001welcome to our tuesday february 27 22nd board meeting if you'd please join us in the pledge of allegiance all right we'll call this meeting to order and we'll start with dr veraco the agenda approval deletions editions thank you uh there are no adjustments to the agenda that you received last week seek approval motion to approve we have a motion by ms kelly second second by mr howard marshall any discussion all in favor aye motion passes thank you miss kelly is there any correspondence nothing in particular that i'm going to share just uh we do continue to receive and read all of your emails keep them coming we appreciate you sharing your cares and concerns with us thank you we'll move on to our liaison committee updates mr marshall thank you under personnel interview committee we
002do have interviews for the grimmer principal or at least for a new principal at grimmer starting tomorrow and wednesday it will take a process very similar to what we have for babbage and in regards to bibich and the interviewing process i'll defer that to mrs mucha uh later on when she talks about new hires thank you that's it thank you miss kelly um i have nothing new to report from either one of those since our last meeting thank you dr medlin nothing to report thank you the only thing i have to report is for dollar scholars the deadline for any senior wanting to submit an application for a scholarship it expires february 28th there will be no exceptions so with that we'll move on to our official school board business topics consent agenda dr veraco
003thank you again mrs seuss you do have uh in your packets minutes from the special meeting on the 7th of february and the regular board meeting we also seek approval of the claims payroll and extracurricular expenditures that you received thank you move to approve a motion by mr marshall second second by miss kelly any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye aye motion passes thank you is there any public comments regarding action items there are none so we'll move on to our official school board business topics regular agenda dr morocco i think you would like to kick off the agenda by inviting ed sedano he is with the new lc blitz booster club for football and he wants to talk about a donation and some of their activities thus far this year and to
004update the board in the community on what the lc blitz is all about so ed thank you dr rocco my name is ed sedano part of the lc blitz football booster club today we come bare and give school board sorry we didn't bring enough for everybody uh but what what we wanted to do was show appreciation for helping us guiding us through these last two years i know it's been a bit of a roller coaster so hopefully this small treat that we're handing you will thank you sir bring a smile to your face um so far we've been able to donate 7 500 7 500 bags of popcorn to the tri-town community we've done both the tri-town fire department police department community hospital in munster franciscan hospital in dyer we did the st john public
005works lake central high school and now all of you so uh we've been working with our fundraising partner and they gave us 7 500 bags to deliver at first it didn't seem like it was going to be enough but when we filled uh one of our our parent booster garage we were like wow that's a lot i don't know how we're going to get rid of it but anyway we just want to thank you all for for what you do for the community hopefully the street will bring your family a smile to their face when you come home so anyway as far as our booster club uh last time i was here was august of of last year you approved us and since then we've gone on to do a bunch of new things right
006we bought tailgating back to lc which which was fun a lot of work but it was fun and uh we've been able to do some community of projects with the sheraville and st john we've done we partnered with the volleyball program and we collected pajamas we donated to the salvation army in two weeks we got a handful of football players who are going to participate in the polar plunge in chicago that money that we're raising for them is going to go to special olympics hopefully it won't be too cold uh but anyway what we're trying to do is is make sure that we bring in the right funding for our football program right as a public school we don't always have what we need so our parents are really motivated and have done a really
007good job of raising money even though we're a young club and uh we're just looking forward to working with obviously you uh the athletic department our football coach football team and bringing excitement back to friday night so that's that's our big goal so anyway thank you very much for your time so was the tailgating successful are you bringing that back yes it was successful uh obviously the last game that we had was cold and windy uh so we didn't have people but throughout the year we we had some good turnouts and we had some good food vendors that that supplied food for people who were interested obviously we don't have enough time uh to do a real tailgate right so with the hour and a half we brought food vendors in so so we were
008very happy about how that turned out so we're looking for other opportunities as well to bring like i said friday night experience and make it a big thing in the community one of the big things that we did was reach out to the community right it's a school built for the community by the community and what we're trying to do is bring them more into our friday nights right so we went out to them and sure we went like this and they were happy to do it because they said you know what we really haven't had that thank you for coming out and trying to expose us to lake central football so we were happy about that great good job all right thank you thank you very much congratulations [Laughter] thank you now we'll move
009on to our director of human resources personnel mrs mucha thank you i am asking for approval for the personnel packet move to approve the personnel package second we have a motion by dr medlin in a second by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye motion passes thank you we have a very special guest here tonight though we we do have besides a great representation of the beach faculty and principal we have our new principal with us tonight allison would you like to stand up and introduce your family to us [Applause] could you come down to the mic so the people at home can hear you thank you hi i'm alison petrulia thank you so much i'm so excited um i am coming from maryville but before i went to maryville i was
010part of the lake central family so i'm so excited for this opportunity um i brought with me my family my husband nick petraelia who is a graduate of lake central and um dominic is seven and annabelle is five so they are they're with me well welcome back and again thank you to the staff and to dd for coming tonight that means a lot thank you my second item is to bring up some people who were instrumental in training our staff and stopped the bleed it was going to be led by jerry but he had a family emergency so we have our new birthday person um brian kissinger to come up and introduce the people who helped us with our stop the bleed program brian did you say birthday yes happy birthday yesterday so um thank
011you for having me up here um so i'm kind of turn a little bit um so the stop the bleed program has been implemented oh geez private now since the beginning of the school year and it's a program that is near and dear to all of us up here so it requires the instructors of firemen police officers medical technicians to go through an eight-hour training course to become instructors and once we got once we we became instructors then we decided that let's get together and work collaboratively through the tri-town and getting our fire departments together and the police department and the sros to bring this program to lake central and so right now i still have more of a speech so but i want to uh just make sure that i i get the guys
012up here too so as i call your name come on up here so chief joe martin so in appreciation we want to give you a certificate chief kevin leduc he's from the st john fire department fireman jeremy golick from the sharerville dyer fire department he's on both uh captain scott hamrick is the dire fire department but he's not here tonight he also works in hammond and then i need officer burton he's one of our school resource officers this is the sheriff police department corporal jerry patrick who's not here today and then of course myself is one of the instructors as instructors we teach individuals to save lives from severe trauma and from unfortunate events that may cause severe bleeding and the training consists of packing wound gauze tourniquets and with that we have 20 kits
013at the high school installed already we have 10 in all the middle schools and then we have five at every elementary school so with that being said you know with with the kids already on our walls we need to train and train our staff and um so far today we've taken what two months i think it is two months and we have trained over 131 staff members throughout the corporation so that's huge and that's just phase one and usually the high school you know obviously will need more but right now they have 20 staff members trained uh middle schools 10 to 13 so it just depends on the class size and then 9 to 12 for each elementary school so for the total of 131 and the future of this program is to continue and
014train everybody because if you are trained and stop the bleed you're 95 more likely to use in in case of a trauma and so we'll additionally add staff members transportation and central office for phase two and then we'll go from there as it kind of goes on so but i'm proud of our school corporation for being ahead of the curve when it comes to stop the bleed program a lot of school districts are you know just starting off and we're way ahead and this type of training will help save lives by having 131 staff members now certified which places us in a great position to make an impact on students teachers and our corporation so i'd like to thank these guys they've done a great job in the stop the lead program so [Applause] and
015again i think it's a wonderful example of how good our police and fire stations are to us that they come to help us with that i did forget to mention that we have many of our elementary principals here also to welcome their new colleagues thank you and before we go on we want to thank the bevich staff and our new principal for coming out but you don't have to stay for the remainder of the meeting if you have other things you need to get to you're certainly welcome to stay but you don't you know this is a good time for you to depart if you want to but thanks for coming out [Laughter] well thank you for coming out [Applause] in the room exit b instead of b all right now we'll move on to
016our director of primary education dr bracey good evening i don't have any field trip request tonight but i do come before you seeking your approval for the professional leave request you have received in your packets motion to approve i have a motion by ms kelly second by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you all right move on to our director of secondary education mrs castaneda thank you for my first item this evening i am seeking your approval for the professional leave request that you received moved it move to approve the professional leave request we have a motion by dr medlin and a segment by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you and for my second item i
017am seeking your approval for the field trip request as presented so moved we have a motion by mr marshall and i will second that any discussion hearing none all in favor aye motion passes thank you and then for my final item i'm actually going to bring up our wonderful high school principal erin novak and she is going to give you an update there is a slight typo this should be an update on advanced placement so tonight what we're looking at as our advanced placement program as well as our results in comparison to previous years as well as to the state there should be a copy at your seat but if you want to come down to view the screen that's fine too all right thank you sarah president lake central school board dr veraco district
018administrators thank you for allowing me to speak tonight and talk to you about ap exam testing and our analysis and basically an opportunity to brag about our our students our teachers and great things happening at our school i also thought it was great that the blitz club passed out popcorn for my presentation so please feel free to indulge um so i just wanted to start with some of the basic information about ap testing if it's new to some people uh at our high school right now we have 20 ap courses offered they're all on this screen a student doesn't necessarily have to be enrolled in a course to take an ap exam if they feel that they are prepared to take that ap exam so for example if they're a native speaker of a language
019we've had native speakers in spanish and chinese take the ap exams and do quite well on those so these are the courses that we offer at the school we have quite a selection one of the things that people always say they're concerned about the size of lake central and i always say it's one of our benefits and this is the reason why is because we are able to offer such an uh a deep selection of advanced placement courses along with many other courses as well so ap exams are scored on a scale of one to five there's many questions on the test it's a regular standardized test similar to istep psat sat it is a college board exam so they take the [Music] the number of questions that that student has gotten correct and formulate
020that into a score of one through five anything three or above in the state of indiana is awarded as credit automatically at any of our state's public institutions so iu purdue ball state indiana state any public institution private institutions will award credit but they also can come up with their own stipulations as well um and this isn't just an indiana thing it's a nationwide the scores can be awarded nationwide as well so i know there's a lot of information on this screen which is why i made you some hard copy so it might be easier to look at your hard copy when we're talking about this screen i wanted to put it all in one location so these are all the exams from 2021 and this is our score summary so up at the top
021in the blue row you see scored one two three four and five and in the left hand you can see the the name of the exam and you can see how many students earned a one how many students earned a two a three a four and a five so if you remember on the previous screen i said the goal is that they want to score a three or above because that way they're going to be earning the college credit so you can look focus your attention on the columns three four and five and you can see that we have quite a few students that are earning college credit by taking these courses taking the exams and scoring quite well on them if they score one and two they do have the option they could take
022the exam again but many of our students do quite well right from the get-go so all in comparison to what so this is the indiana state average for ap exams if you can focus your attention on the lighter blue columns you can see that is the breakdown of how many exams scored a three four or five so this is the state of indiana this isn't just lake central this is the state of indiana so you can see a lot of them are 35 38 39 40 41 that's the performance for the entire state and now this is where we really have a proud moment when we look at just like central numbers and this is a five-year analysis so you can go back to 2017 up to 2022. the tests take place in may so
023they have not taken the test yet in 2022 but if you look at our percentage of students with a three or above we're knocking it out of the park in comparison to the state so if you look we have at least a 10 percent difference a 10 increase in comparison to the state all the way up to about a 30 percent difference so our lake central students are scoring very well on these ap exams so i gave you a lot of data just in general um you know with 20 ap courses being offered we have an analysis of all of those exams so i wanted to pick two of them to highlight for you this evening so the first one that i broke down was ap human geography and the reason why i selected this
024one is first of all it's the it's the biggest exam that we offer and it's also taken by freshmen other grades can take it as well but it's it's a predominantly freshman course so if you look at the data here down at the bottom scores one two three four and five um if going back to 2017 you can see that we had quite a large column of students scoring a one and what you want to see is that trend decrease across the years so i think they did a pretty good job going from 2017 to 2018 those students scoring a one definitely decreased it did go up a little bit again in 2019 but if you also look at the data showing scores three four and five you also see that those grow those grew
025pretty significantly as well and that's what we want to see is that the scores of the ones and twos those are going to happen some students are not going to be great test takers it does happen but you can also see that those threes fours and fives were growing throughout the years as well you can see a little bit of a a dip in regards to covid and the pandemic and that's not just a lake central statistic in the state of indiana they reported about a seven percent decrease in the amount of exams taken and they did see a dip in the performance as well so it's not just a lake central thing i think you're going to see that in a lot of school statistics over the next probably i would say three to
026five years you're going to see the pandemic kind of weighing out in many school statistics but if you focus on 2021 you can see that those numbers have risen again so that's that's a great trend that's a great great statistic right there so the next um test that i broke apart was ap calculus a b and the reason why i picked this one is because it's predominantly um taken by seniors we do have a good handful of juniors that take this test as well and i also wanted to compare the the social studies test the human geography with the math kind of different side brain i guess so you can see in this data kind of the same thing you want to see those scores of ones and two shrinking as the years go on
027and those scores of three four and five becoming more elevated and again you do see kind of a dip in 2020 but 2021 we are rebounding and our kids are doing great so again great news when you look at their performance on these tests so the ap college board also classifies their top scores as ap scholars so there's three different levels of distinction the first one is just an ap scholar and i shouldn't say just it's it's an incredible distinction for these students an ap scholar is defined it's granted to students who receive scores of three or higher on three or more ap exams and this isn't just in one sitting in one school year this is cumulative throughout their four years of high school the next level of distinction is an ap scholar with
028honor and that's granted to students who receive an average score of at least 3.25 on all of their exams taken and scores of three or higher on four or more of these exams so with each level of distinction the stakes are a little higher and the final one is an ap scholar with distinction that's granted to students who receive an average score of at least 3.5 on all of their exams taken throughout their four years and scores of three or higher on five or more of these exams so what does that mean for lake central again another moment to shine our students are doing phenomenal um we have 80 students just in 2021 we had 80 students earn that distinction of being an ap scholar we had 41 students earn this distinction of being an
029uh ap scholar with honor and then 48 students with the ap scholar with distinction so that in the right hand column that all took place in 2021 and then that's our analysis of 2021 remember they can earn these distinctions throughout their four years so that's what that pie chart illustrates is um the breakdown of those students with those distinctions so again our students are doing an incredible job they are knocking it out of the park with their ap tests one thing that i did want to share with everybody is ap potential this is kind of a cool trick i shouldn't call it a trick but more of a tool that allows schools the ability to see which students have the potential of earning a three or higher on an ap exam and this is all
030based on their psat scores so in our corporation they're taking the psat in grade 8 grade 9 and grade 10. so we use those scores as predictors they will send us information that we can break down into a spreadsheet and see which kids fall into those categories that they could potentially earn a three or higher on those exams um so this was taken from the college board site they say there's moderate to strong correlations between psat scores and ap exam results again they're all college board exams so they know by their scores on these psat tests if they're going to be a good candidate for ap courses so this is what it looks like on our end when we take that data and we look at it so what i was able to do i
031took out the students names and their distinguishing characteristics i left their zip code their gender and their grade and then you can see all of the courses that we offer at the high school and the whys mean that they would qualify as one of those students that could potentially earn a three or higher on their ap exam so just a cursory look at this data you see one column that has mostly y's in it computer science principles to me i thought that was amazing i thought that was really interesting that we have that many students in our building in our school that have the ability to do that well on a computer science college board exam so to me that's very impressive the other column that has a lot of y's is the english language
032that one's taken primarily the junior year so you can see a lot of our students will qualify and that as well but the main thing you look at that screen you see a lot of whys so that's a lot of good data that's a lot of good information our counselors have access to that our ap teachers have access to this information so that they can reach out to these students they can recruit our freshman teachers that teach ap human geography they do a great job of going over to the middle schools talking about their classes and getting students interested in that so we've got a lot of great information our counselors our teachers are doing a great job of using that information as well and then my last slide is just our ap teachers at
033lake central high school mr frederick's missing from this picture i believe he's the only one that was missing um but again i a lot of the credit goes to them of course our students who work hard study hard and prepare for these but these are the backbone of our ap program and i just wanted to give them a shout out because they're they're great educators they do a lot of extra training to be an ap teacher a lot of conferences they go to workshops many of them also serve as a grader of exams as well and that's it if anyone has any questions aaron over the years we've had very strong foreign language programs is there any particular reason foreign language is not classified in the ap category so what we are looking at doing
034is adding word language as a dual credit option we're going to look and see what our what our students might want are they going to want more of a dual credit option is ap something that they might look more into we're going to be looking and talking with our teachers we do have two teachers right now who are working on earning credentials to teach dual credit and offer that at the high school the dual credit would be activated i've known a number of students go off to college university and just pass right through the classes get credit for it right that's for a dual credit situation when they enroll it's a partnership with some of our local universities okay all right very good yep so we are looking into more options in our world language
035department um again like i said earlier if they feel that they're very strong in those skills they can take the test without being in the course that's a small number but i would like to boost that number in world language as well any other questions no all right thank you thank you thank you thank you all right we'll move on to our director of business services mr james thank you the only item i have for tonight is to seek your approval for the donations that were included in your board packet move to approve we have a motion second we have a second can i just ask you uh do you know what the g3 foundation i've just learned of the g3 foundation this week when this donation came in it is all i really know
036about it is it was formed in 2019 um i'm not sure the behind where the funding comes from but it is a local foundation that gives money to first responders to educators and to community service organizations so yeah thank you thank you all right uh any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you all right we'll move on to our public comments we have no public comments this evening so we'll move right into our board comments and consideration of future agenda items mr marshall i have nothing in particular this evening thank you thank you miss kelly uh just a couple things i wanted to mention uh first time in 18 years the lake central boys swimming had one sectional so uh winter band and guard also had great showings
037of their competitions recently congratulations it's good to hear dr medlin um i'd like to thank the administrators and teachers who have been working to fight against house bill 1134 and other like bills it seems like a lot of their work has made a difference in the minds of the legislators and i appreciate their hard work in that regard thank you thank you and i just have a couple things i you know just want to give a shout out to the three wrestlers that went to state johnny cortez took fourth in his weight class i believe there were three students that advanced to the national merit scholarship finals so congratulations to those three and you have to have the highest psat score right is that how you get into that okay great so good luck to
038them and last week dr malcolm made a comment about transcribing meeting minutes and i just wanted to say thank you to ms nowacki for transcribing those words word for word on each and every week's meeting minutes so i appreciate you taking the time doing that and thank you and with that we'll turn it over to dr verrocco for board calendar future activities yeah so we are back here in two weeks and that's all i have for now keep checking the calendar for school activities as things start opening up we may start having more than just what's currently scheduled keep your eyes peeled thank you thank you do we have a motion for adjournment motion to adjourn we have a motion by ms kelly second by mr marshall all in favor aye thank you