001okay call this meeting to order roll call please brown is here mrs galbraith dr hall here mr sawalis here mrs walters vice president rupert here president albrecht here please rise for the pledge 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 and ms roop would you please read the mission statement sure it's to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future great uh terry any public comment okay so we'll move on to administrative updates and turn it over to dr cara great thank you board members i just have two updates i think today um the first update is really to talk about uh remote days student attendance
002staff attendance and then the other one was to provide you an update on where we're at with the dome and some of the construction projects that we've started so i will give you just a brief update on attendance as you know when we came back from winter break there was just a lot of conversations about what's going on with the omicron surge and so forth and there was just a lot of you know concern about that as you know the illinois governor along with cdc idph and the illinois school board have made in-person learning a priority they have stated that numerous newsletters as well as publicly and again the idea is you know we need to get our students back to school in person whenever possible because of some of the damage that happened you
003know with many of the students with remote the last year in doing so the state has really provided very limited options to close for remote now this is different than last year last year we were given the autonomy to close if we saw fit based on the positivity rates in the community that is no longer the case is a different game this year so we are told that we need to be in person regardless of the positivity rates out there in a community but really need to offer instruction in-person instruction as much as possible districts are given five e-learning days those e-learning days can be done for district-wide emergencies or for inclement weather those are basically what we have to use from now there are other days that we can take such as an adaptive
004pause and some districts are taking that adaptive pause now in order to do an adaptive pause district-wide it must be pre-approved by the regional office of education and in consultation with the idph so there's a little bit higher bar in order to get those district-wide times and again those are primarily used if there's not enough staff to support a district you can't have classrooms with no no staff so that's predominantly why many of the districts had moved to that criteria once five e-learning days are exhausted then a district may consider using non-attendance days so you can do a remote day but then you're gonna have to add on to the end of the year the school calendar and many families and many staff members are not particularly interested in going that option so usually we
005want to make sure that we're using that sparingly and again it's to cover shortages of staff currently the district does monitor staffing every single day at five o'clock we are beginning to look at our attendance for the next day each building principal contacts our um meal to run numbers to see if they can open and then those in buildings can make an individual call if they can run their building or not we can close a one building for an adaptive pause as long as it's not the whole district for district wide and that's what we've done you've seen that we've done that with the middle school last week and we did with elc for two days and that's what we did now having said that you know we are really stretched on these days and
006we are just in some cases just keeping classrooms open for our regular instruction which includes interventions and sometimes we are not running them at our full capacity staff is extremely stretched they are covering for one another they are covering for classes and recesses and lunches and many of the staff members are going without breaks sometimes so it has been difficult to say the least and we want to certainly acknowledge that our staff's been working very very hard and they've continued to work very hard and they are definitely being pulled but we have been able to manage keeping our buildings open for the most part and we have been able to cover last week we were able to cover most of our buildings as i indicated overall as for the district we had 81 percent of
007our staff members total that were able to come to work and that you know was a pretty decent statistic considering what's going on 83 percent of those were teachers so for the most part in many of the schools they were able to keep things up and running so much of it depends on individual buildings example who's out when they're out and so it's not necessarily a number district-wide it's every building has to make that decision for themselves now out of this number we have about four percent four percent of our staff that had the confirmed case of coped and one percent of that was due to just exposure so they were excluded while they were getting tested this data is based on staff self-reporting of copin because we do have to have them report to
008nurse kate who does keep the data for this and there's also this conversation with the idph now other absences of staff is undetermined why they're out based on a variety of other reasons and sometimes it could be taking care of their students it could be we've told staff if you're not feeling good don't come to work you know if you've got a sore throat or cough people are very sensitive about this so you know staff is you know taking taking that seriously students last week we had 73 percent of our students were here last week that was that first week this week it tends to be trending a little bit higher we're averaging about 79 percent of our students are back this week out of this number we have an average of two percent of
009our students have confirmed uh reported cases of covid and 10 are out due to just exposure this is the amount of students who are able to receive live streaming so according to the state they can have remote live streaming if they're out on confirmed remote because of covid so we have those students if somebody is just out for other reasons then they just have to make up their work being absent out of the 21 percent of our students that are absent 12 percent were confirmed or exposed receiving live streaming the other is about 9 percent so 9 of our students had undocumented reasons and so they're just receiving generally homework afterwards and so forth um you know we are monitoring our community exposure rates right now and it varies certainly communities are up we have
010some communities as low as 11 percent and then one of our communities is up to 25 and that was as of today and those are seven day roles so you know we definitely are seeing that um and as we're looking at our district uh statistics you know our district level statistics seem to be lower than the community and so this kind of reconfirms you know idph as well as others saying you know try to keep your schools open because they are a better place for our students testing for staff and students we're looking into right now agencies that can help support our staff either vaccinated or unvaccinated staff that would like access to testing as you know test kits are very hard to come by now there was a big run on those for a
011variety of reasons and it was difficult for many staff members whether they've been vaccinated or not to get access to testing so we are looking at some agencies around to help support us um and we are we are having some luck with that can i see a question yes so back in september i thought we talked about shield coming here yes did they can they not come here well we were supposed to be put on a list and we were on that list um and they originally told us that they would provide all the staffing we have a very limited staff when we talked to them a little bit later in the fall they no longer could provide their staff they said you had to staff it yourself and those test results needed to be
012run driven daily you know or driven into um you know the facility to be tested so it was going to be very burdensome and at that time and i think it was even in september we were not able to get their services so we started our staff just finding their test results outside and that seemed to work and people were able to get their testing and so it really wasn't an issue i think until probably after january when test kits became unavailable that's when the staff were having a difficult time getting their appointments and so forth so then we went to see what else we could do to try to support the staff so we are looking at that um we do have our and we are looking at it as whereas we do have
013outbreak testing available if we need it in the district we have not had any outbreaks statistically relevant for us to do outbreak testing but we do have it available if that was needed we do keep our co covid dashboard on our website it is accurate take a look i know people want to see how things are running it is accurate we update that daily um so that is available for others so that's kind of the high level view of where we're at and kind of maintaining and moving forward you know we look at this every single day and we make decisions based on the data that we received and priorities can we run classrooms enhancement coverage so now we we have five days right how many of those do we use in august for the
014ac we didn't we used we did not we used um emergency days um for closures and we only had two of those so we used those so we have three left of those well so let me back up a little bit trust me it's it's very confusing to figure out how you can use various days and that's the reason why i'm bringing it up so that anybody's watching understands that how do we close because of ac and then again the com you know the concern is why are other districts and again there's not as many as we think going remote but there are a few but again for how long and how does that how does that happen because that's the question is you know and then you said we have one we can close
015one building but that doesn't does that depend on how many buildings we have see um so going back to beginning of the year we were closing just a building or two at a time for the heat as you recall again it's not district wide and we were able to close and we use those as two uh heat heat days we still have our five left untouched five e-learning days yeah okay and that's supposed to cover if we have inclement weather if i have a snowstorm coming in i gotta use one of those if i can't staff district-wide i'm gonna take one of those by doing an individual um school closure as long as the whole district's not closed that doesn't count against us um so that kind of um maybe separates some of this a
016little bit okay to use an adaptive pause for a single building do you have to go to the idph or to the we do consult with them yes okay in the regional uh school board um we do have are always well we do both yeah okay and like i said individual is a lot easier to do than a whole district yeah okay and so that's that's the criteria we've used is looking at individually as we go through so in theory if things get a little worse and we decided hey that's what we're going to do we did remote it wouldn't be for the rest of the year it would be for a limited time if it was just safe for two weeks five of them would be covered underneath that the other five would probably
017have to be made up at the end of the year it could be there's a possibility there is a possibility yes just so like i said there's just a lot of information out there that people don't know what what the reality is what is our reality our reality is can how many days can we use what availability do we have if we close the school does that you know how does that hurt the parents and the staff and the students so yeah and like i said every individual district has different things that they're going through a majority of it has been staffing from the conversation they've had with many other superintendents it's about staffing they don't have enough to support their classrooms so they've had to take you know go that route we have been
018able to um to maintain as best as possible okay yes busting fits into this and this probably is your little ariel over there mr sermon i have had people contact me not angry i mean we expect the buses to be late now we know that they're going what what we're going through but some districts with their bus company i'm not quite sure who's making the call but if they have a bus that's running 40 minutes late and it's a 10 degree day they're calling the people on the route they're sending out a robocop your bus route 362 is running 40 minutes late if it was due at 8 10 you won't see it before 850 or whatever so that the little ones aren't standing out on the corners i'm just wondering if there's any way
019we i mean when do we talk about buses again is that something that we i mean i think that the parents right now they they understand that we have no control and and then they're not screaming and yelling they're just telling me what other districts have come up with or what the bus companies have come up with so i'm just wondering if somewhere in a conversation that could take place that you know if you have a 45 minute delay and it's 10 degrees outside i think it would be very nice if we could call that bus route and say your bus is going to be 40 minutes late or whatever sure one of the things that um so i'll tell you what we have to do in order to do that we would have to
020set up every single route in school messenger in order to do that the bus company itself does not have the the school messenger like we do that that will throw out the robocalls and then so again what you have to do is go into school message or set up every single route in there there's a lot of them you know and that and then push the button at the same time you know you have to make sure you keep that up and keep those routes you know uh current because those change all the time too is it possible yes it's possible and then so it can be done uh i think it's something that you know i don't know if we can get that done now but it's something we can look at for the
021future though too yep do we have any data on what our experience with our buses are are we consistently running late how somebody hasn't looked at that right now i can i can easily ask and get that get that data to find out they're right or are they doubling up routes or how their drivers are i haven't i know you know i'll tell you this i know we're covered you know and that but i know and in fact i just talked to the first student uh the other day you know they're they're struggling too with drivers as we all know you know and all that stuff so i can get that data just to kind of see where we're at with everything yes and i did make one other suggestion to a couple people you
022know there are parents who drive their kids to the corner i mean even like i only live a half a block off but when it's cold and you've got a six year old that's a long way out there so they're starting to make like little carpools with their neighbors so that maybe this week the smiths drive the six kids and sit at the corner because some of those people have to go on to work and now they're late for their job sure so um i've just been kind of watching what people are saying on social media and trying to pass some of those little tidbits on sure and i just thought there's some way that maybe on some of these days when when they're really running late and nobody's complaining about 10 minutes or 15
023minutes they're complaining when they're 40 45 minutes and i guess that's happened a couple of times in some of the routes and the bus driver will say i'm sorry you know i had to pick up a different route first and i don't know that when i come to work yeah you know um from what i understand we haven't been horrible horrible but our times yeah i don't think we have a thought that people are growing out there for the future sure there are also things quite honestly this is something i can't do that now but i'll do that for next year where parents can have access to where the bus is also on an app on your phone so versatran interest is a system we have has that capability it's got like a locator or
024gps locator on there so it could tell you where the where the bus is and when it's coming and all that so that may even help i like that actually a lot better than trying to put the rosters into school messenger because they change constantly i think that's a good idea i don't know that was available it is it is that's something that we can look at turning it around guys for the future right right yeah so that's something we can look at for sure thank you i don't know if that's my advice for that but nope it's in here so last question i have on the remote thing if we did if we had to go to that that i seen your fyi or i think it was lyle's fyi um of the two
025uh unions the question i have is do we have a plan or a procedure that if we do call it who who comes in who doesn't come in like what what happened so if the students are coming in the remote are the teachers coming in here and teaching or are they teaching from home my thing is if something happens so we can communicate that out so that everybody is aware and prepared for that and then the second thing is then how many layers of that is affected meaning if there's nobody in the buildings is you know our is is i know you're in charge of his maintenance coming in and still maintenancing and his cassois still cleaning because we want to keep it clean like just so that the employees understand they know before it
026happens i think maybe something should be at least talked about so that if we if that comes up then everybody kind of knows what's going on because i think part of the other issue everybody has is there's just everybody's kind of unsure of what what to do you know but if we do have to go down that road at least we're prepared yes we do have a plan and jontel i don't know if you want to maybe address that we have a plan that's been outlined already [Music] thanks don so um as we prepare to close each building receives instructions and it really depends on what type of closure we're going to have again if it's not safe for staff to travel we're not going to have staff on site if it's safe to have
027staff in and kids out it really just depends on what type of closure we have to have and as soon as doctor cara meets with her team and we decide that notice goes out right away of who's on site and who's off site and then a lot of times um depending on the employee group we will say check with your supervisor so all the directors know where their teams are supposed to be okay so different levels whatever it is whether it's weather or remote because of covert or whatever it is yeah just as long as everybody knows yeah and on the operational side then whenever you know dr kara and the team make that decision then once i know about it or if i'm involved in that decision then again like chantal says i will
028call my directors you know whether it's pam or gloria or keith and all that stuff to let them know and say okay you know let's just say let's just say maintenance a custodian you guys are still coming in you know and but we're not going to be in school at that building maybe so it's it's a constant flow of communication that goes on and like you know as gentile said i mean every every situation is going to be different because sometimes we may close this building but we make those inactive holes that one so it's kind of all over the place so that but we do have a plan we know uh it's just we continue that communication all right good that made me think of one question when i was watching cps this week
029that's a drama into itself um they kept all their schools open with somebody in them because they had to provide breakfast and lunch how do we do that so um all all building administrators have part of their team show up so that could be principal assistant principal other administrators usually someone from uh pam's team is there um depending on that building pam decides where we're going to distribute food from from for the district so again it it really just depends but we always have a building administrator there in case someone pulls up with the child we would not have that child left out on school property without an adult being there so last week i'll give an example so last week we were having discussions about whether we should close down the district for a
030couple days and then as part of that preliminary discussion i met with our directors to say okay if we shut down what are you going to do and one of the discussions was with pam on where are you going to distribute food because we're going to continue to do that do you have the capabilities bringing people in so we we put the plan all together already now we decided not to shut down any of the district but again the plan's in place so we know so if that's gonna if that's gonna happen we will publicize during this that you can pick up meals here all of that okay my only concern there is what if they can't get to that location like cps kept all their schools open because so many kids walk to school
031so many i mean chicago yeah what would we do out here i mean like we had a lot of people when we were closed before that pam's people were driving around then we got the buses i mean if we're going to close for a couple of days this is very important to many families that we have that food to us sure it just depends on the length that we're closed i mean for clothes for a day i don't have the resources nor do we have the logistics plan and start getting buses going out to distribute food and all that but for close for a few days we will we will of course look at that and see if there is a possibility of doing that because again we can do that with our transportation squad
032too yeah okay thank you i just had one question i believe i asked it before regarding clarity on remote learning versus e-learning are we using those two terms synonymously or are they so these you know distinctive from one another they they are different so e-learning you have five e-learning days and those are to be used in case of an emergency or however we need to that's it we get five that's all remote learning is where we are able to still give students learning from home so virtual learning whatever that looks like and for us right now that is students working on their computers at home if they're quarantined or excluded from school and they are streaming into the classroom and working with the teacher and she's working with students who are on site okay so
033that can that remote learning could consist of some work packages or things of that nature paper paper some type of paper trail or is there interaction with the teacher themselves with the students that's on the other side no right now we're providing streaming so what our students get to like our families at home that are watching and staff that are watching us now that's streaming so there's not that same interaction in cases where a classroom has had to close then those teachers who have been feeling well and we've had to close a classroom down then they then it looks like it did last year where that teacher may be on a google meet and meeting and interacting with students because that entire classroom is closed down versus five kids at home and 20 kids in
034the classroom okay so is it fair to say over this past last week we did close emmy uh the middle school right the middle school closed for one day last monday for an adaptive pause so those students received um they would have received google classroom assignments from their teachers they would have had google meets because the entire school was closed so they kept their same schedule and met with their teachers and now e-learning only comes in play when the entire district is closed down we can use an e-learning day when the entire district closes down not for a specific school it's different because an e-learning plan is just it it depends on how we have to code it in our school calendar so that is a student attendance day and it's just the way that
035kids receive their instruction but if we do the entire district we're likely to use an e-learning day but we could still use an adaptive pause day okay so of the is it five e-learning days how many do we have left now we have five we've not used them and we have not okay it is complicated so so just just to kind of clarify summarize don't confuse e-learning days with the method of instruction e-learning days is really kind of the equivalence of what we used to call snow days you know that's kind of the best way that's what the intent was whatever days was snow days right so but if an entire class or entire school building is is closed down for a reason they're going to be interactive on their screen with the teacher just
036as we did last year but if you have a class that's still in session but a student has to stay home because he's quarantined they're just going to it's just going to be streamed to them it's not going to be and that's correct and that's defined as remote or is it that's defined as streaming so we will give you we will put out all the definitions we will put out all the definitions all right okay thank you all right any other questions for all right mr cerma would you uh provide the board an update please on the dome and any construction projects that you're working on please sure i i sure could do that good evening dr cara and the public um let me first start with the dome the first thing i do want
037to say about that project is i i do have to give a big shout out to carl engl i don't know if you know that name um but carl is a gentleman that i met i think about two or three years ago when we were having discussions about where the oil tank was at the sixth grade center and carl and his family delivered the oil to that building along to other buildings in the district and when keith and i met him in front of the sixth grade center he just pointed to the ground and said it's right there and um i will tell you without that we would not have found this because we even had during the project when they were trying to locate this uh right before break the ball think sonar couldn't
038even find the tank down in the ground uh but carl said it was there in fact i got him back on the phone while they were there uh i called me for his number and got him on the phone and i you know i said carl i said do you think they ever took it out and he's like nope it's there you know that so we did find it it has been removed um we are waiting for some soil samples to come back because we're epa wants us to do that to see if we need to do any other excavation so they all take us out but again i do want to pass on my thanks and the district thanks to carl uh for his work and helping us find the tank because quite honestly
039it saved us a lot of money so i told carl i uh i owe him a few things uh i won't go into that but uh so uh i will i will make sure that uh the district's thanks just passed along to him though yeah so please do that i think dr cara is got something up her sleeve maybe too i kind of talked to dr cara so sure because we can't all partake in here i understand i understand um so anyway as everybody can see the uh the structure of the dome is bound right now they are working their way into the sixth grade center uh they have started working on the maintenance building i believe that is almost all down also uh at the dome itself the structure is down uh they are
040working on the lower level and digging all of that out getting all that concrete out and everything like that so once that is done they have already taken i i saw this taking a lot of the rubbish out already in that so they're separating that out and that's that's moving forward in that it's probably going to take them um probably two or three months to get the sixth grade center down just because of weather and all kinds of things and the size of that facility and everything so but that project is is moving forward in that um the other oh uh i will touch on because i know some things came up about this and i want to address this uh you know straightforward and that is something about people being allowed access into that
041property and i want to assure the board and everyone else that in no way shape or form have we given access to anyone to get into that property nor has the contractor when i heard about it i contacted the contractor right away sorted keith and they said the same thing their policy forbids that so somehow uh people got in there during operation and there's ways of doing that i'm not going to go into that but there's easy ways of doing that with all the fencing that we have around but as of now uh they are under strict orders to keep everything closed down if there's a problem to call one of us or call the police right away so i just i'll just let the board know that and let the public know that also
042okay um the other thing another project that we're working on again is the air conditioning here at elc in talala i will tell you that today was the bid opening for that um and the bids were very favorable so that's good news i won't tell you how much yet because we're still going through our due diligence but what i will say is that on the agenda for the meeting on tuesday next tuesday will be an action item to award the contract so we can start moving forward on that and the contractors can start ordering supplies and all that as quickly as possible especially with shortages going out and want to make sure that that is moving forward on the other three buildings which is uh crete balmoral and csk we're in the final stages of
043getting the bid documents done so that is moving forward also uh we just met today on that with technology to talk about some tech things and everything so uh that is moving forward also hoping to have those bid docs on the street probably by the end of the month the cooling rooms uh are moving forward also most electrical work has been done and completed in the buildings that we're putting the cooling rooms in they will come in over break and put the air conditioners in then and then that project will be done and operational by the end of spring break they already have the air conditioners they're being held with talisman builder who's a contractor they have them uh but we thought it was just best to do that over break instead of interrupting any
044instructional time or doing that at night so so that's what they're doing and then i think lastly overall from a financial standpoint i was on a ratings call the other day and today and good news for the district is our rate our rate uh or our rating actually has stayed the same but our outlook has improved to stable from negative which is a positive for us and that which means in the long run that you get a little bit better rate when you go out and sell bonds and so that is because of a lot of the work that all of us have done in the financials area along with reports and fund balances and all of that stuff a lot of those things so i just got about an hour ago the new ratings
045report uh i was on the call with that today when they told me about it so i just wanted to announce that to the board and let them know that's some good news for the district also okay is that something you share with the board yes i will i'll probably put this in the fyi as a doc okay uh that you'll have access to the same thing mr albrecht i've done uh i just put in the latest observation report from the dome and sixth grade center i just put that in the fyi so i'll attach that into the fyi so you have that you guys can review it then too okay so that is good i don't know if anyone had any questions or anything about any of those projects no well just one question
046when you put the request for bids or however you put it out in the newspapers and things like that seeking contractors yes it's part of the bid specs does it come with seeking minority contractors as part of the prime being a subcontractor or the prime contractor we we do have language in there that we are want to encourage the use of minority contractors by either the main contractor or subcontractors we also want to see from them as part of the process what process they're kind of using to try and recruit minority uh contractors uh for the project too so that's all in the bid documents yes okay i just would like to know and it's up to the board is the board prerogative if they any other member would like to know i would like
047to know any progress on that sure you know say yes you know we got females we got minority contractors uh subcontractors like these primes and i'd like to get a running tab on that or something sure that's not a problem at all i can take care of that all right thank you you said that it's i'm just trying to get understanding you said that it's put in the language it's put in the language of the bid documents so within the bid documents there is a clause and i can get that clause actually what it is that we put in there uh encouraging the use of minority and female businesses we don't have like an act of like push for it no we don't have like so much of a percentage has to be for minority
048or female owned businesses we don't have that okay we have a language in there that and i can get you the language dr hall i don't know exactly but it's something like that but but yes we don't have actual percentages in there got it yes no but there's probably something on there that says that are you a wbe or mbe is what they're you know a lot of the government jobs of this nature that's what they're gonna they're gonna fill it out if they are right yes and then we do ask that uh you know whoever wins the contract when they when they go out and get sub-contractors they try and look at either local uh minority or women-owned uh firms in order to do some of the work so i can find out what
049the progress is on that and even even veterans too okay sure okay i can do that yep okay uh any other questions on any of those projects okay let me go right into business sure okay so i i have given everybody uh and i'll let the public know this so on the agenda there are two resolutions that are out there that uh we were going to discuss i put a placeholder on there because bond council was still developing those resolutions so for the public you'll see documents new board reports out there that give the actual new resolutions and i've given the board a hard copy of that this evening so you have in front of you two documents one is and i'll go to the first one the first one says resolution providing issue not
050to exceed 45.5 million so that one is for the 45 and a half plus the seven and a half the 45 and a half um fund refund funding bonds i could get my terms right funding bonds to pay off the debt of the debt certificates and then the seven and a half of working cash bonds and that so that's the one resolution so that's one resolution that you have now the question is and mr brown asked me this question i thought we did this already and then well what you actually did was you did your attempt to do this and that intent was done back if you remember that intent was done back in november and then you had a petition period and this now is what's called the parameters resolution so this is what
051is we're going out for because the parameters of the bonds could have changed based on the petition period if there was a successful petition it could have changed the amount of bonds that were going to be sold so that's why this is important this is the parameters resolution so the parent this first one is for 45.5 million of general obligation school bonds which are uh funding bonds that will pay off the claims against the district so it's paying off the debt that's certificates and it's for the seven and a half million in working cash bonds all right the other thing i'm going to point out is you'll see there that it's authorizing sales of the bonds to huntington's securities and blaylock and van and blaylock and van is a minority partner so it's something that
052i asked our financial advisor pma to to work with to get a minority firm involved in this transaction and so they are okay the second one that you have then is a resolution for 35 million dollars in general obligation refunding bonds and what that is is basically we're refinancing our current debt in order to keep the annual debt payment at 12 million dollars and then decrease it down to 10 million so in essence we're refunding it or refinancing our current debt and just pushing those bonds out a little bit farther so that we can have a decrease in the debt payment so it's not taking on any new debt or anything like that it's just refinancing the current debt so those are the two resolutions that you will have that come next week to vote
053on and ken these are all the end result of all the paperwork that we were given and that were shown on the screens yes i'm not sure if it was last month the month before i'm sorry i can't remember exactly when but this was when i believe bob was here and and things like that so that these are really just the culmination of that now yes they are yes okay thank you okay that's it did um we you submitted the um that application for property tax relief yes that has already been submitted to the state you know when we were here we should here by the end of this month okay and that so as soon as i know you said we're right on the cusp of yeah we're right we're number 40 and i
054and i think uh if i total up ahead of me uh uh probably about 37 will probably get it above us you know if everybody applies for it so that's what i just have to wait and see okay you know we'll see but uh should be by the end of this month you should know okay okay any other questions for ken okay any old business i have one item okay um and this is board related as we all know we got tons of emails lately addressed to the board and if i recall correctly we had a discussion maybe five or six months ago about handling emails sent to the entire board because everyone or multiple people were answering them and they were giving different answers or versions of answers so i thought that we had
055come to a conclusion that we we as board members were oh it was okay for us to just acknowledge the receive and let them know that someone would get back to him but i'm not sure if i'm unclear on that or we didn't come to that decision but through all this all these emails we were getting i was told by people that they were getting multitudes of answers and many of them didn't match up so i wanted to address the fact again that when people send an email to the entire school board are we all supposed to be out there giving our answer are we supposed to thank them and you are going to answer them or i think we need a system because it seems to be confusing to the person getting the answers
056and then it's confusing to me because i'm trying to figure out exactly what's taking place so i understand why people are answering you don't want to leave it hanging out there um but i just want to bring that up and see if we can if i misunderstood or if we need to come to conclusion or no one really cares because i care well i'm happy to respond and then um i think i've been doing that and you know i'll either answer directly most of the time i'm you know giving them you know thank you for your your email you know the board values your input and then i'm handing it off to dr cara for an answer um and i mean my only i think that's probably the best way to do it but um
057i think what i've said in the past if you have a personal relationship with the person emailing or they're in your community in your sub district i don't have a problem with you saying you know you know responding to that individual so okay what i i would like to see though because people are confused and some lady said to me well sometimes i get four answers sometimes i get one i think that if you're going to answer and i have no issue with that at all but i think that maybe somehow you state in that email um on behalf of the board of responding as the president or something to let them know that you're responding on behalf of them okay i can do that um some people take it that nobody cares you know
058i got one one answer and then others say well i got four answers but they were variations they didn't all say the same so i guess what i'm just trying to look for is that we're all doing the same thing and i just said thank you for reaching out to the board you know and i haven't really done that lately because you are doing it um but that's what i used to do is say thank you for taking the time to reach out to the board you'll be hearing from someone you know regarding the matter and just leave it at that but i'm not really sure how we want to address this because i know there have been some volatile times and i think we're all work no one is not giving the right answer
059but mr brown may give this path that he thinks they want and mrs root may give this path and so they're not understanding why they get different answers from different board members i guess is what it comes down to so i i don't know if we want to address it if we just want to leave it be and i'll open up to the board i mean i don't like the idea that you answer them and just say on behalf of the board whatever or something to let them know that it's really response yeah the difficult thing is you know um kind of doing that in context of the open meetings act not cop you know kind of starting a what i what i did on a couple of them was i sent a response and
060then i sent took that response and sent it back to all of you right so that you know i've responded so you could be cc couldn't you that's what the village does i was told that the mayor answers and he bcc's his trustees so they know it's been answered and what he's told them could we check with bill i think bc is the same thing what do you mean it's the same thing it's cece there's no difference they don't know that you've sent it out that's not the point but that's that still doesn't address open meetings according okay is it different because that's what i was told the village does is that the mayor answers any general email and they he bcc's the trustee so they know it's been answered and what do you say
061i don't i don't see there'd be a problem with the cc as long as you're not replying at all i think you're ready for this because we said we do that all the time we send you information right right and you all see it but you don't respond the responding is the breaking of the online right right okay i'll try that i mean just i don't know how everybody feels about it but and i know no one is doing anything intentionally i just think that you know when i read email i may take it one way and i give an answer and that's someone else is taking it another way so and and it probably won't come up again because hopefully we not have issues like we have had in the last few months but
062just trying to nip it in the bud yep i don't know how anybody else feels i mean china i do what nelson said i i answer if i do have a relationship or i know there was one time somebody mentioned something a board member said didn't say the name but i knew it was me and i took that opportunity to answer since it was me and i knew what my intent was but if it's a general thing that i know that nelson or actually cara is going to take care of then i usually i usually don't yeah i believe that we we don't need a constituent out there hanging dry we need to we need to respond if that constituents send an email to an entire board including the superintendent you know i'll look and
063see way to wait a little while day or whatever see if that person has been responding to the superintendent usually pretty good and i'm seeing nelson chiming a couple of times so i don't respond with non-factual stuff if i respond i better know that i have some facts okay and and no i'm just saying that's that's for me yeah right but i tried i try not to you know delve in until disseminating information like that on on a big mac the two to constituents out there or group so i leave that to our email is tough because you right i leave that to our superintendent i think you can think you're very clear and the resp the recipient is going to read it a totally totally different way absolutely so but yeah one thing is
064again i i i you know i so i put myself in their shoes if i'm asking for information i'm trying to get something and nobody's getting back to me in three four five days you know i see that have been a problem so i would hope in some fashion that the leadership get back to the constituents and you know we was we was getting fired from all angles last week a lot of emails was going on and the superintendent was was responding i don't want to put everything on nelson to have to respond to the board he is our spokesperson for various things and certain things but i don't think he needs to respond on our behalf every time issue come up you know if it was pr related yeah but i i don't know
065but i i'm definitely the superintendent should chime in okay so when i sent an email to the school board do you think if it's a school board the school board slash superintendent okay but if you look at them most of them are coming to us because i forward them to cara i've done that since day one and that's many times she doesn't get them they're literally just addressed to the school board yeah you know if it's just so that she knows that there's an issue they're claiming in a school or whatever it is i think nelson and the superintendent should have some dialogue on that and how to respond either one of them should respond but it shouldn't be just a blanket statement for nelson to respond if if someone send usually i could abort
066i'm carol why don't you deal with this and then occasionally she'll push back i really think this should come be better but i'll tell you i'll keep our eyes if a couple days uh no respond and they keep chiming in you know i might send something to you guys or whatever and just say please respond or oh i'm sorry you haven't got to respond and i'll get it to the right person nelson i'll say did you respond to this because sometimes we don't know i'll try using the i'll try using the bcc so at least you know so just don't reply all can we get clarity on the bcc please i just would rather be safe than not if we can somehow get clarity on that attorney clarity yes yeah the use of that i'll
067throw that in for this week then okay it only cost us about what a thousand dollars for them to answer that question that's that's not the phone for every 15 minute email i see on my bill yeah we didn't have them here tonight so we've we've already racked up some savings this year okay um any other old business or i'm sorry or okay is it possible to call um illinois association of school boards a nice thing they're cheaper yeah see yeah do they get legal advice they usually can give standard kinds of things like this these are standard questions for oman things like that okay any other old business going once going twice new business mr robert can i just mention one thing i just have to ask you a question please um and i
068forgot this on the 25th of january we are going to be pricing the bonds and so i need to see if you're going to be available that evening to sign a document if uh everything goes well we can do it docusign what day of the week i mean it is a tuesday yeah okay all right i just want to make sure and then you know i'll i can i can communicate with you okay so thank you uh we have no need for a closed session tonight uh can i get a motion to adjourn