us just how much more than academics schools in our country not just here but in our country schools provide a heck of a lot more to the community than just the strict educational i know dr sparlin and i have had this conversation just in his own family um with with prior educators how much more we provide with social emotional learning and even

157feeding kids and providing all of the things that we can to provide a solid academic environment to as many kids as come through our doors and i think that for me that's why when i'm looking at academics i'm seeing that we need to be looking at the whole picture um which is why i like these these different options um but i also wonder if it shouldn't be some combination instead of just all or nothing of one thing so i with that unless anyone else has specific questions like that let's let's just talk um i think that we need to plan dr sparlin um for between four to six million if you'd like to come back um with some ideas that are in that range so that when we do know where is the board we

158are heading the four to six million range is what we're looking at and that's the best we can do right now so um definitely that would be the first question we needed to have you answered i think uh lori i think this is on our we have a finance and facilities meeting virtual now tomorrow night because of the news rules and i believe this presentation is going to be at that meeting so is there anything specifically that brent and i should be looking for let's discuss yeah that i actually do think that there's some aspects of this choice that if each of our committees um are having meetings in this next month before we meet again to make some decisions on this it would be good to hear from our diversity equity inclusion committee because

159this will affect how different students can access all of our opportunities potentially so we want to make sure that we've considered that from a teaching and learning standpoint we need to understand what that can what different things will affect our academic success and policy and legislative i mean i don't know can you ask the state to give us more money maybe a letter writing campaign or something but but in any event it probably hits your committee the least i guess is what i'm saying does does everyone kind of agree that we should probably have all of our committees at this kind of level we should probably have all of our committees kind of look at this in before we would meet for our december meeting if you have a meeting scheduled tony i know that

160our next um equity advisory committee meeting is december third something december second second okay and when is our december board meeting uh the sixth or seventh seventh seventh is the seven so your diversity committee is meeting already scheduled to meet before that obviously the financial committee or the finance committee and facilities committee of which this would be a big discussion both from a financial standpoint and from the demographer's report you're gonna have a big meeting tomorrow um is meeting tomorrow um which well obviously before that what about teaching and learning what are your current plans on that committee we do not have a meeting i don't i don't believe we have a meeting scheduled for it um but we will we'll get we'll get one on the calendar okay before the december before the december

1617th was it so i think if you can kind of take a look at this and and here's the the here's just my thoughts on on how to look at this as a committee that's a good question i would ask that all of our committees understand that their piece of it is not the only thing for us to consider that we can't just look at building space and money we have to think about the curricular benefit and equity components that for equity and curricular we understand that we have to think about facility space and money and that it's not a matter of all or nothing for any of our committees either that would be the only thing i would i would ask um i am curious how as representatives of the committee of the community

162and our administration and staff knowing that as a board we've decided that this is what we're looking at where where is the favorite path will one emerge that seems more preferable to others that's that's all i would ask i don't know if anyone else has thoughts about what they would like to ask our committees to work on i would also add i know for our committee there's always time for public comment which very rarely is there any public comment and obviously we're meeting virtually so if people had a burning desire to make a public comment at one of these committee whether it's teaching and learning or financing facilities they can email that to ursula states it on the agenda it's on the agenda which is listed on the district website great and again we have

163to follow modified pandemic procedures um as we continue to roll in and out of different levels of capacities um and in and out of virtual which is we're going to talk about that after this great that was the sarcasm under the mask i know that we just didn't get to see the facial expression right yes okay so um thoughts um where do we want to lean where what seems like something that would be the least odious of some really unfortunate choices to me the idea of going down the path of closing a school um doesn't seem to have the the cost the cost savings that we need to to and yeah that doesn't seem to have the cost savings it also feels to me like a pretty major change um you know with pretty you

164know pretty long-term you know impacts and it wouldn't be nearly as easy i think to reopen a school um in a couple of years should illinois you know start doing what it should do to fund our schools um so to me that doesn't seem like a great avenue to explore so i would say that a mixture of what we of some of the other options like what are you thinking well like uh looking at a percentage of staff cuts and a as well as a percentage of um the athletics and activities and however that shakes you know whatever the recommendations or suggestions are general thoughts on 60 40 each way like if we're trying to get to the four to six million i um you know i kind of did well in my head i

165had like the a two percent for like if we did two percent for staff based on the numbers that we're looking at that would put us at about three million right wait i'm so sorry can we let them figure that out yeah that's what i was saying yeah i mean and then like i don't need if i know if i necessarily want to say 60 40. i just want to say i'm just looking for a direction because if we know that as a board we're not looking to head down the avenue of say a school closure and we want to be looking at the reality of the need to change some of these boundaries for an elementary thing there is a time frame that we really need to take a look at so i do

166want to give them an idea if if this is just overwhelmingly like hey no we do not want to touch extracurriculars or hey no we don't want to touch buildings that's that's the goal that i have here as usual i wish i had more information for me you know what you you feel like you need more information and then we get a lot of information and then you have to understand a ton of information and then there's more information and yeah that's also what i want to talk about i mean i just we can do that maybe about our expectations when we are present our expectations of the administration when we're presented when they do when we give them some feedback and when they present to us is that certainly we can ask for additional

167information and say could we you know a b or c but i don't think we can go down these uh paths that we went down in previous years um and upend every plan that is presented to us um so but so what i would so i'm just gonna say from in my piece um and i'm only one person i i don't really have an interest in exploring the school closure i would like to see um suggestions around the staffing reductions and the extracurricular and athletic um areas thank you all right let's head down to the quiet end of the room i'll jump in here with a couple of things so um i like what you said before i think i think things are going to come from each of the three buckets i i would

168close in elementary and junior high that's 1 million dollars i would find uh look to find another four million so a total of five in staff reductions i would also like to explore the possibility of working with our bargaining units to make adjustments in the sports stipends because that that is a potential avenue where we don't have to reduce sports but we could realize some cost savings without harming a lot of folks okay so i've got that for you all right did you mean five million on staff or five percent just so i'm clear i was working towards a total of five so five million total oh that's your total gotcha okay okay so four four million instead okay ali tony do you have a particular ways that you're leaning tony i know we wanted

169to also add in a concept of the operations budget operations budget and also anyone who is not in the classroom directly with kids is my pick for first staff cut so you would go down the avenue of staff cuts and operations cuts okay okay allie thoughts um i mean i think brent's right i think you're gonna have to take a little bit from everybody at some point in some way and i think you know my hope is that you know some of our bargaining units will you know step up and make it a little less painful for kids and i don't even know if that's a possibility but i would hope that in these times with so many people struggling that something could be done and your appetite for a school clothing or not clothing

170closing i i mean i mean at this point everything's on the table okay there are ideas that i like a little less than a little more than others but at this point i don't think again i think this list is a jumping off point for administration i don't think that this is right the end all be all i think no this is this is a conversation to head us where we can focus their efforts because obviously at this time as heather said this is not the time for a 70 page item list or anything that we've done in the past they're also trying to plan two completely different school years at the same time um that change on a daily basis and we're in really critical circumstances for some unknowns in a lot of areas

171so i i tend to agree with that myself that i do think i do tend to think that we need to try to spread this and not make it all just one thing because each piece is critical i think as dr sparlin had said i'm hearing that we will have some natural reductions as we have for the last several years we'll have more we don't know what yet because we don't know which kids would come back um or if they will or if another development will spring up for for whatever reason with a boundary change or anything like that so i think my thought on this is that when i'm looking at the whole picture of this year with with kids and with what this whole year is doing i i'm really disinclined to upset

172the routine and the things that they're hanging on to for when it's done as much as possible and if that includes when it's done i'm going to go to wolf's crossing or when it's done i'm going to go to lakewood creek elementary i'm i'm disinclined to take that away from five or six hundred kids and put another unknown on a huge group of kids by closing a school i just feel i i just am worried about that i'm also disinclined to take away those clubs and activities this is including honor societies this is including service societies they provide valuable services to our schools but more importantly this is the thing and when we talk about being a trauma-informed school district for me i don't want to cause them more trauma just by being in our

173school district as much as we can possibly help it and for the kids those are the things in their daily lives and their daily routines that i think in my just in my opinion would probably end up with the most i would be more inclined to talk about a school building [Music] because it looks like we might have some ability i did want to ask about the school building concept is how long could we close a building for and if there is in our projections and i think that i don't see an end date in these projections over the next five years that this wouldn't be something we would be only able to do for a couple years this would be something that would be ongoing and there might in fact be some potential rental

174income coming from that as well because the building's not going to go away so i would be inclined to think about that but also i think for me it would be more in staff cuts because some of that will happen naturally because um for me what i'm seeing is that the outcome of this year is that we are a district with one to one technology grade six through 12 which completely changes what staff we need in what areas so i feel like this will be the least area of student impact it will be the greatest area of student impact for our staff that are already doing way too much this year that are already underpaid in some ways in some jobs this year and other years and i know that that's not what it means

175to be a good choice but for me what i would say is i would consider i would consider a school building i would probably consider one building and that would be at the junior high level just because of the numbers and then i would consider the rest coming in through staffing and i actually do like tony's idea of the operations budget cut as well because i agree with her i've seen over the years we can always find a little bit more um but at the same time i don't i don't know how much more there is so that's just kind of my thought um ruth i would agree with allie that anything needs to be on the table and i would eagerly anticipate here you know if if administrators you feel that closing a building

176would be the right step that i would be able to get behind that you know if you really thought that this is the best you know way to go um but i agree that that would cause trauma when we're already i'm sure people are already sitting at home freaking out right now and compile i'm sure i'll have some emails already when i get home and and that's great that's fine is it important yeah yeah and i can't say i blame anybody for doing that absolutely not we do too you're absolutely right um so i would say we need public input we need opinions and um we'll be happy to listen to that and yeah i've already shared quite a bit of my opinions already no you're nothing opinions are something i think every board member

177will always share as a commonality which is why democracy works okay so dr sparlin what i'm hearing is um some interest in taking a look at potentially what your your please forgive me if i'm paraphrasing what i think our group is saying as a whole but what we're saying is don't hit anything too hard please present us with what you think will be the least impactful and least traumatizing to our students and that our students level of cost reduction is what is the number one priority we are far less concerned with other reductions than we are with things that will directly impact students which is just how we began the presentation but what that means in this case is we want to be looking at these buckets and we want to hear truly the least

178impactful and and i will say because i have been through this every year for the last five years i have and i've seen the 70 item lists and every year and i am very sorry to say this and i don't want to put more on people but frankly i'm disappointed every year that every single year it's always considered more impactful to students to cut an administrator than it is to cut a reading specialist every year i have seen that come back from administration and every year i believe that that can't possibly be true so i would really be highly disappointed to see this come back as cutting administrators would be far too detrimental to our students but let's take away the people that help them learn to read every day that would hurt my feelings

179and i would be a little annoyed to say the least just putting it out there that is really i hear you i hear what you're saying that bothers you bothers me i think i think that was really critical i think um i think we i think we all said reading specialists no way and we and and that got you know taken off the list but i think too to say that it was an f that it was a statement that an administ administrator is more important than a reading specialist i think is kind of an unfair statement given the fact that we you know given the fact that of all the information that we know around cuts and whatnot but so i heard what you said i think you hear where i'm coming from um

180but that was your opinion i understand and it is rough because heather i have listened to this every year and every year it's been just this rough and every year this has actually been the exact thing that's come back even though we say no that's why i say it so i would just i would just suggest that perhaps there's something about my statement that you don't understand and we can agree to disagree i think heather understands but i think that heather i have to say being in those situations for as many years as i have i would trade a half a reading specialist for probably 10 administrators and that is no offense to administrators it is just that when children don't learn to read like the entire thing falls i know i know that and

181i know your opinions on that i just think it's like kind of like pot shots right now and we just don't need to do that like we don't but we do need to figure out where we're going to get money and these kind of i didn't intend that in any way shape or form as a pot shot at anyone i just so i appreciate that you didn't feel comfortable hearing it and i appreciate how you took that but at this point what the point is is that when we come back and do this we're not going to spend three more meetings determining what to do right so this has been an area that five years in a row has come up and we do not have the luxury of time wasted down that path when

182we have all agreed which is the entire point of this not to criticize any individual it is really about creating a solution that will be comment was not critical though do you does it matter well what you're it was it's some direct but heather whatever you're asking is that you just said my opinion but and that's fine that's more i i hear you and i understand where you're coming from i i i'm going to ask you i'm going to ask you to take this offline with me later because clearly you're not happy with me right now and i can understand that but this is about the job i think i have all right you had a right to say what you said i said what i said we're having our exchange i think we can

183be able to be done with the exchange now but please you know then please stop asking if if what i think is valid right because i do think that i i heard what you said and thank you for sharing that your opinion is that you disagree so i'm going to ask that we move on let's please let's thank you i appreciate that yes thanks because we have so much more to go through here tonight moving along way too long reiterating this stuff that we've already said so just keep going you know i think we're going to move on um to the fact that we've given you where we think we want to go you've clearly heard the opinions of of each board member in attendance and i'm sure mr bauman will have an opportunity to

184provide his as well so we can move to your next informational item all right very good christy you want to exchange positions with uh theresa good evening teresa how are you good thanks for being so patient out there all right item 7.4 is to review the decision-making process for stages of in-person instruction that's what we've uh titled that we need to talk about our decisions for uh decisions for in-person instruction to provide the board with information on the contact tracing uh process as requested so um teresa's put together a short presentation uh that we will answer those a couple of those questions and then we can have a discussion on what needs to be discussed okay so um so this is just a review the same slide that we presented when we first went through

185our stages for the district reopening plan again our priorities start with minimizing health risks for students and staff while maximizing as much time for in-person instruction as possible we want to make sure that we retain that choice for families to determine which educational setting is best for their students and then of course prioritizing the return of our in-person students starting with those with the most significant disabilities and then moving on to our youngest students that directive comes directly from the isb and idph joint guidance that was released over the summer people often ask and this is probably the number one question that we address is what leads into determining which setting is feasible for a district when we look at remote versus in person or a combination hybrid in between for us one thing that

186we monitor very very closely many times every single day is our our own covid data we're going to go through in a few minutes what that contact tracing looks like but we have a very good handle on what is going on within our own district at any point in time additionally we take a look at both local and regional metrics we measure the four primary zip codes that our school district services as well as we are part of region two for the idph and then we look at state and national data ppe availability is a big one for us making sure that we have adequate stock to supply that as requested for our staff members who are working in the buildings adequate staffing levels making sure that we have people in those buildings any exclusion

187and isolation requirements and then of course the ever-changing guidance revisions from idphsb and the kendall county health department to give you a picture of what we have going on right now in the stage that we're in we have currently 380 students that are registered as in-person learners for our self-contained special education department not all of those students have been attending that number has gone down as the weeks have gone by parents retain that option to move back into the remote setting at any point in time and we are starting to see that go on a downward and we have approximately 200 teachers tas related service providers that service those students we are operating classes in 18 of our buildings at this point our average class size is between four and eight most of these students

188attend for two days for about two and a half to three hours on those days that's not inclusive some of the programs are running up to four days but most of them are attending two days for a couple of hours this is a look at the area metrics this is calculated on those four zip codes or primary zip codes one thing i want to bring back to you which is different from the last time we talked is that beginning on the 6th of november idph began including probable cases in the totals so probable is defined as somebody who is both symptomatic and exposed but did not get a test result so those are now included in these positivity numbers um currently the last metric that we had up here was 18.16 the seven day positivity

189rate that's a rolling average and then the number of new cases over seven days for the population balanced at 100 000 is 604.2 new cases as you can see on the graphic we hit a high point several days ago and we came down slightly and we've kind of plateaued right back there at that spot again if we look back at where we are in our own stages of our reopening plan we are remain at stage two at this time this is having just select programs and related services in our buildings we established a number of metrics that were supposed to guide our decision those are still one piece of that decision that we constantly monitor in addition we have our own data we have our own availability for staff as well as students ppe a

190number of other things that we've we've realized now that we're in it this far that we need to consider i wanted a quick review and adaptive pause with you this is the term that coins our ability to either delay moving forward at any point in time in our stages or pivoting back to a remote learning environment and that doesn't have to be district wide this point of it being adaptive is that it can be in response to any set of students or staff members a class a grade level a school we went ahead yesterday and placed the wheatlands elementary school into an adaptive pause this was our first time doing this we had a number of staff members that had received positive cases over the course of about 12 days and we felt this was

191the best decision the ppe that we have provided to our staff members that are in our buildings the this these items are stocked in each of the buildings that are operating in person learning we have the face masks that were both state provided as well as district provided along with shields gloves gowns plexiglass shields goggles and then we've expanded our n95 masks significantly we currently have about 180 people on our list that we're going through for fit testing n95s require us to go through a fit testing process with each of those individuals to verify that they are fitted appropriately to that manufacturer and the correct size is being used we have several nurses that have been trained in doing this and they're out across the district doing that on a regular basis our mitigation strategies

192include social distancing wherever possible six feet or further frequent cleaning sanitizing we have sanitizer in every classroom and in common areas throughout every building face covering requirements daily health certifications for students and for staff members and then we have exclusions that we monitor as we go through contact tracing i wanted to bring this back to you as well this is when school districts were to consider what the most appropriate setting was for their schools and their students to learn per the cdc there are four points that they cover one is promoting behaviors to reduce spread maintaining healthy environments and healthy operations and preparing for when someone gets sick again it reiterates that schools need to determine in collaboration with their state and local health officials to the extent possible whether and how to implement each

193of these considerations while adjusting to meet the unique needs and circumstances of the local community implementation should be guided by what is feasible practical acceptable and tailored to the needs of each community this is an important point because as you look around the state you'll see that there's likely not two plans that are the same as school districts move forward with coming in and out of in-person and hybrid plans and that's because they're all responding to what they feel is feasible practical for their own communities it's difficult to read on this slide but for those um for those of you that have this pulled up that is a live link to the top and this contact tracing information is posted on our website i just wanted to walk really briefly through this with you because

194a lot of people don't understand how we know so much about what's going on in our district we have a covid reporting form that's available on the intranet and is accessible to all staff members across our entire district this form is utilized to track any person student or staff member who is symptomatic exposed to a known case or positive for covid19 once that initial form is completed the primary information is gathered that is sent to the nurse and the csn that are over that building or department that then results in a direct interview with that individual and that nurse and they determine whether or not there was in fact an exposure or gather more information on the symptoms or the testing that was received if we need to we also come back at this point

195to any of the teachers bus drivers anyone else that might have been involved in that situation if we're contact tracing a positive case the nurse then completes a covet 19 nursing investigation form this form was developed to follow that idph decision tree so as nurses complete that it asks for certain information about the individual they're reporting on and then given whether the answer was yes or no it takes them to a different set of questions and walks them all the way through that and at the end that comes out with whether or not there's any exclusion so quarantine or isolation for that individual and if so it will say is it a 10-day isolation is it a 14-day quarantine it'll give that instruction that then results in a form being completed based on the results

196of that tracing and investigation form that is sent directly to the individual whether that's a student's parents or a staff member and we copy the building administrator or department head so that they're aware of what the exclusion period is and then hr follows up subsequently with any necessary information on how to calculate or account for any missed time absence change of their primary location any positive case is also then put onto a tracing form that is shared with the health department that includes information on the county of residence that the individual that's positive is noted on anybody that's then determined as a close contact meeting six feet or closer for 15 minutes or longer is also then recorded and traced back through and if they subsequently become a positive case then this whole system starts

197back over at the start again we are really cognizant of protecting personal health information so as we communicate back with co-workers administrators and so on only the exclusionary information and necessary questions for contact tracing are communicated sorry i went really fast i know it's late what what questions can i answer for you can i just clarify real quick when you say we're really cognizant of protected personal information i am i understanding it correctly when i think that what that means is i'm not going to know if it was a student or staff member that put me in quarantine and i shouldn't because that's their protected information is that what you're saying unless you're part of the investigation and it's unclear as to whether or not there could have been a close contact so in like

198a teaching position where someone might have worked with a student we might need to know more about that particular student in that that situation but a co-worker may not necessarily know if we've been able to positively identify that there was a close contact we aren't going to go say it was mary smith for example right and we wouldn't put that information out for them no no but along those lines what if it is a teacher who comes in contact with a kid and um the teacher comes up positive later and doesn't know the names of the kids because i know that we say we're self-reporting or doesn't know the name or they're a substitute teacher or you know what i mean and they don't have for a million other reasons so this form is um

199widely used in the district we have over 800 reports a lot of them in the investigation process don't follow through to be positive but there are potential i think i might have been exposed or um i think somebody else may may have been positive because i heard it through the grapevine any of that information don't fill out the form that's my question so what if you heard it through the grapevine and they didn't fill out a form then we would ask them however that information came to either the district or an employee or a family member or anyone to report that to the school and everyone knows that that first step is the reporting form including calling a student in sick so if a student calls in parent says so and so you know vomited

200last night all that information is collected on the form it results in a nurse calling that parent and walking through that with students so that that's the key piece for us is the reporting how long does that take this process um every day we don't know what i'm saying is so say somebody says to you hey i tested positive i filled out my form these are the people i was around how long does that investigation take before the people involved usually be notified or the following morning at the latest it's very quick we have nurses that are watching this after hours not overnight but late into the evening and on the weekends and then all of our nurses and csns are on this sheet all day every day and then myself and a couple of

201other leaders in the health services department are watching it as well are you doing the same thing for your staff who calls in sick or who can absolutely so we're following up with everybody everybody like i tell you it's been over 800 that we've followed up on as far as call-ins and reports rumors etc every one of them is investigated using our nursing team yep tony can i ask another i'm sorry i didn't hear what i didn't see you over there go ahead um i just noticed on here that you had referenced the cdc whereas before we've been very carefully and purposefully distinguishing between our requirements as a school district from idph and the cdc because they've been different sure so this isn't any sort of specific guideline this is just a consideration for schools

202as they look through what what factors should help to lead decisions so this isn't guidance that we're following from cdc but more considerations and discussion points this is actually this portion of the cdc guidance is referenced in the idph manual last question i have can we please have a status update on um all of our facilities how are any of our facilities in that adaptive pause that you mentioned the wheatlands currently is and that was based on a number of staff positives over the course of about 10 to 12 days we were able to with high certainty identify some of those individuals that had had been exposed outside of the workplace following your protocol exactly um and then some of them there were there wasn't a clear other reason so i don't have abundance of

203caution um since we're not able to determine that the school wasn't the site where maybe those individuals were exposed to each other and and subsequently tested positive for covid we went ahead and closed that building until november 30th that will allow the quarantine periods for anyone that's positive to expire as well as at one o'clock today when that building was closed it is undergoing a very deep clean and we'll sit empty until the 30th and that would be our call on any any building our nurses are watching for patterns if there's any connection to epidemiologically link any cases together that is certainly our first step is to to call that and as dr sparlin mentioned earlier this was something that we even watched on a weekend and were able to make that call on a

204sunday teresa i appreciate all the stuff that you're doing i want to keep this brief because i don't want to get into the details of all this but who is supposed to make sure that the teachers i know we're paying for ppe who's supposed to make sure that those teachers have pv ppe that is appropriate for the situation because i've heard from several people and special many people that they're not getting what they're supposed to have and that concerns me deeply because i see it being in the budget in the operations and i don't see it on the people and that is where it's supposed to be so it's a mix of answers so i saw i saw and heard from some of the same individuals that you did over the last few days so

205i spent quite a bit of today in calling and talking with some of those individuals and understanding a little more about the situation i think it's really dependent on the program the classroom the school and we do know that ppe is deployed and is in every one of our buildings it's a matter of that maybe some misunderstanding on the chain and how to to get it or a misunderstanding that we perhaps were hoping to really maintain that stockpile and not go through it quickly and so dr sparlin did communicate with all of those teaching staff and in those programs over the weekend to let them know that it's not a matter of cost we aren't trying to keep them from utilizing those materials and then today i sent out some information to all of our

206administrators to make sure that there's a very clear understanding both from the administrators on who they're contacting when ppe runs short and how to reorder that as well as at the employee level knowing who they're supposed to go to whether that's the lead in the classroom their program administrator their building administrator and understand how to get that ppe i will say that there are some individuals who have spoken up and said that they don't want to necessarily wear things people have opted out of the offer for 9.95 i'm not going to say that that the system was perfect we've never done this before we know it got out to the buildings there maybe was some gray area there and we hadn't heard from these individuals until recently so now that we've we've identified the issue

207i understand that tomorrow morning we're beginning on-site visits to make sure that each of those programs know exactly where their ppe is at and as i mentioned the the addition of the n95s the state only requires those for nurses who are evaluating potential cases and for cleaning staff who are cleaning up after confirmed cases and as i said we've got about 180 people that we're going to be deploying those n95 fitted masks for so again we're trying to exceed the minimum requirements for ppe for our our teachers and our staff in the buildings yeah thank you and we'll remain a source so if they have any questions or if anyone listening or anyone heard anything we certainly don't want to to hide behind any misunderstanding like we absolutely want to know if if this is

208a concern right um yeah i i think it's great that you're keeping track of a lot of paperwork but that's a bureaucratic step in an epidemic time which has to happen but people have to have the equipment and people have to have it when there's kids with medical exemptions that do not have to wear a mask in return correct and for those classrooms they were prioritized as the first to fit for n95 masks wherever there was a student that has an exemption additionally we've deployed plexiglas shields and we've provided the shields that can be worn by the teacher or the the employee working with the student as an additional ad to that safety measure we understand that the students we have in the buildings are high needs and that it's not always in fact very

209rarely able to maintain an entire day where you're six feet or further away which is why we've implemented additional ppe and why we've opened that line of communication and reiterated it again over the weekend from administration to those employees to know that their health and safety and the feeling that they're they're being heard and supported is very important to us and we want them to come forward and the number of them that i talked to today we're appreciative of that and i hope that we can continue with our site visits tomorrow and and continue to help spread that that support can i ask a question just only sort of off topic so when we're talking about adaptive pauses with um the current state of affairs around us and other districts who are getting ready to

210go on adaptive pauses but with the holidays coming up what is i mean as a board i assume that it's dr sparlin's decision to make that happen i just for my own sanity wanted to make sure that was true that wasn't the question i thought you were going to ask so i'm going to end up with one more question um but that is a good question that's brent's question you took his question i'm sorry it's late so uh thank you for the info yeah so my question is this um i'm a little i'm sure you're hearing this too i'm a little frustrated that you know the board voted to return some semblance of in-person learning and we've had to delay for certain reasons and i guess my confusion and concern is over the process and

211who's making that decision and what i mean by that is if in this case it's my understanding and it may have all changed on friday last week but prior to last friday the district made the decision that we were going to hold until january for no no november november 30th november um it was only it was merely a recommendation from the state right so then my question is if it's a recommendation why are we going there and why isn't the board making that decision i was going to say is that is that a question you want me to answer is it a question that you all want to talk about or i had assumed that it was related to what we had voted on as the stage metrics that it would be related to the

212adaptive pause in that plan allowing for movement into any level of remote learning to prevent disease transmission and pivoting that's that's what i had assumed just honest answer my my thought process was that the changes be it adapted pause or moving from one stage into another stage as was presented at that meeting was tied 100 to whatever the state mandated that school districts do either our state either the state or the county or anything so my question is then if it's not a mandate who's making that decision because i think it should be the board the only mandate's going to come from the governor the the health department can make a recommendation but even if they make that recommendation we don't have to follow it um i think if health department made that recommendation we

213didn't follow it i think we'd be silly not to uh for liability purposes but ultimately it is the board but i thought and i responded you know you and i talked a little bit about this brent and my response was that i felt that the decision i made to uh pause the k5 opening from november 9th to and talk about at least until november 30th was bait was a data-driven decision based on the metrics based on what we've provided the board here and based off of the all the different metrics that we're getting from the health department our local our own for zip codes oswego the positivity rates the number of cases per 100 000 new every seven days it's uh they're through the roof we all know this um other local school districts were

214making these decisions and i thought that the decision i made there was uh based on uh what needed to be done at the time because november 9th came before november 16th on this board meeting and i didn't feel that it could wait that's why i also sent this some information out letting people know that this is the route i was going down i didn't hear anything different we talked and i made a decision so again all my decisions are always made in the what's in the best uh for the safety and health of our students and staff and that's what this decision was based off of stu health and safety of kids as well as the metrics that were up that are within the board approved guidance document so is the question then as a

215board are we okay with him making that decision or what i want to say about that is that absolutely this is different than some other things brent and i agree if it were something like we agreed to make this cut or we agreed to talk about this at a meeting what dr sparlin is saying is that there there's that space between board meetings and i think if it is feasible to consult the board that is what should be happening but i really think if you tie his hands and say the only way you can do anything is by will of the board it's it's not a great it's not a great direction to go in a pandemic i think in other situations absolutely you have to abide by what the board wants but i'm not

216arguing that the decision was wrong i'm not at all right but it feels like if the board's going to vote to adopt a policy or procedure the board should be involved and then if if that means a quick phone call from the board president to say we're doing this uh is that okay um well and i i wouldn't even go that far because the problem for me is this that you are making it a situation where and and we kept saying when we went into this whole thing when we said oh we're going to go into this stage and this is how it's going to be we kept saying but please be flexible and know we got to be flexible and things might change and then we get to this spot and we say nope

217no flexibility and i think especially because it's november and december and january we're gonna see some stuff happening very fast that's the reason why i really think it's it's like you say if we get consulted by phone call if it can happen if it's the whole district but like the wheatlands it's it's a school and it was having a lot of trouble and i think you have to make that call and i think other districts are letting their superintendents have that um judgment call so my thoughts on that one um are that what we can do and dr sparlin in this case what he had sent out was he'd sent it out to all of us at the same time [Music] if as a board we agree that you would like me to also reach

218out to each of you individually to to let you know what's happened that's one thing um if dr sparlin communicating to the entire board as a whole at the same time is enough via email or if we would prefer that happen via text because that's what we do now but at the same time understanding that when you're in the middle of a situation time is also of the essence and any time taken to communicate is time lost so feasible i liked that word um but i guess my thought would be do you have a preference here as to how this information is passed along are you satisfied with the the path that sparlin has chosen um with communicating it out via an email saying this is where what i'm doing and why are you looking

219for more communication about that before it happens or goes out publicly tony you're on board with what's happening currently i'm saying if i get an email and it seems reasonable that's what we have to do okay brent you're feeling otherwise a phone call or a text or something so that i have in some way shared my opinion okay for the decisions made ali i'm gonna trust the superintendent to make the right decision heather yeah i'm fine with how we've been doing it ruth i'm fine with the i get the email notifications so i also i'm fine with it i think that um if you get a chance to um help mr lightfoot out that would be appreciated um when it's feasible my second question on this is that i don't know and i don't keep

220up with the news as much as i should but i think our positivity rate is way above eight percent right now and we're still listed as in stage two and we still have kids and buildings and we're still talking about elementary being in the end of november so i'm a little i don't understand can i address that in two different parts for you so i think the first part of your your concern with we are way above eight percent and we have kids in the building absolutely i will tell you though that prior to the staff situation at the wheatlands and still stands between students there has not been any link that the buildings are the source of the infection and so these students most of these students would still be coming in for related

221services in the buildings meeting with providers they are only like we said coming in most of them two days a week for a couple of hours they would still be in the district receiving the related services but that's a lot longer time than just related services would be they wouldn't be in for related services for two hours no but it's but again most of thank you we couldn't shut the ho um i i think what uh mrs doyle was was getting at is that uh you know we we have we have some metrics but we also are seeing these rates show that you showed the rates going up up and uh i have heard that there are many predictions that after thanksgiving weekend that we'll see even more of a spike even if we saw

222a plateau for a few days prior to that um so if did i hear you correctly or you know are you where are you i guess i'm asking what you're thinking since we are at a board meeting we may as well find out conversation instead of wait for an email no we have been talking there's a number of school districts that are you know in the area that have already made this decision either to stay in full remote or to move from their hybrid to a remote setting now so it's my recommendation to uh to remain in this pause stage two for the k5 for the due to the area metrics the you know the future predictions the additional climb and the numbers that we're talking about at least until the beginning of second semester

223and be revisiting this in december and uh to make a decision prior to going on winter break if we are able to come back to the hybrid model that we've talked about at the beginning of january or not um like i say you know plainfield 202 has already put this out the naperville 203 until at least the beginning of the second semester valley view as bowling brook romeo bill 365 made that decision i read in the paper today kanelyn moved from their from their hybrid to fully remote due to staff and student absenteeism and the rising covert rates i don't see anything changing over the next week that would change this decision to you know to hold this pause for k5 until at least we come back and i also think that parents the parents

224appreciate knowing so they can plan for the month of december annie but i think i i think what also lori was asking that we we we do still any anticipated changes with the students we do have in the building in the buildings currently i know that we've been largely successful which is which is great for them but given you know the current numbers do you are i don't any anticipated changes or recommendations to pull to pull that back those are conversations that we have been having um considering a lot of conceptions are a lot of factors considering a lot of factors i mean there's obviously two ways we can do this we can continue to going forward with what we're doing and issue adaptive pauses when necessary or i think we're starting to see more

225districts make this decision is to pull back and on the on the uh the students in the buildings at this time just because of the cover i mean the covert rates are 18 and oswego and they're the number of new cases for every number of new cases for 100 000 for every seven days is over 600 i mean these you know there's there's multiple people died today from it in our in our own county and uh this you know we're we're in the we're really in the throes of the pandemic so why are we not following our metrics in this plan i have a piggyback question really quick just about that because i i noted in in your presentation that on november 6 they began including probable numbers as opposed to confirmed numbers and obviously

226rates are still rising you know regardless of its probable or confirmed even if it was only still confirmed they would be going up but would it be at 18 i don't know like you said there's no way for us to separate those numbers have we considered it all in light of that change and how they're counting numbers changing any of our metric numbers that we're using so we had that discussion and at this point there hasn't been revised published numbers out of the state or cdc or any of the other groups that publish numbers we're still really in line with where they're at but one piece that we've really added to that equation is looking at the other things that play a factor into that so especially our own metrics and so the wheatlands being

227a perfect example where we saw even though the number wasn't significantly high we saw a potential connection there and called that pause so there's other bits of information that we maybe wouldn't have been able to predict the importance of at the time of developing all of the metrics i don't want to discount the area metrics they're very very important and they inform our decision at this point it has been that difficult balance between the most needy students being in the building receiving the services and the things that they need with pushing all of those remote and having those staff members back out again though like we mentioned there would still be some related services so we're kind of in that weird balance point as dr sparlin said this is a conversation we have multiple times

228every single day there's not a perfect answer in either way i think there's going to be unfortunate consequences from either from either direction we as a district can't discount the fact that we do have cases in our district certainly we do both students and staff members where i think we're a little bit different is the volume at which we contact trace and can figure out where some of those cases are originating from and try to ensure that we aren't the source of transmission in the schools so we don't we don't have a perfect answer i guess it's our answer at this point and i just want to bring up that you should adjust the metrics at this point is that the summation of what i'm hearing so that there hasn't been any movement page as

229it were so so there hasn't been any movement like the state of illinois for example in the regions eight percent is still their mitigation number so above eight percent for three days can then push you into mitigation which the entire state is in right now as well as the cdc numbers for low medium and high risk they haven't adjusted their numbers and not really having any other source to follow at this point i wouldn't would be compulsing and i hate for us to react and change the numbers because they're higher at this point it really has to be an environmental examination of where we're at specifically within our district and make the determination on what's the safest as well as beneficial environment for the students while retaining that choice for the parents as well and

230for whatever it's worth and i want brent to offer his opinion since we just talked about that too um because here's your chance thoughts yeah that's fine okay i've i'm thinking different um and my concern here is that we've been really clearly communicating that this is a grid with data that we will be making decisions based off of and i'm seeing contrast and it's probably because i don't see the whole picture from where i sit um but i'm seeing a contrast between what i see reported in all these little things i can see where kendall county is today all that and where our school district is saying we can still say that we actually are within these numbers um what can you explain why i see different numbers than these so seven to the seven

231point nine percent right absolutely we aren't denying the fact that the regional numbers and the zip codes that we monitor are much higher i will say that at the time we developed this plan of course the numbers looked very different and there's not a lot known about covid and the restrictions keep changing and the guidance keeps changing and we're you know something's dangerous and then it's not and you know so we're kind of reacting to this a little bit i don't know that making a change to the metrics is the best move at this point because it would be a completely uneducated guess on what the metrics should look like that's not what i'm sorry that was okay i was asking so but we don't want to say that we're not admitting the fact we've

232published the numbers and they are much higher on there one piece that's really important that is listed underneath the metrics on our website is the statement that the metrics are one piece of the puzzle so we have no point any one of those things that we consider could throw us off if we don't have the staff to run even if the numbers look great that could throw us off you know ppe becomes unavailable that's another reason we pull back so there that's one piece of the puzzle and to this point prior to yesterday afternoon we felt really confident that there had been no evidence of transmission within the school setting and so this this was new for us yesterday afternoon every day something new which triggered every hour conversations that were that we're having right

233now um so in regards to what he said the board is comfortable with the with the k5 uh information not coming back in november you know pushing this off till second semester that's what i just heard if that's what your recommendation is that is my recommendation i don't know yeah and in regards in regards to the special education piece that we do that we're talking about now i'm real nervous about that i am i am too my recommendation is to pull him back and but i need to have a conversation with denise and exactly what that looks like so we can communicate this out to our families to so everyone knows what that looks like and that could happen very soon meaning this week that makes sense there's some practical things there that and dr

234sparlin you're basing that decision to pull special ed back to remote on what is actually going on at the schools with the staff and the students from special ed correct because that's what i agree with and i'm glad lori brought up the metrics but i think that the metrics as much as we would like to cling to that chart as we would like to cling to anything the most practical thing to do is watch what's going on right in front of our eyeballs and do the best we can to make sure everybody has what they need to be as safe as they need to be or as safe as we can possibly make them and that's about all we can do in this world you know we can talk theoretical but that's not what's going

235to save lives or what's going to make a difference for these parents and i agree that we have to do our best to try to keep kids in school who need to be in school and who don't have a great situation if they're not in school well i appreciate the conversation today it's very meaningful and i think i thank you for that it helps give the direction and we'll be getting some information out very shortly thank you uh well we we have an hour and five minutes till it's tomorrow one way to prevent covert spreading is to have a very short board meeting too late for that we're on action items and and my computer logged out from it's okay in action someone can help you so i'm right on my paper version here thank

236you ursula and we're on to action items um 8.1 would be first good good call ali thank you does anyone have any question on bills for payment there's my page nope can i have a motion i make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of eighteen million one hundred and twelve thousand four hundred and ninety two dollars and forty nine cents as presented swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye mrs croner aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot all right motion passes 6-0 item 8.2 i make a motion to approve the transitional english course to be offered at oswego and oswego east high school for school year 2022 mrs croner aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye ms morgan aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye motion passes six zero before

237we start on eight three i'd like to make a motion to separate item five colon 120 to be voted on separately can you just tell us what that refers to brenton that is specific to that language regarding babysitting ah thank you so we're voting on to separate that not on approval of either thing so i'll list that one's in a separate motion well we have to vote to determine if we will do that first so we'll just need the roll call because we have a motion and a second miss morgan hi mr lightfoot hi mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye motion passes 6-0 maureen is on the line and just for clarification five 120 did go back for review and changes were made by what i'm seeing i'm just

238still not comfortable with those so i'm voting no okay unless anybody else agrees and we send it back again maureen we could send it back again i mean i don't know if any of the changes would make me happier if you'd like do you think that there would be was there enough discussion the last time it was sent back to warren to second discussion there was would that would further discussion substantively change your recommendation i don't know i haven't discussed it with the committee was there enough left on reason i know but yeah you're right but it's just trying to come up with i for me what i want to know is is that a waste of the committee's time um because they've already discussed it twice and they still haven't changed it to something

239that would substantively matter to the majority changing it then we haven't met again so if you want to send it back to committee we could yeah i would send it back would i make a motion to send it to committee see what they have to say ellie not like an emergency no i don't think that any of that is an emergency what so if you'd like to make a motion to send that back yeah i'll make a motion to send back all second five cool and 120. yeah mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye mrs croner aye ms morgan aye motion passes six zero will send item five colon 120 back to committee for a review may have a motion on the remaining amended i make a motion to approve

240board policies section two school board two colon one two five and two colon one six zero section three general school administration three colon three zero section four operational services four colon three zero section five general personnel five colon three five five colon six zero five colon two two zero five colon three three zero and then section seven students seven colon seven zero seven colon nine zero second miss morgan aye mrs doyle aye mrs moyer hi mrs croner aye mr lightfoot aye mrs swanson aye motion passes six zero item 8.4 personnel report i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot no mrs croner aye ms morgan aye motion passes five one can i have a motion to adjourn i make a motion

241to adjourn