SD308 Board of Education Meeting (09/28/2020)

001gentlemen yeah mrs doyle here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer here mrs swanson please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all these are weird okay year 21 budget we will therefore have two opportunities for public comment tonight the first opportunity will be during the public hearing on the fiscal year 21 budget if you wish to make a comment about the fiscal year 21 budget please make it during the public comment portion of that hearing if you wish to make a comment about some other matter unrelated to the public hearing you may do so during the second opportunity for public comment

002please make sure that you noted on the comment card during which portion you wish to speak this is the public hearing convened by the board of education of community unit school district 308 regarding the fiscal year 21 budget at this time i will ask each member of the board of education the district attorney and the district administrators who will speak to identify themselves for the record maureen lemon ruth croner heather moyer matt balman lori doyle john sparlin brett lightfoot tony morgan christy tyler at this time i would like to ask our administrators to give any additional information and updates on the fiscal year 21 budget thank you for your review excuse me i have included the budget summary page and you will notice that the uh the deficit is now 5.9 million this is a

003change from the 5.5 million deficit presented to the board in the tentative budget and from the 8.2 million deficit presented to the finance and facility committee in that version additional staff were added for the in-person learning plan presented at that time so i'd like to start by re-examining the primary cause for this deficit which is directly related to kovid first the loss of the increased evidence-based funding dollars that we would normally have received and be due to the additional staff and ppe uh required to meet standards for safety and now some of the adjustments that have been made to this final version of the fiscal year 21 budget include we eliminated the curriculum allocation this was kept in the tentative budget as a placeholder for chromebooks but this year's lease payment as well as some

004additional expenses will be completely covered by the digital equity grant this grant did just come in at over just over 1 million dollars which is more than the amount of six hundred and fifteen thousand that we included in the project uh for projected in the tentative budget uh we we reduced the line for item the line item for ppe given the recent board approved bid that resulted in more favorable pricing in addition we wrote an amendment for the cares act to move more ppe ppe expenses to that grant and although we added additional custodial and health clerks the number of staff needed has been adjusted given the plan present being presented tonight and i'll speak more to that during that presentation and then finally carry over from fiscal year 20 grants allowed some district instructional

005expenses to be moved into the grant funding as for the levy we are very close to where we were in collections at this time last year so far we have collected just over 96 percent of our total 2020 extension and we have more payments still coming in the upcoming months and this budget does reflect that and then i just a final reminder that this budget more than any other budget is built on a mountain of unknowns we won't know what if any additional savings or expenses any model of instruction will bring until we were we are in the midst of it in that regard there may be cause to approve and file an amended budget at some point in the year however fiscal year 21 expenses have been reviewed and adjusted where possible since the

006tentative budget was presented in august can i answer any questions for the board so uh thank you miss tyler and i know you updated us as well at the finance meeting which we'll talk about shortly um that can you remind us again the difference in what we had anticipated receiving from the state versus what we're going to receive from the state what's the amount the amount we were projecting to receive 4.3 million in additional evidence-based funding dollars this year okay and so we're now we were at about an 8 million deficit when we saw the first version of the proposed budget and now we're down just just under six million that's correct that is correct and as we learn more information through the year and especially i expect to hear more information after the elections

007we'll make adjustments given that information so does this budget assume that the second semester of school will operate in the same manner of the return to in-person instruction we're going to receive be getting later tonight does that make sense yes okay are you asking does the does this budget reflect what we're presenting tonight what we're presenting tonight to continue through the remainder of the school year yes okay and what reason does the state provide you said that the state funding is not occurring and it was uh directly related to covent right how how or why is the state not um providing those funds as it relates to cobit how is that affecting or what is the reason for that as as covid as you know it's had a an impact on finances and revenue throughout

008the state sales tax and things like that so in order for them to present a budget they reduced the or kept the evidence-based funding flat for this year in the state budget so that means no new money distributed to the district illinois school districts in the school districts such as ours a tier one school district that that means a lot more money as compared to as it would to a tier four school district christy where do you guess that that puts us before we've been talking about things like 62 percent funded where where does this lack of progress we'll call it toward the goal of fully funding schools where does where does that move that move us to well that's very hard to predict because it is a very complicated formula and interesting the state

009did not release those tiers this year because of the lack of funding but i would expect us in many districts to move down in the percentage of adequacy have have our expenses and what they're asking of us to provide for kids have those expenses increased um well you know staffing and you know staffing increases every year of the expenses for staffing between salaries benefits things like that yes and just normal utilities things like that that we must pay any any any guesses or any information on how that difference was expected to be made up there's that too from the from the state no no okay no no no offer or no guidance on that one no anyone else have questions or anything they'd like to include a question just popped in my head but i

010don't mean to put you on the spot i'm just i'm curious the approximate four million dollars in evidence-based funding that we thought we would receive what percent increase would that have been over last year well it's about we receive about 70 million dollars in evidence-based funding so if you want to give me a second i'll do this i'm just wondering if it's like around two like two or two percent or three percent so yes about two and a half maybe are you you mentioned that the uh digital equity grant came in higher than what we had anticipated which is very exciting yes um and helpful are there any other outstanding grants that we have out there that we're waiting to hear back on at all well one grant that we did hear back from uh

011the will county cares act that we were able to secure 65 thousand dollars from that source and is that reflected in here yes okay it isn't reflected but nothing else outstanding that's not already in here no so if there is another um stimulus package coming down from the federal government then we would make that adjustment yes okay so christy just kind of a general question just to make sure we are all on the same page it's been a few years quite a few since we've had a deficit budget um what does this mean when we have a deficit budget that we're submitting so to make up that deficit we dip further into our reserves or our fund balances so that means our fund balance will reduce from sorry uh from i don't have it but

012it will reduce i believe it was around 16 million so we're going down to 11.9 just under 12 million dollars and do we have other it looks like we must have a deficit reduction plan yes included with this so and that is filed so that is part of the um entire budget document that is attached to a line i'm sorry agenda let me i haven't written down nine i believe it is right yeah yes um so that is part of that and it's a very if you look at that it's on page twenty 4 through 27 i believe but it's a very very high level reduction plan so to address the deficit what i did was include increases in evidence-based funding going forward for next year and if that does come true if evidence-based funding

013does get it back on track next year we're facing a deficit of just under 1.6 million so that's an estimate and then in fiscal year 23 we would move back on track to a surplus budget if evidence-based funding is back on track do you have anything else in that reduction plan besides the hope that this will return next year just the expected increase in the levy of your property taxes but that's a new construction anything pardon do you have any anticipation of more new construction anything like that this is just the operating fund so that would be in the capital projects fund but i will uh now after the budget is adopted i'll work with forecast five to do a more detailed five-year projections with these new numbers anything else are you getting ready to

014talk you can't tell anymore when people are going it's the masks but um yeah you know last several years we've worked really hard really diligently on trying to to balance these budgets cutting 2 million 3.2 million i'm going to happen just going after everything we can to to balance that budget and looking at pardon me 5.9 million um that's tough that stuff it was tough to to find three million dollars to 3.4 million dollars to to balance a budget with where where to even start i know that's not a great topic it's not a great subject to to want to start to go into especially there are so many other large items that we're discussing but to to move forward on the hope that the state's going to go back to increases on the evidence-based

015funding that's on the hope that their funding is increased or comes through from somewhere and their expenses continue to improve and if they don't that doesn't look very well for us so as as good as a five-year projection may look it could look even worse as well without us knowing so i i don't look forward to it but the discussion is soon going to turn from uh approving this uh this budget with the deficit to let's let's balance that budget and we're going to have to find some big stuff and i it's going to be tough it'll be tough decisions and a tough discussion but i i agree matt i don't want to get ahead of myself because ruth and i have some updates from the finance meeting but i i think you know realistically

016we're not going to fight we're not going to find 5.9 we're not going to find four we're not going to find three but i think what would i think maybe a goal of this board would be to find things that might get us to two so that as we move forward we're gaining steam as it were versus sitting around and hoping things get better but i i just i like the context of we don't have to bite all of it right now even though we you know we we have to do something but it doesn't have to be six million now but we've gotta we've got to start working on it because as we all know the budget comes after we've already made plans for the year we've already done our staffing and that happens

017in the summer usually actually in the spring so this that means this board has until this spring to figure out what those changes are going to look like for next year and it's you know as we discuss we'll hear tonight what a reopening plan looks like if we can get to that point you know some of these discussions will unfortunately if we had a little bit more time but to be able to decide what what the student body is coming back to right whereas uh we make those decisions in those cuts and we're we're taking that you know that away those students that are already involved in certain activities groups clubs whatever they may be and now that we are at home some of those activities aren't running they're not operating as disappointing it will

018be for some things not to appear in order to balance this budget it would be just a little bit easier coming back into that scenario without those options but unfortunately we don't have the time to to put that together but it will be it will be another tough tough winter and spring with those reduction conversations and i hope that we can look at christy some of the things that because of the covid situation there have to be costs that we've learned that maybe we don't have to have those expenditures and when we come back what are the things that we can come back differently to so that we could reduce some of the costs because i know that there have to be certain categories that are not the same as they used to be so

019that's all i'll say for now but i know you know if we look at everything on the monthly bills if we look at everything on the the way that we've been doing business differently there's got to be some savings that we can find anything further and now the board asks members of the public to comment on the fiscal year 21 budget when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that the comments are limited to three minutes per person and that neither the board nor the administration will be answering any questions during this time thank you for your comments david edelman yes good from evening illinois the proposed budget has now highlighted the simple fact we are

020not okay as highlighted at the open forum meeting this earlier this spring the community has now told us twice it doesn't want to pass the operating referendum people in years past have advocated to not levy in years past we now have a deficit of 5.9 million dollars i would respectfully disagree that covet is not to blame for this though it's sped it up this has been years in the making unfortunately we have buildings needing repair we are behind on technology investment we must maintain quality and experienced teachers and administrators if we wish to remain competitive the community needs to clearly see what will be cut to balance this budget i have to say it's disappointing that this is not being presented tonight why is that people are demanding for schools to reopen due to covet

021crisis yet we don't have the adequate funding to support both virtual learning and in-person learning model to try and get the kids back in school ironically some of the loudest people in the community that are calling for this have supported this district the least which is extremely disappointing but not surprising the impact of this issue will now have a significant impact on our community as it relates to property values the quality of our community and the future investment of development we're left with three options one the right thing to do is for the community to raise the cash to set this district back on on its tracks which will be extremely difficult to do proven twice over the worst option is to continue to borrow money that's the absolute worst option the third option is

022to focus on being a core academic institution by following state and federal guidelines and unfortunately not having any extracurricular activities i appreciate your time and efforts through this difficult time i know many of you have received unfair criticism as always i come here in full support of the school district means a lot to me we've been here since to my family we have a business here and people should be very proud of this district but this moment this moment has been coming for a long time there's a group of people in this community that should be here tonight explaining themselves the ones that have the no signs in front of their homes the ones that have done everything they could to not levy and here we are with the budget deficit here we are 5.9

023million and the bank on the state of illinois that's pretty difficult considering that's part of the reason why we're in this situation again i appreciate your time and i wish you all the very best of luck i appreciate your service to our community in these difficult times thank you at this time we will close the public hearing item 5.1 public comment on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card or submitted your comment by email to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i

024ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that comments are limited to three minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters including names or specific job titles or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow-up to your questions or concerns will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card to ensure that all topics get addressed we will hear three comments per topic this evening thank you katie hayden thank you so much i'm just going to be addressing a few questions i don't have a paper or anything to read off of tonight i really just wanted to hear what you had to say i really want to hear about

025the plan coming up my biggest question is i keep hearing you guys talk about where are we going to get the money how are we going to get this what grants can we get the biggest thing i don't hear coming out of anybody's mouth and it's really hard for me to hear it is how are we going to make the money i understand that schools are non-for-profits i get that but our federal government our nation is broke the state of illinois is hurting and is broke we can't keep anticipating to get handouts that it just worries me we have so many great local businesses entrepreneurs that i'm sure would be more than happy to collaborate give ideas to programs i too have mentioned it as well and i wouldn't mind being in a discussion with

026any of you to bring new ideas to the table i'm a graduate from 2005 at ohs i've been in oswego pretty much my whole life and so of my kids i remember when it was a corn town and it just had target and applebee's so we've come a long way and i think it's amazing to see the difference but i understand population and growth is hard but i i keep seeing these things about increased tax revenues you know with property values how can we increase property values if now we're talking about our school being funded around 50 some percent with the decrease from covid so i i just want you guys to think about i appreciate everything that you do but i really think it's time that you guys need to start bringing some entrepreneurs

027into the picture how can we make the money how can we not be so dependent on the states the grants the handouts let's try to make it from within you know and be self-sufficient i think that if anything that's my biggest wish for sd 308 we've got amazing people out here i know you guys can do it let's just have a meeting and bring these creative ideas to the table thank you aaron mandeman i have a freshman that has enrolled in oswego high she comes to me all the time stating she is constantly getting kicked out of her google classroom that is of she is even able to enter at all she tells me she feels like she is learning nothing as these glitches happen so frequently the struggle to try to fight figure out

028the assignments when you can't attend class tough she has even asked me if i could pull her out of school to homeschool her her anxiety levels are high as she is struggling with e-learning greatly julia anderson hello first i would like to thank district 308 for all they are trying to do during this pandemic everyone is trying their best and my family and i are very grateful we have four children in us in district 308 and we are new to the district as well e-learning has been challenging but we are making the best of it as the school year continues i do have many concerns and hope you will consider them in your decision for in-person learning computers can't provide the same experience as in person the interaction children have with face-to-face learning offers mo

029more growth in development and helps children mature i'm not a teacher and having to switch from helping a junior eighth third and first graders has proven to me that i just can't keep up i understand online may work for some families but it doesn't work for mine i hope you will consider moving toward in-person learning very soon because i don't want my children falling behind in their academics julie de carl it's amazing that we're even considering sending our kids back to classes as the pandemic is worse now than when schools shut down in april much of the return to school seems to be driven by a vocal minority of parents who want their kids back in school because they either want a a normal senior year or b want their kids back in sports nothing

030is normal right now dr fauci and the cdc have both warned about how bad things will be this fall pretending things are normal won't make them so and frankly there are too many people in our community who haven't taken his seriously from the start and definitely don't adhere to social distancing and mask guidelines at home if we can't get adults to be responsible with masks how do we expect students to keep each other safe many of us have spent the last six months creating a bubble for our children the minute school resumes in person we're at the mercy of every other person in this community many of whom have continued having parties and get-togethers through this entire pandemic let's say the course and try this again in the spring maurice sims i would like to

031know how the district plans to address the issue of having absolutely no conversation about recent social injustices systemic racism or any representation of black and brown students in curriculum and teacher context what is the plan to address these issues and having race conversations in classrooms i don't want this issue to fall of deaf ears i believe this is the proper time to really address current events and it will also allow the community to know where the district stands on such issues being that there are a lot more black and brown kids in the district item 6.1 board member comments we'll start on this side this time in an effort to not be here all night long i will not have comments same i'll pass tonight same let's go rent kid well then here there's me

032and she could have started here laurie but he could've had saved the best for last um i just want to say that hearing about the budget makes my stomach hurt because i know what it takes to reduce two or three million we all do to get to six million is a lot of money it's a lot of money in a time where we know that the state of illinois doesn't have it and the idea that somehow it's gonna come out of this great responsible new future that we're creating is unrealistic and i'm not an unrealistic person i don't think the cheapest thing we can do is to not reopen schools in person because online is the cheapest option but as we said at the last board meeting there are some parents and some kids who

033really really are hurting because there's not the choice of going back to school or being online um i just want everybody out there to think about that if you're one of those people who's pushing for school to come back you're also pushing for it to cost more and you need to understand that there's a cause and effect out there as a community that when we put people back in school it cost us more money of course and that's not necessarily a bad thing but then we are going to be faced with the very difficult choices in the spring of how to get some of this reduced you know and i'm sure brent's working on it as we speak it looks like he's given the budget a good go over but what mr edelman proposed of

034having no extracurriculars that is not an extraordinary scenario that is a very possible scenario it is a very possible scenario that we will have to cut people lots and lots of people for six million dollars so people need to know that when we make these decisions it's the whole community's job to absorb the blow and the consequences it is not all disneyland it is not all easy and it is not all the board it's everybody in the community making choices and and balancing out these things that we want to have um i also want to say again because the one and we're not addressing specific comments but i'm very excited about there being an equity action committee that advises the board i'm hoping that we are going to have a lot of students that weigh

035in on on issues in the near future because i think that young people especially high school age people are the people that when they speak up they're the ones at the school they're the ones who see the kinds of things that go on and i'm not saying that there's not problems at junior high or elementary school but we're at a time where the high school students can have the voice to let us know what's going on at their schools how fair are these places how well do they treat you how care do you feel or how cared about do you feel by the people the adults at your school and you should feel that if you are young you should feel that you should feel like somebody's there for you somebody cares about you and

036somebody wants to help you when you're having a problem and if that's not happening in our schools i really really urge young people to write and let us know as a board and let us know as a school district let the superintendent know assistant superintendent everybody um and then i just want to thank everybody who put together this plan that we're going to see tonight i'm really hoping that it represents all the people who should have a voice in making a plan like this because to me if i hear later that those voices are being ignored nothing gets under my skin more than knowing that people tried to give good advice and it was ignored so i'm really hoping that all the stakeholder groups were listened to and given some input as to what we

037were going to do to to propose this back-to-school plan so that's it for me thank you i mean you said we get to save the best for last anyways i also don't have a whole lot to say because for right now what we're trying to do is have a board presentation on reopening so before we do that what i do want to say to our community and to all the staff members and i know that there are many many many many many people watching we've never been so um watched i think um please keep in mind that this presentation will not answer all your questions and it is not going to be great and and i'm just going to come out and say it because this is not our end goal everybody involved in schools

038knows that the situation we are currently in and the situation we need to go in and i have spoken with our administrators throughout the months that has taken a secondary seat to safety this plan is not going to be the best thing for everyone just like our current plan is not the best thing for everyone there will be communication that speaks to you as a staff member that speaks to you as a community member that speaks to you as a parent in a variety of different situations this is all going to be happening but not tonight tonight the first step to making that happen is for the board to look through this plan and make a decision on if this is something as mrs morgan said looking at costs looking at the realities of everything

039that we approve of and think is in the best interest of our community at this point in time not forever so with that being said i don't really have much more to say except to please keep in mind that the intention here is to provide a better learning environment with the understanding that it's not what we would normally want as a learning environment and to please have patience and you will get your answers that you need you will get the answers to all the what ifs and we will work through those as we go together as a community that's pretty much all there is that i have to say 6.2 board committee reports financing facilities take it away brent just doing some quick calculations here and i'm done okay um that's three okay so um

040as the board is aware the finance and facilities committee met for a second time because we felt there were going to be a number of questions that that needed to be answered and so we met again um on tuesday the 25th of august i'm sorry that's the old that's last month we met last week last monday monday i'll try to keep this short and sweet we answered a lot of questions there's still more kind of in the background historical context that had to be explained um and the discussions uh i would say parallel comments that we've already made and comments that we may continue to make tonight in along the lines of we're not going to be able to cut 5.9 million that's probably not the goal um but there are things we can do

041one of the things i was looking at is and i know unfortunately we all love to hate these documents the budget reductions that we went through in 2018 by quick math and i do mean quick there's somewhere between two million and three million dollars that the board in 2018 felt they were not comfortable making those decisions but they are decisions that have been vetted by administration not necessarily recommended but you know we we have a playbook if you will that could potentially get us to two million or three million dollars add to that any money if we choose to sell that land on route 71 understanding that that's money that we had hoped we could put towards things like curriculum and other activities that are going to have have to be used to fill budget

042holes we got creative in the finance and facilities committee meeting there were the questions that have to come up that can't be answered today regarding building use utilization and i know that's something we may talk about in the future but there's other discussions that came up that i'm going to frame it this way ruth cut me off if i get too far off kilter here there there may be additional savings that we could we could activate with the cooperation of our employees that would have no impact upon their salary and benefits but could save us a substantial amount of money in the way that we calculate some cost to the district it's not a snap the finger fix it's something that would have to be done through a discussion but everything is on the table

043and so we've asked miss tyler to take this conversation offline to get numbers put together and the committee will be meeting about that to go on a little bit more discussion more discussion further down the road it could be it could be a considerable amount of money um but i'm not saying it's a it's a guaranteed win because it's not i think i think the only thing i will add to that as you mentioned the what you call the playbook from 2018 and i think the only thing i would add which i did mention that night is now it's 2020 and not only do we have some new coaches in the game but we also have different opponent maybe i guess we're going to use those analogies like perhaps that playbook could be revised at

044some point to with fresh eyes to to take a look at look at a bare minimum we need to have it revised by the administration and one of the things i was we were explaining to the committee is look when this was built we asked the administrators to score it based on impact to kids because it's fair right we are laymen representing the community trying to do what's best for the district so we can rescore this we can look at it again but the concept there is is that we might make decisions today that we weren't ready to make in 2018. there may also be things on there where we say no we're still not comfortable is that pretty much the way the tone of this is in the board committee report the finance committee

045that was basically the point of the committee discussion is that what you're trying to say that there might be things to revisit from that any anything i'm not capturing okay i have one question um did you also look at extracurricular activities as a committee and what that could look at for a budget from a budget perspective yeah it's on the list it's in the playbook it's in the playbook okay good all right cool um anyone else have questions did you talk about that rating system we had how it was going to affect students how it was going to affect the classroom because we did try to limit the effect it had so a lot of those items that are remaining or were remaining were very impactful topics and scenarios and the committee as a whole

046is behind bringing those back up for for discussion correct was there anything that the committee felt wanted to remain off or to take off that list well remember the scope of of our task here so we explained that there was a scoring system but finance and facilities understands the impact to kids but their primary focus is on the budget it's up to the board to make decisions on do we agree or not agree to do these things as must have can't have or somewhere in between so thank you superintendents report 6.3 well thank you mr doyle good evening board tonight i just have one item that i would like to report on as i and many others are looking forward to presenting the return to in-person warning plan the district has sent out a number

047of communications regards to the census today marks two days until the end of the 2020 census response period which will end on september 30th um we can't over estimate or overstate i should say how important a complete count is for our schools missing just one child means missing out on federal funding for the next 10 years which is a significant portion of a student's educational career to put a dollar amount on it illinois received over 34 billion dollars in census tied funding in 2016 and over 2 billion of that went to education that year so just a one percent under count means losing 195 million dollars in federal funds uh each year for the next decade the census doesn't just affect our schools it affects our families it affects our communities and affects our programs

048the census also determines how many representatives illinois has in congress in the electoral college which means how much it influences the uh our state on national policies that affect us in our schools so what i'm getting at is there is still time to be counted it's not too late families can take the census online at my2020 census.gov or by phone at 844-330-2020 or by sending back the form families received in the in the mail from the u.s census bureau so that is my report for this evening thank you item seven approval of the consent agenda is there any questions about this can i have a motion i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 7.1 minutes from the september 14 2020 board of education meeting open and closed session 7.2 acknowledgement of

049the administrator and teacher salary and benefits report from fiscal year 2020 and 7.3 to acknowledge the foia request received by the district mrs croner hi mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye mr bauman aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye miss morgan hi motion passes 7-0 all right 8.1 school reopening school reopening tonight we're going to present our proposed school reopening plan in an email response to a parent this week i stated that starting the school year a school year is a complicated endeavor and what we are currently doing to bring students back during a pandemic is even more complex with that said it's my hope that when we are finished this evening you can see the amount of thought and planning that has gone into creating the plan you're about to see at the end

050of the presentation this evening we've included additional slides as an addendum to this presentation that provide more specific details to each area of the plan it's important to note as mrs doyle stated earlier that there will be a lot of communication that goes out to our parents and community over the next few weeks so i ask that i ask patients from those watching tonight as we will begin that communication process immediately before i before i start i'd like to thank all of our 308 staff for all their extraordinary work during our time in remote learning there isn't one staff member who hasn't put an additional effort and time to provide the best learning opportunities that we can in our current environment and i believe that's something i think it's important to acknowledge them so let's

051get started shall we all right this evening's presentation is the product of a very large number of hours worked by a number of committees union leaders and administration is a comprehensive look at what our return to in-person uh learning will potentially look like as with any plan of this magnitude it isn't perfect but we do feel it provides the best learning opportunities for our students in the safest environment that we can provide at this time there are a couple things that have changed in august since august i believe the number one item that's changed is the guidance on exclusion and the second item is the plan that we are presenting this evening the plan you'll see this evening is a hybrid plan of in-person remote learning that phases our students in overtime one that allows

052choice for parents and one that maintains smaller groups of students in the schools which will allow us to create the proper social distancing within our classrooms so when kids do exhibit any signs of our symptoms of covit it doesn't automatically translate into large numbers of kids having to be excluded from school so tonight's presentation we are going to the sd-308 safety plan will be talked about updated guidance we're going to talk about what's changed since august we will review the metrics that we are using we will present the stages of the in-person instruction plan and we will discuss the proposed timeline for implementation for each of our student populations good evening i'm theresa commutes director of communications and coming at you with a public health update on the current idph guidelines as dr sparlin mentioned

053we've seen significant changes to the guidelines since we last went through them the most recent updates were published on september 10th and within this list of symptoms there were more specific added to each of the symptoms as well as some alternative causes for them including the footnotes that allow for an exception for allergies and also for pre-existing conditions as you look at the list of known symptoms on here you'll see that there's now some descriptions i've underlined those here for example abdominal pain from unknown cause new congestion fatigue from unknown cause nuance set of moderate to severe headache and new cough so this does take into affect any existing condition that students might have a chronic condition that they might suffer from things like seasonal allergies migraines chronic dry cough other things where we can

054now have that on file and it wouldn't necessarily result in a student being sent home from school or a staff member being sent home from school and being away from that learning environment so this is a significant change from what we were at the last time that we presented on this topic theresa could you remind the public uh where they can see this uh presentation and how do they how do they get that right now sure so it is live on board docs so if you visit the header right on the front of our website the yellow banner it has the instructions there on where to find it within their board docs thank you sure so moving on to exclusionary measures so within those guidelines as well we first talked about the document that was

055considered the crosswalk document and it talked about when symptoms appear within an individual and how long they might be excluded and who else may be excluded as a result of the symptoms that that person was experiencing again we've seen significant change here where we're able to keep more people safely in an in-person environment together i'll walk through these briefly for you so the exclusionary measures include symptomatic individuals who would be excluded for 10 days and they could need to have an improvement of symptoms before coming back however they could come back earlier than that if they visit a medical provider and are able to provide an alternate diagnosis that would be the cause of those symptoms or um now it's down to one negative pcr covid test so no longer two there and their household

056members would be on quarantine while that person was awaiting their test results if they're symptomatic until that negative is received for someone that's exposed to covid19 that individual would quarantine from 14 days from the last point of contact with a positive individual however what's really important here is that a close contact is defined by either someone sharing the household or someone who was within six feet or closer for 15 minutes or longer so as you look at a classroom set up and as you consider how we can conduct school in a way that would keep children six feet or further away from one another or very brief times would maybe be passing closer than that we may not be talking large numbers of individuals that would be required to be kept out of school on

057a quarantine due to a positive case moving on to positive or probable covid cases probable is something that we're seeing pop up more in the guidance now this is defined as the high suspicion of case based on the exposure and or set of symptoms so again this would be somebody that perhaps is symptomatic and maybe had a known exposure to someone that had covid19 they themselves have not gotten a test or do not have the results yet however they're placed in that category as a probable case so they would isolate 10 days from the symptom onset or from the day that the specimen was collected if it's positive again we would require symptom improvement in the absence of a fever without fever reducing medications before they return and their close contacts and household members would

058quarantine 14 days again from the last contact to the positive or probable case i'll walk briefly through the scenario if you'll recall the last time we went through the scenario similar to this very quickly we had large numbers of students that were away from school for large periods of time after more revised guidance and taking a look at what our plans that you'll see shortly for in-person learning look like we believe that we would again be impacted in much lower numbers and smaller ways so walking through the scenario if our student is married while mary's at school she develops a headache and she visits the nurse first of all if mary is a documented history of a condition that might be causing this for example she's a migraine sufferer this feels like a traditional migraine

059headache to her it's not something new or something different and it's not overly severe after talking with a nurse she may be permitted to stay at school that is that is new if however she doesn't have a pre-existing documented condition on file or if this is something new or coupled with other symptoms that wouldn't be reflected in her history she would be sent home mary would isolate at home until 10 days passes and her symptoms get better or again diagnosed with an alternative case of something that would cause such symptoms or if she presents the negative pcr test result worst case scenario if she is positive her close contacts would quarantine for 14 days from the last date of exposure but as a reminder close contacts are only those who are within six feet of

060mary for 15 minutes or longer so again if we do our job with social distancing masking keeping everybody really far apart this would not impact a large number of individuals however married household members would quarantine while she's awaiting that test result and would continue to quarantine for the required period of time if she was positive in this case when we look at the factors that are in place for whether or not we can consider in-person learning settings as a safe place for students include both local and regional metrics as published by the illinois department of public health availability of ppe adequate staffing levels exclusion and isolation requirements and of course any revised guidance from both state and local health authorities the chart that you're seeing here includes the metrics that we will be monitoring on

061a very regular basis and publishing these at minimum once per week we've developed our own primary service area by examining the zip codes that our students originate from and taking those zip codes to build a custom report that informs our community as opposed to using regional state data and or the county data since we cross over several of those so the areas that we would be looking at from health metrics would be the weekly new cases per 100 000 population as well as the positivity rate which is calculated on a seven day rolling average additionally we would want to keep an eye on all of our available ppe stock and know that we can have those on hand as required by the state guidance and then lastly on here is the staff availability so knowing

062what our typical staff attendance looked like prior to covid and the number of staff members we needed present in a building to safely conduct in-person learning and then working backwards from that number so as you look at this chart we go through stages one two three and four stage one would be where we were back in march april when we were first hit with a pandemic and everyone was kind of on that stay home order we had no staff in buildings no students in buildings and we operated in a fully remote environment stage two is where we're at today this is where we have our students still learning in the remote for all environment however we do have some staff in buildings we are doing related services for students there are some sports and trainings

063taking place that are following the ihsa guidelines and again we're focusing initially on our special education students here stage three it will be our next stage which is a hybrid and remote by choice plan that will be detailed for you here shortly but this brings all students the opportunity for all students to come back to an learning in-person learning environment again as a phased-in approach throughout the stage three that brings more people back in person with each of these stages you'll see there that there's metric numbers assigned to them for the areas that we discussed and just to give you a thought a sense of where we are at this moment if we were to you to look at the rolling average a positivity rate which again is a seven day rolling average currently our

064service area would be at 5.2 percent which puts us within that stage three and our new cases per 100 000 population is 67.8 which again is within that stage location so these metrics are meant to inform us of trends not spikes so we would not necessarily pull back and forth very quickly between these stages these numbers and numbers coupled with both the county level and state level metrics that idph and our local health authorities monitor would begin conversations between the health authorities and school district officials to determine if it's just a subset of population that's being impacted perhaps a certain school a set of students maybe exposure occurred even outside of the school setting so we have what we would call an adaptive pause which gives us the opportunity to pause a certain set of

065students an area of school a grade a certain school a set of schools and even the whole district pulling them back into the remote learning environment for just a set period of time several days you know up to several weeks while they determine whether or not there's a lasting issue here or if there was just a temporary spike that that caused our numbers to exude where we would want them to be for where we're at in this plan so this as i mentioned right now all of our numbers that we have straight across for ppe staff availability weekly cases and positivity would safely be allowable within that stage three or better creating plans for stages of in-person learning excuse me there were four areas that we identified as priorities as we created the return to

066in-person learning plan the first item was to minimize health risks for all students we felt it was extremely important to create a plan that uh that put the health and safety of our students and staff above everything else the second was to maximize the time for in-person instruction third to enable families to have some choice and how to address the educational needs of their children and finally to prioritize the return to in-person instruction to students with significant disabilities and our youngest students we've developed a comprehensive safety plan that can be found on the district's website we also worked with the kendall county health department in creation of the safety plan and the health department has signed off on our safety plan the operational side of the plan addresses cleaning and sanitizing of all facilities ventilation

067classroom layout visitor restrictions and international travel the health side of the plan addresses face coverings personal protective equipment ppe social distancing daily certification or daily self-certification contact tracing and notification and employee and exposure exclusion and notification process again it's very important to note that all this information and the safety plan can be found on the district website the illinois state board of education guidance documents states that there must be a daily certification that anyone who enters the building must complete in sd 308 we will be issuing a daily survey formed to all parents through tyler that is completed prior to the start of the school day we have been doing this for our employees for many weeks now and it only takes a couple moments to complete if a parent chooses not to complete the

068certification students will have their temperature and symptom screening completed by a staff member upon arrival at school it will be extremely important for parents to complete the daily certification form to ensure that kids who are attending school aren't exhibiting any of the signs of covet and to minimize lost instructional time if the school has to do it for them this is faith dolce i'm the associate superintendent and i'd like to talk about the two options that will be available as we move into stage three the remote for all that would be changing we would still have remote learning by choice and parents and students would still have that opportunity to have all of their instruction remotely but there also would be an in-person instruction and i do want to highlight that both of the options

069the in person and the remote learning by choice would keep students with their current teachers and their current classes it would not be reorganizing and choosing new teachers so when we went to consider all of this we put together committees of staff and administrators and these are the parameters that we set forth we wanted to have shortened days of instruction with no lunch we also wanted to maximize the instructional minutes and try to get them as close as what they're having now or to exceed that we wanted to make sure that whichever the plans we had there had equal access for all of our students and then to maximize social distancing we did make the decision early on to divide the schools in half by the letter of the last names with a through k

070being group a and l through z being group b then another very intricate part of this was to create start and end times for all of our schools so that our buses that run multiple runs on one bus with one driver they do a high school run a junior high in an elementary and to have the complexities of that all fit into a shortened day was no small feat so quickly there were some decisions that we needed to make that needed to be across the district because our committees were mostly organized by elementary early childhood junior high and high school and some of the things that needed to overarch the entire district were those start and end times with all the intricate bus routes so you have here what the proposed start and end times

071for each of the levels early childhood through high school and then our special programs as well and then we also took those students those group a and group b students into cohorts and grouped them by having them come to school two consecutive days and then either having the wednesday or the weekend in between for deeper cleaning and this also will allow for that better reaction time of tracking and periods of isolation that teresa talked about because students would go a five-day break before they would come back to school so this slide goes through the stages that teresa was talking about where she was looking at the health metrics this is describing what students would be doing in those stages and as teresa said stage one was back in the spring with no students or staff

072in the building currently we're at the top part of the green part there were stage two where we have our students coming back with related services what we'd like to do is move to the bottom half of that screen where our self-contained special education students would return you'll see all the names of the programs indicated there and we'd like to have that student start date of october 19th depending on how the rest of this meeting goes we would like to have all of our self-contained information up and available on our website tomorrow for program schedule start dates start dismissal times a question and answer link for parent questions and we would like to host a live q a session on october 1st again that's for those immediate students that we would be talking about and

073then for our resource uh students and also those in co-talk classes with 504 plans we would be offering a question and answer and some more information for them but at a later date you'll see that would be by october 1st and again we would talk about the start dates and have question and answer for parent questions and a live session then if you progress we've been talking about stages one and two when you look at stage three we've broken that into two parts with the first part being the early childhood students and the remainder of the students in kindergarten through fifth grade that weren't in our self-contained special ed programs and having them come back as a proposed date as november 9th and then looking at the remainder of the secondary students in grades 6

074through for december 3rd now december 3rd it looks so far from november 9th it's actually two weeks of instruction because of thanksgiving and parent-teacher conference pieces we are suggesting that we also take two days to run an orientation for our grade six students and our freshmen they did not have that availability in the spring and we'd like to acclimate them to the building and have some of those routines prior to returning to this we may have different levels of stage 3 as president doyle had said this is the beginning of those pieces we may come back and say now we're capable of doing more but this would be beginning where we would like to start and then stage four wouldn't be until we were back to almost regular in-person instruction good evening my name is

075lindsay allen i'm the director of elementary education and i'm going to walk you through three sample schedules for elementary and i think what's really important for you to know is that these are sample schedules these times won't be set in stone because what we are looking to change is to bring specials um have specials offered every day instead of just on wednesdays and then also there is a flex time that will need to be put into everybody's schedule and that will be based on the school as well as looking at fourth and fifth grade replacement gifted education math needs to be at different times so again these are sample schedules so this first one is a sample schedule for group a and as faith had said this would be students who are coming in person

076with last names a through k when you look at the schedule everything in white is considered in person in the school building instruction and everything in light gray would be remote and from home so for group a they would come into the school on monday and tuesday for in-person instruction they would start off with their attendance the pledge in the morning message followed by 50 minutes of math instruction a 20 minute flex time for movement bathroom break or read aloud 50 minutes of reading and social studies instruction 30 minutes of writing instruction before heading home for dismissal there is time for lunch and travel back to home and then in that afternoon they would be working remotely from home watching their science video this is also time for student support time during that time reading

077specialist el teachers special education teachers anybody who needs to support a student could use that time this would also be time for the teacher or for the students to finish their homework and their assignments on wednesday there would be go live specials so just like now we would be looking at art music physical education and library now on thursday and friday you will see that group a will be remote all day long so in the morning they would have time to watch their science video again to have their go live specials that student support time they have more time in the after in the morning for that as well as time to finish their homework and assignments they would have lunch and then in the afternoon they would go live with their teacher just like

078they do now they would have their pledge afternoon message 30 minutes of math instruction 30 minutes of reading and social studies instruction and 15 minutes of writing instruction before ending with student support time now the next slide is an example of what it would look like for group b so that's last names l through z it is exactly the same as a but flip flop so instead of coming in person on monday and tuesday and finishing remote they would be remote all day on monday and tuesday and then come in person in the morning on thursday and friday and then in the afternoon work remotely from home the final sample schedule that i have for you is for those students in group c who choose remote by choice so they would be remote every day

079monday through friday on every morning they would start off with their science video their go live specials the student support time and time to work on homework and assignments followed by lunch and then going live with their teacher for the attendance the afternoon message sel as well as 30 minutes of math instruction 30 minutes of reading and social studies instruction 15 minutes of writing instruction and then student support time what's important to note even if you are in person or remote you will be meeting with your teacher every day so on monday and tuesday kids would be coming into instruction group a and then in the afternoon remotely that teacher would be working with their students in groups b and c on thursday and friday when group b comes in in person in the afternoon

080the teacher will be working with the students in group a and c so they will have four days of ongoing instruction with that go live specials on wednesday denise hildebrand executive director of special education students in the self-contained programs stars instructional skills life skills skills and deaf and hard of hearing will return to on-site learning on october 22nd from 9 00 to 11 30 in the morning on thursdays and fridays they will be following the start and end times of the remote for all schedule until general education students return beginning on november 9th all students with ieps and 504 plans will be back on site students in the self-contained programs will attend from 9 30 to 12 30 4 days per week monday tuesday thursday and friday students in the resource program these are students

081receiving pull-out or push-in services and those receiving speech and language services only will be part of the a b cohorts and will attend school on their designated days students who continue in remote learning will follow the remote learning component of the elementary schedule and related services as they're currently being delivered will continue to be offered on site if parents choose to transport students in the cross categorical program and the blended programs have the following schedule which is currently up on the screen students in the cross categorical program in early childhood will begin on october 22nd and students in the blended early childhood program will return on site on november 9th highlights of the early childhood schedule include the following on-site attendance is divided into morning groups monday and tuesday and afternoon groups thursday and friday

082for both the cross categorical and the blended programs students will have two hours and 15 minutes of on-site instruction twice per week students who remain in remote learning by choice will continue to have a combination of instruction through large live large and small groups and pre-recorded sessions remote by choice morning groups will have live instruction on thursday and friday mornings and afternoon groups will have live instruction on mondays and tuesdays students in the remote by choice will still have the opportunity to receive related services speech and language occupational therapy physical therapy and social work if parents choose to transport their children on site this schedule will begin during the week of october 19 for all students even though blended classrooms will not return on site for a few weeks an additional note students attending the

083early childhood deaf and hard of hearing program will begin attending on-site four days per week monday tuesday thursday friday on october 19th they will attend from 9 00 to 11 30 until november 6th beginning november 9th the 4 day per week schedule will increase from 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours from 9 to 12 30 and just for your information this early childhood deaf and hard of hearing program is a five hour program and not a two and a half hour program per day this is renee sartor the director of english learners for english learners in elementary the el resource teachers will primarily serve students through student support times during the times that students are not in person they may also join in person and go live sessions with classroom teachers for those self-contained classrooms sheltered

084english and dual language the classrooms will follow the schedules for their grade level and do a language instruction will also be offered in spanish junior high schedule is important for us to keep students with their current class schedules and current teachers and have similar instructional minutes to what we are having in remote for all again our students are divided into three groups group a and b are in person and divided by the letters of the alphabet a through k and l through z and group c will be our remote learners so group a will attend school in person on monday and tuesday mornings and group b will attend in person on thursday and friday mornings this gives us an entire day in between the two groups in order for the buildings to be cleaned a

085major consideration for us when we were building this schedule was how to split nine a nine period day into two two days so we ended up splitting period five and kept both of those halves at the end of the morning in order to keep a consistent bell schedule each day so on mondays group a attends periods one through four and half of five in the morning while groups b and c attend via live stream in the afternoon all three groups attend goal live sessions for periods six through nine on tuesday mornings group a attends periods six through nine and the second half of period five in the morning while groups b and c attend via live stream and then in the afternoon all three groups attend go live sessions for periods one through four wednesdays

086are consistent with the current schedule in remote for all where students are completing an attendance survey and google classroom assignments teachers will participate in professional development team collaboration and attend building meetings thursday and friday are the very same schedules as monday and tuesday with the exception that group group b is the in-person group so the students who will attend remotely via live stream excuse me can watch and listen to class during that direct instruction then during group work activities or discussion the teacher can have a whole group with both in person and remote students or use breakout rooms in google classroom and have students interact with each other this would be up to the teacher to structure depending on the lesson for that day our committee told us that it was very important to teachers

087to have that student support time at the end of the day and so we wanted to keep that opportunity for for our teachers and students and have kept it then at the end of each of monday tuesday thursday and friday and that is indicated by ssp from three to three twenty five i will also add that we have a number of students at each of our junior high schools that attend our high schools for advanced math courses as you will see when mrs kade presents the high school schedule our schedules do not align perfectly for those students so our schools have already started to look at individual student schedules for our students in advanced math to try to find that flexibility in order to allow them to participate fully in those classes and i know

088that both of our high school and our junior high school teachers will be working flexibly with our our families in order to allow those students to participate remotely but they will not be bussed to the high schools as they have been in the past in order to prevent the spread of the potential spread of the virus similar to elementary junior high students in the following programs will return to on-site learning first life skills instructional skills stars skills and those students in the deaf and hard of hearing program who spend the majority of their time in the dhh classrooms they will begin attendance on october 19th following the remote for all schedule currently in place the proposed plan is for students to attend full days 8 am to 2 pm on thursdays and fridays full day

089attendance is proposed as half the attendance is not feasible given the format of the current remote for all schedule for example transportation home during the time in which school and session is in session would result in students potentially missing one or more class periods remote by choice students in these programs will participate via live streaming or offline activities while their peers are on site all students with ieps and 504 plans will begin on-site learning on december 3rd students who spend the majority of the time in general education such as our resource co-taught students with 504 plans will be part of the a b cohorts as they are in elementary and will attend school according to the proposed schedule students who elect to attend classes remotely will follow the remote by choice schedule and will participate

090via live streaming if parents choose to transport they're certainly welcome to receive related services on-site students in the programs that begin in-person learning on october 22nd will be on site from 8 15 to 2 55 four days per week when all students return on site good evening heather kincaid executive director accountability in high school similar to junior high the areas of focus of our committee when building the in-person return to learning schedule was to maximize instructional minutes provide equitable instructional opportunities for both our in-person and our remote learning by choice and as mrs luther's mentioned keep the schedules the same for semester one so they can continue in the classes that they're currently taking so the high school will also be divided into three groups group a and group b both being in person groups

091divided alphabetically a through k and l through z where group c will be our remote learning by choice group in the mornings monday tuesday thursday and friday will be our go live sessions so all groups a b and c would be participating in go live sessions in the morning of a length of 35 minutes we have split our schedule in half i'll talk a little bit more later about the arrangement of the periods but the mornings would be go live in which all students would be participating simultaneously then in the afternoon would be our in-person instruction so on monday and tuesday group a would attend in person while groups b and c would be participating via live stream similar to the junior high on thursday and friday group b our l through z group would

092be participating in person and groups a and c would be live streaming so that way every student has two go live sessions one in person and one streaming so they will see their teachers for each of their classes four times throughout the week we also have built in that student support period at the end of school so students would be able to either participate after school in person on the days that they're attending or they can participate remotely while at home any of the four days wednesday will serve as a google classroom day similar to now not only to allow for deep cleaning but also to allow additional time for learning activities and also teacher collaboration team meetings and professional development if you take a look we have reordered the periods from the traditional one

093through eight the reason why we did that is we put the lunch periods so four five six and seven on the book end of our in person why we did that is to hope to spread out the students arrival time so a student would not come to school necessarily if they had their own transportation or were able to drive for the lunch period obviously we will have students to take the bus so we will have a study hall opportunity during the lunch period but given the sizes of our schools the buildings felt that this was important to reorder just to spread out the arrival and potentially the dismissal times of our students so this is the goal schedule goal will also be split into groups a group b in group c they will attend from

0947 40 to 12 40. goal is our alternative learning for our junior high and high school so they have basically blocks of time within so they do not follow a traditional period schedule on monday and tuesday a through k would attend in person and then thursday and friday l through z students would attend in person also given the opportunity to participate remote by choice since the entire block is in person if a student is not attending in person then they would participate in live streaming on that day wednesday would be similar to both junior high and high school as previously described high school students in the life skills program stars and select students in the dhh program or deaf and hard of hearing program these students the students who spend the majority of their day

095in the dhh classrooms will begin on-site attendance two full days per week mondays and tuesdays beginning october 19th they will follow the remote for all schedule from 8 a.m to 2 p.m until their general education peers return on to on-site or in-person learning at that time the schedule will change to 7 30 a.m to 1 55 pm four days per week monday tuesday thursday friday students in these programs who elect to continue to participate in remote learning will be able to live stream during the time their peers are on site and will also be able to engage in remote learning with their peers per the current format when all students are learning virtually there will also be the opportunity for them to engage in off-site or i should say offline activities as well students in

096the instructional skills program skills and co-taught programs as well students with 504 plans will be part of the ab cohorts when all students return to in-person learning on december 3rd students who elect to participate remotely will follow the remote by choice schedule and again if two parents choose to transport these students are eligible to receive related services on-site for english learner students the el resource teachers will work with the classrooms during their scheduled in-person and remote times they may also serve students during the student support times sheltered content area and co-taught classrooms as well as the dual language classrooms and junior high will follow the schedules for their grade level and dual language will provide instruction in spanish so for east view and transition programs at east view academy students will return to on-site learning

097four days per week beginning on october 19th both elementary and junior high levels will begin at 8 am and students will attend half days for the first few weeks and then begin full days attendance on november 9th high school students will follow the current high school schedule until december 3rd when all general education students begin the in-person schedule and at that time the schedule will change to begin at 7 30 to 2 pm students who choose to remain in remote learning will participate in live streaming pre-recorded sessions and small group instruction and as with the other groups they are welcome to attend on-site for related services if parents choose to transport for the pathways transition program they will be divided into a and b cohorts given safety considerations and group size the a group will

098attend on mondays and tuesdays and the b group will attend on thursdays and fridays both groups will begin with half days and transition to full days the week of november 9th students who participate remotely will receive instruction comparable to what is currently being provided virtual live instruction via large or small groups and participation in offline activities and these activities will also be provided on wednesdays when all students will be in remote learning i'd like to touch upon the timelines and communication obviously we would need to provide parents much information about what needs to happen in order for them to make some sort of a choice so if you look at this slide we will be giving information as long as we have approval from the board for our special our special education students in self-contained

099classes that that email along with lots of information about that would go out tomorrow and then if parents are wanting to indicate that they only want remote learning by choice they would need to fill out that form by october 6th and then we would make plans accordingly we have seating charts and transportation bus charts and all kinds of things that we need to make in order for that to be ready and then the next row is our elementary and remaining early childhood students this plan is supposed to come back to the board on october 13th for approval and then we would immediately the next day if it has been approved send out an email with all of the various information we'll also have a question and answer session we'll also have that on our website

100that form would be due back the 21st so we would have two and a half weeks to be ready for our students to return at those levels we're also asking that same timeline for our junior high and high school to re to give all the information out on october 14th and return it by the 21st i just want to reiterate if we do not hear from parents we will assume that their student is coming to in-person instruction parents do not have to fill out a form unless they would be indicating remote learning by choice christie tyler chief financial officer and i'm going to go over the additional staffing needs so listed here is a sampling of work that the requested additional staff would be tasked with on the custodial side shifts would be staggered so

101that we can best address the additional disinfecting and cleaning that will be needed for example some staff would be scheduled to begin their shift at 9 or 10 a.m new custodial staff primary responsibility will be sanitization additional bathroom cleaning disinfecting touch points in common areas and then after students and staff have left the building all surfaces will be sprayed with the electrostatic sprayers we are also requesting to hire additional floaters as it is already very difficult to find substitutes uh or to fill in for call offs health clerks the original plan was for health aides but responsibilities have changed and these staff members will now be taking temps of students who have not self-certified and making parent contact as needed the cost for the custodial we've laid this out by level how much additional staff

102were requesting by level and this brings us to a total of an additional 31 custodial staff at a cost of 751 750 on the health clerk side these staff would work for two hours again additional staff is laid out by the level for a total cost of sixty thousand this brings our total uh salary for these staff to an estimated uh 811 750 we're estimating about 250 000 in benefits because we don't know uh what health plan full-time staff would take so that brings the estimated cost of this additional staff to just over a million dollars as i mentioned at the beginning of the presentation there are another 26 slides of information that answers specifics on programs and i know that was a lot of information but when you're talking about the seventh largest school

103system in the state and you're talking about uh you know preschool through age 22 it's a complex organization so there's going to be a lot of information in the presentation so i appreciate your patience so that brings us to questions and comments my first question mrs tyler is about the custodians so they're going to clean and have the place ready for the morning yeah probably allison and i this is probably better for rob actually i'm sorry i just when he stood up i realized um so mr ellison we're going to have the custodians clean it up everything's ready to go in the morning then they have custodians that are there during the day including these extra folks that are on the roster on the side and then they clean after school is there any way

104to shift any of the duties to make them earlier to having custodians start earlier or start at a different time of day is that not possible well we could with second shift make a slide of that workforce i think we already have that in the day shift what i call split custodians say they're working at 10 to 7 30 10 to 6 30 to support impart the day shift service level needs yeah and then they're going to be a contributing force to help second shift uh expand on their on their infection control efforts so i think we already have sort of that early that model is already there correct yeah okay the goal of that is to provide service level support yeah i was just trying to figure out how to get as much custodial

105help as possible but that is um and and can i ask you this when we have 17 folks for the elementary schools how many more people does that mean per elementary school or per school because it's not just elementary school it's pre-k first total yeah well it's 17 yeah right 17 is the elementary okay so the elementary schools used to have one now they have two people all day okay okay that's good thank you i have a question on those janitors too so a couple weeks ago we had another presentation where it said 43 janitors so i guess my question is first of all is that the number that the union was okay bringing forward because as far as i'm concerned safety and and the janitors like we are in a building i know tony's

106also in a building but the janitors come by they wash the door handles they clean off that and they do it all day long every day so they're providing a lot of additional support that would get a lot of these people in school and feel more comfortable in school so i guess my first question is why did we start at 43 a couple weeks ago and now we're down to 31 and then i just want to make sure that there's not something that we're not covering because we decided to take 12 less the initial plan was predicated on all kids in school right out of the game no no hybrid model what we did was for the junior highs we were intending to to staff both one full-time fte on nights one full-time fte on

107days edition we took that and we split that shift 10 to 630 reduce that by one fte at the junior high level because this model the new model doesn't necessarily i don't think necessitate that additional fte we also roll back one fte out of the elementary so originally most of those elementaries would have an additional ftp so we rolled some of those out for the same reason and we don't have to support the same volume right because the hours have reduced the initial plan was to be half students to be in school all day now we're only looking at three hours a day and the big a big part of this is that we're not having meals majority of students will not eat meals in the classroom okay but that leads me to my second

108point so now when we go back to putting all these kids back in buildings now i'm going to need to hire more janitors potentially i can't i can't say what this model is going to look like because i don't have any history maybe that's a possibility i can't say that's not a possibility but at the moment this current program this is what i think will get us where we need to go and then finally i do want to touch on your other question we did go over this with the custodial union and they are fully support this model the the union leadership but while we're on this slide i also had a question because it says on here that this assumes all staff would be hired and begin their responsibilities in november but we're also

109saying that we're not bringing junior high and high school students back into the buildings until december so you're gonna have to get them that's just for costing purposes we don't content we don't expect that we're gonna put a posting out for 31 custodial and we're going to be able to hire 31 right from the get-go so i think it'll be a gradual hiring as we bring these folks on staff but if but if you did get all of them right away would you still have them start in november even if there's no students in the building i'm just saying like that's the highest numbers are obviously at the elementary level but that's still you know nine positions that one month less of salaries and benefits could be right and and i think based on the

110plan for the special ed students and what that uh now that we have more information on that we would make adjustments uh again i just use november as a costing point can we go back one slide sure because you also had on there which which i found interesting because again i'm in a building the electrostatic sprayers so i called some of the buildings that my kids were in and they do not in fact all have electro static sprayers right now which was a bit concerning to me elementary schools don't have high schools have handheld electrostatics or the backpacks they have three backpacks junior highs also have handhelds we just purchased a different electrostatic sprayer with one gallon that is in all the junior highs now to give them additional electrostatic support the handhelds for the

111elementaries are doing in two weeks they're doing in two weeks so i guess my next question then is how many because when i called thompson they thought that they may have won but i missed the janitor because i thought about it too late today one every elementary will have one junior highs we'll have two high schools will have the backpack so i know how often ours get used so i guess my question is how many classrooms can you clean in one of those you know what i mean like how many of those can you clean in one night like obviously those aren't great and you still feel like you have to clean up afterwards but it does you know at the end of the day probably hopefully kill coven right so i wanna i want

112everything cleaned which means i need to have enough of these backpack machines we've done a beta test with the handheld already we've had six or eight months or longer and we can get the entire elementary done with one hand held in one night shift now i do anticipate that these being deployed during the day shift selectively so it's not just limited to night shift but we can get through an elementary school with one sprayer effectively in one ship okay so so now i've got one janitor doing one whole building spraying now i've now left myself with one less janitor to clean which is where that split person working 10 to 6 30 will come in and fill those gaps so all the junior heights so everybody will have at least two of these machines by

113the next two weeks you only put one at the high schools one for the elementaries backpacks for the high schools and i don't recall if the high schools have one or two of the portables well if it's all the same with the board i'd rather have a couple per building um can we can we talk real quick about slide four i know i just got a couple quick ones slide four we talked about um covet testing and i know that this has changed a lot over the last several weeks so what i did not see on there was what type of covent test so are we talking about the rapid covet test they can come back in a day are we not so it does it is specifically the pcr test which is not the

114rapid one correct so we would accept a a positive would be considered a positive across any of those it's the negative and trying to come back earlier from the um isolate or from the quarantine or isolation period that they're assigned where we wouldn't take anything other than that pcr test based on the reliability rating okay and then um slide 11 are we only temping kids if their parents don't fill out the form and all of a sudden because whenever you walk in because that's what so it said right here if a parent chooses not to complete the form students will have their temperature and symptom screening so are we still screening everybody for temp so the self the self certification form is uh option one and if it's not completed then option two is that

115it's done while they're at school uh when they arrive so the self-certification the first question on it is certifying that your student does not have a temperature above 100.4 fahrenheit and then and then the list of questions that come after that so parents would have to certify that that morning prior to arrival at school they've checked their child's temperature and it's not in excess of 100.4 so we would then have those students coming in one place the students that are not doing the self-certification form or have not completed it would then be routed a different way and they would have that temperature screening and that series of questions asked upon arrival all of those results would be recorded in tyler whether that was done by the parents prior to arrival or by a staff member

116when the student arrived at school right so so the semantics of that scares the crap out of me how are you separating them right so you're going to separate them when they come up to the door they're going to have ids now and oh you weren't on the list so you're going in that door and you're coming like no so what the plan is is that initially we have a form that parents would fill out to indicate whether or not they have the ability and desire to complete the self-certification form so we'd know right off the bat those who whether their morning routines don't allow for it or simply do not want to do that we would automatically route that arrival location for that set of students right off the bat to a different area

117so they would come through that door where there is someone standing to do the temperature check each day we are able to run some reports out of tyler very rapidly on a regular basis so the plan with having the health clerks in the buildings for those first two hours is to very quickly identify those students right at arrival or right before arrival that don't have those and we would need to scan as many of them as we could that are supposed to have been doing the daily self-certification but failed to do so that's where we're hoping to be able to do a call to the parent did you do this and if you did you forgot to record it could you please record it if you did not we would pull that student aside the

118plan is that we would have all of that conducted researched within those first several minutes of school starting and being able to identify those students very quickly and conduct that screening right at the very start of the day so we wouldn't be standing outside separating them and a and b i think the key for us is knowing the parents that are very honest up front and saying look that's not feasible for me to do that on a daily basis and that may be a large number and then we know what that drop-off procedure looks like for those students upon arrival and then we have the parents that have indicated no i wish to do this at home and i'm going to do this on a daily basis and if they just didn't submit it correctly

119or forgot one day we would then be running those reports to gather those students data really quickly at the beginning of each day um i'm going to wish you good luck on that because i have no question in regard to that so is this something you say it's going to be the certification is done through tyler can we do it through tyler on our phone or does it have to be done on a laptop because some things you can't really do on your phone with tyler so so this is a new feature of tyler that we have bringing on board as we speak it's the tyler survey module so it will allow for you to do it right on your phone so it will be a separate survey for each student so you'll log in

120through your parent portal it'll pop right up and tell you that you have a daily survey your student's picture will be right there you click on it it asks you the series of questions you answered the bubble yes no next survey bubble yes no we're able on the back end to very quickly run reports on who has and has not and just before arrival time we can send like a blast email out to the group that has not yet completed it that are supposed to be completing it to remind them we don't have this on file yet reminder if your student doesn't have it they'll be screened at school so very quickly we'll be able to separate those students again um self-certification according to the rules are supposed to be done daily and if that's

121absence of that then the school is supposed to do the screening as feasible for us and so for us as feasible the definition of that would not be prior to students you know arriving at a bus stop because then we have safety issues with potentially leaving students alone at a bus stop if they hadn't filled out that form and it becomes an equity issue for us as well for those who maybe didn't have the ability to get on and complete that form prior to boarding a school bus so here's what people should know if you are choosing in-person learning that not everybody's getting temperature checked can i ask three more questions real quick hang on one second only because we are at our 10 minutes so we want to make sure that everybody's got time

122to answer questions obviously this is going to go longer than 10 minutes i think we all agree um but yes yeah okay so let's try to just do a few per person and then we can go around again for saves one thing to remember is that there's probably no way to answer all the what-if situations and that maybe what what what we could talk about also is what do we need to look at i'm i'm liking this what do we do we need to look at as a board do we need to ask them to add additional custodial staff or machines things like that so i totally get it there are a zillion different thoughts questions whatever but let's try to make sure that when we're working through this as we continue through the time

123we're going to spend on this that we're keeping them focused on things that we can have an impact on first and make sure that everyone has a chance without having to stay till right then i got one more maybe just do an order since it's a match you have a jump if you want to start one i also i just want to i think and i want to continue to encourage all of us as board members to um to be cognizant of our tone um and we and to know that i think we all know as lori mentioned this is not a perfect plan because we're not in a perfect scenario this is this is a really important a really important plan and a starting off point but just like the community and parents aren't

124going to have every answer uh every question answered right now we as board members might not have that luxury right now too so i just think that's really important that we are mindful of tone um as we are working our way through our presentation ali since you started with questions why don't we go with your you said you had three more uh but really so slide 21. slide 20. so i can 100 fully appreciate the junior high and high school group c like to me those kids that are home on live that's fantastic for me for those kids to always be involved because it almost looks like group c gets more live instruction i mean you know what i mean so they seem to be more in person but my question is on slide 21

125is about this group c at the grade school level so i well so and this could be completely wrong but i have i have group a monday tuesday mornings group b thursday friday mornings and then i have group c's broken into the a group on monday tuesday and the b group on can we was there i guess my question is can you take all the c kids and put them all on one afternoon together or is it just not possible for them to go live with the ab group like the junior high in high school are doing do you know what i'm saying like if you're going to have a lot of them so in the afternoon the group c is going live with their teacher on the afternoons on monday tuesday thursday and friday

126the difference is on monday and tuesday they have also the group b students with them so that they're seeing their teacher every day and then on thursday and friday the group um a students would be with them so group a b and c see their teacher and have sessions with their teacher every day okay because i read it okay it's so that they stay with their teacher right i mean i get that i just might be good i thought that the c kids were split into an a group and a b group but they're not now c group is all over four days yeah this is group c slide um and that's what they are doing on each of those days i think lindsay is asking me to go to the teacher's schedule if you

127go to slide 46 it shows you a sample teacher schedule and i think you'll be able to see how each group is met with every day then so on monday and tuesday you see group a in the morning in person and then in the afternoon they'll meet with groups b and c and then on thursday and friday they'll meet with group b in person in the morning and then in the afternoon with groups a and c okay that makes more sense that's it go ahead my question is for mrs hildebrand mrs kincaid and mrs dalquist um some of the kids in special ed have a double period where they need to go seventh and eighth for example in high school some of the kids have um they're in they're not all mainstreamed their partially mainstreamed

128and i know that you said the majority if they had a majority of the time mainstream that they would go with a certain schedule but i'm wondering what will happen for kids that are kind of on the border so i want to know how much flexibility is there to accommodate students who need to have like the double period how much accommodation is there for the teachers to see kids kind of in a in a way that maybe doesn't fit exactly into the schedule so that all of these kids especially special ed kids are getting schedules that make sense for them in terms of their needs i don't know who wants to jump in i know that on the committees we did have some of our special education teachers and our self-contained teachers that sat on

129these committees and some of the double periods that you talked about because i was worried about that a lot of what we do is not blocking them all together but making sure they have two periods of support so they would still get those two periods of support even if they aren't back to back within the schedule and then as far as flexibility with those you we would have students that could be going live and mainstreaming although it would be through remote to be able to do that or to be able to pull back we also have the student support time to allow some collaboration in those pieces i don't know if you had a specific program then i'll turn it over to denise but i just want to make sure that if the families have

130a need that the schedule doesn't reflect that the family's needs are considered more prominent than the schedule for example so i can address that um i think that every time we create a schedule for a student with an iep we have to realize that they're going to have to be some individualized decisions that are made and i think that's my understanding of what you're saying so we're absolutely taking that into account the middle of the day as you can see for both the high school and the junior high schedule while students are being transported there's that period of time in which those students aren't going to have specific classes so this will give the opportunity for students to work with their related service providers to receive some additional instructional support and also to have lunch

131so the periods during the day in which they would have been scheduled for lunch we're also going to look at additional supports together with the opportunity for related services provision as well and then again to your point we also recognize that while this is a proposed schedule we anticipate that there may be some students who have difficulty trying to acclimatize to return to on-site learning that's another you know consideration that we need to take into account as we bring our students back to in-person learning okay yeah i'm just really interested in flexibility because i know that in the spring that was a i think a value or a valuable point that some of the parents had and we also just for your information um we're fortunate enough to have mr bise from epic group um

132we i called him he was able to um send out an email to parents and we had about 14 parents participate in a feedback group as well so they gave us some really good information about what they consider to be important as we return to in-person learning thank you for doing that because i actually was going to ask that and i put that aside because i wanted to save some time but thank you do you have any more tony oh that's it that's my only one okay i only have one question and i guess this all looks great on paper i can tell there's so much time and effort and input put into this and i really appreciate all of the work that everyone has done and taken things into consideration i like that we're

133so i i hate to use the word cohort because i feel like we're raising a bunch of roman soldiers or something i know that's kind of a education ease type of term at this time that's very popular but i like that how we have group a like two days in a row just for have some synchronicity of of their learning and not just to avoid contact time i think that's going to help the teachers to be able to teach those different groups my concern is i'm seeing on here that the remote groups are participating in class via live stream and i just i don't know i'm not listening to a ton of my kids classes and i honestly have no clue what's going on with my high schoolers they're fine they're just doing their thing

134in their room not complaining but my junior high student like i've heard overheard some things and it's like just to help the students get to find a single document can take 15-20 minutes because the kids just don't i don't know i don't know what they're doing or they're not paying attention or it's painful and my concern is that i don't know how the teachers are going to do this if they're trying to teach the students in front of them how do they manage what's happening online like i just realistically speaking i just do they are they each can have an aid in their classroom who's going to help them manage the online portion how do they know if someone's asking a question i'll jump in so when we met with our committees we did propose

135different options some of which did not have the live streaming and what all the look like and we have talked with other districts um that have embarked on this journey and some of the things that you know will take into consideration is you will have time with a significant part group a and group b to kind of help through what that looks like so when they are go live later on to be able to find documents do those kinds of things they would have that we see that students in the chat sometimes are more supportive of helping each other find than you know some of those pieces you need to think about it a little differently when we're talking about live streaming we're not talking about a teacher trying to be here watching all the

136students on the grid and having the other students sit 10 feet from back there and being on devices that's not what we're talking about it is more of if you have your slide deck that you're presenting so i'm talking to the staff i'm talking to the students that are here in person but the students at home are seeing the slide deck and seeing the visuals and just hearing my voice so it isn't going to be like face time because to try to teach this and watch students at the same time isn't very feasible we've also done some setups where the teacher has the chromebook like this has the projection screen behind uh we did it so i'll use she behind her and then the chromebook i'm standing in front of my presentation i'm able to

137talk i'm able to do this in the chromebook it's a little bit fuzzy you're not going to have like you can't see my wrinkles from far behind on that but they can still see my non-verbal see what i'm um emphasizing and what i'm talking through some of the sound system we are looking at what that will look like because we want our teachers to be able to move around the classroom and that would mean that they have to carry their chromebook but there are some really cool things that you can put on your app so that this can be a speaker and google meets is coming through here and all i have to do is carry my phone around and i have that sound system straight to the students outside the classroom so people need

138to think of the live streaming more of seeing what's going on in the classroom and really depending a lot on that auditory piece than how google lives go live sessions are right now while it's the the teacher's face and interacting with that we also um the teacher will have to pause occasionally and you know check the chat or do those kinds of things so it is a different type of teaching and the staff will need to multitask but they also will have that new piece of being able to have students in person to explain some of those things so when they are going live it can go faster is there things that other people want to add from some of our learning i'd like to add that the folks that were on the junior high

139committee have all decided to continue meeting so we are going to be meeting twice a week for at least the remainder of october and these are the very types of questions that we're going to talk about with the group and our group has a building engineer a teaching assistant special education teachers el teachers so a wide variety of perspectives and these are the exact types of things that we're going to be discussing and continue to discuss and this was something that we did talk in depth about um during our committee meetings so and like faith said it it is going to be a little bit different but um we hope to have some some ideas for our teachers starting tomorrow we're going to go through you know life in the day of a student from

140a parent's perspective what do i as a parent what am i going to worry about with my kiddo from the time that they're going to go to the bus stop to the time they get home and finish at the end of the day you know from a teacher's perspective from a student's perspective what are all those little things that we may not have already thought about but for the next month at least they want to get together and continue to talk about those things thank you who anybody want to go next particularly i can go next we can order um so just related to the um the live streaming um things you know it does sounds like there's some interesting things being explored related to some technology with the microphone kind of thing are we

141anticipating at the um for junior high in high school that we will effectively will be able to effectively go go live um all at all at once talking about bandwidth things are we gonna test that i have to get there oh i'm going the wrong way darn it yeah so um we went through and mapped out the bandwidth and that is some of the behind the scenes uh scheduling pieces as well and it's getting there slowly so there is a 10 minute overlap where all three levels would be live streaming or doing the video piece so the way that bandwidth works within our district is we stream from both high schools and then all of the feeder schools that go to that so where you need to look at the a green is when one

142level is on our bandwidth yellow is when we have two of our levels and then that little orange spot is the 10 minutes that is on there we are currently not ever over a little over half of our bandwidth piece but we are telling our staff we would not advise everyone students to be trying to go live and stream video at the same time it really doesn't work we've attempted it in the office anyway and the the sound gets all crazy that's in there so it would be the teachers that would be doing the live streaming from school and then the students that are at home be doing the live streaming back so we don't anticipate that bandwidth will be an issue okay um that is really very interesting so there's a lot in those

143addendum slides that we should um people should take a look at um i just related to the like live streaming piece and kind of what ruth was talking about it does seem that the experience for students who can to choose to continue families who choose to continue remote for all for junior high and high school it does seem that their experience may be quite different than what their current experience is with everybody doing you know remote learning and that does that does it does make me wonder about how that will be it does seem that um there could be some disconnect for those students and i do worry about some of those um the impact of that um in you know in in being slightly left behind and not having as much um ability to

144have a face to face with their teacher when the teacher you know when the teacher is teaching in person as well so that is just something that um you know does uh kind of create some pause for for me what that experience will be like for for those students but um i just had i think two other questions i mean i have more but i'll limit them um i am wondering how this impacts kids connection um and for um families who do need um full-time um or you know full-time and full full-day care and how that will be managed within um you know within the buildings and and whatnot and if our capacity changes at all or so i have shared the schedule with kids connection and so we're working collaboratively with them um right

145now the plan is to stay at those four existing school sites that we're at if that needs to be adapted or adjusted they will do so but right now we are planning on uh to continue the program she understands or they unders the park district understands that for some kids it'll be all day on monday tuesday everybody all day on wednesday and then you know some students all day on thursday friday what i found in my visits of the program they have separated the gym with the curtains so they're not using the entire gym so hopefully we can continue that route and that way the gym would be available for whatever the um the school would need it for the the other side of the gym okay so at this time you're not anticipating well

146the the kids connection is able to stay where they're at currently have the space that they currently need and have and um you know adapt if necessary okay that's great to know too um and then finally early childhood i don't know if there is a more confusing schedule than looking at this early childhood slide um holy smokes this is that's a lot of moving parts thank you for um thank you for everything you do so looking at um i did want to look at sorry what yeah so slide 24 um this is a lot um i guess my question is this seems to be i i mean this is a massive change for everybody for all of us and from what normal school kind of looks like this seems to be a fairly significant change

147for early childhood in terms of like the schedule and times and stuff for our little you know when our little ones are starting and ending and um you know afternoon and morning session um it is yeah it seems it's late you know one o'clock start for for you know three and four year olds you know might be a little bit of a struggle for them um what are some of the i guess can you help me understand how this kind of came and can you what's cross categorical cross categorical are those classrooms that are comprised of students with ieps only blended classrooms or classrooms where we have our at-risk our students without ieps as well students with iep okay so blended would be you know classrooms where there would be students with less intensive needs

148across categorical or students with a more intensive needs okay so interestingly enough the schedule that we have here follows very closely to what the remote for all schedule actually is it's only about 15 minutes off in terms of start time from what they currently have and we did that very deliberately because we wanted to keep it very consistent so for our on-site groups if this were to be a regular school year they would be there two hours and 30 minutes now they'll be there two hours and 15 minutes so again it's very comparable to what they would um participate in five days a week if this were a routine or normal school year so this will be now two hours and 15 minutes two mornings a week for our am groups and then again two

149hours 15 minutes two afternoons a week for our pm students so for those students that are participating off-site on the days that they're not in person so it's very similar to what our elementary and junior high and high schedules are in that you have your in-person group and then you have your you know at-home group but rather than being split into a b cohorts by letter of the alphabet it's an a b cohort by am session and pm session so during the afternoon for those students who are afternoon students they're actually participating in activities that would be comparable to what they're receiving now where it's a combination of live large group sessions live small group sessions teaching assistants work with students on either practice activities or are reviewing materials they've already learned and then there

150are also online activities for them to complete as well this was at the request of parents who felt that it was very difficult for students in early childhood to sustain attention to a computer for that duration of time so we very deliberately set it up in such a way that it's a combination of different activities so there are students for example who may work in a small group one day but not in the next day in order to afford the opportunity for that flexibility to occur so i think the substantive change that what you know our students will experience is that they will actually be in person learning for that two hours and 15 minutes which they're currently very flexible in terms of the remote learning as it stands now we have a large percentage

151of our students whose parents are bringing them on site for related services and i've been at the early learning center as children have been coming in for related services so i think that transition is already occurring for our students so i think the participation-related services as it currently stands is a really good preparatory activity for them to be on site for a longer period of time thank you um that's it's it's a lot of work so i know it's been a lot of time committee work that's to be commended thank you thanks to the committees the teachers everyone who was on that it's it's a lot to take in it's a lot to try to to get all just a little under 18 000 kids in this environment um a comment about the busing or

152the the temps that we started the conversation with with the amount of busing that's going on some of the the elementary schools that are almost all busing i i think giving too many options too much flexibility on who's self-certifying who's not who's done it at the door who's who's done it when they get to school by the time you got a bus with 35 kids on them and if half of them are not certified half of them have not taken temperature what what have you gained what's the point i i think it's it's a great option i love what you're doing but if we're not certifying the students before they're on the bus and not doing too until they're in the building we have risked everybody on that bus and i think that's something that

153i hope can be looked at a lot a lot more seriously to have that done at home prior to to the students getting the bus i i know there's a lot going on but i just don't see how the sense of of bringing all these all these bodies back into the buildings all this effort that we're going to and then letting students letting the population get to the door and not have being certified at that point where we've already possibly contaminated other students mr bowen can i sorry um real quick on the temperature check thing i just wanted to bring up a couple of quick points so one cases um of positive covid are considered contagious 48 hours prior to the presence of symptoms and a large percentage of people are completely asymptomatic entirely and

154fever is not overly common in children as a common symptom of covid so while temperature checks is one component of it we could have somebody that temperature checked monday and tuesday and as positive for covid and we wouldn't know until wednesday thursday friday or at all so it is important to note that while it's one measure the biggest piece for us is making sure that we're keeping those students six feet or further apart from one another so even in worst case scenarios where someone is positive if we've kept that social distancing and we enforce the face coverings and other things even of having a positive individual within a classroom setting is very very low likelihood of content crossed exposure i think we're talking about all the symptoms though not just the fever i look at

155it as especially at the elementary level i don't want to dwell too much on this because there's i mean there's there's core stuff beyond the bus ride um elementary students were were not even it was it maybe nine o'clock starting bus routes or so often i don't think it's too much to ask even me as a parent i wouldn't mind doing it having that certification done by 8 or 8 30 even before the buses come around it would be our intention that parents would complete it every day as it was presented initially the point with having them indicate whether or not they're going to do that is so that we aren't planning on someone doing it outright we know there's zero chance that whether they don't have the ability to do it because of their

156child care situation maybe an older sibling takes them there again this needs to be a legal parent or guardian or emancipated adult so it can't be an older sibling that certifies for a younger sibling if we meet the state guidelines okay um elementary on the the schedule i again i think there's a lot of great work trying to get as many students in the classroom and in the time frame that we're working on i i would like to have some clarification on the 20 minutes that is put down dr ellen for the flex movement read aloud and all the science is moved to a video at the end why the focus on that that 20-minute kind of flex time rather than trying to to get the science in person since they're there the committee did

157feel that three hours of straight instruction for students with hardcore instruction is a lot for elementary kids they are used to getting up and taking some type of movement break or having a live special because they're not able to do that we wanted to make sure that we offered some type of flex time so that could be and again this will be where a teacher assistant or another staff member comes in they're doing a movement break they're helping with the bathroom breaks it could be take some time to independently read or draw but just some down time before they jump right back into that hardcore instruction we did change the the science for the writing what we saw in remote for all by combining the ela so reading and writing and social studies there wasn't

158enough time for writing and so with our amplify science program we do have wonderful videos that our teachers have been creating but amplify has also been creating these and they they run very nicely so um and it's very engaging and hands-on for the kids so we felt that we needed to bring in that time for the direct writing instruction since we haven't had that then i'll just have one question for junior high one for high school if i may at the giant junior high level the scheduling the the 25 minute time frames go live similar to what they're getting now yeah 25 minutes i think it's 20 minutes so no it's 35 minutes 35 minutes it's reduced i mean we've got some results last time but in person it's 41 minutes now so overall the

159time is it's very comparable yeah to what they have now we're at 140 minutes um per week per period okay and then last one i don't see it so much in the junior high but i do see it at the high school level i'm familiar with the junior high when we talk about like the blocks like the honors ela is a too it's that's that that two hour time frame and at the junior high level are we seeing that in periods one and two would that be comparable to what is happening now would student that honors ela happen for period one and two or two and three so um at the junior high english language arts is a double period for every student so it could be periods one and two it could be three

160and four it could be two and three so because they're seeing their um every class period every day um and then within the two days they'll have it in person at least one time they're able to to still see that teacher whether it's remote or live and then so so to carry that over to the high school level the high school schedule does that happen uh because like this concave you said the the book and so to speak so would you would it be scheduled based on the students do they have those block times at the high school level as well and would that not happen on like your four five six seven where they're split up so it really depends on the course even right now some of our double period math courses algebra

161geometry and algebra ii are not necessarily consecutive periods so with this schedule you would still potentially not have consecutive periods but that's what they're currently used to some of your other courses like child development ap physics 2 they would potentially depending on where they fell if it's second third or fourth then it would maintain but they would still just like the junior high at least still maintain the instructional minutes so they might not be back-to-back periods but they would still have the same amount of instructional time if it was double blocked or single blocked but aren't the double blocks aren't they blocked that way to have that so i mean that that really bulk of instruction had that serious you know interaction so for like the child development they're double blocked because we typically house

162uh the preschool this year we decided not to bring the students in they're trying to participate in some virtual experiences so not necessarily having the block wouldn't hinder because the students are coming on site some of the potential lab classes yes it's a great experience to have that longer amount of time but for those classes then we will have to make adjustments um to the students experience and and thanks for all that effort especially working on with special ed department with stars isps skills all those kids getting them in and getting that interaction i know i've heard so much we all have heard from those parents that you know the students really needed that physical interaction so thank you for all the work that went in and getting those students in and i'm happy i

163hope to hear good news in october to see how that goes thanks i'll be i'll be really quick um thanks everybody a lot of work i know this isn't where we want to be but it's on the path of where we're going to end up right so that's the good part um one of the things that and this is not but i say that in all honesty this is not directed at you guys but it's just the reaction that some in the community may have and i certainly have when i look at that and thank you for explaining that when i look at that december 3rd return date that's where it almost feels like okay well the semester's pretty much over and we talked beforehand a little bit and i understand part of that reason

164is there's some concern about having or not having technology right we're still waiting on those chromebooks right i kind of feel like today we're you know we have students learning remotely some students are borrowing computers uh a majority i'm guessing of students are using their own devices or a family device and i i'm just asked i'm begging the question of you don't have to answer of saying look if we're able to be remote fully remote now i would think that we could start earlier than december 3rd and then work towards that one to one that we want to get to but it's not shouldn't be a preclusionary to prevent us from starting in december and only and the reason i say that is and this is i'm hearing this across the board from students who

165you would never hear it from they're they're frustrated in the lack of that one-on-one hey teacher i don't get this concept i know i read it i'm not understanding it and i think we're missing that and we all know that right and so i'm just saying hey and i know you've talked about it and stuff i'm just saying my feedback is is there any way we can come back a little bit earlier and then the last kind of comment or question is what's the next step i don't see an action item but it looks like there's activities that are going to happen starting tomorrow and that's so what's what's the next step so um we were all eager to start the instruction for our self-contained special ed students and we thought that we had had

166that message from the board that we would not have to approve the plan in its entirety in order for all of us at this table to feel comfortable moving forward tomorrow to share that information with our parents start that opting and choice process with all of them so we could get that going so that would be a next action step we've made some notes here about things like the whether we need to purchase additional cleaning equipment i think you're asking about is it possible to move up the high school date and maybe for the people that are tuning in at home i'll talk a little bit about that technology piece we have deployed it last week the number was at 7 319 devices out of our schools and into homes and that has left a

167lot of our schools with no devices and we have a lot of devices that will be coming and we certainly don't need to be at one to one to reopen but we do need to have some computers at the schools to be able to access some of our software like news ela our project lead the way even doing writing and those things while they're at school it's very helpful to have a chromebook and to have the internet and be able to search so it wouldn't be that we need to be at one to one but we need to have some of those devices back at school so we can look at that timeline then the next piece is really bringing it back for what questions that you have so that when we saw those deadlines

168there's a lot that would be put in motion the morning after the next board meeting to be able to make and put all this information out to our community and to start that choice process so that we can get our teachers and all of our classrooms ready to receive students again i was going to say we got we have a lot of notes and some questions from the board this evening um we need to know we need to know do would you want to speak to that yeah i was i was gonna get there i have a plan go ahead okay i have a plan it's gonna be great um and i have one more thing too that everyone forget we have a proposed changing calendar of parent-teacher conferences that we'll need to talk about

169because right now parent-teacher conferences would happen two days after we bring elementary students back and we'd like to push that off until right before thanksgiving and we would bring that as a discussion item at the next meeting too is there any way that parent-teacher conferences are going to be done remotely instead of in person yes okay yes they will be done remotely yes that's good to know and good to tell parents right questions sorry i haven't had a turn yet before we just before we go off on the new topic no i'm not going anywhere with that i just wanted to make sure that we made that client people that are watching okay so i have some questions and i i am also limiting myself because i have so many questions like everybody else um

170so i want to limit to a couple of things that i didn't hear already addressed and most of my questions actually were addressed so that's great um one we're talking about a big change for our staff as well in the way they're teaching again this year we're asking them for the third time to completely change the way they educate um so if if i had to ask just quite simply what what are the top three concerns you're expecting to hear from staff members teaching staff teaching assistants custodial staff and transportation staff the four different main categories what are the what are your main concerns you're anticipating and what would you how have you addressed them well i guess i'll i'll jump in um one of the things is all of the safety procedures how will

171we do these things who will do these things when are what is the proper protocol and we're you know have already have some slides and things that aren't in today's presentation that we'll be going to staff about what's a nurse question versus what's a teacher question versus what do we do if we if a student comes to the bus and they don't have a mask we're going to have a supply of all of those what-if scenarios that parents have multiplied by that by a lot and you'll begin to have the staff questions that would be there how to maintain student safety how to maintain their own safety we're going to have a lot of questions with that i don't know if it's high on all of those staff members list but certainly we're all wondering

172how our students and staff will be when they get back it's been a long time and lessons learned from some other districts about the amount of social emotionals kind of slow down we'll need to do even though we're coming back mid semester there will be a lot of this that will feel brand new that we'll have to connect again not only for relationships piece but just how to do school again some of our youngest students and some of our students in our self-contained special education classes we're going to have to spend a lot of time more than usual teaching routines and getting back into that and yet at the same time it's going to be new routines for our staff this is what hallway looks like this is what bathroom looks like and it doesn't

173look the same you know than it used to obviously there's going to be all of the tech where we just learned all of the different things of grid view and all that kind of stuff now we may not be using you know grid view and that as much as we live stream now there'll be different instructional strategies with the new we that we would be incorporating students that are still at home but are part of our junior high and high school classrooms and understandably that's going to be a learning curve again that we're going to have to provide a lot of support for our teachers to be able to do that part of what we'll be sharing with staff as early as tomorrow is kind of thinking about how to do that lesson plan so

174that you have students in live at one part of the day at the elementary and then you're redoing that same lesson but with tweaks because now you're doing it go live and and helping staff kind of know those differences and kind of think about this is the math concept i'm going to teach but i'm going to do it in person in the morning and i'm going to do it you know via computer in the afternoon um i may have already gone over my three or four i probably could go on what else have you safety social emotional technology you hit on lesson planning i would imagine that would be a main concern for teaching staff um and you've kind of addressed that with technology um thank you so you know lori i asked that same

175question when i was a meeting with the leadership of the ota oespa and the ocma those are the other three unions outside of the teachers union and i asked them the other day what their concerns were right now and i think basically they're they're uh they they really didn't have many concerns because i think the concerns were addressed through out of the conversation but um just getting back into just getting back into the routine you know of what of what we're talking about and which isn't really a concern it's just that it's going to take you know it's going to take a little time and that's why we're also phasing this in in a methodical way bringing you know kids back every few weeks and having small groups of kids in the in the classes

176in the schools and i think it will be done the way it should be um two more questions that's it for me and then my super idea um one teaching assistants we had a lot of teaching assistants shifting job assignments um will they be maintaining the classroom assignments that they had how will they be will they be remote all the time will they how will how will we be handling the reallocation of teaching staff do we need additional teaching staff like we need additional custodians just for and you're specifically talking about teaching us teaching assistants so uh they would be coming in to assist with the classrooms and also be assisting with those go live sessions like they do now because there would be a combination of both in person correct and then for some

177of that flex time that dr allen talked about with the elementary piece we do envision some of the teaching assistants covering some of that because teachers will need a little bit of a break after three hours of doing all of those to go get a drink and to go to the bathroom and probably one of the things that i know staff would also say is that sustainability piece this is going to be a lot of work for teachers so you know providing support will be important from the teaching assistants and having the wednesdays to be able to regroup and to do those things but our teaching assistants short answer are coming back um to support live instruction and going live they'll probably similar to what they're doing now but just in person correct a hybrid

178okay cool and then um my last question and maybe this is just odd of me to ask but it feels like it's got to be more than just a few times that we'll have classes not evenly split by alphabet where especially at the high school level with electives we have gone through the entire year although i'm not i'm not saying that we would be in a b schedule with this hybrid for the entire year but we have gone through and balanced and looked what that would look like and by the end of the semester we're in good shape and then we start over in january there are some nice things that happen in our calendar where winter break is we end monday tuesday and then we're off but in january when we come back we

179don't have monday and tuesday right away so that helps balance all of those out and then some of our sip days we would be taking as all go live days to sort of balance all of that and we went through in my office a great deal with all of the calendars uh and we are actually by the end of the semester uh only a difference by one day um by the a and the b places that's pretty impressive when you think about all these calendars we're looking at thank you guys that's awesome i don't my my mind is spinning thinking about how to start that process so thank you everyone sitting at the table um this has been just an incredible year i could imagine to be an administrator a teacher a custodian really anything

180to do with education i mean this is this is new there's that's not good that's not bad it's new and i know that there's a lot of anxiety for every single person involved um that happens with this kind of change and is going to happen again and i appreciate the patience um and the thoroughness with which you're adapting to these changes and which you're helping all of our other staff members adapt to the changes as well and i know that we all have that same intention that what we're trying to do is provide a pathway to a time when we can again look at as education as the most important factor in school so here's my great idea folks how about this i've heard some really interesting that i'm kind of interested in tweaks we've

181heard um from faith that we would like to you know they're kind of waiting to come back for answering our questions so i guess what i would say is are there as a board member and we'll just go straight from tony on over um adjustments that you would like to to see to what are presented not small little details although maybe it is if that's what but are there just one or two things that you're like you know what i feel like we really need more i feel like we need to address so let's just try to go around like that just to kind of provide that direction and to kind of give some focus again any other questions and we all have got them made a big list um please make sure that you

182email to administrators also i know that you're going to be compiling the same thing as you address this with parents and again there will be some live q as for for parents obviously there's going to be way copious amounts of communication with staff as well um and we're all going to be really nervous on that first day again so i'm pretty pretty curious to see um what we come up with the board so if tony if you want to start is a couple things that you'd like to either adjust or you want to see more attention i just want to make sure that special ed parents are heard that their needs are met as much as we can possibly do it because i know that that's a frustrating position to be in and i was

183very grateful for what you said and that's all i really want to see and i think you guys have heard me say that so i don't think we need to go into it more and as i said before my only question is is there any possible way to get the upper level kids back before december mine is more of a board question so as we go forward in this process and i have asked maureen this question and i have asked ken miller this question as we as we go forward and things will happen because they would they just will um i would like to see us as a board talk maybe at the next meeting about what we do about our subpool right i know that like i have offered up that we instead of

184having a bachelor's degree as a minimum even if it's just during coven let's reduce it to an associate's degree to kind of widen that pool because if that's a state requirement isn't it yeah well so as ken miller and in pandemic times there is the possibility so i mean we have to ask some questions but that's what i would yeah and i believe i remember starting that conversation so this sounds like it would be a good time to start to add some conversation in about that again i think that's a close maureen is that a closed session or an open session uh changing the requirements would be an open session okay conversation so i'd just like to see that added going forwards at one of these upcoming yeah i'll talk with uh ken and we'll

185get the information but uh just so the board knows we are we have an open you know application process for subs we are constantly adding subs on a weekly basis as you you lose them and you add them it's a revolving door with subs but it's always being done i just like i work in a district so i realized how small the pool is gonna get as soon as everybody goes back to school you're exactly right okay so ellie i heard you before talk about it would be worth finding out the cost of adding in a couple extra machines and staff for support is that something that you're still interested in seeing what the cost would be yeah okay so we would add the cost of additional custodial maintenance machines and staff and we were

186talking about going back to that initial 43 or some number because i i kind of agree no i know but i agree with ali a little bit only because in the conversations i've had you guys are great you will never ask for more you got this it's all good you're going to make it work no matter how hard it is but it tends toward sometimes we don't want to have things stretched so thin that it could create an issue so if you know don't be a hero don't i think that's what i'm hearing aly say is that hey this might be a little bit more in reality so if we could have what what it would be what it would be if we decided that we would like to you know move forward with that

187that would be great and i think i agree on the machines too i think i saw them selling one at walgreens the other day oh you gotta you gotta remember that you'll spray it down but then it leaves the film on it right you have to leave the film for a while but then you also have to clean it so yeah now are the teachers cleaning it or the janitor's cleaning it or the yeah let's take a look at that and i actually agree with that one um my ask would be same thing but for assistance in class just for some of the live streaming because i'm a little concerned again also about group c and having heard just a little bit from one perspective i can see where the chats in the live stream

188not carefully monitored constantly might get a little goofy depending on the class so i would ask could we see what what would really be needed to make sure that we could have something relatively equitable matt i would agree with brent if at all possible if uh 6 12 could be in sooner than the december 3rd prior maybe that week before thanksgiving that way if there are any issues anything that needs to be modified adjusted corrected that can kind of be made during that that thanksgiving kind of break time off and we can get those last few weeks of december before the break in really some nice robust in person learning other than that you know it's been said before as we've gone into remote learning and it's gonna have its hiccups it's gonna have its

189issues and we're gonna work through them the first couple of weeks of the school year we're pretty rough but routines were were made and adjustments were made and things are not absolutely perfect but they're going well so i'm confident that this will too when the time comes um well so um i'll echo the timeline statement related to six through 12. um i um and i admit i don't ha you know i just don't have a lot of personal experience with students in junior higher high school so i had even thought you know obviously i've heard can we get them in sooner you know but i you know so that or i do wonder is it more disruptive getting them in december 3rd right before knowing that we're going to have some lead time to get

190everybody used to the new normal is that more disruptive so i ain't even my head in my mind sooner or after that is clearly not going to be a popular opinion but i'm just throwing it out there i do wonder about that timeline i also um i also wonder about the rearranged class schedule um and i heard the reasoning and i thought oh that's really in terms of staggering you know and i thought that makes sense that's really interesting i do think some i'm i'm i do wonder about some of the other things related to the specific reasons people have requested an early late arrival early dismissal and how that also may impact even some of our teachers schedules who might have alternative maybe alternative schedules so those are just two things that were in

191my mind um because i think that this the rearranged periods is going to cause um a lot of um a lot of feelings and uproar you'd like to see what it would look like i'm just you know what i want the pro con would be we're just asking for like the list for the next one right i if that's if this is the best plan and you then this is the best best plan but um a consideration of um an alternative if it's something that's worth considering is something that i am interested in for what it's worth at west high we go one through eight and then eight through one and it works yeah uh yeah yes because of the double block thing the instructional time related to double black stuff early arrival or early

192dismissal so i'm sure that's something that you guys can answer for us for the next one yep and that was it heather it does it does work okay it's me so at west we go one through eight on a red day and then eight through one on a blue day and it yeah it's an adjustment but they get used to it really quickly so it's flip-flops like from yeah we we async the first four and we synchronous teach the last four and then it flips the whole thing flips over on the following day so it does takes getting used to but it's like anything and are are any of our administrators actually expecting um perfection day one from staff our students would you raise your hand if you are i mean well heather started too

193but i think she got peer pressure no i'm just teasing she's she's not expecting it either i'm joking i just want to say ally mentioned my second favorite uh education ease terms asynchronous and synchronous learning cohort those are my favorites um i don't i don't see anything significantly that would prevent me from saying that we should go forward with the what faith you were asking prior to a vote of approval going forward with the plan for our special ed and those classrooms that you wanted to take some action on tomorrow i don't see anything that would prevent me from wanting to go ahead and do that and as a parent of a high school to high school students i don't see i mean it's like finals week when it's all like crazy schedules too they

194just figure it out they're motivated they're high school kids they can figure it out to get to sleep in or leave early mine were actually like does this mean i get to leave early on the days where i have fourth period like i think yes it does so they'll be do you have a ride well well yes they do because one of them has a car so and i have the same lunch period which is a minor miracle so your ask is not much to adjust okay again last time we'll go around again because we had at the last meeting i think all been pretty clear about the request to start looking at this but let's just go around make sure we're good if she goes forward with special education before we vote on it

195anybody not want to do that um i don't see much in the way of that so i think as we'd said the last meeting we already were pretty much requesting that you start looking at that we obviously will have this as an action item at our next meeting pending questions and a little bit of this um and i'm sure that there will be more things that as you're communicating with parents and staff perhaps you might have already realized you'll need to tweak um so we'll need to get that update a little bit sooner so unless there are any other real big level i just want to have somebody explain what's going to happen in terms of the staff who need to be on remote versus the staff who can return in person all right um

196so i didn't mean if dr sparlin you wanted to jump in or okay um so we've been working on addressing that and ken miller has been going through and making phone calls to people about what accommodations and things would be needed we are going to allow for some of our staff that because of health concerns they'll still be able to teach you'll see a lot of the half day is all the go live anyway and then in the mornings at the junior high level when students would be coming in person the teacher would work with a guest teacher or those pieces to be able to still have continuity of instruction and have some of those maybe even go live into the computer help with while it was going class but also have a teacher that

197was there some of the things that you were talking about ali on how we would get some of the sub pieces then we would only need a portion of sub for that time if the teacher could teach from home the other afternoon and then junior high is in high school are the flip of that so you could use one sub to be able to cover in-person instruction for both a junior high slot and a high school slot so ken has been in the process of talking with all the staff that put in requests at the beginning of the year and has put that in place elementary would look a little differently than that because you need when you're talking about having a guest teacher or substitute it's only for one period or so in a

198junior high in high school at elementary level we would need to get a more of a permanent or long-term substitute to do some of those co-teaching pieces but again depending on the staff's needs that might only be for that small period of time that was in person instruction and the staff member would still be able to teach remotely and i just wanted to stress that the communication just like with the special ed parents for the staff needs to be really complete because it's my ongoing mission in life to get people to really return emails because as somebody before i was on the board that was part of the district that was a big frustration for me to not hear back from people so i hope that everybody's really taking that seriously because it cures a

199lot of problems before they grow i think that's probably for me too just to echo what ketone is saying going to be the piece that i think all of us here have been trying to and i've been seeing a lot of good communication and i also hope that um that continues because communication and just answering and some things you know can be answered in different ways but to do the best we can even as board members just to direct people to the appropriate resources to ensure that the best communication in the most timely fashion can happen would be really important i think you know something ken likes to say is i try to he tries to keep the human and human resources and that's you know the answer your question tony he's uh personally reaching

200out and having private you know one-on-one conversations with each of those people that you referenced and i know that's been greatly appreciated and it's been able to be he's been able to clarify you know what's that we said what the plan looks like and now that we have this is a different plan that people have said oh you know what if we can do you know what kind of accommodations can we work with you on and we make and he's making those happen so that's a that's a good thing all right anything further or shall we move to action items no okay action item 9.1 thank you everybody yeah thank you thank you very much um i'm sure you already have emails waiting for you so but go home don't check them go home and

201rest item 9.1 are there any questions any thoughts any anything before we ask for a motion can i have a motion i make a motion to approve board policies section 2 related to school board 2 colon two six zero two colon two six five section five under general personnel five colon one zero and five colon two zero five colon one zero zero section seven students seven colon tens seven colon twenty seven colon one eighty old and seven colon one eighty new and seven colon one eighty five second mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye mrs croner aye mr bauman aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye motion passes 7-0 item 9.2 i make a motion to approve the revised intergovernmental agreement with the kendall county food pantry as presented croner aye mr lightfoot

202aye mrs moyer aye mr bauman aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes 7-0 item 9.3 make a motion to approve the master tax-exempt lease purchase agreement dated october 1st between oswego community unit school district 308 and american capital financial services inc an addendum [Music] and to authorize a chief financial officer to execute all related documents second miss morgan aye mr lightfoot aye mrs toriel aye mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mrs corner aye motion passes seven zero item nine point four i make a motion to approve property schedule number one to the master tax exempt lease purchase agreement dated october first two 2020 between swego community unit school district 308 and american capital financial services inc to secure financing to lease and purchase 11 930 acer chromebooks

203with licenses and services and authorize the chief financial officer to execute all related documents second mrs thorial i miss morgan aye mr lightfoot aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye mrs swanson aye mr bowman aye motion passes seven zero item nine point five the budget yep uh just quickly obviously we all understand the situation that we're in here being asked to approve a budget with a huge deficit i normally will make a comment about how i don't vote for unbalanced budgets i will tonight because and it was pointed out earlier but i hope we all understand this by the time we got the budget and knew what was going on there is no time to make changes um we will develop a plan and it's not going to be fun but let's go ahead and

204adopt a budget i make a motion to adopt the fy21 budget for oswego community unit school district 308 as presented second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye ms morgan hi mr mrs swanson aye mrs croner aye mrs doyle aye mr bauman aye motion passes seven zero item nine point six i will make a comment about the levy um i talked to a lot of people you know we've all been here together before in this uh we understand the dire situation we're in um i understand that the levy is going to pass out of principle i'll be voting no and the reason is we have approximately 10 percent unemployment we're the highest taxed county in the state of illinois and raising taxes isn't the answer i understand those in the community that feel that we have

205to do this because the referendum didn't pass and and i respectfully disagree i have in the past and i will continue to point out areas that we may have to cut in that will help us balance the budget thanks my counter comment is that i think realistically the money has to come from somewhere and if it doesn't come from taxes and it doesn't come from a referendum then we need to think about where we magically think we're going to get the money and if we want to have a school district that meets the high standards of this community somebody in this community needs to come up with some money in a different way that comes in in huge quantities or we need to be more active in the state of illinois to make the state

206of illinois give us the money that we should have for education because those are the choices i see and i really think that it is a shame that we have to vote for something like this but we are being put in a situation by those other factors that make us so that's my comment i don't i don't disagree with what you're saying about having to talk to the state but i also have neighbors and family and my own tax bill and i won't vote to raise taxes i think we should make cuts and it's not going to be pretty and people are going to be pissed but i can't vote for it anybody else i make a motion to adopt the 2020 tax levy as presented second mrs croner hi mrs swanson no mrs doyle

207aye mrs moyer aye mr bauman aye mr lightfoot no miss morgan aye motion passes five two nine seven i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot no miss morgan aye mrs swanson hi mrs croner aye mrs doyle aye mr bauman aye motion passes six one can i have a motion to adjourn i make a motion to adjourn all in favor aye we're adjourned thank you everybody this was