School Board Meeting

001uh hello everyone good evening thanks for coming out in the cold and snow and whatever precipitation is going on out there i'll call the meeting to order at seven o'clock and will you please join me in 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 thank you you may be seated okay we'll start the evening with um celebrating orioles one of our favorite parts of any meeting um and this evening we'll be recognizing the avon community school corporation contact tracing team dr wyndham thank you so um as you recall at last month's meeting we recognized our school nurses for the work that they have done to support our staff

002and students during the pandemic and but there is another group of employees that has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help us navigate such unprecedented challenges and those are our employees that we call our covet team i really felt like i should get a t-shirt and they're like superheroes as we began planning over the summer for how we were going to navigate all the new requirements of contract contact tracing quarantining all those things we made the decision to centralize most of those activities at the district level so that we could ensure consistency across our schools and to allow our building leaders to focus on the important work they needed to be doing of leading their building not making calls and contact uh and making calls about close contact so our team has been led by

003deb swain bayless who little did she know that school safety was going to become coveted uh central but that is what school safety has become this year she mobilized and put in place procedures and processes to keep our schools safe and healthy so the first group of individuals i'm going to call and for the board to recognize is has is our on-call team our covid team and this group all school year has been on call and they drop everything to help us navigate when we are informed of a positive student so that we can activate our processes and that team is deb swain bayless cheryl baker stephanie nelson and vicki lingrich we recently added a few more to our contact tracing team to help us out and that is cheryl briggs sharon harris and carol

004aylor additionally there's another group of employees who does the same thing they drop everything on a moment's notice and help us make phone calls or send text alerts to parents when their child has been deemed to close contact those individuals are tracy gray amy hunter brianna moss leanne snodgrass and barb marcotte so what has this team done since school started every time we learn of a positive covet student this team takes action they notif notify the building leaders so that they can pull seating charts they notify transportation so that we can pull seating charts and videos they pull information so that we can then notify parents of students who are quarantined they re they review attendance records they respond to constantly changing guidelines and adjust their processes and procedures we were working on that friday

005and today as evidence of that since school started we have quarantined over 5 000 individuals every one of those individuals has either received a phone call or a text alert letting them know and sharing important department of health information with them none of that happens without these individuals taking action they have also manned our covet hotline so that when parents have questions they have a resource to go to quarantines are frustrating so many times they're talking with frustrated parents like this dad whose daughter ends her quarantine tomorrow and i was asking questions of the team i know they're frustrating and our team has done great to navigate helping parents particularly parents who have had multiple quarantines for their children they've taken extraordinary steps to implement these these processing processes and procedures i am struck that

006there's a lot of attention right now across the country as to what does it take to keep to get schools to open and every time i see those news articles or i read those or those news stories or read those articles i'm struck by we've been open since july how did we do it we have amazing employees who have taken extraordinary steps to keep school open but more importantly to protect the health and safety of our students and our staff so i could not be more proud of these individuals and if you'd like to come forward we've got a letter for you and then the board will recognize you and mr carr will help us take socially distant pictures so if you ladies would like to come up that would be great i signed up

007[Music] i'm so glad i can say i've never gotten a call put together [Music] [Applause] i'm ready thank you thank you so much job [Music] i'll write it down i just wanted to say thank you to this group because when we started out it wasn't going to be a big deal you know we were a few people here and there and it got overwhelming pretty quick and for me to say that i need help and i sent out an email and i'm like who can come i'll train you and all of these people showed up outside of their job duties to help me and it means the world and that's part of being avon i think and they made really difficult phone calls for people you know are not going to be happy with the

008message that you're giving and to be consistent and then when we pivot to explain why they were the pivot why there was a problem the i dotting the t crossing it's fantastic all of them have picked up and done so much work to help out over and above what's required of them and i can't thank them enough i think it's fantastic that's awesome thank you very much uh board members would you like to make some comments to our um [Music] well superhero has met their match with you ladies thank you so much for coming to miss swing bayless aid when the the cases were just mounting last fall and i know there were many weekends that i would see cars at the admin center and that's what you were doing as you were contact tracing

009you were got out those lists and those seating charts and calling those parents and thank you so much for allowing us to keep our students really to keep our students in school which was been our goal since almost a year ago march 8th was when we first said all right now we got to talk about how we get them back in and keep them in and you really have been the glue to be able to get that done so thank you thank you anita well congratulations ladies i know it's an awful lot of work and um i'm never glad to hear from you i'll go ahead and [Music] but i appreciate the work it's an awful awful lot of work trying to keep up with all those tracings and i just don't have the patience

010it's not it wouldn't be for me but thank you so i agree with anita i hate it when you call and now every time i get a text from avon and cringe even if it's parent square from the fourth grade it's oh my gosh it might be from them um and i'm certain that i have been one of the difficult parents that you've had to deal with so i i want to compliment you on the professionalism and grace with which you have done this job because lots of people including me have not been happy but it's not your fault and you guys take it and you explain it to us and you take the high road all the time i'm sure you have been yelled at i'm sure that has not always been easy and

011so for the way you've represented our school corporation i want to say thank you and also again as you're doing your work i'm sure a lot of the time you feel like it's a thankless job but know that we know that we're not open without you so thank you i too lady ladies would like to thank you for all that you have done and who would have thought a year and a half ago that there would be such a thing as a contact tracer never thought it would happen and a couple of things too i'd like to share i've been in the office after working hours for meetings or several things like that stuff and pick up something and you members are still there working on the phones and i'm sure the parents are very

012appreciative of everything that you do the information the calls that you share and two i just want to thank you for all that you do to make avon school successful uh i'll pour us those thanks um it you know i always use the term it takes a village but it really really does um this was as as cindy just mentioned this was not on anybody's radar just you know nine months ago ten months ago um and suddenly um you step up to the plate and you're able to fill such a crucial need in getting those uh kiddos and their parents really the information that they need uh in order to keep us safe i talked to my sister yesterday she lives in ohio and she said when are your kids going back to school i

013said uh what do you mean she said well i mean when are they going to go back to in-person school i said we've been in school since july 30th and she just found that remarkable because in her community that isn't the case and then today we were my husband and i were sitting in the parking lot of avon intermediate school east getting ready to pick up one of our grandsons and i got in the car and he said you you don't realize what an impact school really has on kids until you sit here and watch all of them filing out to get on the bus and you see the happy faces and you see kids that are being kids and um normalcy resuming that would not have been possible without the heroic efforts that you

014each each and every one of you played i'm sure that it was tough i'm sure that as greg said there were really hard calls but you just kept going and you kept representing avon in every great way to give the information and also to give i'm sure some comfort and some guidance to parents and students that needed them so once again i chorus what my fellow board members have said and that is thank you sincerely thank you for your efforts we really appreciate it your heroes for sure thank you we will move on to the next topic of discussion uh this uh there are two presentations we will begin first with the discussion of the proposed um school start and end times oh yes do please feel free to leave and go contact tracemoor [Music]

015no don't but leave anyway and have a margarita no i shouldn't say that okay um so i will turn this over at this time to dr windham if you would like to talk about the discussion of the proposed school start and end times for 20 21 22. dr windham absolutely thank you mrs woodward and i'm certainly not going to go through many slides in this presentation because you have heard this numerous times but i thought it would be helpful maybe to just highlight a few of the things that have guided us over the last couple of months we started studying school start and end times in november with a working group with representation from each level we began discussing this publicly at our school board meetings beginning at the end of november talking about start

016and end times and then we have been sharing information in various formats including the december and january school board meetings parent square communications to all of our parents social media a dedicated page on our website discussions with our teachers union and a community input session we don't typically live stream our school board meetings but in november we began doing that with as a part of redistricting and we have continued that in december january and now this meeting in february just so we could make sure our community had various ways to access this information so lots of work and lots of input has gone on into these various options that we have been talking about over the last three months i'm not going to spend time going through pros and cons we have done that in

017previous meetings multiple times but as you know we we started with three options we added a fourth and at this time we are not recommending those options because of the feedback that we have received from our our community from our parents and from our teachers uh based on the feedback that we have heard primarily the reasons that we have rejected options one through four was that tier one was uh too early for starting k-4s was a general consensus that we had heard that that posed child care concerns for the parents of our youngest children we also heard a really strong desire both from teachers and from parents to keep school levels together to keep the intermediates together to keep the middle schools together and then also there was concern about spreading elementaries across all three

018tiers and so that's some of the main reasons why we are not recommending options one through four and that has changed over the course of the last few months as we have taken those steps to get more input so that really led us to what has now been called option 5a and option 5b as you know from our discussions option 5a keeps all the k4s in tier 2 and tier 3. it starts the intermediates in tier one and the middle schools in tier three and then the adjustment to that that we put out at the end of january as another option for your consideration is option 5b very similar to 5a with the exception of it it flips the middle schools go to tier 1 and the intermediates go to tier 3. so these are

019the two options that we feel like are most responsive to the feedback and the input that we have received over the last three months and the options that we would bring to you for your consideration and with that i will turn it back to mrs woodward for more discussion thank you um i would like to start by saying that the board really literally received dozens of emails with additional information and that was from all perspectives it is very helpful for our board to know what is going on at the ground level and to hear from parents and teachers about the impacts of each of the options that were presented as many of you may know we were initially going to have our decision making time on the 25th of january but with the um 5b

020option then being presented the board really did not feel that we should move forward at that time without the ability to hear and collect additional public comment and community input about that particular option so we postponed our initial vote to this evening for a couple of reasons number one we discussed all the feedback and found that there were several majority themes that really needed further study as a result um as i already mentioned we had option b which addressed several several of these themes but um it had not been vetted with our community um and we felt it would be unfair to set the stage for input on all the other options and then giving this option only that opportunity in public on the 25th and then finally and not insignificantly both our superintendent and

021one board member were unavailable for the meeting on the 25th in person due to quarantine and family matters and so we now feel that we have collected the data and we have allowed the comment period to really make it a well informed decision i want to thank our board thank the administrators and the community for weighing in and taking time to respond typically our public comment will come and there will be a second public comment portion but because we're about to uh discuss um the board we'll have discussion about what led us to um being able to make a motion i will open the floor for anyone who would like to make a brief uh less than three minute statement if anybody would like to do that we have a microphone in the front don't

022feel that you have to but if you would like to say something at this time i'd like to give that opportunity okay thank you very much seeing no movement in that i think um we will proceed but i do want to say that we're going to do something a little differently tonight to ensure that the board um is in agreement uh that we are ready to move forward um i will entertain a motion to proceed with the start stop time discussion and action i know that the board of school trustees will proceed with the voting on the star to stop down revision for the 2021-2022 school year thank you motioned by anita and second advice cindy for members is there any discussion all those in favor that motion passes 5-0 so we will proceed with

023voting on the start stop times this evening thank you so much um what we found in our discussion is that there were various opinions in our community and actually on our own board that didn't lead us to one right path forward i would like to now invite our board members to share their thoughts and opinions uh about what they felt was most important in consideration in the start top stop times um and if i could start with you please absolutely well thank you for everyone who has joined us tonight and for all the many phone calls texts i've received it's really been very good um for me when i started out on this journey back in november actually it was probably even before then um what drove my decisions and thoughts and questions was how

024can we best provide education for our children that that's been truly the driving force at every point after we finished our first round of public meetings i really landed on item number four i felt like with everything that was given everything that's been shared some of the research or really kind of met all those needs and met the needs of education then i continued to read i started really reading all of the input on the survey and that was just real eye-opening and plus of course emails from community texts phone calls from neighbors and and friends and it was kind of like puzzle pieces started kind of coming together and then i could have just an even more clear view of what our community was saying their points and really understand what they um believed

025and then when i would couple it with education and student needs it really helped me to see my way clear one of the comments that really um influenced my thinking that i would like to share was you know many parents said we've been through a lot this year and we just can't handle another big change and that really resonated with me and i thought there's we gotta come to the middle on this because they're right many families have been hit hard and um i wanted to be able to put that as something that you know would really affect education for those children in those areas and so that really helped shape my thoughts um that's and at that point that's when i became open to model 5 because i felt like okay i understand the

026the points the parents are making and i understand the needs of the school corporation so that really kind of helped me to understand why we needed to that was a viable model and i needed to look at it um i was really interested in all the research about sleep i found um when i did the research and read and looked up other reports that it wasn't necessarily the amount of sleep that that these articles were trying to get across but when they slept and now as a parent who's raised five children i could look back on it was interesting all five of them they did they slept when they hit their teens or even their emerging teens they then started needing sleep a little bit later and i found that so interesting now they don't

027want to go to bed so i still have to be a parent and say no you need to go to bed but i did see that there was some truth and maybe not for all children but at least for my children there was some truth in the research and i i found that that was a very important um a very important point to all this especially as we started looking at 585b so as i contemplated um i had to realign my main driver the education i had to go back to that so this was this is the main driver here and if research and experience is telling me that children who are in their emerging teen years and teen years need to have later start times then i thought okay that's what 5a gives us

0285a gives us so that those youngsters who are emerging teens can have a later start time then that's probably what's best for them for education that so that's where i landed based on the input of our community the research um all the work that our administrators have done and they're always they're always contacting us with things to think about new input and they really try to make this as transparent as possible and so when i put it all together i landed that i i feel like 5a is the best choice for our students and our families going forward thank you anita okay and my facts came from the daniel pink seminar and the impactful points there where students 12 and under do best work in the morning so that would be your intermediate schools in

029the a.m and let you get to sleep earlier at night for uh teens to mid 20s they should start later not before 8 30 a.m and that was pediatrician recommended so um it was tough but i landed on 5a as well because it met the needs of the staff thank you great so kobe's put us in an interesting spot we have to recognize as much as we are thankful that we're open that there is going to be some learning loss we have kids who've been quarantined we have had some e-learning and some stops and starts we've had some hybrids and we're starting to see even as nwea comes back at the earlier levels that there are some kids that are sliding across the whole range so it's helped me quite a bit in kind of

030reframing what's important and i will say every decision i make in the next probably two or three years will start with how do we help the kids make up the learning foster code that's got to be the number one priority in physical corporation i think it's important to note just in general why i voted moving forward the lack of drivers bus drivers is a real problem it's from all over the state it's from over the country and it's not going away so we have to figure that out so that we can keep offering transportation the way we do here in avon and we have an opportunity to save between four and five hundred thousand dollars anytime that's presented to you you have to think about it so with those three things that to me was

031we need to do something and we need to do something this year we have this opportunity in front of us to take to to make a move and allowing the the the stop teams which allow the teachers to get together and have more collaboration time which then directly impacts our recovery from the learning loss that's too important to not do um i was watching a not very good football game last night [Music] and i took the opportunity to reread every email that was sent to us and go back through the 1250 responses we got from parents and i came to a couple conclusions one is every kid needs more sleep everybody can find the study or a pediatrician recommendation that their kid regardless of their age if their kids between the age of 5 and

03218 that their kid is going to school at the wrong time i think we live in a society where our kids don't get enough sleep so it's very difficult to prioritize this grade sleep over that grades of sleep so then i start thinking about well then what is our community thing what's the feedback from our community and there was some consensus and scots addressed some of it nobody wanted the elementary kids in the first year in our community so that was almost universal so that's an easy thing for me as a board member to respond to almost everybody said the high school kids if they can get a little extra sleep to get a little extra sleep so again if we all kind of agree on that let's check that mark that down um so

033that puts you in the 8 5a and 5b realm and the really the discussion is who should go earlier intermediate or middle and when we had our meeting with the principals i asked a question of of our intermediary principles and that was because that's the age group where everybody starts to develop and hit puberty at different times what's best for this child will be worse for this child and what's best for this child will be worse with this child and as you move through those four years regardless of whether or not you go early or late it'll be right for half the kids and wrong for half the kids so that seemed to that that made me even more open and also more confused um and then when you look at teacher feedback teacher feedback

034was also split about down the middle half of the teachers at the elementary at the intermediate middle schools wanted to go early and half of them argued for the other side so having the science in my opinion being definitive that everyone needs more sleep and me unwilling to prioritize one group over another and listening to our community and listening to our teachers the best way i could sum it up is in baseball a tie goes to the runner and for me in school board a tie goes to the parents and what the parents more often than not said was that they were uncomfortable with their little guys and the little girls at age 10 even 11 being home alone in the afternoon that that's a that would create a problem for them and then also

035you think a little bit about change management because there were a lot of calls to not make a change intermediates are in the afternoon now our parents have figured that out our community has figured that out so if there isn't a compelling educational reason or a compelling health and safety reason to change it i'm going to vote not to change it and i'm going to choose 5b thank you cindy well as being an elementary teacher former elementary teacher would we switch times all the time so when this came up i thought oh boy here we go so here we go um i do have an option that i'm kind of leaning towards too and as i was working on my notes today i wrote a couple of things that i thought of and i'm going

036to just share my notes and although we the board we know that each option is not perfect and we will not make everyone happy i wish we could but it's it's not going to work i believe that the option that i'm looking at will be the most beneficial for our students our staff and our whole school corporation starting the elementary slaters later will then allow the students to diminish from school at the same time or after the high school which we had a lot of parents say you know there'll be nobody home to watch my child and so when we had that early time and then we moved it to the later time plus i like how all the elementaries are pretty much dismissing starting and dismissing around the same time we don't have that

037early school at 7 25 like we had that first time this will be hopefully allowed for an adult or an older sibling to be present at home that will be able to supervise this elementary child or their children the biggest time change as dr windham said was the east and west and i brought this up i believe it was when we had our zoo meeting the other night that uh the west east west is 56th grade and they're usually 9 10 11 aged that way and then the north south they're a little bit older and i know that some parents think and i know uh mrs winter and i talked about this about the kids the five six they're still kind of young to stay by themselves and especially that time frame so i feel

038that the fifth sixth graders are too young to stay by themselves in the am particularly uh the time change will benefit the parents especially at the east and the west um i know that there's new times that will cause changes in family dynamics but i am hopeful that after everyone adjusts to these times it will work best for all the parties that are involved i appreciate everyone's dialogue opinions and feedback as we have studied the best options for our staff and our students and our community i am going along with option a and i have my fingers crossed as i say this that whatever option that the board votes this will work thank you is that uh well i will make my comments uh brief simply because i think you can see that our board

039members have really thoughtfully considered this and we have definitely all had a lot of dialogue about it my first reaction to the options that were presented initially were that um the those models really had school be getting too early so i asked i appealed to our administration to please try to move that um the start time for any school to closer to 7 30. um i also felt that there was a as greg mentioned a lot of concern about elementary school uh students starting too early in sleep requirements but really for me it came down to waiting on the bus well before seven a.m simply did not feel safe for me in k-4 students um so i was very much in favor of moving the elementary start times um back so that our k-4 would

040not be standing on the bus stop quite so early we heard a lot this is a new topic that we heard a lot from but we had a lot of parents who have students that they transport that are in multiple schools and what they were concerned about in some of the earliest models were the pickup times being such that they were going to have great difficulty picking up one of their students and making it to the next stop to pick up their other student so we talked about that and i asked if there could be some amnesty for the pickup time at different schools since many of these students are transported to and from school by their parents or caregivers there was some very legitimate concern i felt expressed about navigating traffic and arriving for

041pickup at multiple schools and our administrators at the building level in the meeting that greg talked about indicated that they would be open to working on a case-by-case basis with families that find this to be the case for them i requested that actual data about the bus driver shortage um was something that we wanted to have shared with us and we were able to see some of that information it is really difficult to say how many of our really truly great bus drivers who are heroes also will react to this change um but we do feel that we have um the option of both full-time routes and non-full-time routes that hopefully will be enable us to continue to attract and retain um drivers um so i felt that we're taking steps in the right direction

042in transportation there were many many parents that said intermediate students were able to stay at home and um some were not able to stay at home and that certainly is a fairly typical line of demarcation where fifth and sixth graders are mature enough in some situations to stay alone and then others are not getting themselves on the bus due to a late start was not ideal for many but staying alone a few hours in the afternoon did seem um a bit more palatable um finally i i want to say that i felt that parents and all of our community needs to remember that school is the priority while extracurricular activities are highly important for families and for whole child development we as a community we are facing as a community and as a nation a

043severe degradation in student learning due to the pandemic that we've already talked about the two ways that we regain what's lost really are more student instructional time and teacher and professional development uh we are doing what's best for students to help them get back uh to the learn to have the learning stamina which is described by many of our educators that has been lost the ability to really stay focused and on task for a prolonged period of time all of the months last year where they were learning virtually and at home and some of the time that they have been disrupted due to quarantining due to face masks due to a lot of factors have reduced students abilities to really focus in and have learning stamina for the long haul so i really feel that

044it's important that all of us remember that school has to be the priority for our children in our community um early on dr windham reported that the copious survey information was divided and that about half felt one way and about half felt the other way and what we found in board discussion is that our board members feel the same way seeing one option is better than the other is um something that each of us clearly has spent a lot of time and effort to really um search our heart and search our research and our minds in what we feel is best for our students we listen carefully to each other and i'm proud of our board for doing that we listen to each other's arguments and each other's justification nevertheless we will not be in

045a hundred percent agreement this evening it appears and we but that does not mean that our board is not 100 committed to ensuring that the direction forward is highly successful and so with that i will entertain a motion about the start stop times for school year 21-22 i mean that the board of school trustees approved option 5a as the school started and stopped time for the 2021-2022 school year second motion by anita seconded by anne is there any further discussion all those in favor all those opposed that motion passes 3-2 dr windham the start time will be uh the option that the board is recommending is option 5a thank you so much appreciate all the synergy and the conversation that the board has put into that discussion and we will transition now to a presentation

046we will transition now to a presentation from dr susan bradvig on a update to our demographic study and as ms nelson is getting that pulled up as the board knows dr brudberg has worked with us for the last few years there she is and she did a study for us in 2015 and another study for us in 2018 looking at our enrollment projections and we asked her to do an update of helping us look at some long-range enrollment projections and updating the data that she had presented to us before so with that i will turn it over to dr brending how is the volume and how is the screen slides it looks great we can hear you and we can see your slides okay i'll just keep on going and stephanie feel free to jump

047in if i need to make some changes or alterations again thank you very much for having me to talk a little bit about the enrollment projections what i intend to do tonight is really twofold the first is to talk about um what it might be like or what a number might be like if washington township avon schools actually built out um essentially meaning what is the number of schools i mean number of homes that would be built if the entire township was built out so that's the first part that i'm going to talk about and then i'm going to go into what the current enrollment forecast is and i apologize for the touching mouse here so so what is the estimate of build out and how do i do that right so how did i

048come up with that i made some key assumptions one was that i was going to take a look at land use areas and land use districts and come up with an estimate of the acreage the next thing i did was i took a look at platts new plants some of the infill building and made some assumptions about what the residential zoning acreage would be and from that came up with an estimate of additional single family lots okay so uh this image is of future land use districts it is of the township and essentially what we want to focus here is on the yellow areas and to some degree the duplexes which are an orange and the multi-family areas that would be in brown going through here and figuring out what the acreage is it's about

0493 500 acres that could be built out as future land use being residential other colors here really aren't important for residential building for instance the green areas are designated as possible park or open green space areas the next thing was to look at some of the current zoning for avon um and so this is the boundaries of the town and the darker yellow are residential zoned and the orange are is also residential zoned also looking at infill and a way one way we can do this is to go to plant maps and actually drill down to actual lots and see if that lot has been assessed which would it would suggest assessed as a residential building which would suggest that a lot has already been built out and then lastly look at new approvals for

050home building um these are things that i have listed here that are since the last time we did this study or did this update and that would have been 2018. some of these are in progress some of these are already approved sf would mean single-family homes and db would be doubles or th meaning down so compiling that information basically it gets us to approximately eight thousand single-family lots that could be built assuming that the entire township was built out of course there was room left for parks there's commercial zoning that's not included in this and other areas of the district that wouldn't be included we're just focusing on residential there is an assumption here of 80 homes for 40 acres so if you made a change in that assumption that could go a little bit

051higher or a little bit lower than the 8 000 estimate what i think is really important here however in particular for enrollment which is what we're talking about is what is the impact on enrollment is it's not just the level of building it's also the pace or timing of building for instance the impact of 8 000 homes in 10 years is huge compared to the impact of 8 000 homes in 15 or 20 years and that's largely because you already have students who are in your schools or about to be in your schools because they're preschool aged and when that building occurs faster it really has a significant impact on enrollment than compared to when a building occurs much more slowly okay so in my mind it's just not the level here that we're talking

052about it's also the speed and the speed is what really um drives enrollment so that's the first thing i wanted to chat about today so that was the first agenda item the second agenda item is to talk about an update to the enrollment forecast the last time i did this for you all it was 2018 and when we did that and and some things have changed um one of the things that has changed is we did that forecast uh for 10 years and since then births are actually going down yet housing has gone up and those two things have impacts on enrollment in different ways fewer births means maybe elementary school enrollment might not be as high as we would expect but more housing you'd actually anticipate that your enrollment score would grow up would

053go up in advanced grade levels so the enrollment the forecast is basically being redone with these new data and the new patterns that we are currently seeing um also additional thing that we we've done and this is the first time we did that this is the new piece is we're extrapolating the data so that we had a 20-year look into the future and you know the idea here with an extrapolation is just basically saying okay we've got a forecast we've got data from the previous 10 years and now what if what if that trend continued into the future what does that mean and particularly here for the activity that we're trying to do or the question we're trying to answer what does that what would enrollments look like if 8 000 homes were built out

054okay so that's really that second piece that we haven't done before that we're going to do with the forecast so you've seen this graphic before or this was our 2018 enrollment forecast and i bring this up just to kind of highlight some things uh when we're doing the forecast one is we have this apologies for this touchy mouse um we we have this solid line and we have the previous 10 years which is actual data and we have the future 10 years and we don't quite know exactly what the future is going to bring or the future is going to be but we can make some reasonable reasonable assumptions and then see what enrollments would be so we've seen this before and that solid line going into the future 2018 forward is what we often

055call our base forecast and then we have a range around that high or low based on both birth assumptions as well as housing assumptions now where are we right now with regard to the forecast currently actual enrollment is just a little bit higher than what the forecast was there were some differences though enrollment was higher at high school levels and lower particularly at kindergarten level but overall on a total basis the forecasts did pretty good even in this covid times but there were differences at grade level the other things that we do know that's going on is burst births are different so in the year um 2017 we had 1700 births for hendricks county residents all right so these are moms who actually reside in the county and this is the lowest level of geography

056also that we can get this data and at that point in time when we did the forecast with 2017 births we actually expected that burst would continue to go up and actually they haven't so this is burst for 2018 2019 and that's that solid line bursts have actually declined somewhat since then all right so an assumption is reasonable assumptions well what's going to happen in the future and if you look at this history of births here now we have 12 years of births very unlikely if history is any marker on the future that it would would go back to the peak numbers this was the highest number 2007. that was the peak number of births that occurred in the county now one thing that is not here is uh covet babies matter of fact one

057thing that's not here is even 20 20 births all right so um 20 20 burgers will not be available until may of this year and 2021 which would be coveted babies right children that were conceived during covet that data is not even yet available those children are newborns right they're just starting to be born so um what we know and what we anticipate is that during covid years we're actually going to see fewer births and the reason why is because it's very uncertain times as well as we have high unemployment and during high unemployment births tend to go down during good economic times births tend to go up so that's what we would anticipate also based on current times that data as soon as we're going to have data on covid babies would actually be

058may okay what else do we have going on is permitting now you have seen this graphic before what's different about it i i actually added a couple years so we're going all the way back to 000 so we're seeing a snapshot of 21 years of single family permitting in hendricks county and you can see at the beginning of the turn of the century right so the heavy building years it's 2000 all the way to about 2005 were peak building years um those numbers came down and they bottomed out about 2010 2011 and burst i mean sorry um permits have since gone up uh what is new is permits are not only not only high last year historically we're approaching high levels this year all right so in 2020 the numbers at least countywide appear to

059be very comparable to 2006. now this is washington township not countywide but washington township so we're seeing a very similar pattern when we're just looking at the township itself again you've seen this graphic before but i think this is the first time you've seen it where we're just looking at 2 000 and moving forward in 2020 we're looking at home building at about 550 560 single family permits i should say single family permits issued that actually doesn't mean the house is built yet the permit has been issued um and that level has not occurred since 2006. this level of building exceeds what's in the current forecast okay so that's another reason for us to go back and say all right what should the forecast be what should the numbers be what should we be looking

060at in terms of building and how can we update that forecast and give you the best numbers possible so in terms of the forecast range and what's most reasonable for us to assume you're going to start first with bursts the base forecast assumes that bursts will be fairly steady like that graphic that i showed you but burst could go up so we'll make that the high forecast and burst could actually decline and so we'll make that the low forecast in terms of single family permits uh for the base forecast we're saying that permits will increase to about 700 per year and again right now they're bad about 560. so we're increasing the number of permits to 700 a year at a high level again this is just a scenario we don't necessarily know that this

061would occur but at a high level we're bringing it back to what occurred at the turn of the century where we're going to about 900 permits a year and at the low level we're going to basically take permits and we're basically going to cut them in half over time they slowly decline to about 250. so that gives us a range of the high and the low as well as a base forecast we're going to assume that all scenarios could actually support the infrastructure for building out you know that apps actually is a question and it's not something that's reported here i'm also assuming that transfer students as well as private school enrollment doesn't change much from current patterns um there are some unknowns and probably the biggest the known and and we've talked about this

062previously as being a big unknown is resale and the resale of homes what would happen if homes turn over well if homes turn over let's just say mom and dad live in the house and kids have already gone to college or and moved on and if they sell that home postcovid then that becomes another place where enrollment could grow there's not a specific assumption in the forecast for that really it's not something we know but if you do believe something like that is going to happen or could happen then that would suggest we should be thinking about the high side for our forecast okay so what does this mean um when we when we run our our forecast what does what does this mean these assumptions mean so again we're going to see a graphic

063very similar to what you've seen in the past with um going back 10 years so that's a number of 8 500 which was enrollment at 2010 enrollment this past year this is fall adms by the way was about 900 students and then we go out 10 years and then because we're doing this extrapolation we go out an additional 10 for a forecast of 20 years okay a couple things i want to point out here is that i have labeled the forecasts f and t right and so the reason i'm doing this and trying to make this distinction is f means it's the forecast it's our forecast process where we have assumptions about births and housing the t is the extra that means time series now that's our extrapolation okay so we're not making assumptions like

064we've made for um the first 10 years of the forecast the time series forecast is something very different we're just assuming trends are going to continue and we're taking those numbers and we're extrapolating them out so in terms of a 10-year forecast because again this is consistent with our forecast process uh avon schools would go from 19 i'm sorry apologies would go from 99 9 900 students let me say that one more time would go from 9 900 students to almost 12 000 students over a period of 10 years on the low side that would be about 1965 terms of member and students and potentially on the high side with that high level of building at over 15 000 students one thing that i look at when i look at these types of graphics and

065i would encourage you to think about is think about the base fork i mean i'm sorry the low forecast as a floor okay so the low forecast which again here is 99.65 it's very unlikely total enrollment would go below that all right so it's basically you can think about it as a floor the only way we would anticipate that enrollment would go below that would be if housing really fell off all right um the number of about 12 000 that would be your forecast number going out 10 years for total enrollment um the extrapolation the extrapolation here is taking the 20 years previous so 2010 all the way to 2030 and then extrapolating that another 10 years and so we're basically taking that trend and pulling it out into the future what you could anticipate

066would be on the low side 9 100 students nearly 14 000 students at the um at the base forecast and over 20 000 at the high forecast now before you take a big deep breath about that 20 000 let me just say that doesn't mean that 20 000 is a reasonable number and and this is why and this is why we did the extrapolation is if if we assume that 8 000 single family homes could be built out the question is where does that occur and what would be basically a peak enrollment number okay so at the high level buildup would occur in cy meaning calendar year cy calendar year 2030 that would impact enrollment at least for the next three years to 33-34 and at the high level that means 1600 and 16 and

067400 students at the base the base you know that's the same level as 8 000 single family homes but the timing of that is much later so that's at 2032 and it impacts enrollment until 35 36. uh what does that mean in terms of total enrollments just shy of about 13 000 students at the low level while building would occur and could continue to occur it would not hit the built out levels whatsoever okay so this is the updated um enrollment forecast with the new [Music] assumptions let's next take a look at grade 9 through 12 so this would be your high school enrollment okay so we're going to do the same thing year 2010 he had about 2500 students last fall so 2020 you had almost 32 or 30 we had 3300 students and

068the forecast would suggest over a period of 10 years the base forecast with building at approaching 700 single-family homes a year that would you would be over 4100 students in 10 years okay another way to look at this is what about below forecast would have actually building fell off a little bit it's very unlikely for your high school to be below 3500 students that means even with low levels of building your high school is likely to grow at very very high levels of building looking 10 years out you're probably at say 54 5500 students um one of the reasons why for instance at that low level uh you're you still grow or you your school is still going to grow is because you have large cohorts coming through you have large cohorts uh kindergarten first

069graders you know sixth graders seventh graders i did some quick checks i think your current sixth grade is somewhat large if i remember and that's a cohort that's getting very close to a graduating class when it graduates in six years very close to a thousand students okay so what's happening is you do have large groups that are coming through and they'll come through at the high school level essentially whether or not there's building or not if we think about build out though that's that second question that's taking it out 20 years so again build out occurs in the high level at 20 30 and at the base level at 2032 that means if the township was entirely built out at a very quick pace enrollment at the high school level at the high level would

070be about 6 000 students at a little bit accelerating pace from where it is now build out would bring your enrollments at the high school to about 4 600 students and that's the base again it would never occur at the low level we're doing the same activity or that same type of process for grades seven through eight so at grade seven and eight tier it had about fourteen hundred students ten years ago today a little bit over sixteen hundred students and that again is fall numbers and looking out ten years we would anticipate enrollment to be about over 2 000 students again at the low level very unlikely for enrollments to fall from where they are now even with lower building and at the high level could approach 2 800 students at about 20 30.

071now what about those build out levels well at the high if assuming a very quick build out that would bring enrollments to about 3 000 students in the year third in your school year 3334 and would at the base level would bring you to about twenty two hundred students in the school year thirty five thirty six again does not occur at the low level and grades five through six a 10 years ago you were over 1300 students last fall you were 15 64. and if current patterns and trends continue you'd be at about 1800 students at the 5 6 level in 2030. again looking at the lower level or the low forecast enrollments might fall a little bit if housing false but essentially when i look at something like that a period of 10 years

072that looks like a fairly stable enrollment at the high level potentially could be over 2 400 students with a very fast level building now build out occurring at the same time frames like before at the high level with a full build out at a high forecast we're looking at 2600 students at 33 34 and we're looking over 2 000 students at the year 35 school year 35 36 and finally came through for your elementary school students elementary school 10 years ago 2010 you were at about 30 to 3 300 students last fall you were almost at 3 500 students and the enrollment forecast has your elementary at 3 900 students in 10 years at the high level could potentially be 4 600 students and this is where building does really impact um elementary enrollment and

073potentially be a little bit below current levels if home building kind of fell off if it basically cut itself in half or went down 50 over a period of 10 years at build out levels your elementary enrollment would be about 4 600 students in year 33 34 assuming 8 000 single family homes built out and at the base level looking at probably about 4 200 students in the year school year 35 one thing that is available in the packet which i have also updated is is there's this summary table but later on um in the packet there's also a single age group single grades single grades so you could actually take a look at the individual grades and see how they grow through time so for instance taking a look at grades six in the

074current school year and seeing how that cohort grows and becomes a graduating class of almost a thousand i believe it's uh about 8.70 right now okay [Music] that in a nutshell was my presentation for the this evening board members do you have any questions um i have a couple of questions could she hear me can you hear our board when they speak i can hear fairly well and um if i don't if that could be put in chat for me by a typed into chat i can work with that okay okay thank you my first question is when uh the demographics are presented for all of hendricks county i wonder if we if doctor brendan knows off the top of her head what percent of the total population of hendricks county is washington township off

075the top of my head i don't know i honestly i've been waiting for the new census data which is not available so i know i don't know if that that helps i can certainly get that number for you and we talked about the census data not being available until i presume that may 2020 is when census data would be available you mentioned that with respect to births in 2020 being available in may is that when all the census data will be available for release no um i think i i i apologize if it was difficult to hear or if i misspoke um the may date is going to be birth numbers and those are coming from the indiana state department of health um the census data the census was conducted well it's been conducted over

076a long period of time because it was a covet census um that is supposed to be an as of date of april 20 and then so it's conducted every 10 years and there was a goal that data would be available first data as actually goes for reapportionment so that's the that's the constitutional obligation of the census bureau is to make sure that data is available for reapportioning the house of representatives data users like all of us we aren't first in line so congress is first in line and then a data then starts rolling out they have been delayed and i was hopeful we would start seeing some of this data you know shortly after it starts becoming available for reapportionment often what happens is then at least we get a number of um persons and

077we get a number of voters so uh people of voting age so just by quick math we can see how many children there are right so it's it's just total population minus the number of voters i have finding very difficult to get a schedule i'm finding it very difficult to find a schedule or release dates and you know the census actually went through i think it was october of this year that they were still collecting data so um i do believe we'll see it i just don't believe we're going to see it really really quick there are estimates that the estimates are based on 2010 census so at this point i i tend not to use it i'll i'll wait for even the covet census numbers thank you you're welcome please correct me if i'm

078wrong sometimes through zoom this is always real clear for me but it seems like as i'm separating the numbers the k-4s over the next 10 years will only grow about 80 students per year per rec per [Music] so let's look really quickly here i don't know if you can see my highlighting assistant numbers that we're talking about here i just want to make sure i understand my goal is to not over build so when i look at that that that tells me that it's less something unless there is a major change in burst or development we are really going to kind of just go along over the next 10 years and the move-ins is what's really going to drive our numbers up and am i and am i inferring that or is that what you

079see in your research that what's driving us driving like our high school to be where you're predicting is because of movements i'm just trying to understand that what's driving it so i understand when that driver is switches or we could peek out yes so you know even here um on the on the base forecast you know it's going up you know your ballpark number about 80 a year is correct um and so it goes up and it goes down and you know we are coming off some lower home build holding and we're coming off bursts that are going down so it's basically two things working almost contrary to each other right um bursts going down just start going down or at least in best case flat and home building going up if we look also

080at the below you know if you're if you're thinking about and you know if you're thinking about what's i i don't want to say the worst case but you know the the low case in terms of enrollment one thing you can do is look at the low and i look at the low as a floor so if births go down and if housing goes down over time is elementary going down yeah it's had it's going down a tad it is going to go up to about 3 600 going out a little bit but we are we are making strong assumptions though about births as well as housing i would also say we haven't made any clear assumptions about turnover in existing housing and you know that's you all know your community a lot better than

081i do and we do know what occurred in wayne township when there was turnover in housing when they were built out their enrollments went up i'm not saying that's what's going to happen but we have seen it and you've seen it in a neighboring township so i i think it's something to be aware be aware of right and and covet times our cove at times we now really don't know but you do know that there's demand for housing in your um and township you said i in my opinion i feel like kobe still has brought about a variable that we can't get our hands around so while i think it's important that we continue to have this discussion i think there'll be a lot more information in six months nine months a year and that's

082why sometimes i kind of pull myself back when i think about well we've got to really figure out the high school then i i don't know that we have enough information but because of covet i think what you have presented is extremely accurate and obviously i mean you're ruining 24 students of your prediction two years ago and then if i remember right five years before that you came back which would have been two years ago and you were still within probably 20 students so you're extremely accurate and it's honestly just amazing to me i just worry about that that bogey if you want to call it coping and um and i want to be able to make the best decisions going forward especially in the high school but i fear that the height of elementary

083before is only growing 80 students at what point do we start seeing declines yeah and so i just moved ahead to slide now i know you've probably you've seen an earlier version of this and i and i said oh i didn't have these single gray slides in here but i do have them in this packet and so this is another way to think about your question i think um am i talking was it anne yeah um so you know for instance i think i mentioned grade six being there there it is it's over 800 students so that's another way just to ballpark this this question and this you know what's going on here uh historically your grades have grown you know covet or no covid you've added students over time and your cohorts have grown

084so um we can if if it'd be helpful i could even give you some historical information when there was a little bit lower building than what there is today and you can follow a cohort over time and essentially watch it grow and if that gives you some confidence i think about it this way the first thing the most important thing that is going to affect your enrollment is the students you have today right um i can show you the scenarios of first and and housing but what's going to affect your enrollment tomorrow five years and seven years are the students you have today and we also know that over time in your township in avon schools those numbers tend to grow so i kind of want to second what ann said and it's not more

085of a question it's more of a request and i also second round said this work that you present to us is incredibly helpful i just cannot thank you enough for the detail and the specificity that you provide us we have just to be very blunt we have a very difficult decision about the high school to make in the next couple of years it is close to full we could make changes in it to get through the short term but if we're going to 4 000 it won't hold that many kits so as you get your may data and your cova data and as you move forward and we continue to rely on you my request is think about that as the specific problem we have to solve and so the we can focus on that

086and you can use the tools that you have to say this is what i know and this is where the guesses are that's what we need in the next year to 18 months as we try to figure out what if anything needs to happen to the high school to prepare for this growth yeah and and you know i would say that while my forecasts have been fairly accurate um and and i do pride myself on on doing the best job i can um my forecasts in general especially in a growing school district tend to run low and it's not just avon i've worked oh gosh i've worked in clark pleasant for almost 20 years and at one time they were the fastest growing school district um in the state and i every two years i

087came back because they needed to stay on top of their enrollments and every two years my enrollments were low and the nature of the methodology is that you're always kind of i don't want to say chasing but you're waiting for um the numbers kind of to all catch up with each other and so i tend not to force things you know i don't want to make up a number i want the data to speak but i know that in general my methodology is inherently conservative when it when in growing times it will be an overestimate in down times or slower growing times so for for you all even though the total has tended to be very good and that's my experience in other school districts too and you know part of it is because you

088already know the students you got are going to be the students you have in the future is that at higher grade levels and particular at the high school i have been low in terms of the forecast and so and so i say this to you because i know this is how statistically and the methodology works as well as my experience in other school districts fast growing school districts like um clark pleasant or comparable school districts i would say like center grove i've worked for center grove for for quite a bit on and off as well as mount vernon so um probably very comfortable to to you in terms of the building and the type of building in particular is occurring now i personally believe and professionally believe that you know i'm looking at these numbers

089this is the high school right here i clearly see four thousand here i don't think it's a question of if maybe it's a question of when all right because building you know it like i said it wasn't it's not always the level building it's when it occurs and and that's almost a truism so is it in five years or is it in eight years when i'm looking at this i see eight i see four thousand it doesn't matter if it's in five years or in eight years because this number is not precisely correct but it is directionally correct everything is pointing in that direction um i would also say the bill the the housing forecast that i've provided you is also high right it's higher than it is today so where will it be a

090little bit higher a little bit lower but directionally we're on a path to four thousand very helpful other questions board members with that dr brookwood will say a hearty thank you for um for once again providing us with a lot of food for thought a lot of good information i appreciate your work and thank you for joining us tonight okay thank you bye-bye okay so let me move us to the next agenda item which is the consent agenda