001i pledge allegiance to the fact of the united states of america and choosing a republic for which it stands one nation under god and indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone first on the agenda uh adopt the agenda mr president i move we adopt the agenda as presented moshe's been made the second adopted agenda all in favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion passes next on the agenda is the recognition and presentation okay thank you um this evening we are honored to have uh with us a few state representatives that are going to offer a recognition of coach moore and their successful football program so coach if you could come up here and um i know would you like to study a few things [Laughter] michelle davis and this is representative peggy
002mayfield where also representative john young couldn't make it tonight and senator jack stanley could make it as well but we all wanted we all worked together to create a resolution of the state house and the general assembly recognizing the pat well we did this last year too but recognizing both years as the undefeated football team state champions two years in a row what an awesome program you all have here at center grove and we just wanted to take a minute to recognize that and let you know that we recognize that at the state house as well with the general assembly so very proud of you do good work you have a great leader my son played through him so i'm a little biased so just wanted to take this chance just to share that um
003each player and coach will get a copy of the resolution um okay house concurrent resolution number 38 introduced by representatives michelle davis peggy mayfield john young sponsored by senator jack sandler adopted by voice vote on march 8 2022 during the second regular session of 122nd general assembly a house concurrent resolution congratulating center grove children's football on their undefeated season and winning the ihsaa 2021 class 6a state championship whereas center grove children's football achieved their second consecutive undefeated season going 28-0 through the 2020 and 2021 season whereas the center grove children's football team has won back-to-back state championships whereas center grove football won the ihsaa 2021 class 6a state championship state championship game with a final score of 27-21 over westfield high school whereas indiana football hall of fame coach eric moore won his fourth state
004championship as head coach of center grove football whereas the center grove trojans football team has demonstrated hard work preparation resiliency and tremendous teamwork and whereas center grove children's football has made the community proud representing the community with class and dignity therefore be it resolved by the house of representatives of the general assembly of the state of indiana and the senate concurring that the indiana general assembly congratulate center grove children's football on their undefeated season and winning the ihsaa 2021 class 6a state championship [Applause] great thank you thank you peggy and michelle for taking the time on your union tonight to come here for that that was wonderful thank you the next on the agenda is public comments our board policy states public comments for the union can be addressed to the board for items we're
005taking action on this evening we do have two people signed up for public comments but neither one of those or for action items will be taken action upon so with that being said we're going to move on to the next agenda item which is reports action items only we're moving on important doesn't take action yeah we don't take action on reports we only take action on action items reports okay thank you uh the first uh report this evening uh dr long is going to share with you the annual safety and discipline report dr long thank you tonight we are fortunate to have lieutenant back with us from the center grove police department and lieutenant beck's going to cover the police reporting information and then i will cover the the student discipline part so i'd like
006to introduce lieutenant peck good evening everybody thanks for letting me come if you could just roll through the slides and we'll we'll just hit them as we go so center grove we take pride in making sure that we do a good job both in the schools and outside of the schools on the street and so as you can see right here cgpd uh we have had uh in 2021 2022 we've had 391 runs uh total and uh and and without of that it has resulted in 59 uh various arrests whether that be uh filing charges or uh outright arrests okay you can go to the next one yep um within within our arrest this is kind of a breakdown as to what we normally see it ranges across the board a lot of it is
007battery criminal mischief uh possession of marijuana or or that also includes thc or uh those kind of those kind of uh devices so all of that uh is encompassed here that makes up the 59 arrests uh either filed or outright that we have that we had this year uh through the department we have three canines um canine ido is a bomb dog uh canine ozzy which is my dog he um he tracks narcotics and weapons and then canine lampio is a narcotics only within that we've had nine deployments or searches basically those are when we're invited into a school we conduct a search whether that be of the cars or of lockers or book bags the dogs perform a search and then from that we take action if needed this year it didn't result in
008any arrests from that those canines did not find anything of the illegal nature that any particular person had in their possession another bonus to having the canines is that we can perform school presentations so within within the school year we've done eight presentations at different grade levels everything from elementary to middle to high school just showing the the dog what it can do how it works how the nose works and all the different ins and outs of what the dog can do and then within the 73 training hours that that encompasses training of the dog because those dogs just like us if we don't stay in shape run lift weights eat right then we can get out of shape same with a dog so the dog has to go through training throughout the year and
009that's what is represented by this the 73 hours so the citations uh those are traffic stops so when i say we we patrol the inside and the outside of the schools these are traffic stops that we make the blue column in 2021 2022 represents uh warnings that we give i'm sure if anybody's driven before and you meet a nice cop and they give you a warning you want to say thank you that's we we live in a community where we want to help the community so we do offer warnings but we also have to uphold the law and offer citations as well so within that we had 81 total total contacts 40 of which were warnings 41 of which were citations and then as law enforcement you have to have training throughout the year we
010would be very foolish if we thought we knew everything and we just showed up to work and did what we thought was best so all year long we go to different trainings there's a bunch listed there we participate in all sorts of trainings we're mandated to have 24 hours of ongoing training that's from the state and then on top of that 24 hours we we perform multiple hours of training as a matter of fact we just did an active shooter training a couple weeks ago that was lights out it was it was absolutely the best training we've ever been to but all of that is just to make us better officers uh for the students and the staff and that's all of my piece so don't know if you wanted to ask questions questions for
011lieutenant beck now before we go on to the rest of it well just uh i know at times we get call up for off campus because the deputy sheriffs might be busy on something so we do share duties yes we work really closely with both bargersville greenwood and johnson county because our district where we can patrol actually goes anywhere the buses can go and so if there's an accident up at county line with one of our buses at county line in 3135 we're gonna we're gonna respond to that so not everything happens within the school buildings like i said we patrol the streets and the schools and so some of our off-campus uh calls are represented in those runs but but it's it's it's an all encompassed department so that we do we do help
012with center or with johnson county bargersville greenwood those guys we we had a bus get run into on county lane road and we had greenwood police there center grove police there and the perry township schools came just to see if they could support i mean we're really appreciative of all the law enforcement agencies that that help us and then we in turn can help them too sometimes how's life in the new eoc it's good it's it's uh yeah we figured out that tv's put off a lot of heat and so our monitoring room was we had like seven fans blowing in to try to cool it down but we've got it under control i think so yeah it's it's working out great we really appreciate it good anybody else have any questions i just want
013to say thank you for everything you do and all your other officers do absolutely i am glad to see the three the dogs you guys have because i've heard from multiple students and administrators and teachers here that those those dogs kind of give a good opening for children to feel comfortable with the police officers and kind of break that ice i guess you know something now they feel comfortable with that officer so there's ever an issue there's every concern that that student has they feel like they've got a friend in that person and they can kind of go through them so absolutely not only do they provide what you said they also kind of provide some other things too i think the dog so anyway thanks again for everything you do and your whole team
014seriously thank you so much thank you board appreciate it thanks okay we'll go on and talk a little bit about student discipline in our schools this is just a list of of incidents by type and and what grade level they happen in you can see the high school 873 incidents middle school 733 and elementary 422 not surprising the numbers if when you look at the sizes of the schools and the reasons for um for for us being for an entry to be made you know we talk about this every year with the the other category these are doe reporting categories and so there and we'll talk about a little bit later so there are multiple offenses that fall under other that's why it looks odd that 535 out of the 733 or other but i'll
015break that down a little bit more for you on the next slide do you want thank you in school suspensions and out of school suspensions you could see again the high school has the most but they again have the most students that's that's the number of days that's not necessarily the number of students that have served an in-school suspension and then the same thing with out-of-school suspensions i think our schools really try hard to to make sure we don't suspend kids out of school obviously it's tough to learn if you're not in school so they work really well with the students trying to keep them in school go ahead so these are the reasons for the high school in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions you can see you know defiance by far the biggest category that
016we have um don't know that that's something that's um a particular problem at center grove than it is in any other school corporation especially with high school kids and most of you have all had high school kids so you know what it's like to have a high school kid 231 attendance i think that for me that's the other item that sticks out a lot for us and we work really hard with the family resource program through the johnson county uh to to try to limit that and uh we've worked hard and uh dr nelson's been working really hard to align our three level attendance policies and get everybody on board with with the family resource program we had this this spring we had a meeting with the prosecutor and the judge and probation and the
017family resource people to talk about attendance and what we can do to further that because everybody knows that kids need to be in school it's the best way to learn keeps you out of trouble especially at the high school age if you're in school middle school suspensions again these are the others that category of other of those were basically um inappropriate acts uh aggressive behavior was 90 of them uh disruptive behavior 63 inappropriate language 45 insubordination 35 and disrespect 29 so that that's what kind of fills in that other and so you can see why it's large it has a lot of broad categories in there uh elementary suspensions um the other uh i don't have my notes on that um just again the the same types of other cat things for the elementaries as
018well um you know i think if anything we're seeing our numbers grow a little bit at the elementary level with discipline but i i think that our our deans and our assistant principals and principals work hard with the parents to try to keep that down to a minimum and with the teachers as well is that is that proportional duck along with our student group um you know that's a good question i'll have to go back and look at our other the previous years you know we've given this report for probably four or five years and let me go back and look and and get back to if you don't mind don't mind okay so uh expulsions uh the high school we had 20 alternatives to expulsion and our yeah and five at the middle school
019and actual explosions 10 and eight and um i think this is an area that that i'm really proud of because the schools have worked super hard to try to keep kids in school and and they're coming up with ideas as an alternative to expulsion and and probably almost every single time the parents agree to it because they know that they need to be in there so those numbers have gone down i there was a year it's probably been eight or nine years ago i think we did 59 expulsion hearings so our numbers have gone down significantly with that so i don't know um jason do you want to talk about this just a little bit this is the report that mr hubbard has been anxious to to hear not the expulsion the next one do
020you want to flip go to the next slide the sro app so um this year we we got an app for our sros to carry around with them that can record any kind of contact with any student and we wanted to share that information and we have a whole year's worth of that information and i think this is really good information because not all of our contacts with our students are in a negative light in fact a lot of them are in uh developing relationships and jason can talk to you a little bit about those yeah so the uh the nazro mentality is a triad and that's counseling and mentoring that's guest speaking and most important the law enforcement side of it so the app allows us to track that more on a real time
021so if we're having conversations with kids we leave we can just pull the app out you know make a note of it and then it's it's trackable data so that you know people are like well you're just a school cop what do you do all day well i do a lot actually i you know i interact with kids so what you're seeing here is so in to do the law enforcement portion of it i mean that's what we do every time we wake up in the morning and put the belt on so the law side of it was represented in the call the runs that we that i presented earlier so within these graphs it's not that law enforcement portion of the triad isn't there but what we did put in there is traffic control
022just so that you know it makes sense when you guys see us with our lights on and we're directing traffic and and how much time that actually does take so within the months it's broken down um and this is all done by hours so the white little section is the guest speaking usually at the beginning of the year we we allow the teachers to get used to the classrooms to get the students used to the teachers so we don't want to interject too much in in bombarding them with hey can i read a book to your class can i present a canine to your class um so the first couple months we we try to tailor the amount of guest speaking however what we do on top on the back end of that is more
023counseling and mentoring so anytime we go into a school the first couple months and kids are still learning the classrooms or learning the teachers or having a hard time coming off a summer to get into the school we pull them aside we talk to them when they're in the hallways if if they're trying to do math in the elementary schools and they're sitting down at one of the tables we'll sit down next to them and just try to help them out so that counseling and mentoring side is represented in the red section the red section is is per month that's how many times we have those contacts with the students and then the gray section is just the amount of time that that we have spent out directing traffic so as you can see uh
024i mean the the months as they go get a little hairier um i'm sorry the traffic control gets a little smaller because you've got christmas break thanksgiving break and all that so the traffic goes down but the student connection goes up the this because now we're developing those relationships with the kids uh we're we're allowed to have more interaction with them we actually look for those interactions now we've made connections with students who you know maybe have piqued our interest a little so we try to like pull them aside and shoot baskets with them or you know whatever the case may be so so you'll see that and then second semester is where we really start hitting the classroom harder so in january for example we spent seven and a half hours teaching whether it
025be canine presentations how a bullet travels through the air uh the amendments uh or we guess speak i taught art class one time this year that was fun kids learned how to draw a really spectacular stick figure but uh so you'll see that the the classroom time picks up within the second semester uh but we really my my the thing i think in my opinion the biggest impact that we can have as sros is that student mentoring and an informal counseling portion of it i tell the guys all the time if that if that number ever gets lower than uh the the traffic control or whatever we're in trouble because that is our key that's what makes an sro and sro is being able to connect with those students and we do that from the
026elementary levels all the way up to the high school levels so april uh i know i had to talk with the guys because there's 57 hours of student mentoring and 60 hours of traffic so we had to talk so if you see the next slide it should jump way up or maybe not way up but close but all total at the end of the year we spent 522.5 hours of traffic control 43 hours of actual guest speaking and then 391.5 hours of student mentoring and so that's what i take pride in is that student mentoring section so you guys have any questions about that where do you log your time in uh pre-planning and like what you're doing tonight does that go under guest speaking i mean that goes into that plan no we have
027we have we have every monday we have a meeting that we just sit down and lay out what the week looks like uh we talk about you know where we're at with students and um it's a time for me to connect with the with the other officers to see what they have if they have any issues and so that's kind of where we put the plan in place well i guess my point is there's more than just these three big buckets that you guys are doing oh right yeah absolutely that this doesn't represent that i think you should get credit for no no i mean we do we do a lot and this is just something that's trackable data right so um if we meet kids for lunch you know that that's that's part of
028the student mentoring but if we go to a football game and we see the kids in the stands and we have conversations with the kids as they're playing you know throwing a football with them as as they're passing around uh underneath the bleachers even though i know footballs aren't allowed in the stadium i understand that um but but that that's the kind of thing that i think you're getting at that we don't we don't track that but it still has value and so i'm i'm blessed to be a part of center grove's sro program because of the connection that we get to have with the kids on a daily basis so well next slide is that all officers together i'm assuming that's the whole it is yeah now do you guys keep track of each
029individual officer to kind of see where you can coach other officers yes we do yes it's all within the app it breaks down as to what officers are reporting and responding and all that stuff so so yeah that's that's something that i can look at as lieutenant kind of coach them if they need a little more help with classroom instruction or making sure that they're getting in the schools and having those connections with the kids but that's done on like a monday morning type roll call to what mr alexander's point was so but yeah this is just total what we all do every month thank you yes sir okay go ahead so we have an anonymous reporting thanks mr russell for cueing that up there we've not reported on this before so i thought this
030would be a good addition for this report if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide so we had the 77 is that right yeah 70 anonymous reports and the categories they break them down into are bullying harassment intimidation uh safety or just a general tip and and the the people that that submit that click on what that category is we we didn't put those in those categories so um you know if we went back through we could probably take most of the general tips and put it either in safety or bullying and harassment but i wanted to present what what we showed what from the data when we when we pull the data i think one of the things that we talked about when we were looking at this is a
031lot of these came from secondary which is probably understandable but we want to make sure that we communicate with our elementary parents and even our older elementary kids about the the having this we push it out to all their devices it's listed in their handbooks but i don't know that everybody is fully aware of of the the ability to do this um yeah it's a website yeah they click on it and they can download their phone they don't need to it just takes them right to the web and they fill the format right and it's on our website stacy's will put put a link on our website so if you wanted to you could click on it and it takes you right there to um to do to submit a an anonymous report but i
032i would like to see us push this a little more so to get more information from parents it goes to the building principles or an assistant principal whoever they've delegated and it also goes to me and then if it's not responded within a few hours i get another notice saying hey that that report you know number 278 uh hasn't been acted on yet and and then so sometimes and but if i see it i won't wait for the the building principles to depending on what it is i'll forward it to chief jackson say hey you need to get on this right away let's not wait for um a building administrator to contact you dr long how long i would think about three years does that sound about right it may be older than that well
033they keep they've changed names so um it may be a little bit longer we have been or we did early in the first semester we did a lot really early um and then it kind of tapered off again kind of like jason's charts and tapers off again and then it starts to pick back up again and so it kind of it ebbs and flows i think so i think we're and i think we can do a little bit better job of promoting that out to make sure people are aware of it and maybe it'll keep the school board from getting emails and if we submit an app or a report just uh not to be overly picky but backing up on the other category that you mentioned in the earlier slides sure i appreciate you
034giving us verbally what those were i would ask next year if you could include that somewhere on the slide so we can see the kind of subcategories of other i don't know i'm talking about it sure yes well i mean general tips well just so we can visualize it instead of just hearing it yeah i think um i want to work uh dr nelson and i have talked about a way to when we do the reporting if there's a way we can have that pulled out rather than have to go through all 533 and put a little you know count a little tally mark by each one of them which is what my assistant lin did so i think there's a way that yeah but we've already talked about that dr nelson i did slide
03512. but yeah i i appreciate that i i do appreciate you giving those numbers this year because i think we hit you with that question last year so thank you very much that that's helpful yeah i appreciate lynn pulling and doing the little tally marks for me so that's right that's that's the end of our reports if there are any more questions or my report anyway dr gabriel will present this for you this evening and dr gabriel this will be your last report to the board this evening yes i'd like to talk a little bit tonight about the impact of circuit breaker losses on our district something you haven't really talked about before but we're in the process of preparing next year's budget right now this turns out to be a an important factor that
036we thought we should mention so start with what is a circuit breaker loss at a very high level um and it starts with taxpayers have a constitutional limit on their tax bill and when um the taxpayer reaches that constitutional limit they just don't pay the rest of their tax and various units of government lose out on that revenue and just to give an example and this is a very generic type of an example if you think about a home with an assessed value of 60 600 and 500 000 of that is taxable after various deductions if if they live in an area with a rate of tax rate of two dollars and 20 cents which is what some of our districts has and that represents of course their total rate for all of taxing units
037then you can see the calculation for the tax bill it would be eleven thousand two hundred and fifty dollars but homeowners have um a limit of one percent of their assessed value in this case one percent of six hundred thousand dollars would be six thousand dollars so that would be what the taxpayer would pay and the difference of five thousand two hundred and fifty dollars would be a loss to the various government units and this tax rate again represents all the government units that would be collecting taxes so that would be the school system the appropriate fire district the city or town if they were in it the county the library the waste management district the fire department all those various units of government would share in that loss for this particular homeowner and this
038applies [Music] by the county does this calculation for every parcel uh individually and we've used a data analysis firm to help us better understand this data and kind of do a little bit of a deeper dive into it next slide so just to put some perspective on this i like to show this chart this is our tax rate for the last 13 years and we've maintained a very level tax rate during that time and feel as if we should be able to continue to do that going into the future if you look at what's happening with losses what's that yeah right [Laughter] right the next next slide so if you look at what's happened with the circuit breaker loss this chart shows the dollar amount of the loss which we as a school district received
039in in each year and we just in the last couple months got the figures for 2022 and as you can see 2022 is a much different year that dotted line is the is the mathematical trend line of what's been happening with with circuit breaker losses and this year we really had a pretty significant jump and that was kind of the reason for us to bring this to everybody's attention because this is clearly going to have an impact as we develop our budget for next year unfortunately not a very good impact so if you can go to next is there another slide after this one yes okay i'm sorry yeah go back i'm sorry i didn't i had an older version of this so obviously people are want to know well what happened in 2022 that's
040so different than um the other years and uh in looking at trying to dig into the data there are a number of factors that enter that have an interaction uh and that but primarily you're talking about the assessed value and the tax rate and what we've determined in digging into this is that the really critical factor in 2022 was the uh tax rate and this chart shows the increase percentage in tax rates in the various taxing districts so we have six or seven taxing districts that just is based upon where you live and your tax rate is based on that mean you either live in the county or in in the township or in bargersville or greenwood or neither and all those things things that affect your tax rate but what you're looking at is
041the increase percentage that you see the height of the bar represents the total increase in tax rate across those districts and the red portion is the increase that was pretty small for us this last year eight tenths of one cent on our rate uh so of that total rate increase you can see the the small part that was due to uh to us and um as we looked at the data this is the principal reason that we've seen um such a significant increase in the in the dollar amount of circuit breaker losses in our district now we're ready for those this the last one so what does this mean well we're in the process of developing our budget for next year and um unfortunately uh there's that's going to be an additional 600 000 in
042tax revenue that we were projected to receive that we won't receive next year and um in our operations fund tax revenue for next year was originally projected to go up by five hundred thousand dollars but in fact it's going to go down by a hundred thousand dollars so for next year we will need to cover this loss with increased funding from the funding formula which is based on the number of kids and what the state legislature provides to us through the funding formula and for 2023 we will we will be able to do that that simply means we have less money to spend on other things we'd like to spend it on but that will be how we'll cover it in 2023. um if this happens again it's very difficult to say uh what we
043will do to cover that loss but we've got it taken care of for this year fortunately uh the data analysis firm that we're looking at is predicting that it will not be this bad the year after that in 2024 so hopefully if that prediction is accurate we'll we should be in better shape than we are looking at 2023. so that's just a summary of something we really haven't talked very much about in the center grove district before but as you can see it's something we're going to have to really consider and wanted to make people aware of that concludes the report questions any questions for dr gabriel is the general public allowed to ask a question no sir no we just have to pay for it next on the report this is dr gabriel yes
044i know this is your last report as you go off your retirement yep we didn't we didn't make a a big to-do about when we approved it on the first denial report on a new setting tonight thank you for your years of service with the school district and the meticulous planning that you go through every year in preparation of the budget i know we cover you with all sorts of questions i know as we prepare for salary increases and negotiations and insurance benefits i'm covering you with thousands of questions every year you've always been gracious in your responses and and i want to thank you for for all that thank you very much i appreciate those comments and dr gabriel i think scott said wonderful things to sum it up i was going to say
045something at the end of the meeting to congratulate you but i think people i don't think realize all the tireless hours you put in and all that you have given back to this community in this school corporation i've been on the board for six years and i've always been impressed when i see your especially when those slides come lesser and lesser but i'm always impressed i'm always impressed when i see the time and the effort you put into it and all that you give us from an informational standpoint so so thank you for your service and i appreciate that you take such an integral subject as school financing which is unlike any other and can make it so simple and understandable and the love you have for it really showed through i mean you have
046a genuine love for this kind of thing and that's what you know was needed so very much appreciate that sorry rob if i beat you no not at all i'm glad you i didn't know what the appropriate time to speak was i wasn't going with the meeting end without speaking so thanks scott strategic planning okay thank you very much well this evening i'm going to do a report out on the strategic planning update i do want to say that this is a multiple person input on this but we thought rather than handing it off to everyone that they would give it to me to do so i probably won't do it as well as the rest of the team would have done it but i will do my best now i know the board has
047heard some of this before and so we're going to provide you with uh just a quick update on strategic planning 2.0 just um going to that first slide i just want to remind the board and kind of just refresh your memory for those of you that might not have been around when we started strategic planning 2.0 the board worked really hard to get as large a number of parent input as we could we strive to get 100 parents to come out but we ended up getting 300 over 300 parents to come out and provide input into strategic plan 2.0 it was very well attended and got some great input and some really good involvement of many parents during that process we also had around 60 people including board members parents community members teachers and administrators
048all participate throughout the entire process which was over a year long in putting the plan together you can go on the website and see the details in the plan and it will drill way down in but we wanted to kind of just give you the overview today of where we're at the other thing that happened in that plan was that vision and mission statement became more codified we had pieces of that vision and mission statement the mission was pretty much developed but the vision at the time really didn't match what we believed our mission was and what we wanted to achieve and so um through the work of all of those people that i just mentioned we created the vision of all students receiving exceptional educational experiences so i wanted to say you know that's
049been something that's really gone very well stacy's done a nice job of connecting that with the hashtag of e3 square sorry e3cg thank you and so we've been doing that for several years as long as the strategic plan has been out another piece that before i move on to this that broke off of this plan was while we were going through you might some of you might remember that we had an offshoot of this plan in technology that we had a very intense focus on what can we do around robotics and technology and all of that that led to a subcommittee that involved mostly community members and business owners and mr mr taylor led that process with folks from the teaching and learning department and teaching people in the technology department extremely successful and led
050to the creation of the innovation center we got lots of support and donations through various organizations such as anders hauser lilly to name a couple and just been very successful now houses not just the innovation center and where kids go throughout the year from all of our elementaries and get some phenomenal experience from some great teachers but also too houses our robotics program which by the way has been extremely successful this last year and super proud of them so that that was an offshoot of 2.0 that i wanted to make sure i mentioned another thing that happened in the next slide is that in 2.0 beliefs were developed and codified and clear and clarified and so here you can see the list of beliefs that the organization embraced and so all of these things that
051we've been doing um we want to focus on all of these areas again this this was formulated in um 20 is it 20 20 stacey helped me 20 15 14. at least 15 right 2015 i believe it was yeah 2015. um and so you can see a lot of these things today are still there things like college and career readiness you know our legislation legislators have found an emphasis in that here even just recently we've been focused on it long before that things like social emotional support you can see that as well on the list that again is something that has developed into you know a much higher need than it was in 2015. you can go on to the next slide we we then our committee of 60 individuals worked to create six goal
052areas and focus on for student on student learning those areas were character education stem integration you're in go back a minute sorry yeah your investment teacher capacity connected learning and learning needs and so i want to dig into each of those as i go thanks so the first is character education so you can go to that one thank you so the district and the committee developed a goal as you can see here and work through character education when we started we had a very sporadic character education throughout the district every building had a little something different so the goal here was to organize pull together and have a very common character education language and so the principles work together with teachers and sta and other staff and began the process of basically organizing and unifying
053it across all nine buildings and so that led into the character education um so you can go to the next slide thank you and so what happens next what's really interesting about character education and as a strategic planning goal this has become basically a standard operating procedure for us now so rather than a goal to accomplish we've actually done this so well and so often that this is now just a standard operation for our buildings and how we how we function what's happening next what's going to happen next so we're we're looking at defining the definition of of needs from the focus of personal and social growth to social emotional learning and you can see i won't read all of those to you but you can see the areas of focus that we plan to
054follow out now between 2022 all the way through 2023 and our administrators and teachers will be working through these areas to carry 2.0 on i'm seeing the next slide a stem integration so you can see here we had a goal in stem integration which was you know to increase their performance in science technology engineering and math and so what was accomplished you can see here some of the items and i won't read them all to you but a lot of training for teachers in this area it's hard to imagine but when we started this teachers did not have a lot of experience with a lot of the technology that we have today and so now today a lot of the technology they have in their hands they've gotten a lot of training on stem kits
055were provided to to the elementary students and available to the teachers and that's the hand-on manipulatives to do different types of activities that's more stem related we continue to work on global campus which you know who would know became very valuable during the pandemic and we were ahead of the game there and just a couple of other areas you can see we receive national recognition as a community and state and at state levels and for our stem work um and that just continues to go on to this day um so i'll just go ahead and move on um is there anything else i'm good okay good on that one yeah yeah absolutely i've been able to go observe when they do the stem at the it at innovation center i mean from first graders up
056to fourth graders phenomenal and it's amazing what those kids start talking about just because of the manipulatives got put in their hands and each table has to come up with the same result but it it's you know if there's 20 tables there's 20 ways they come up with that result and it's just phenomenal to watch those kids and the wheels turn yeah one thing too i would add is that we've had as it says here recognition um we've had schools from all over the state um and maybe even out of state come and observe the work that's going on we know that i believe it was plainfield immediately started to develop a facility just like ours and i i think there was another school district as well who came over and that's great that's what
057we do in this industry we provide that for folks and and hope they go out and steal it because they think you know what we're doing is great because it is great for kids i'm going to the next slide so the other area focus oh i'm sorry uh the so the next steps for stem integration so as you can see the stem courses are being added at the middle schools we're redesigning the k5 elementary innovation center piece um incorporating elements of reading and problem solving and some humanities humanities piece we're also applying for the ido computer science standards um we um into the tech lab specialist specialist time and then finally in 20 next year in 2023 uh we're looking at middle schools into anticipating and promoting differentiated support you know for their instructional practices
058to include co-teaching blending blended learning tech integration and more innovative innovation visits innovation center visits oh is there any other questions on that no okay next is your investment at the time we were working on this we were looking to improve safety in the corporation um and but one of the things we really wanted to do was really educate people on our investment dr gabriel does a fantastic job of making sure people are have availability to all of our funding all of our our budget information is out there you can read it to your heart's content and dig in as far as you'd like but also too with stacy's help they also make it very simple and easy to understand too so uh it's it's been great to have that resource out there for parents
059and and community members and we received a lot of positive feedback from that we we instituted or implemented a marketing plan a couple of things that we did in that way was we have the center grove ambassadors program so we've have several we have a few classes of that the pandemic kind of put a kink in that and we're excited to get that going next year but that is uh you know we have people and community leaders that involved in that mayor myers was a part of that group we've had some state representatives that live in the district that's been a part of that we've also had you know business leaders and so forth that were part of that and that program you know it's about four or five classes and they come in and
060they spend time learning about the district and everything that happens in the district the next part is uh we had the oh sorry go back to me tracy sorry we had the uh silver card program that's an exciting one that's where we issue out silver cards to folks over a certain age where then they have free access to all of our programming unless the programming is for something like say a state competition where we don't get the gate they're going to have to pay to come in but other than that then go to all kinds of of school functions we also work with our assisted living facilities and provide them there as well and a lot of times even like our some of our programs i believe our choir and our drama programs have offered
061special times just for those individuals to bust in and see a program just you know for them we've added electronic signing throughout the district as you all know uh that's been wonderful to unify that communication stacy has control of that so be really nice stacy because she can put things out on that we've created virtual tours for each school and athletic space if you haven't seen those those are amazing it's been a great thing for folks that have been looking to come to center grove we hear about that all the time and again as i mentioned the development of the hashtag to highlight the vision and social media and all of the great student performance act you know academics athletics all of that and people just contract that hashtag and really get the information so
062one of the other reasons that we really worked on that if you remember we were looking to do a safety referendum at the time and unfortunately that didn't pass but we did tell the community that if it didn't pass we would slowly implement what we could with the budget we had and i have to say you know dr long dr gabriel done an excellent job of working that into the budget writing grants and getting things we're further along than we thought we would be based on that another huge thing that helped us was our involvement with community health they came in and picked up our nursing staff which really helped us and then they provided a lot of social work mental health support counseling or things that we thought we might have to hire they've
063come up they've stepped up and they've provided provided a lot of support at no additional cost to us so with that been really really moving along in our plan and finally on that note too our eoc was accomplished you know without raising taxes and having great interaction again compliments to dr long and mr alexander for going out and working with two fire departments to come together join hands and and you know work to create that beautiful facility and provide safety here on this central campus that we're really fortunate to have so going on to the next slide which is your investment beyond so we're continuing to manage the debt and maintain a steady tax rate that's something we're really proud of and the board takes a lot of pride and takes very serious to continue
064to maintain that steady tax rate um as you know by looking you see that that tax rate of ours of a dollar two to a dollar for um it's it's substantially lower than most of the school districts around us um but we're able to uh pay i've said you know you get a great bang for your buck center grove you know with what you pay in your tax rate we've been able to maintain a seven to 12 percent cash balance that's across all of the funds can be somewhere between that seven and 12 cash balance that helps us in borrowing a lot of our lenders look for what our cash balance is you know we continue to focus on communication the areas of importance with white river township residents and we've increased the exposure to
065white river to right river township community through social media news publications stacy puts out a quarterly newsletter to the community uh that really we provide a lot of we just had one go out got a lot of compliments via email from parents and from community members and some former board members really appreciating that community letter that really highlighted mostly all the academic success we had this year which was amazing and then finalized the trademarking and i don't even know if we've had time to tell you this but we are finalized as a trademarking and so our next steps are to figure out how to police it and so we're going to be talking about that with you and the board and so those are some things that will be going on you know that was
066a task set before us a long long time ago and if you've ever tried to do a trademarking process through the legal process it is cumbersome and uh difficult and hats off to stacy uh for sticking to it and getting all the way through with our our legal team moving on to the next one is if i have any questions on on that okay moving on to the next area was teacher capacity and this was a huge one for us prior to prior to the strategic 2.0 we we've had pretty much a one one person show in our curriculum department and there was a lot of things that unfortunately couldn't get done from grant writing or curriculum implementation instructional pieces and so as we've grown that department the things that we focused on was developing
067a guaranteed and viable curriculum between k-12 and what does that mean as i'm sure you all remember what we talked about is is that we're going to guarantee that what you're going to get in this school district whether you go to elementary one or elementary six is exactly the same it is it is a guaranteed curriculum that is across the board you're going to have that same educational opportunity and that what we are set out to do is going to be viable in other words we can get it done um because if you look at the state standards that the state puts out it'll take about i believe it's 22 or 22 23 years to get accomplished so yeah and so we had to pare those down and make that more manageable so you can
068understand how difficult a teacher's job is just in general just going to school and working with anywhere from 28 to 35 kids every day just on a day-to-day basis but then having to uh having to organize curriculum having to do lessons having to do grade grade books and you know and all of that work and then you know classroom management discipline all of that the social emotional needs of the students the social emotional needs of the teachers all of those things are just a lot that go on and i think people really often underestimate the significance of what a teacher does every day and so with that we work really hard by providing them with instructional coaches in each building that's to help them with their instruction this is probably more popular among our newer
069teachers that are coming in and just starting to really learn uh what it's like to teach and and really what it's like to teach as opposed to what you did in student teaching for you know a few months and then also to professional development for teachers to help them you know grow as as teachers and leaders and then cross-curricular instruction snapshots so instructional snapshots basically teachers work to kind of you know put together what are these solid lessons what are these great things that they do that helps people helps other teachers you know figure out the best ways to teach um and then the supported instructional rounds in each building and i'm just talking about how we use that as well and so we've developed those this has been pretty well implemented since 2016 you
070can go next slide and what's happening next so as we continue to go on what we're looking at is continuing to develop our common assessments and measure student learning and provide learning support we're looking at ways to on our numeracy and reading instructional frameworks in secondary we're developing common assessments and continuing support of quality assessments and feedback and are learning cadre also for their practices and then finally new new teachers redesigning programs to support new teachers and collaborate between district administration building leaders and instructional coaches and so that's the work that's moving forward from this a lot of the work that's happened in teacher capacity has become standard operation so i'll pause there a minute see what questions you have or comments okay we'll move on to the next one uh so connected learning wow
071did this benefit us and we had no idea we started down this path to increase the effectiveness of instruction through in instructional technology to improve student learning and so what was accomplished was a survey that helped us find out what our students had access to what what future we needed to do for pd professional development for our staff we then implemented online courses in canvas that grew exponentially as you know and became a backbone of what we had to do to get through the pandemic and then you know one of the really neat things was the monday monthly twitter chats that were held and teachers were able to engage in some professional development via via twitter so the connected learning piece while it it was moving along at the right pace the covet hit and
072uh it got accelerated and you know what really helped us is i know that a lot of the school districts around us said how in the world are you already there and it was because of the work that you know we had started down this path you know a few several years earlier so with that moving forward our connected learning plan beyond that you go next slide you'll see that we're continuing to develop the essential elements of e-learning to support virtual and blended instruction you know to be prepared for that you know event that might need that that might require that um we're also looking at that not only that but also too there are some instances now where that's become the best practice sometimes as all of us have probably learned that sometimes it's
073just better to have a zoom meeting than to drive all the way across the state for a meeting so there will be some opportunities for utilizing the technology we're piloting the global campus flex program so we have 30 seniors that will be full online and that's a that's at their request and based on need is that our capacity right now or just a chosen number it's the number who um were able to that applied and met the criteria because there were some criteria we wanted to set kids up for success so there were some things like had taken a global campus cast path class in the past and been and what are some reasons that some of these kids need this some like the flexibility um they can work and do global campus and manage
074some things some just really thrived in the environment when they were in virtual school and wanted to continue that opportunity as we developed the classes to do this for seniors it might expand we also are working with the high school it might be able to go down to the junior level or maybe become a blended program where kids could part of the day here part of the day or every other day at school at home so there's a lot of opportunity here um it's kind of nice to have a small group to work up some of these yeah oh yeah you don't want it and we've been having some students do these things on an asthma basis for medical reasons or different things but this is our true first kind of like that's a section
075of kids there that we'll get to fully implement that the other things are some staff plc courses that will be online through canvas um and then the digital learning grant we are a digital learning literacy grant recipient which is great and we'll be able to utilize that as well um would you like to give a little like just explanation of what that does for us yeah so this summer our connection learning team is providing some intense support volunteer for teachers but they're able to do it kind of they're doing a session an elementary session and a secondary session and it'll embed it in that will be a lot of those blended learning techniques so how can i utilize technology in ways whether kids are sitting with me or not with me to flip learning there's
076a lot of different things and some of the tools then to do that and giving teachers more training and support for that so then they can go back and then if they choose they can stay in that cadre all year the grant lets us give stipends for support throughout the year and some a book study and some really great continued learning so it's not a one and done it's a how do we continue to grow together as a group and the grant helps us pay for all of that how often do you have to re-up for the grant uh at this point we might need something different so they they survey our teachers to see the needs and this was one of the places teachers wanted to learn and grow okay thank you next slide
077so the next area was learning needs and as you can see there we were looking to meet the learning needs of our diverse student body so even back in that 2015-16 school year you know we we recognize that our demographics are shifting and changing and so we're working to provide our staff with the tools they need in order to meet that ever-changing population and so one of the things that we started with was we developed the we developed the plc model the professional learning communities a lot of school districts around the country use this model and basically teachers meet and they answer the four questions once a week they meet as a group some of them do it more but they talk about as you can see those four questions there what do we want
078our students to learn how how how will we know when they've learned it what will we do when they haven't learned it and what will we do to enrich students who have learned it and so they focused on that and have become very strong in those questions and work hard on a regular basis as i shared to focus on those questions and that can result in anything like i said they use a lot of data a lot of times it's student performance data that they're using probably most of the time and that can be anything from state data to test uh local assessments self you know self-developed assessments uh to uh nwa which is a big one that we use um so they'll use those things uh to have conversations around and those are guided
079there in the building with their it could be either their administrators or their lead teacher in and or department chairs so this is the learning needs slide um and so the next the next slide uh so so one of the things to talk about here and also at your stations um you'll have a kind of a one sheet paper we wanted to give you it's got it's kind of on a black background you'll see these data points you know we've always talked as a board that you know the state state testing is frustrating it's changing every two years it's so ridiculous we hold you know we it's hard to utilize it in a meaningful way because the data changes so often the test changes teachers are scrambling to then figure out well what is exactly
080now the state wants to assess so what's interesting in 2014 as you can see amongst our peer groups here we were ranked 36 we looked at that and you know that was that was concerning for everyone and as i said you know we were light in our you know our curriculum area um so the board the board said let's let's work on this you know we looked at uh through the strategic planning process what to do to improve that area as you can see we click we quickly implemented several things i can't say that one particular thing helped but we then made a quick jump up in the following year got back to where we belonged in those areas now when you look at that data you can see we're just we're running the same
081kind of trend line as as the other districts that we there that we put there this is our peer group that all of you know that the board selected several years ago as districts to compare ourselves to uh demographic wise uh financial uh as well uh so they they have a similar revenue stream as we do um and and their demographics and all of that so um is there i will show you so this is our top five peers yes we actually have 12 peers that are similar to us as a graphic size and all of those things but when you put all 12 of them on here it looks like just spaghetti thrown on a plate because there's too many lines what's important here is we're we were out of the top five before
082the strategic plan and now we're in there and we're staying right in those sec that third or fourth spot all the time so we're fourth out of 12 now fourth out of five of our premieres of our peers yes and then the number under at each point then is where we rank in the whole state among all public schools in the entire state corporations yeah and that's an important distinction when we say public schools because when you look at other data there are you know especially from the state there are you know online virtual schools there's private schools there's all kinds of charter schools yeah yeah and so um it's pretty hard when you you know to try and compare your test data and your scores to them those that can select who comes into
083their school those that can you know cancel you know uh contracts and agreement and things like that so um so we wanted to stay as the board wanted to stay focused on these on these uh peer corporations um you know a lot of times people say well you know what's uh you know what's the what's going on with brownsburg you know um and we had this discussion if you guys remember several years ago about this and one of the interesting things about brownsburg is the fact that they do a pretty heavy concentration of language arts and math to the point that students students don't receive the other cat the other areas unless they are maybe in that la that fourth question we had which was what are they doing right um so um we had
084this conversation in committee work we had this conversation with teachers you know we we're all about a well-rounded student so you know that that involved things like science social studies all those things we did not want those things to not get taught or be put on the back burner so with that you can see where we're a lot similar districts like us who do that they are very very myopic and focused on those those things especially at the elementary level um so i'll go on to the next slide uh so what's happening and moving beyond and i'm sorry also too you do have in front of you a couple of other data points and and you know i can go over those if you have some questions but just ilearn data and there is also
085the um i read data as well and we have some notes on that page for you um so then uh the last thing is that we're going to continue to move forward with understanding being a professional learning community we're going to stick with that model and the process of professional growth and and continuing to develop that that's become a standard operating procedure for us to continue working in that area we're also looking at our enhanced systems and support to response to instruction so you know you've probably heard us talk about this on and off throughout the years but this is what we do to help those students identify those students that need that extra support and so we have processes in place that teachers and administrators work through to provide students that individual academic support
086so they focus on the specific data and then they implement various techniques try it out and then if that didn't work then they're going to try something else out so their interventions they're just going to continue to try different interventions out you know that might be out of the norm that a child might need so that's the learning needs slide is there any questions on learning these before i move on to the last one okay so the last thing really isn't part of strategic planning 2.0 but we wanted to basically give you an update on next steps for facilities because it is part of strategic planning um you know i i will probably defer this to dr long because he just loves to talk about it so um we are having a facilities report do
087you remember something you weren't around in 2012 we had a facility assessment done of all of our buildings and they gave us a kind of a checklist of things that we needed to do to um to improve them and we thought after 10 years it might be a good time to go back and say hey what did we get done and what do we still need to do just kind of a self-check um we are updating our student potential forecasts along with our building capacity and utilization reports make sure that we're still on track with what we what we're expecting enrollment wise and make sure that we're meeting those needs with a building expansion we worked with aecom hunt to develop building standards they met with all of our maintenance guys to talk about what
088we want in our buildings and what's a a traditional building and and all the specifications because as you know we work with two or three different architects sometimes four different architects and they want to put things in or or you know they they like something and this way it's it's something that's in line with all the rest of our buildings so it's easier to fix it's easier to get parts uh it's standard with what we're putting in in hvac or hot water heaters or anything like that and it's really going to help us so now when we're going to add onto a building or build a new building we hand them our building standards and ask them to design that with our building standards in mind instead of going back after they've done it and
089say no you've got to change this this and this and then we're also part of our facilities report and we didn't do this last time but in the 2012 report we probably started replacing our lights with led lights we've used geothermal wells to try to reduce our our cost so we're going to do a study of our utility efficiency by building to say you know to look at to see if we're what we've been doing it has paid off for us uh financially um that's about it any question dr long i'm glad to see the building utilities efficiency study on there you know not only looking at all the good things that have happened and how we've saved but then ways to keep improving right thank thanks sure on that initial cso report have we
090gotten through all the items that were in that report or do we have anything um i know uh probably the big things and that's one of the things that we're going to do we'll chart those of what they ask are what they recommended we do in 2012 and where what we did and then what's left so you'll be able to see those side by side uh to gauge that and then i think that's a time for us to prioritize hey we need to do this so for example all of our roofs have been on a roof replacement plan and so you know we're almost finished with that cycle of replacing those roofs so now we need to go back and say all right we got to keep the roofs on there but what else do
091we need to keep in our our cycle kind of get into a preventive maintenance program so it doesn't cost a whole lot you know we talked about renovating north grove and center grove elementary and hadn't been renovated and while mr russell 30 some years or well something like that and so now our goal is to try to renovate those buildings between their 20th and 25th year so they don't fall into so much disrepair that it costs a lot more money so we're going to try to to to head that off we've got a preventive maintenance program that that will spit out all the preventative maintenance that we need to do on our equipment so we make it last longer or so we can forecast when it's due due to fail because of age as you've
092brought up you know it's a continuous maintenance it's a fluid situation so that budgeting doesn't get surprised right your schedule in those rooms you schedule in new premises sure yeah mr thompson and his crew have done a really nice job of getting that preventive maintenance program up and running and it creates a lot of work at the beginning you know to get caught up with that you know those monthly checks or everything but once you do that then we can extend the life of our equipment a little bit longer and and like you said we can project when we think we're going to need major replacements sometimes as we saw that that you know that's a new pool no it's 25 30 years old already and you don't want to make it you can do
093right but there comes a point the usage is just a lot more than what i think people phantom sure so just kind of to wrap it all up i said we had over 300 people involved um they worked hard with dr nelson and um let's say i think it was mr proctor and dr harp and they all worked to basically assimilate the information that you have in front of you today so with that any other questions i'm dr arkanov i if you said this during your presentation i i apologize for asking now but i'm assuming this update somewhat of the strategic plan itself is available somewhere on our website it will be after this presentation after tonight yes yeah wonderful information in here yeah and so if you go to our website and any page
094on our website go all the way down the bottom you'll see strategic planning link you click on it and it'll take you to 1.0 and 2.0 and everything in between and this will be am i right stacy this will be linked up probably there at that okay so it's under community yeah i think of thanks goes out to not only the administration but everyone in center grove all the employees the teachers the you know not certified staff and everybody else that have been pitching in to make this thing work yeah this is a true team effort so thank you doctor thank you okay next item next item is consent agenda items thank you this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the consent agenda as presented mr president i know that we approve the consent
095agenda as presented second motion has been made as secretary to approve the consent agenda items as presented all in favor say aye aye oh sorry i have a question and i'm sorry that i just i didn't catch this when i reviewed the materials have we gone to a three-year contract because i got my next i got a begin date of 701 to 2022 and an expiration of 6 30 a 25. yes absolutely yeah normally on two year we have that discussion for each i'm out for the administrators those are that's for that administrator's list well for a little amb yeah so those are everybody but me but everybody else on that it's all those administrators with that discussion with the board about supporting the three year for all the administrators the principals and all of
096those okay yeah sorry i forgot okay i remember having that conversation so okay you want tables because because yeah yeah and it's at the moment a one-time shot okay once again we have a we have a motion and a second to prove the consent and items all in favor say aye aye aye does anyone opposed motion passes thank you thank you let me take just a quick moment and someone for uh sure uh dr members of the board uh gives me great pleasure to present to you uh tonight mr joe branchella from among this lovely wife collette he is our new athletic director as of your most recent action here this evening to approve the consent agenda mr bronkela endured a rather grueling interview process involving 21 or 22 committee members an initial round and
097a second round interview and finally a third round interview and we haven't scared him away yet so comes to us with over 21 years of experience in education both as a teacher as a coach and as an athletic administrator most recently down in madison and running not only the high school program there but also the middle school program there and every sport that they have at the high school they have at the middle school he's done that with one assistant and no administrative assistant so we know he's a hard worker and we're excited to have him join the trojan family thank you for the opportunity it's amazing and touring here got some great shoes next on the agenda is action items we have one ashland this evening yes thank you uh this evening i'm recommending
098that the board approve the covid related absence forgiveness for employees and mr taylor is going to provide you with some additional information thank you dr arkanov which one of these is working um this is a uh a returned item we did this in january for the first semester at this point we're bringing this back for the second semester as many of our covet absences happened in those first couple months there the second semester january and february so what we're recommending tonight is for the board to forgive all covert related absences for the second semester of the 2021-22 school year beginning january 1st 2022 and running through june 30th 2022 paid leave that was used for a coveted qualifying reason shall be restored for the employee employees who did not have paid leave time available and
099were forced into lost time shall have their wages restored the cost of restoring these lost wages is 800 871. any changes to that final total if we have any more absences in the next week or two we'll bring back as a note on the personnel report in july and this will be retroactive to the first employee work day on or after january 1st 2022 this action does not apply to employees with covid related absences after june 30th of 2022 so it's just this six month period and that number i spoke to earlier is not a new budget item that we'd add these are wages that we were planning to pay these these people and the covet absence made them use lost time and lose those wages so we're just restoring money that we'd already budgeted
100thank you i'll turn that back over for any questions or comments thank you jason any questions for this one mr president i moved it we accept the covet leave that as presented second motion has been made as secretary to approve the code of religious related absence forgiveness for the employees all in favor say aye aye anyone to post motion passes thank you next on the agendas announcements dr arkanov uh yes you've got a couple of announcements here this um this evening on july 28th we'll have an executive session and followed by the regular board meeting and so those are the two big announcements next year any board member comments i have nothing to say okay with that being said meena adjourned