JTHS 204 Board Meeting

001Now call this July 18 2023 Joliet Township High School board meeting to order roll call please Mr Fitzpatrick Mrs Lynn Mrs Guerrero numer here Dr Huntington here Mr Coffee Mrs stiff here Mr Kennedy stand for the Pledge of Allegiance allegiance to the flag of the United States one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all I want to ask everybody everyone to remain standing standing so before we get started I want to acknowledge honor one of our staff members that passed last month in a moment of silence so we lost April Morgan she had been employed with the district since 2005 and she um her last responsibilities responsibility was teaching at River Valley and so she leaves her husband and one adult daughter and two small kids so I just want to you

002know take time to honor her in a moment of silence thank you no so on behalf of the Board of Education I welcome everyone our um all of our guests that are here in person and those that are viewing via live stream so thank you and we appreciate your coming out all right so can I get a motion for consent agenda so moved roll call please Mrs Steph Mr Fitzpatrick yes this is Lynn Mrs Guerrero numer yes Dr Huntington yeah yeah Mr Coffee yeah because we have no recognition and Awards this evening we'll go right into the superintendent's report thank you um no correspondence or legislation legislative information to share um but we're going to start off with Dr Hampton uh sharing some really exciting information about the America School Grant award yeah this is

003very exciting for the district the department of energy actually had a competitive Grant it's called the renew America School Grant and it's all around solar energy electrical Vehicles micro grids things like that so we had a Consortium of 20 schools that apply for the grant as a unit and we were awarded the grant it's about almost 15 million dollars there is a proportionate share breakdown for each school um a five percent share for each school so for us roughly a million eighty three thousand dollars was awarded to us our share is about fifty four thousand dollars um and it's to be used towards um solar array which is your solar panels um stationary uh charging storage micro grid controllers and switch gears uh infrastructure um superchargers and electric school buses um so right now we're

004working with a Consortium group that includes ComEd amaran Highland electric lion Electric C Electric Nuvi Siemens and UIC working with them to get more details in terms of what does this mean for us what type of infrastructure what what the true cost of damage infrastructure be and hopefully at the next board meeting I'll have more specific details to provide it's moving fast I Believe by October 1st we have to submit the final application as a group some may drop off some may stay it just depends but each entity is Def is going through this process of what does the true cost mean for us and in those different categories what does that mean the size is it one school bus is it three school buses two superchargers one micro grid so we're going through that

005analysis now but the exciting part is is that we were awarded the grant about two years ago we submitted with four other school districts as a Consortium I believe that one's for 25 million we didn't receive that one so myself brianshaw the director of Support Services we continue to work with his name is Tim farquer he's from Southern Illinois school district and he kind of leads the consortiums and us as a group and so we're always looking at these opportunities there is another um uh Grant opportunity out with the EPA Environmental Protection Agency that's due in August we're going to submit for that one also so wherever there's opportunities where we could potentially either Implement infrastructure at the transportation center superchargers electric buses we're going to go after those those buses can cost anywhere between

006250 000 to 400 000 so the support of Grants is much needed if if we're trying to move in that direction of electrical buses but it is an exciting opportunity it'd be a great start for the for the district because of how ahead we were on some things that we were able to use money for other things that you know down the line who knows what requirements yes any other questions thank you and thank you to both you and Brian working on this so we don't qualify for every single Grant that's out there so we're looking for the ones we do so thank you all right we'll move on to our first presentation we have our suicide and depression awareness and prevention presentation and to present the information to us is our PPS coordinators um

007Mr John randich and Miss Julie Edelman good evening ladies and gentlemen um so Julie Brett Markham and myself were tasked at having our annual review of our policy so Brett in perspective that we could bring to the table as you know it's policy 7 290 and so annually we take a look at our policy we just review it with the group that was in the previous slide and we just get some input and make recommendations if any so um part of that policy we want to just acknowledge that we're always working at protecting the health uh safety and Welfare of our students we're promoting a healthy development so that's something we always want to think about and use when we're planning any activities we want to understand the significance and impact that mental health issues

008present to our students and their families um and just provide a safeguard if there's any attempt or threats or information that we get at school for our committee work this year we met twice it was in the second semester we met after school for about just under two hours each time it ensures the first thing we do is we make sure we're ensuring that we're logging accurate information with our internal system so that's something we take a look at we also organize and plan any educational opportunities for the upcoming school year we discuss any Trends in cases so we take a look at what numbers we have so far and take a look at that and then we ensure all mental health information and services are available to families in their preferred language hello everybody

009to review the data this is last year's data as you can see I won't read it necessarily for you we broke it down by the demographics and then we did take a comparison then to this year's data and taking a look at it we did see a reduction at West and a slight increase at centrals but that's the breakdown and then we broke it down further to what type of services that they received in regards to as it's an emergency room visit via ambulance parents a company SAS and then there were times where parents then refused but they acknowledged the need for an assessment here's a seven year comparison you'll see a real low dip at one point because we weren't in the building but then you see the trends there so some of the

010things that we take a look at is how we transition students back to school after a hospitalization making sure that we have safety plans into place and that we have the team who needs to know on board and part of those safety plans as well as confidentiality that we keep to a high standard and make sure that families are on board and what were what they're comfortable with sharing with the classroom teachers as well as our PPS team and our support team what came of this were some proposals for our pal for our procedure changes our assessment right now um was not uniform but we are proposing that it is now going to be a uniform assessment as you see or screener I'm sorry it's a screener that our staff will be using counselors and

011social workers we are proposing that it's then Universal and then it then is uploaded to um once the plan is developed it is uploaded into Infinite Campus under a counselor document so that it remains confidential and that teachers are shared only the information needed that would impact the classroom that's all we have from there any questions sure sure about the level of concern that we have so I'm going to assume that if a student is in crisis We're Not Gonna not provide intervention while we're completing this assessment right so so that screener is just helping to guide the conversation and that that conversation then is uniform you know there are some certain obvious crisis situations where if we feel a 9-1-1 needs to be called that we would call that we wouldn't sit down and

012conduct a screener I have a question I don't even know if this exists but I had just read an article that one in three females have the students or high school students have thought about suicide or think about it and that's a high number where she'd look back the female numbers are so much higher um so definitely is a problem I was just wondering is there something that is a pre-screener of like it's like a yeah Like A needs assessment there are times that our district has done needs assessment that something as part of our committee that we would like to in the future look at doing um wider screeners as more of a proactive way of determining what the needs of our students are only something that's increasing like the need for and after

013reading this Arc I'm like oh my gosh one in three girls and they presented how they feel the need to just smile and move on if you have feelings because of being female and being like the good right so um you know just seeing the numbers that we have how much it is and so some of the things that have been discussed as part of our committee is you know some of our buildings have 3 400 students so you can't screen everybody at 3 400 because once they if they come back at high risk you need to be pulling those kids down and then doing more of these types of individual screeners so doing that in a very um tailored way of making sure you know if you're going to screen or do A needs

014assessment on 100 kids make sure we have staff available so if they do indicate in a high needs that we can pull them down before the day is over so yes that is uh something that we are know that we would like to be able to do as long as we can get a schedule and get that done quickly can I just say I want to thank you for pulling together all of this data and that's the thing about our school district versus a lot of our surrounding school districts and I'm saying this as a mental health professional we have the data we're more transparent with our data we're honest with it we have triangle teams and PPS we have all of these things that come together and a lot of they colleagues that I

015have at area hospitals are kind of impressed they're like oh the school already has them with Thrive work so they have them already plugged into different programs after school and within the school environment then talking about all of our after school programs and sports do just you know try to bring in as many students as possible I just want to say thank you for the data and then yeah going back to the screening tool um you're exactly right it's a means of it's directing the communication in the right way you don't do it verbatim so that the child actually feels that they can open up and give that information to you so I just want to say thank you for continuing this work and we really are like that ahead of the ball in a

016lot of ways thank you scary because you don't know what to say but I have learned in the past few years it's better to ask are you thinking about killing yourself are you like to actually have the conversation um but I don't know saying that to me with um so is there things like that we can send out information to parents parents how do you talk so I know as part of our suicide prevention week we will be sending out additional information during that time to educate our families that is a very heavy topic though so when it comes to you're absolutely right like in our counselors and social workers are trained to know that if the kid is getting to a point part of that screener is to ask that direct question um and

017that's something coming through a newsletter I don't know if we'll we'll probably do some helpful tips of what is going to go out there and that may be included in that mm-hmm talk to your kid about so we um we are planning to create a structured partnership with nami um they already have um work that they're doing in I think DuPage County and they're getting back to us with um what an mou would look like I believe it was Jr telling myself like we met with them this Summer and what we are looking to do as an enhancement to what we're already doing with the prevention week and information that we send out is um it not me partnering through the health curriculum so it would touch all 10th grade students and it would be

018over time and they have a set curriculum that is specific to this topic as well as bringing in adults who have struggled like younger adults who have struggled to talk about the stigma and some things that are associated so we are looking to potentially enhance that education that it would get to every 10th grader in that very structured way appearances that uncomfortable conversation how do you have those conversations and we asked them about that like is there something then we would do through like a a parent University or a partnership where we could have a parent component to it that we could run either during open house and and we're still still um Nami uh individuals so they're learning from their counterparts and DuPage but we asked about that because we thought that would be

019something really excellent to partner with yeah thank you yeah thank you Dr Guzman for that reminder but when we did meet with nami what was nice about it was it was truly going to be a partnership with nami in our school district meaning they wanted to do a short like um uh PD with our social workers and counselors so that we can support them when they come in and vice versa if they have any ways we can support them and they have Community groups to support families of you know maybe a student or another member of their family that might be in crisis or suffering from mental health issues and so there were I think there were a lot of opportunities there for developed Partnerships and Nami has been regularly coming to like our jreck

020meetings and the one thing that we talked about going into next year we asked them if potentially they could be maybe our first speaker at our J-Rock meeting in the fall and if not that one another one where then other Community Partners can learn more about what Nami does so that they could get the word out too and maybe strengthen those those groups that they're running or increase access to the groups sorry just one last question I know that Mrs McDonald has talked about panorama is that utilized as a universal screener in the district we have not used a screener to my knowledge and we even understand a lot we dated last year as a so yes it's a screener that's used it's a screener but let it it's a it's a little bit different

021Panorama is a universal SEL screener so it'll assess the the cork core SEL competencies right and what we what we talked about in this committee was more specific to a suicide screener which some schools will do um but as Julie mentioned it's much more labor intensive we need to be prepared for the response and the Aftercare so it would take a we'd have to work with our Community Partners and have enough mental health professionals available to get through every student within that school day so so we have a general SEL screener that the triangle teams use to Target students for early intervention but in terms of a suicide screener which is something a little bit more specific uh we haven't done that yet and you'll see some of the data from the is that something

022new to our district though individuals in those rooms are trained in how to have these conversations and Screen students as well so we have a lot of opportunities but I know the question universally that's not a question we have answered yet and and I and when I answered that it was directly related to that so PRP PE courses do scl screeners as well so that we have a general understanding of where we are with social emotional needs but not necessarily directly related to like the question that you asked have you had thoughts of suicide or self-injury those kinds of more deeper level questions about social emotional these could be warnings dying though right like they might need a little additional help correct yeah any other questions thank you very much we will move on to

023our next presentation which is our annual presentation on prevention of in response to bullying intimidation and harassment and we have um Mr Locke and Mr Brett Markham to present this information response to bullying on the prevention plans right here we have numerous methods not only to put things out on our website and make things um normally accessible to everybody but we also have numerous times to where we meet with the different groups in person to discuss harassment intimidation and bullying throughout the school year as you can see on this slide as far as the response plan all formal complaints were investigated investigations were completed within 10 school days and then finally victims were provided with information regarding services that are available within the district and the community and the evaluation and assessing of the policy

024outcomes and Effectiveness we collect data surrounding victimization all the way down through the bystation bystanders intervention and or participation uh just a quick overview of some of the data that we collected through this year so we had 109 cases of harassment intimidation or bullying reported 104 cases were founded a variety of locations you see up there most of them are in the classroom but what I would say is that a lot of times there's multiple so it could be in the classroom and electronic right but when they happen in school typically it's in the classroom the basis for founded Hib reports so these are the categories that are outlined in school code for us to monitor we'll talk later about a house bill that was recently passed this list will get longer and so with

025that long not high number and unspecified will be lower next year just because we have more categories now to track uh so some recommendations for the next year uh we we've got a lot of new Deans on our team so uh it's time for us to do a refresher of our procedures make sure that we're following those with Fidelity every every incidence of harassment intimidation and bullying I think it's important to point out too this isn't just bullying it's also harassment intimidation so sometimes we we forget that so uh just time to do another refresher uh Tanya has been patient with Steve and I as we've been updating our our online shares uh site to make sure that our forms can be uploaded appropriately definitely going to incorporate this into our see something say something

026presentation which which we deliver to students at the beginning of the year but then also refresh from time to time in our advisories um we're also as we're pulling data so so you get to hear from us a lot tonight so we apologize in advance but as we're as we're pulling data to monitor how we're doing uh all of these fit together so we'll be cross wrestling cross referencing uh our discipline data with our Hib data to make sure that we're catching every case that we're document everything appropriately because now uh this house bill was recently passed signed into law and there's more requirements on parent communication there's more documentation that's required and ultimately we'll have to upload our data to the state of the Board of Education moving forward so just good timing for

027us to hit hit reset on this and make sure that we're following our procedure appropriately oh how were um those cases reported yeah so uh a lot of times we we have the anonymous online reporting we have uh through the website through JT Webb students can report I think it's JT Lauren is what they see um but a lot of times what we're seeing is students just coming in and reporting to staff members most of the time that's how it happens correct I mean most kids all have to ask for grades Infinite Campus so I I think it would be fair to say that most of the time when students are accessing that they're accessing it through their device when they log into their device they land on JT learn and there's a link right

028there where they can report it awesome like a set of procedures for that for staff like if staff feels intimidated or so we're going to talk actually later about strategy 1.5 action plan 1.5 which is one of the things we adopted and and part of that is about staff reporting for for like microaggressions or incidents where they're uncomfortable so I don't know that there's anything formal at this point that exists but but I met with our affinity group leaders this week too and we talked about the same thing it'd probably be something similar to our Hib that we can do on the website for microaggressions and there might be some crossover where a microaggression could also be a intimidation or harassment or it could fall in both and so we'd probably have to cross-reference um

029that's our best way we can think about doing it right now but um through that we did ask there are some contacts that both of our affinity group leaders have that they were going to reach out and see if they have any money who's doing this in a different way even in different states we were going to gather to see if there's any other way of doing that um but we all agreed that that was probably the best way to do it going forward at least in this school year and that's something we'll share an opening day I know a lot of schools don't have that so I'm not pointing out like if anyone has any ideas um I know it's not like comment where do I go what do I do and just like

030a layout of or maybe I see something with a student I don't feel comfortable Direct um the the one thing though that and we talked about this too when we talk about that with staff there has to be enough information entered that we have something that we can investigate so we do want to talk about that too um because if if it's just something very vague there may not be something that we can potentially investigate so so to talk about HR if you're not comfortable going to this person going to that and we have multiple complaint managers um male and female at each building um as well as at the district um and just point that out to staff too because sometimes you know you're more comfortable if you're female going to female or male

031going to male or depending on the context of the situation vice versa so that can be part of the information that we share but it is very timely because we were having those conversations your uh and each school there would be okay at each school there would be and at the district okay yeah any other question all right thank you very much and I know some of you are staying up there um our last presentation and a large presentation is this is um historically this has been multiple smaller presentations but we just felt that it needed to be put together with data components as well as where we're at now interventions and supports and next steps um so I know I already shared we're not going to go over each and every piece of the

032data happy to answer any questions but I'm very thankful for to the team they worked really really hard on this presentation so I'll let them introduce themselves as they're talking because I know Mr lack is just once gets started no I I absolutely do um I I will say that the team put me first intentionally because I was supposed to come up with something witty to kind of break the ice of this marathon of a presentation but I have nothing I absolutely have nothing my wife texted me before I came in to tell me my son broke his driver her that we just bought and now I'm upset but you know what we're going to do we're going to move forward and we're going to talk about exclusionary discipline and student support services so with

033that being said I am Steve Locke I'm the assistant principal um at Joliet Central Brett Markham assistant principal at Julia West will also be pres be presenting the night Shelly Clark strategic partner director of strategic Partnerships um John randidge PPS director at Joliet Central Julie Edelman PPS director at Joliet West and to start off the director of student Support Services Dr Gilbert good evening it's a pleasure to be with you this afternoon this evening what time is that I'm not sure it's all blending together to begin our presentation we'd like to share with you just an overview of our enrollment demographics the reason we start our presentation with this is very important to contextualize our student demographics right who our students are as we look at further explanation of our office discipline referrals exclusionary discipline

034and interventions that we'll be discussing this evening so to start with this should be probably very familiar data for everyone um but just so you can see here we have looking at our race and ethnicity and again these are the areas identified by our state board of education that represent both Joliet Central and Joliet West looking further at our enrollment demographics we also like to consider our students with an individualized education plan and you can see that represented here as well between our two buildings and we also have our English learner status so again between our two buildings what our percentages include and then again you can see the information there as it represents both buildings finally we have our meal status with respect to students receiving pre-reduce lunch paid lunch Etc from Juliet Central

035and Juliet West as we get further into our data and looking at our the demographics you'll see this information translated in different ways as we look more specifically at the data and the rest of this presentation so with that being said I'm going to turn it back to Mr Locke as he begins looking at our discipline incident data thank you Dr Gilbert for presenting the first four percent of this presentation um we will continue um I actually did count those out um so our discipline data broken down by campus first and foremost our odr offices office discipline uh referrals you do have the breakdown in the comparison from the 2021-22 school year to the 2022-23 school year one thing I do want to point out on this slide is it looks like we had a

036lot more referrals which I guess technically we did but the point of emphasis that I want to make on this is that it was the tardies from Infinite Campus that were produced automatically through Infinite Campus and generated to the Deans um so that is the one big layering numerical difference between the 21-22 school year and the 22-23 school year as far as discipline referrals in relation to Federal and race or federal race ethnicity uh the numbers are up there between Joliet Central and Joliet West I know you're all familiar with this because you have had the presentation so please ask any questions if you have them as I proceed as far as um the discipline referrals based on IEP status once again Joliet Central you can see the numbers right there compared with Joliet West

037from this past school year going into El status very similar to what Miss Gilbert or Dr Gilbert presented earlier this is just breaking it down with El status as far as the overall referrals both at Joliet Central and Joliet West this past school year also the meal status you can see that the Western Central up there are portrayed and obviously there's always room for improvement that goes without saying as far as District data and severe infractions um overall there were some very positive gains between the 2122 school year and the 22-23 school year you can see a lot of them were a decrease within the past year or they stayed relatively the same as far as referrals distributed at both campuses with severe infractions yes you can yep so uh-huh African-American feeling and when you

038look at the referrals our white population is 30 in Juliet West so as we're looking at this disrespect to me I'm wondering does me as a white teacher interpret something that a student of color does as disrespectful and is this where maybe some of these referrals are coming from because there's no reason to have 13 of white kids having referrals and that number decreasing but our other races are increasing and I just I keep asking this question is why is this happening and is there a specific number like teacher these referrals coming from teachers that I've seen disrespect is it disrespect is it a cultural thing um that's what I wanted to dive into because these numbers aren't changing I've been on the board two years now and in two years the numbers aren't getting

039better of our referrals being equally distributed between all Races and this is just a serving and to me a lot of our referrals like to me those big ones all disrespect in class conduct can be attributed to a cultural um differences between teachers and kids and so what are we going to do moving forward to understand that to get those referrals down and we like enough of we're making progress like one two percent yeah that's great it's progress but it's not enough and it's happening quick enough so what are we going to do moving forward to have it more Equitable for our students so so I do think as we proceed through the presentation um strategy 1.5 of the Strategic plan and implementing a more systemic approach to restorative justice I certainly think will help

040other than that team is there anything off the top of your head so they understand what some cultural differences may be uh you know very well a kid could be in my class and I say this is are not history responsible or I think it's funny or I understand it's a cultural thing but the teacher next door didn't get a referral report and how many times I've said to my students I may think this is funny but the teacher next door is not going to do anything or the teacher next door may not do so what are we doing with our teachers to get those referrals numbers down because it's not about restorative practices about why are these referrals being written in the first place why is there so many more referrals being written on

041black kids for disrespect or for um class conduct and it to me the numbers the percentages should be almost identical um and it's not and it's not any better that's always the goal right is to be proportionate in our representation so we're going to continue with our cultural responsiveness cohorts that's that's a huge piece of it we're going to try to expand our restorative justice cohorts and ultimately in strategy 1.5 a big part of that is going to be student feedback staff feedback as we mentioned in the last presentation that Steve and I are going to be pulling uh referral data on a bi-weekly basis so as we're doing that trying to identify teachers who maybe need some support maybe where there's just a disconnect with the students like you're talking about and then just

042the other thing I would add is as as you read research on restorative justice implementation it really takes five to ten years to see the proportionality start to level out so there's a lot of research out of Denver public schools they went all in on restorative justice uh and and research started coming out in 2016 and they're still disproportionate even today when they publish updates to that research so it just takes a long time um it's it's kind of like turning a barge um because it's it's a systemic problem it's not just here um but but we certainly see it in our data too right so uh I think those are some of the things that we're going to keep doing uh and just trying to support our teachers to meet the needs of our

043students better or changes and toxic talk to consultants and share the data with the Consultants so maybe they can modify their instruction to do something a little differently to a better support the teachers and understanding what that looks like so we have a plan to bring some of our co-parts together that we're specifically working with the um cultural responsiveness when we first started cultural responsiveness the it was not an application process but it was who would like to partake in this and for three years we had a waiting list and so I think we're entering into our sixth cohort last year I think was one of the first years correct okay was one of the first years where we started adding individuals that didn't necessarily volunteer into it so now we're adding but with their

044and we've talked to our Consultants about that um it has to be a breakdown of people that might have an interest in going in and an interest or and people that maybe wouldn't have self-selected themselves in and then obviously for this particular training you have to have percentages of Staff of people of color and white people so there's there's a lot to consider with that but this last year was the first year that we had individuals that didn't self-select to go into it um so we're going to continue to do that are we tracking the data go through the program to see are they writing less referrals and students of color are they is it the same has it changed is it less than the teachers who haven't gone through the program I talked to

045Hanover about doing that um and we can do that in the future because we do know who the teachers are there might be other variables at play though um but we we could do a study like that with Hanover I do there's a reason to referrals being threatened and I'm not I mean some are going to be legit you know but how many of these are a cultural thing how many of these you know of race and um and and I it's so right now and in training we're going to continue on with the training um and I would say our in-depth training is the cultural responsiveness cohort and the restorative practices cohort um with new staff though um with our certified staff we have the four-year induction program and we put in a cultural

046responsiveness track um into there so that staff have access to that early on in their careers too so we do keep adding um things in and then one of the things that I think we're going to be more intentional about as I think it was Mr Markham just that that looking at the data every two weeks and identifying and intervening if we see something that is occurring with a particular staff member to provide support and intervention so that would be a um an additional approach too and that was something that I know the board had talked about as well yep and you you did name the event types that are more subjective right so one of the things that I think Steve's going to mention as we look at severe infractions is when you now

047I'm just speaking of race ethnicity right but when you look at race ethnicity of severe infractions with exclusions that's a little bit more proportionate so our staff who we've done a lot of training with on restorative justice we're starting to see that reflected in our exclusion data but to your point that's why we have to monitor those those more judgment call referral types and we I feel like we have a pretty good plan for it this year um that you know our numbers are changing and if teachers aren't making progress on the amount of going to this train but right and that's the part I want to know is your great plans but what storage right yeah absolutely no no please yes so the jury at Central data as far as severe infractions I'm happy

048to say everything did go down across the board so that is that is positive um well it's a Joliet Central slide um Miss Parker all right so and then Julia West they had um everything went down as well with the exception of fighting which I do want to point out that the team did discuss the data reflects the number of students in the infraction not the number of incidents okay so Joliet West absolutely made some strides too okay severe infractions the breakdown of Joy at Central Joliet West Federal uh the ethnicity and race for Western Central broken down right there as far as a severe moving into IEP status of students that received referrals continuing to El status and then severe infractions as far as free and reduced lunch and the students who pay for

049their meals and that will move us into Miss Clark with exclusionary discipline good evening so I'm going to discuss the expulsion data this year we had 38 expulsions which is about average if you look at the previous years the 1920 school year is lower because of covet and we ended the school year a little prematurely of the 38 students expelled 20 were male students and 18 were female 28 students were African-American and 10 were Hispanic this year there was a higher count of sophomore students who were expelled also if you look at the data you'll see 9R 10r11r those are when we were using the term Gap students we're no longer using that term that was for students who require credit deficient so you'll see that that is tailoring off now this year 30 students

050were expelled from West and eight were expelled from Central as you can see this fluctuates by year just depending on the circumstances this slide shows the expulsions per month there were more expulsions in second semester because we are providing more interventions and using expulsion as a last resort when possible all students are recommended to Lincoln in lieu of expulsion unless the student has an IEP and the team determines its placement yeah okay so uh in terms of out of school suspension uh this slide has a comparison year to year so overall uh our our exclusion data is is mirroring our severe infraction data so you're seeing a decrease from 2122 to 2223 so that means fewer days of school loss for our students which is is a positive uh here it is again just with

051a comparison and a percentage of change from year to year uh and then disaggregated by race the suspension data again I pointed this out uh earlier but well not ideal and not anywhere close to where we want to be our exclusion uh disaggregation is closer to uh how our referrals our severe infractions are disaggregated so obviously still work to do but in terms of decreasing the suspension that's a good first step for us and a place to start from I have a question about the out of school suspension information so I know at the beginning when Mr Locke was talking there was some laughter um and I believe that that was about between East or us West and and Central but when I look at the number of students to spend it out of school

052to me this is a crisis and just being at a few board meetings or closed sessions where we talked about some of the expulsions many of those students refused the interventions or didn't participate in the supports and services and were allowed to choose out of school suspension instead of going into some of those programs and services I would like this board to look at a school suspension being removed as an option for some students now I'm not talking about students with guns or weapons or um great bodily harm those are different issues but when I see kids out of school suspended for excessive absences and tardies or refusing to go to a program so they have to go out of school um you know you can take out of school suspension out of the outcome

053list right it could be you did this infraction and instead of a five day out of school suspension or the program it should be the program kids that aren't in school the research is perfectly clear out of school suspension does not fix the problem it only exacerbates the students issues and concerns and puts them further behind in school and that is clearly evidence in the graduation rate of this school and so I think as a board part of our work looking at policy and procedures and practices I think we that needs to be something that is discussed because to me this is a crisis Dr Huntington I totally agree with you about the out of school suspensions um and the thing is is we have to have parents Believe in Us and when I see

05447 of black kids that are getting in more are getting expelled or I forgot what number I was looking at I'm sorry I lost my data but when we ice when I see numbers like this of how many more much discipline are black students get how can parents have trust in us as a school that we're going to provide safe and good services and Believe in Us that we're doing the best interest in their child their children when we're writing referrals on them and I think it like what you're saying has to go hand in hand and with fixing how why and how these were also being written because I agree that out of school suspension is not the best policy but we have to build that trust within the parents who want them to

055have their kid in our triangle groups and things like that so I I understand that there may be an issue of trust and there is opportunities to build that trust over time obviously it can't be a overnight fix but what I'm suggesting is if the practice is well it's a five-day suspension but we can keep you in school and keep you on track for your classes if you go to this program that that should not be an option that should be in the list of interventions or disciplinary infractions that occur like sitting home for five ten days should not even be in in the mix quite honestly outside of drugs weapons and great bodily harm respectful violence um also just really quick I wanted to make sure we do not give um OSS out of

056school suspension for absenteeism is that correct and the data did show that there was at a school suspension for truancy is that accurate though because I thought we don't use it for truancy where a student had left the building externally left and then returned typically we do offer our eyes this program right but typically it goes to ISS and if the students refusing to go to ISS then it does escalate to an OSS it's a different question and that's that's the truancy It's Not absent from school for 10 consecutive days now you come back and we externally suspend you no that's not our response I just want to make sure you know I would consider sexual assault a great bodily harm so I understand what you're saying there this is my train of thought um

057counseling and services and interventions only work if there's buy-in like you can go to a cat like a court mandated counseling session and you can sit there in silence and it's not going to have any effect or change in your behavior so before we just mandate that kids do this we have to have the buy-in because we can mandate anything and unless the parents and students have believed that it's a valuable program it's not going to work we can force kids to sit there and stare but there's got to be the buy-in and the buy-in comes in with the trust and I 100 agree with like that would in the ideal world all parents want their kids to get these services but unless there's this trust of or in trust slash a cultural thing other

058than on some cultures and it's you don't go to counseling because you don't start your business elsewhere and so there's got to be this work with parents to get them like you said a systemic system of this whole thing is systemic system of and I agree with this ideally that an ideal world that that's what it should be but you can't force someone to sit in a counseling session and then it's just going to work right no it doesn't have to be a counseling session it just doesn't need to be sitting at home with no supervision and no support for your educational and academic needs okay so what I'm suggesting is you know you can open the opportunity you can have conversations you can process individual with a student if they're in a program or

059service instead of going and sitting at home you don't have to force anybody to talk about what the concerns or issues are but what I'm suggesting is if if you if if the option is not to sit home and we're going to continue to support you in your educational program that should be the first that shouldn't be an option that should be this is the first intervention this is the disciplinary consequence then this is the disciplinary consequence if you get to out of school suspension at least you have done several interventions prior to sitting and looking at an expulsion I agree 100 because when our students are successful our community is successful so it's it's almost like it's the pipeline of prison right when they're out of school I understand it for me I think

060it's about the relationships that our students have with adults in the schools and our adults should and I'm not saying they don't but if we try to Foster better relationships with our students and actually talk to them not at them or in a condescending fashion and because I've been a teacher I know what it's like I understand I think that is so critical for our students and when they come to school and they don't have adults that believe in them that care about them these are the things that they do so um that's what I have to say on that I think we're saying the same thing Mrs Steph I I think but that's what I'm saying if you're sitting at home you don't have access to a caring adult who cares about you and

061can build a relationship right disagreeing with you all I'm saying is if if we don't uh take action and the students are still in school if there's no relationship they're still not going to open up and talk to anyone they'll sit there that's what I mean by we're off saying the same thing I just think we're saying how we get there might have to be looked at as like where I'm saying you know why are these referrals being written and building the trust in the relationships so I think we're all saying the same things we just need to figure out how is the best way to get to that in solution so I just uh just a couple things because I know the board gets the monthly exclusionary discipline report and is able to review

062that and so from looking at that and I know we have newer board members and that weren't here the whole year um however in looking at that you're able to see the offenses that students are given out of school suspensions for and um and so I think putting in the things like Catalyst and putting in the substance abuse clinician with our think first modules and there's more data in there I think things like that were is where we saw decreases in assignment of out-of-school suspensions we did see more Auto School suspensions as the year progressed because students were detention or they were you know they had a restorative conversation and then the behavior continued and so maybe they got a detention social type of situation and then ISS we didn't see students being out of

063um being on put on out of school suspension for tardies except when they started getting 80 tardies like where they were perpetually late to class and we had tried to intervene in multiple different ways so you know I would just need direction from the board as to um how you want us to you know not use out of school suspension um because even when so as an example for a first drug offense let's say a student is found to have THC we do send them home that day for medical we don't know if they've invested it or didn't ingest it so we make sure a they have supervision when they go home so that they can be monitored and if it's their first offense they come back the next day um so there's actually you

064know and then if it continues again then I guess again there's like Progressive discipline so if there's if there's anything that the board is seeing that we're not you know doing we're like we would we would want that feedback our Deans and counselor our Deans are having conversations and PPS coordinators about catalysts and the Catalyst data is in here too but part of being in that program is acknowledging that you made a mistake understanding the mistake you made so that you can partake in the program so many students have taken this up on that but when they don't then there isn't a mandate okay and and we've had students and parents let out tell us that they're not going to do what is said in catalyst and and then so what then so on the

065first instance we're not going to necessarily expel if we want to be expelled it would vote to an out of school suspension but then if they do the same type of severe um infraction again or similar then we go to that so I would love to enter into that discussion but I also want to make sure we're understanding like we're layering in those interventions and this is how we're approaching it because we want the same things um and we talked this year about how can we is there ways we can be more persistent with families and with students you know building relationships making sure that there's an understanding of why this intervention is so important um for this and for the future um with that and problem solving circles and those different things so um

066you know I I guess just what would we be talking about be to go forward into the next year um except getting better at having the conversations with students and parents and then layering in more opportunities for intervention like are there more um types of infractions that we talked about that would lead to Catalyst or or things like that so those are the things we did this year where I think we saw some successes and we will continue to track these because we see them as the same level of importance there would be nothing that I would disagree with about like it's not good for kids to be excluded from school like it's not in their best interest absolutely not um you know how do we move forward in a productive manner to make sure

067to Safety and Security as well as making sure meeting the needs of all of our students so we'll we'll continue to have that conversation and looking at what other schools are doing um and again working very hard to improve our relationships with students and I know Mrs if you you said like it's not that staff aren't doing that but we want to get better at it with all staff because I also want to really state we have great staff that are working really hard and the majority of our staff have really good relationships with kids and when we identify that a staff member doesn't we we do work with that staff member and at times sometimes that staff member can't stay so I just want to make sure that that's clear we have wonderful staff

068working with our kids I don't mean when I say this stuff I don't mean that we don't have stuff I know we have wonderful staff here but I do know that these numbers are concerning and I look at it and I'm like okay what's going off and you can be a wonderful staff but still maybe not recognize your own microaggressions well I and I think my I'm sorry to interrupt but I just I it was reading information from the diversity equity and inclusion assistant superintendent and Elgin and she made a comment that I found so profound and it was just suspension and expulsion is not going to increase your school culture right so trying to find other ways to support all students All Families all different backgrounds is is essential and I get that and

069I think we have some amazing that's one of the reasons I asked to go view all these programs right away was because I was like well this is a lot that we're doing here let me learn more about it and I think trying to if using that staff to build those relationships to talk to the parents about those kind of things invite them in there's a lot of strategies that you can do to open up the door and pull the curtain Behind these things that can help parents support the work that that staff is doing and I just think that students that get excluded from school and then can't keep up and and continue into this vicious cycle of infractions and and not getting the services that they need and then we end up talking

070about expulsion in their sometimes nine times out of ten probably don't finish High School um this is what I was going to say was I the people are who having the conversations with the parents are they the staff that have been through this the trainings are they the staff that look like the parents or you know am I just sitting here as a white woman telling a parent of color that this is the best option for their student like we need to make those relationships with their parents and bring it to the parents level and with people who look like them and understand the culture that they're coming from and I think that is maybe a I mean a way to start about having those conversations so we can get more kids into the Catalyst

071program is being aware of who were who is having the conversation with the parents and is the parents feeling comfortable one person isn't making progress to the parent maybe could we bring someone else in to say okay maybe you know so and so didn't explain it in the way that you needed it explained what can I do for you you know I mean that parents are to the dean I'm not putting beliefs on that but maybe we need to have someone else come in and have these conversations with the parents or maybe have a conversations with parents when their emotions aren't already heightened you know maybe a day later they're a little further they need to start at the beginning of the school year and when students are doing well and saying something positive about

072the students that's when the relationships start it doesn't start when the student is acting out I certainly agree with that more on how the PPS staff can start developing relationships earlier before we're reactive to a behavior in a little bit when I touch on Catalyst we'll talk about how those meetings take place who's represented at those meetings how we utilize cool down time before we're making an emotional decision to accept catalysts or not so I'll get to that a little later on in the presentation ready for the Segway to ISS all right so um ISS formerly known as in-school suspension is now known as intensive student support um when we started our restore practices we realized pretty early on that we needed to change that name and so um at both campuses that's the name

073change but fundamentally it's not what we do to students it's what we do with students so that's that's kind of a little bit of the background there with calling it intensive student support um oh it froze sorry there you go so um what you'll see here is and we did have an increase in the numbers of ISS assignments so the previous discussion by the board was talking about what else have you done other than suspensions you can see here that we did increase our number of ISS assignments we do look at that as those were students that stayed in school so we were able to do intensive student supports with them in our in our ISS room instead of suspending them out furthermore we've had discussions with our Deans moving into next year typically in

074years past we would assign ISS for one day we're looking at now assigning for two days so hopefully that would also help with looking when we're looking at the infraction and what the appropriate discipline is we want to use we're proposing that we're going to use ISS for multiple days instead of generally just one also we've had a room change at each campus so I can I can speak for Central um we're we're going to be able to double our capacity each day with the amount of students we're sending to ISS if needed and so that will not be it'll be more of an immediate assignment much of this demographic information is similar to the out-of-school suspensions uh this one talks about our common teacher expectations regarding the classroom environment the relationship building the the

075Norms of what a classroom should look like each day we're expecting our teachers to greet students at the door we are encouraging them or it's an expectation that they learn the correct correct pronunciation for students names clearly articulate what the expectations are it's not good to surprise teenagers or any learner so clearly communicate what those expectations are we're going to continue to ensure every minute matters and we're going to model respectful interactions and Communications so with our Dean interventions we wanted to make sure you saw this information so yes you know for many infractions there's a consequence that's assigned but there's also interventions that take place some of them noted here we do some intervention cards we do safety passes our Deans do quite a few mediations we we do a lot of mediations with

076our students it's a proactive measure and our students are coming around to being more interested in doing mediations than they were just a few years ago so we're seeing more mediations in Dean's offices this was important because back in the day Deans would get students in and out in and out in and out of their offices and when we adopted the restorative approach it does take more time for Deans to process through students through a behavioral infraction seven steps is quite quite a few more than what it used to be and we do know that that will make a difference so we also utilized detentions that is new this year as well and so this past year was the the first year most of the assignments for ISS are due to tardies that disrespect and

077Hall class conduct some cafeteria disruptions things that we would consider minor infractions please note that it is at the dean's discretion but generally speaking those are the qualifying infractions program Logistics students are assigned one or more days in their lunch advisory lunches are served up there our staff get certified to handle cold lunches and so that can take place we're going to be able to populate attendance this year using um the the infinite campus scan system uh and then if students that Miss A detention are supervised or detention supervisors will um make more of a concerted effort um we our detention supervisors weren't in place at the start of the school year and so I don't know exactly the start date but they started I know one in September one kind of October um and

078while they did a good job we're still looking to add staff in that area we we have allotted for two in that area we've only had one in each one but with that being said we're looking at using a detention tracker to increase communication between the dean and the supervisor you can see the breakdown for uh detention assignments like I mentioned vast majority are for disrespect tardies and some minor infractions I briefly mentioned this but some of the improvements we're looking at for next year um we're looking to hire Paras one for each campus for a total of two which puts us at about we're looking somewhere in the in the number of about 30 students per Lunch Period at each campus we need some more training for our student management system so our iCampus

079does have a detention tracker it was utilized but there's some components that we can use better and so we're going to have that ready to go for our supervisors and that tracking document is the one I was talking about before where it's just a it's essentially a workflow between the dean and the supervisor to no pertinent information before you you leave sorry um you talked a lot about the Deans in the restorative conversations um and that's fantastic how are teachers looped into those because if the the harm happens in the classroom then the teacher should be involved with most conversations yeah so the approach is that um if there's an incident that comes out of a classroom in most cases generally speaking the dean invites the staff member um so that staff member then we

080find a time when we can meet and we try to do essentially a restorative circle with them see that um we really didn't identify where the referrals were or the behavior was happening so were most of them in the unstructured areas or in the classroom to be able to identify well if it's in an unstructured areas then we need to do something differently with our security so I didn't see that piece in in the report I'm not sure if we have that information I mean we have it right so and we do look at it um so what I would say is for detentions those miners it's a mixture of places right uh but we know when we go back to our more severe infractions those are typically in unstructured areas and so uh Steve

081and I've been meeting quite a bit since July uh to talk about and with Ed as well about how are we going to work with security to better support students in those unstructured areas how are we communicating building wide expectations right because we can be restored we can establish Norms but there's also just expectations for how a school functions that's important to making everybody feel safe uh and so we we are going to work on some things with our security staff monitoring the cafeteria clearing hallways right so at the beginning of the school year we're asking for teachers to on their plan we'll pay them to help monitor the hallways clear the hallways make sure kids are where they're supposed to be and not take them to the dean but just take them to class

082right because we want them in class so we're going to try to intervene early and then just monitor it throughout the year thank you did you say teachers were going to do that during the holiday in addition to security so we already have security uh but in addition to that um because early in the year with the Freshman transitioning in uh there's more of a need to help students remember where they're supposed to be get used to high school which is much different in terms of passing periods and what they might have experienced at Troyer District 86 uh so so early on we're going to use teachers as a supplement to our security staff so before all the teachers are needed to Southern classes yeah you can tell you know yes okay yeah we're being

083optimistic Dr Huntington got it thank you something else I wanted to just highlight in the relationship between the detention and ISS numbers we are trying to reduce our ISS numbers as well students who do not attend their detention the pairs are being utilized to call parents they get three opportunities to either reschedule with their Dean or we reschedule on their behalf before it gets turned into an ISS where they're avoiding those detentions so we're really trying to reduce those numbers as well and we're usually you know trying to use those resources to do so and get that buy-in the relationship so if the parents is why I didn't even know they had detention okay well let's make sure we're bridging that Gap and getting them in detention not necessarily in a full day of ISS

084okay so I am going to be speaking about the regional safe school program which we refer to often as the rsr rssp at Lincoln jths partners with Lincoln school as an alternate placement for students in lieu of expulsion students placed at Lincoln and lieu of expulsion are required to spend the duration of their expulsion at Lincoln if a student fails to attend Lincoln School in Louisville expulsion the student is immediately expelled from jths this data is going to be repetitive um because it lines up with our expulsion data again so we had 38 students this past school year eight of them were at Central 30 were at West we had 16 sophomores and then you guys can see the breakdown for the class um the racial demographic of the students who attended rssp were 28

085African-American students and 10 Hispanic students here are the outcomes for the students who were recommended to attend Lincoln rssp program this past school year we also use Lincoln for our tayat program which is the truant alternative optional education program we partner with Lincoln to provide an intervention for students who are chronic truance true and students placed at Lincoln are monitored semester by semester regarding their progress to determine whether they are able to return back to jths we had 24 students attend the Lincoln payout program this year 19 from Central and far from West there was a decrease in this and the decrease was because Lincoln did not receive the grant that they normally do for the tayat program so that's why you'll see the 60 decrease this year here are the student outcomes for the

086students who were recommended for the tea app program here you're able to see the demographic information for the students who were in the tayat program and then all students who returned back to JT we have transition meetings to help them successfully turn to their home campus in that meeting is myself which is I'm the director of strategic Partnerships Deans jths counselor Lincoln school counselor the parent and student next I'm going to discuss our problem solving circles program this school year 405 students were placed on Behavior warning 247 submitted paperwork to begin the problem solving circles program 136 families successfully completed the program 195 families out of the 247 that referred participated in the process we had 59 families that began the process but did not complete the program due to disqualification for not completing the

087process and not responding to various communication attempts these are the outcomes for our students who were enrolled in our problems solving circles program here you can find the demographic information of students who participated in PSA PSC program and it's broken down by year in school race and gender we have been utilizing the problem-solving circles program since 2012 2013 school year we have had 720 families successfully complete our program and we all always want to thank our community volunteers because if we did not have them we would not be able to run our program all right so the next set of interventions we're going to look at are our interventions for substance use in school you know if you've been on the board for any time or followed what's been going on we've come a couple

088of times in the last few years to try to ask for resources to support our students in this area because we do feel like it's a significant need in our community so the two the two options that we have right now are rethink modules so this is a partnership with Linden Oaks Behavioral Health they they initially developed this with Plainfield schools I came highly recommended from Plainfield it's implemented during ISS there's online learning modules at the end the student completes an assessment based on that assessment it goes to Linden Oaks staff and if they depending on the level of usage that is indicated through that assessment their families are contacted by Linden Oaks staff to offer an in-depth assessment which is free to families Lyndon Oaks does free assessments for students we also this year

089added our substance abuse clinician which was again a new position uh Mr Amber Mitchell she travels between the two campuses she works as our BHT partner contact right because a lot of the time and we'll get into the data in the next couple of slides but but when you talk to her as she does her assessment of students the level of usage is high for our students right by the time they're getting to us as ninth graders they're using frequently it's not early early usage uh like what typically you would have expected from high school students they're they're deep in use so they require a higher level of support in terms of office discipline referrals for substance abuse there's a comparison from 2122 we added rethink in January of that year or March maybe um

090and then 22 23 when we had both programs for the full year so we did see a decrease we also saw a decrease in students who were repeating substance abuse infractions uh again just like everything else we talked about well that's a win and a positive that we're seeing a decrease there's a lot of work to do as you can see right and also just anecdotally these are students who were caught right we don't think that this is all of the usage our students have so we have a lot of work to do in this area uh in terms of students who participated in the interventions again it's a mix right rethink is intended to be early use so a student's not going to go through rethink multiple times that they did it last year

091they're not going to do it again this year um so we had 180 students participate in the rethink modules uh we had 189 students referred to Miss Mitchell this year which if you know anything about social work caseloads it's essentially like having a student with an individualized education plan it's time intensive number of minutes that have to be met so it's a pretty high case load um you know and so we just outlined for you her process with those students in terms of improvements for next year we're going to refresh our training so Lyndon Oaks is going to come back in and work with our ISS staff because we do have some new staff members just to help them make sure they're implementing that program with Fidelity monitoring students appropriately um we're gonna um try

092to work this is something that Plainfield talked about Tim elbow is over there he and I talk about this quite a bit trying to get the students to engage in that parent session after school because that is an important session when we when we've had Parents participate the feedback is always really positive so we want to really focus on getting parents involved in that process in terms of Miss Mitchell's position as we showed the number of students being referred is very high so some of the things she's going to do she's going to screen each student when she initially meets with them she always offers outside options right because there's only so much you can do in a school setting it's not a clinical setting many of our students qualify for intensive outpatient programs based

093on their level of usage which again isn't something we can mandate right but she's frequently talking to parents offering those options there's ver there's a variety of low-cost options she's and she's a part of the Will County substance abuse Coalition through the Will County Sheriff's Office and so she's very familiar familiar with what those options are so we're going to continue to work with her and Empower her to bring those resources to our families and provide more structure and support so I know that we have a high amount of students that they and you know I have a senior who does not but she knows about it right and I asked him where do you think students get it from he said oh cuddies yep Cuddy sell it so are we are we doing anything

094about that like I went to one of our city council members to share with my son told me and she said well we'll have to do a sting and I don't know if it was done but I think we need to work in collaboration with our city council to put a stop for these businesses selling to our young kids absolutely so so similar conversation we all know that name right that is where our students go um so we have our school resource officers in the building uh detective price uh and detective baton and we've had this conversation with them too the city does do things right so we'll go in and do a sting they write a ticket it's a pretty costly ticket right they can only do that so often so so but I

095do I think the more that we can work as a community to try to address all these things that we're talking about right the better we're better off we're going to be we need to um we're working with District 86 to try to increase our collaboration with them on the transition process all the way through but it's not just a school issue right it's a it's a community-wide issue it's drugs it's it's physical violence uh not taking advantage of mental health I mean the fire department we're going to talk about thriverse later there's free uh mental health counseling available that anybody who lives in the city of Joliet and for our students anybody who goes to school with us so if people will take advantage of those things and we get everybody to buy in

096that's what it's going to take to really address exclusions Community violence right all of those things are connected so all of the help that we can get to do that to address that and work with the city we'll we're all here to be a part of it and and work together question also this is great all the things that we do for kids who use um do we have anything for kids of addicts um you know you know kids if your parents are addicts you're more going to be an addict yourself um I just researched um like alitene and things like that like what kind of programs and there's no programs around here for teenagers so do we have anything for kids of addicts maybe it's one parent both parents or these kids might be

097using because their parents may be addicts do we have any type of programs for students so maybe we can even stop it before it you know begins long term by having those type of programs for kids of addicts we don't currently have any formalized programs a lot of it is individualized work by our social workers and our counselors right meeting with students counseling them providing them supports I mean it's definitely an issue right um I think the group work is important so kids know that they're not alone they're not alone and that they're normal you know like there there's other kids like them out there and I think one of the big things with kids is that they don't want to seem different or be different but to see kids who are experiencing the same

098traumas as they are is is valuable um but something to think about of having groups for kids specifically for addicts whether you know a parent might not recommend them but maybe a parent you know it's a single parent whose other the other parent is or maybe a teacher knows that their parents are that we can make these recommendations to get kids into different groups because there aren't a lot of resources for teens um of addicts well I was going to say and with alatine it comes and goes kind of like our Al-Anon groups in Will County and Joliet as a kid who went to ellatine um and it just you I was in flows just like our mental health groups I was inflow at my job but one of the things is the just the

099mental health portion of it because it's tied in also with poverty and all the other system stomach issues yes that's an opportunity as we develop this partnership because they do have um these types of groups um and we could we talked about maybe part of a partnership would include that they potentially could host some of these groups on our campuses because after school then we have um we have activity buses and things like that so they do have lists of things that they do in different places they don't run them at all times because I did ask that question but they did have those types of things that I would say would they might not be called that but they were they were comparable it's hard to find those things out there and I know

100that the closest alatine is Mokena and that's still far and well again with with a Latin you there can literally be a group next month and it'll go on for two years and then there won't be one for six months and then it'll go again because it's all you know member participation but Nami does have great groups and again even them ups and flows with who participates but we do have a lot of group counseling that starts early as with all of our kids here from Guardian Angel to other you know and having the availability of Thrive Works Etc and what you shared about co-occurring see I learned because my social workers teach me right but uh when you talk to our staff Amber especially who's a cadc and a LCSW licensed clinical social worker

101certified alcohol drug counselor so many times with young young people who are using it's co-occurring with a mental health struggle trauma anxiety lack of coping skills so while we don't have anything directly to work with students who are children of people who are addicted those other resources that we have for mental health help us to at least open the door to have those conversations yeah because the color occurring is I mean out of this world and it all goes together I was just going to say the Will County State's Attorney's Office Child Advocacy Center group start September 6th and they go throughout the school year and we have children that come from all of those different co-occurring disorder families so they're out there again but they don't have that name now that I played amateur

102social work I'm going to turn over to a real social I mean those are quick you you do listen Brett I like it which brings us to Catalyst I think we were jumping ahead a little bit um earlier so hopefully I'll be able to answer all of your questions as I go along um thankfully most of you were able to tour both of our campuses and see our actual rooms I think Central's campus is actually going to be relocating to meet some of the needs as we see them occur throughout the year so they're getting a larger space and some more resources within their setting so our goal of the Catalyst program I won't read it directly to you but it is to definitely get our students to have engagement academically socially emotionally and to

103reflect on their behavior but as a holistic approach it's not just the social worker and the pair that is running the program there is follow-up groups as well as the dean counselor and yes social worker and a classroom teacher that takes part in supporting the student throughout the three days the eight weeks of follow-up and then every student that leaves the program will have a suggestion a recommendation for the triangle team through their Catalyst coordinator to be reviewed and Then followed up as they leave the program it is a one-time intervention it is three-day assignment it is volunteer although when we approach that with our families and typically when we approach that with our families we like to have them in person when a student is being picked up if emotions are too high we

104will schedule that at the next day many times because we do want the coordinators to be part the Catalyst coordinators be part of that and typically they're in the classroom just like a classroom teacher is running the program so we don't always like to pull them unless we're trying to accommodate a family member who maybe left work can't leave the next day so and we try to then make sure that there's been time to be able to process that information emotions are reduced so that they can make an educated decision not an emotional decision um and as I mentioned before there is eight weeks of follow-up the re-entry contract which is after the three days the student as well as the Catalyst coordinator is sitting down saying okay what are we going to do to

105be successful not just for the behavior that brought you in here but they've also now identified if there were other needs academic needs attendance needs ongoing other conflicts that may not even been connected to this because we want some we want ongoing success so there's a contract and that contract isn't meant to be punitive it's an agreement upon the supports that we have in place as well as the students change in Behavior so here are some of the eligibility criteria in regards to what would bring you to the Catalyst program these are students that are facing a three to ten day out of school suspension and in some cases historically could have gone to the court for expulsion so we're reducing that and trying to have the greatest amount of influence by keeping a student

106in the building as we said before we know that's where we're going to have our greatest amount of influence and success when a student is not just supervised but also trying to build relationships yes with the Catalyst coordinator but also the dean counselor social worker knowing that it's not just meant to be punitive and to punish the behavior out of them but also what's the root cause what can we do to support you in other ways so it is ran by at West a social worker Wanda Turner and a counselor at Central Katie Breck as well as two Paras one at each building so some of the program activities there is academic support that is we are asking to maintain if not improve a student's academic performance when we meet with the family and they're

107agreeing upon the program or we're offering the program we show right away and like this is one of the reasons we want to keep you in the building so that they see it's not just about the behavior but we have some academic supports you're going to have access to your teachers we will have the teachers come down during their plan periods we'll make sure that they're looking at Google Classroom it's not just being ignored and we print out the grades and show it to them because we want to see that we're maintaining if not improving their academic performance instead of putting external suspension where many times students will not maintain their academics during that time we also do have a period of post-secondary development so they understand what they do currently can impact their potential

108one way or the other positive or negative we do community service which is done within the building it's giving back to the building in a positive way many times we try to link it to the actual Behavior so maybe there was a situation with the teacher or a happen in a teacher's classroom we try to do something for that teacher it helps build that relationship have the student be look at the student in a more positive way and give them an opportunity to get linked to the building mediation is a possibility through this depending on the infraction so we do try to make sure there's a mediation or Victim Impact where we can reflect on that behavior and fix any harm there's also Daily communication to the family again to make sure that they understand

109there's a there's a lot of trust when you send a student after they've had an incident back into the building so there's daily communication home so they know what they've worked on and if there's anything that they could be working on overnight or conversations that they can follow up with the student when they come home so this is the breakdown this is Central's data and this is West data some indicators of success is yes that we're keeping kids in building some students would have been facing a 10-day or even a three-day out of school so we saved days which is some of the successes also obviously we're able to build relationships with students when we're in the building many students walk into the program very reluctantly and as our post surveys will say they are

110happy they did it many times they're requesting to stay in longer because it's a structured setting that they don't have all the noise of the you know the social after infraction many times social media is blowing up so they are grateful to have that time to be with um somewhere in isolation with you know they sometimes are with other students but it is a time for them to work on themselves areas of improvement I think we probably can all look at those those numbers where they are disproportioned we do need to look at how we can improve upon that just as we did our external suspension one of the areas that is kind of hat off we just came back from investing in eight of our counselors into our ASCA training today many things you

111know our our counselor's role has changed very much from just an academic Support over the last you know five to ten years to how we how are we going to support when we pull data that we see not just academic but also attendance and behavioral what is the role of the counselor and how can they proactively support students when those indicators are there so before they get to Catalyst before we're going through the program what other things can we do that's not just a Dean's initiative a counselor and social worker can make sure that they are taking that data and making it more useful during their triangle teams and I think we came back with a it was a four four day training that was I think we're coming back to some great ideas and

112hopefully we'll be back to you very quickly with some um really good ideas oh so going over purpose which I I think I interject throughout is yes to create that safe space Provide support um because it is pretty overwhelming even after a student has done something um that initially could be a fight and they could you know be saving face about something they don't most times they are pretty distraught after um you know they've been in a situation that can be pretty egregious oh sure thank you all right any question about catalysts no I I think it's a great program um looking at the numbers of kids once they complete it like how many go out for expulsion after all these kids have gone through the program like this is this is great and um

113we should be really proud of this I do want to highlight something with the refusal um because I've been able to sit in quite a few of the the meetings as well or if a student is refusing they do have to sign off on it and I'm usually part of the conversation there has been times where a parent has wanted a student to do it and the student is refusing to do it um they've you know left meetings this the parent has been there in tears really are encouraging them to do it and they've not wanted to do it so there's been occurrences like that where the student is unwilling to but I I would like to continue to see what we can do to get parents and students to not deny the program so

114I have a question actually regarding that sure and I know this we married this program with Plainfield and I think you address this when we first started talking about catalyst but is there a reason why we cannot again at a later time if they do refuse is there anyway or even just to bring it back as a possibility can is that something we could change so if they refuse it and then they have another incident you mean or if they refuse it and then they come back and can it be looked at as an option again or is it because right now it's only one refusal you're done like is is it possible that they could change their mind and go ahead and take it anyway be offered again do you mean like um right

115now a day or two later or do you mean like after they've done the suspension still offering the program because they're still going to get either way either way because right now you're not you you get one refusal so when a student is say we're offering the Catalyst program they decline it and they go home for three days and when they come back we have a re-entry meeting with our Deans and at one point we discussed that earlier but so a re-entry then can put supports into place so meeting with the counselor introducing a group doing those follow-ups now if we suggest going oh you know what we've really thought about this over the three days we do want to do the Catalyst program you have to consider now we're removing a student from a

116classroom for six days and that would be our concern I think of then suggesting that that's a good idea because academically now you're removing from even a longer period of time but that doesn't mean that we don't make recommendations to BHT or a group or you know meeting with the counselor or social worker more often and I'm aware of all that thank you very much um I just wanted to see if it could ever or if there was another infraction if it could be offered later on because again right now it's not right could we look at that 10 or two days in you know be calling back and saying now that you've had time about this is something you're still interested in really just push to get back to the program even if you

117know we don't want them to be out there six days but like if they're supposed to be out six days and it's day four can we call them to see if we can get them back in or day three give them back in that'd be great to look at because these numbers are impressive I think I I think that it has to be on the table and we've talked about being more if it was something when we met this Summer that we talked about so that isn't off the table really going into this year a couple of things we were worried about since it was our first year implementing it is like are we gonna have too many kids in the campus like can we handle this um can we do that and so that

118for me that has to be on the table I think if if a kid comes back and they've already served it they most likely probably wouldn't want to go in yeah it might not be a good idea at that point but if it was a long-term suspension where like six days or what have you at day three I think it would be okay to call and say well even if they did their three-day suspension I mean if you have 113 kids enrolled and only six have severe after that is it worth them missing three more days so we like I want I guess the data when we had to look at the data is if we have a severe and they refuse the program what is the reoccurrence rate versus the recurrence rate used in

119the program so is it beneficial for them to miss it three more days if they're not going to have or another reaction yes thank you and we're and we're we're not having huge amounts of refusals and one of the things that we talked about is again how do we have those conversations and maybe more literature so that we can send it home with a parent and then call back the next day so we're going to look at how to improve our or how to decrease our residual rate first of all but then yes not have that off or even kids who have gone through it that may be willing to talk to the kids who want to refuse it so they know again they're not the only one that they are normal different ways yeah

120there's been times we um will offer you know obviously making meeting with the Catalyst corner but even why don't you come down and see the program you walk into the room because I mean you guys may have your own vision of what Catalyst was going to look like and you walked into you know West Campus and looked at it was like okay this actually immediately looks much different than maybe what I envisioned it to be um so there's you know that we have done that in the past to encourage many times that was well the parent wanted them to but the kid wouldn't so we're like let's walk down let's see what it looks like to try to entice them because these numbers are oppressive and we just need to get you know how much

121more can we do with it so if and I mean I don't want talking to miss Turner for five seconds you're like yes it's pretty great right cool down room so as we know cool down room um was at Central um two years ago and was piloted and we brought it to now both campuses it is to provide a safe place for students who are needing to take a temporary time away from a setting to reset kind of re-look at their so their social emotional skills what they can do to cope and re-enter into the classroom I don't know if everybody has been able to visit our cooldown rooms but it is a comfortable setting alternative seating alternative lighting it is ran by a social worker who does allow to prompt our students to utilize

122their coping skills to be able to reset sometimes they don't even need to talk there's a lot of tools in the room for them to then re-enter the classroom we do we did Implement scanners so that we know and can pull that data very quickly so that we know how it's being utilized and how fast students are then getting back into the classroom as you can see here's the visits throughout Central's data and less individual students by grade level total visits by grade level and then students feedback this was also a number you know a very uh you know a cultural shift for students to see that we do care about you we give you a space that is where you don't have to feel like you're isolated in a bathroom setting or in a

123hallway by yourself it's giving them an area where they can work directly with staff and be supervised when they're having the need to use their coping skills next step is just continuing to communicate with our staff making sure everybody knows that that is available to our students and how to make sure they're following the procedures to get a student to the to the room and back building Flyers again this very similar to Catalyst not knowing how many students who are going to be bombarding the cool down room making sure students aren't misusing the cool down room so opening this up further is something that's going to be a goal that we're going to be utilizing throughout this upcoming year um so as you can kind of see throughout there just making sure that we're updating

124one another in the Triangle teams and how it's being utilized and then targeting the students who that is being utilized with and making sure if there's any other interventions we're making sure that we're offering them so that this isn't the only tool that they're using this is great again um because if you're not in a good head space you're not going to learn so maybe you missed one class and get in a better head space and go to the next and we also realize that sometimes when we cannot regulate our emotions that could be times when behaviors occur so disrespect peer conflicts so we're going to make sure that we're using utilizing this data and make sure that if there's anything that again a Dean counselor social worker could be doing or notifying a teacher

125if there's a conflict to prevent behaviors from taking place I also highlight and I know you have it on there but the Institute staff Institute day staff were on tables this was something that we got feedback from Staff last year including the union with like having different I'm going to say tracks or discussion sessions available to learn a little bit more about the interventions that we have that maybe a classroom teacher wouldn't be aware of because they're focused on what their you know their role in their classroom and everything and so we got a lot of feedback learning about catalysts learning about like cool down room and learning about just other things so we're going to do that again at the start of the school year through our Institute days so cooldown room will be

126one of the things to try and make sure staff all staff learn more about it in addition to things like Catalyst and how we're using um detention and it's not just all Behavior it's other programs too like what we're doing in mtss too because it's it's really helpful if everybody knows more about what we're doing so they can direct kids in the right way in all of these things are why I'm proud that my daughter's gonna go here and I mean we have some great programs it's amazing another great program student support groups so we have staff mostly counselors social workers on occasion of Dean and occasion other staff members will run a group and so it's it's a short-term intervention general purpose build connections to the school establish self-awareness identify students in need of

127higher levels so sometimes we identify students through the group process and then you know because it's a short-term intervention that really we're just trying to help them develop some skills they can use right away uh what's so these are the central student support groups I believe it's close to 350 students were serviced this way with about 29 groups that's a lot that's a lot to organize that's a lot to find space for that's a lot to just facilitate and organize and plan but it's good for students and so even though we have some space issues for our groups we we make it happen you'll see in the next slide that West had a few less one of the reasons for that or the reason for that is we had one Social Work intern at Central

128this year who ran five groups herself and we had another intern that ran a couple so that really is the difference and then moving into next year Wes is going to have some social work interns and we have some counselor interns uh so here's the West support groups it's over 250 for West though despite the fact that they had a few less groups so still servicing a lot of students students are assigned to these groups through the triangle team so Dean social worker counselor school psych meet once a week and if it's determined that this is the best intervention for students it's a sign through the triangle team some improvements so we're going to ask our we have counselor leads at honor BHT we're going to talk about BHT here momentarily but we have counselor

129leads we're going to ask them to have more of a um uh I don't want to say managerial but they're going to take the lead on trying to find our staff that's best appropriate for each group that was basically up to Julie and I in the past and now we're just they they really do have a good feel for that so we're going to move in that direction we're going to focus on high enrollment groups like anxiety stress and coping things like that closer assignment so I know Wes is going to be making some switches with their counselor and social work who have specifically counselor and Dean caselotes but essentially generally speaking two counselors will be assigned to one social worker and share the same students so that generally is going to be a good

130way to organize our organize our student by Alpha last name and then we're going to be able to improve attendance because of our scanner system that we've talked about before [Music] so in addition to everything that our staff's doing we've also over the last couple of years added some outside referral resources for mental health supports so the first one carousalis uh is and both of these uh I would just add were supplementing through the American Rescue plan act which ends uh September of 2024 so we'll have to monitor data and make some decisions about what we want to move forward with but kerosalis essentially is is like a concierge service we know one of the barriers to families engaging in mental health counseling is the process of getting into an appointment if you had to

131try to navigate that at all on your own it's timely it's time consuming and costly so this is a service where when you look at this first page of key performance indicators the the amount of communications that this company helps our families with it's talking to the families that's also calling around to Providers trying to find the quickest appointment possible so we get we have a high usage for carousalis um there's a breakdown by demographic age ethnicity this is something that's available to staff and Community as well so you will see that it's not all all our students age range that's participating we have staff participating we have community members so that's a positive and down on the bottom are the reasons that that people are utilizing carousalis similar to carousels Thrive works this came

132on after we adopted kerosalis Chief Kerry and the fire department are doing incredible work for our community with this the city started this process by bringing thriveworks to our community and then providing four hundred thousand dollars worth of funding to eliminate costs for somebody to participate in this if they're a city of Juliet resident they renewed that so they're up to eight hundred thousand dollars we know that some of our students don't live in the city so you all were gracious enough to allow us to use some of our American Rescue plan funds to supplement that for our naturally at residence most of the families participate in Telehealth for this just because of the expediency right and this page is a breakdown on on usage we've been working with them uh they don't typically work

133with schools so collecting data was was newer to them but Martha who uh lives in Tennessee and is wonderful Kelly and I met with her recently very energetic we started getting her to focus on sending us some data in January these are just students who use our grant funds okay so because the city is paying for uh Juliet residence we don't get access to that data but but we know that we have more students using thriverse than this these are just the students who were providing funding for so as mentioned when we were talking about triangle teams Behavioral Health teams at each campus we have a behavioral health Team meets once a week usually for under two hours and really it's a it's a focused effort on talking about some students who've been referred so

134the PPS coordinators some counselors social workers and a psychologists make up that team really some good conversations are had about students uh through the BHT um we can refer students to specialized groups I'll call them groups with some special curriculum sometimes um uh really we've sent through the years our staff for some training like cbis for example and so our BHT will refer to those groups also our BHT refers to our outside agencies so we have some Partnerships with outside agencies in our community and so they come in very helpful and we're able to refer to them they they also communicate really well so once a month we meet with them so I think Brett mentioned this but Amber Mitchell will set up meetings where we just zoom in with them we get an update

135they do a quick review of students obviously using some confidentiality but kind of an update on you know possible openings and things like that so that we can slide students in need into those spaces is here are the central referrals you can see the vast majority of the BHT referrals come from symptoms of anxiety persistence mood and grief and loss here's a central makeup by grade and by um you know if there was a a special funding source for them like special ed 504 free reduced Etc and then here's the um demographic makeup keep going on West okay I'll keep going with West uh so very similar uh persistent sad mood symptoms of anxiety exposure to trauma that was a little flip-flopped with the Western Central but we have quite a few students who are

136exposed to trauma and we talk about that often and they don't even know what it is sometimes uh here's the makeup by grade and by special program and then the the demographic information so uh here's our outcomes um includes acceptance to Pathways so that is one of our slides so that is something we talk about make referrals to our pathway campus um when we the vast majority of that last bullet point where we talk about did not complete it comes down to attendance and when we have specialized Community agencies coming into our building they come in on Specialized days and a lot of time on Specialized time and if our students are absent it takes a week or two for them to try again and that is historically that has been the issue but we're

137just trying to work through that best we can but the vast majority of of the failures that are noted there because of attendance reasons and then our referrals to the Bravo side which is the Gen Ed side of the pathways West made 11 referrals we made central campus made 16 and similar numbers of acceptance we do anything from tours we offer tours over there and so those are the numbers of referrals that were sent over to the pathways campus all right our home visits our home visits uh we are looking at a lot of times chronic absenteeism we've made several attempts to contact the parent via phone calls emails emergency contacts we haven't been able to do that we do work with our homeless Liaisons our homeless visit Liaisons to conduct a home visit that's

138a breakdown by campuses we do want to continue to utilize our home visit Liaisons but provide additional trainings and be more selective about the Liaisons that we do bring out making sure that if there is anybody who has a relationship or had some past conversations that those are the Liaisons that we're utilizing as well as updating our handouts so if there's additional resources if the family does not answer the door that we currently do leave some resources but we would like to increase our efforts with what we're leaving behind okay can I just speak real quick to home visits and I I meant to I meant to send an email um I had a parent call me um earlier this past year on a Sunday evening and I recognized a number from the community I've

139known her since I was younger and she called me and she was very emotional and uh actually would have been towards the end of the year and she said I just want to ask you to say thank you to the staff at Pathways I said okay what's going on because at first I thought she was calling to complain honestly and um so she goes as she's crying she goes my son um is going to graduate soon and she goes and I don't think if they hadn't stopped by my house that he would be graduating now and she um she speaks English but she said she appreciated also that when she started joking in Spanish they were also able to go back with her and they just they they came and and took their time um

140and I just that it was just very significant for her and that's just one of many I'm sure that appreciated those home visits and again uh going back to miss Lynn's point when people you know understand where you're coming from and and you can speak to them the way they understand it's it's really important so it meant a lot to this mom and now her child has graduated because of that so it's good to hear sharing that any other questions about that no all right as we move into wrapping up the presentation action plan 1.5 or sort of Justice practices obviously the goal here is to create a more systemic approach to restorative practices with the staff as a whole to remove some of those educational barriers one thing that I am excited about moving

141forward is that Mr Markham and myself this is going to be normal practice with new teacher orientation moving forward so for example this year we know that 37 new staff members at jths whether they're Joey Central Joliet West transition Center Pathways um certified staff as far as teachers or just support staff that don't have instructional settings they are going to be going through some of these adoptions as far as these practices go so I am excited about that that we got the green light from Miss McDonald for us to move forward with that so that should help immensely moving forward as far as the action plans 1.5 Brett and I have been discussing this we are the owners of 1.5 and we are going to be implementing some of these for the 23-24 school year

142as a matter of fact we are meeting with Dr Guzman tomorrow at 11 30 a.m to solidify our plan moving into August uh just some of the focus areas we wanted to share with you uh and a lot of these are aligned to our earlier conversation right so um we want to collect feedback from everybody that's an important part of building trust in a community is is giving everybody a voice uh in the process so we're working on surveys focus groups for staff parents students to collect some of that and inform our work uh so hoping to do that early in the school year um we wanna we we've talked about this earlier in the year when we talked about the Parent-Teacher advisory committee that's our Avenue to talk about the types of infractions that

143we have the type of responses that we have to infractions so now that we're not in strategic planning we're going to start that earlier this year spread out the meetings so they're more accessible so hopefully that helps with involvement with that committee but that again is the opportunity to really talk about policy wise how are we going to respond to infractions right so that's our that's our arena for that conversation uh and anybody who's been on the last two years knows that I'm really excited about that part of the conversation and then also just working with our students so I know that um Shannon Takara are both talking about student leadership groups at each campus and how we can utilize them utilize our leaders who are students to not just give us information but also

144to help us work with all the students in the building so that we can create a climate that is more conducive to learning uh and and again continuing with our restorative justice cohorts with classroom teachers I would add cultural responsiveness as a part of restorative justice they're not separate things they're not siled initiatives it's one thing um and so that is another part of the new teacher orientation as well in addition to this is that they're also learning those cultural responsiveness as they're being onboarded into the district so we have common language and common approaches to supporting our students I know there are a lot of questions asked throughout does anybody have any additional questions you don't have any um uh student like Equity action committee already this is something that you're looking at so

145I I'm starting I think that that it's it's been something that's existed at both campuses before I think coming back from covid now it's time to just refresh it as the conversation that we kind of had role in and I was going to happen is it like a sponsored club or it will be something kind of separate more leadership type we call it student voice if you've got a representative group of students just to talk about how to get feedback about how things are going and to talk about um initiatives and ideas and proposals for changes and practices or policies and to make sure that hearing from you know the largest group in our buildings which are the students so um is the plan to have that group do some work with other students like

146eventually okay yeah I'm just curious to be honest I did it for one year and then go became okay if they're very much ground level when student voice is really important yeah absolutely that's the that's the benefit of being at the high school as you know right that we we have our students are close to being adults they think they're adults sometimes and so uh you know it's an opportunity for us to get their input for sure some of the other action plans are being adopted are also going to impact everything that we've talked about for the last however long we've been up here so like 2.2 is about programming we can't have enough interventions and programs uh 3.2 is the attendance strategy that's going to involve 3.2 and 1.5 are going to have a

147lot of alignment because it's about creating connection to the school so I think you know we've seen some progress not even close to what we need to be but but we're really going to start picking up momentum now that we have a strategic plan in place uh after being without one for a year so I just wanna oh I'm sorry we're gonna say something no if anything I just want to apologize because sometimes I can be defensive when we came on this board seeing what the board had done before I ever got here learning about the programs then seeing we've doubled our social workers we've like tripled quadruples our interventions we not only have our groups that happen during the day and I was thinking about this why did my brothers and my sister um

148or specifically my brothers do so well at JT and myself and it was the groups that we also had the connections Casa essential against substance abuse um a no-name club badge Julia West and all of these different groups that helped us starting the lgbtq and Allied Community the environmental awareness Club all of these things that taught us like what it looked like to care about your community and love your fellow student and neighbor and you know those are things that we really needed and they changed our lives for the better and we are cycle Breakers and I think right now just looking at all that there purpose that I work with and just like we're seeing a burnout with education thank you Educators and nurses and social workers it's it's daunting and then I think

149about people like Cuddy I want to come after him and tell him I hope he goes bankrupt one day um I just it's a real it's a systemic issue it really is and it and all these social ills when we look at poverty and and just free meals and how that ties together with our students that are are experiencing violence committing violence it really does go together and it is daunting so I just want to say thank you for all this work that you've done and that you do and I hope that we just continue to move on and when you are appreciated and on your most overwhelmed day I just want to say thank you again you change your staff because some of them are still there changed my life um my Miser Advantage

150um all the teachers and what you're doing now like all these people have stepped in it's just important that you know that you are appreciated and we thank you and you're doing big work and when I look at all the other schools around us I'm just grateful to be here and that concludes our superintendent report now now we can move into action items action item a resolution supporting tax rebate agreement for lithium ion battery production facility development by Joliet Township High School District 204. may have a motion questions can comments get Doug prayers here if anyone has any questions he learned a lot tonight I made a question myself out we have a motion so moved second questions comments is this only being utilized in special ed classes or in other mtss or tier two

151or tier three it's specific to the classes right now the reading for everyday living so that's where it's specific for and that's a special ed instructional class okay yep yeah we have multiple let's see so this is a tool to be used in that class roll call please Mrs stiff yes Mr Fitzpatrick yes Mrs Lynn yes Mrs Guerrero numer yes Dr Huntington yes Mr Coffee yes action item C intergovernmental agreement between staffs and Joliet Township High School District 204. I'll make a motion second questions comments roll call please Mr Coffee yes Mrs stiff yes Mr Fitzpatrick yes Mrs Lynn yes Mrs Grano mayor yes Dr Huntington yes action item D J THS activity and Club proposal and change changes recommendation questions comments I just had a question about the IEP managers there's four at each

152campus is that for at West four Pathways for it or just there's two at um West in two at Central and one um additional correct or is it four total I have to go I'd have to go look but it's two left into it Central and then I believe our Pathways IEP manager is an administrator is the psychologist so we have four dedicated 20 West to it central so so nobody there's not a manager for transition or they're part of Central and West covers transitions so they they're district-wide so they're sort of an overflow with a caseload okay this world cup I I just wanted to thank um Dr Hampton and his team in working with the Union um to look at these each year this is an annual and I do um points that

153were made before I think these clubs are just really really important and I too you know am proud of that as a superintendent but also as a parent that we continue to look at new and different ways to encourage kids to be engaged in school you know I know I've already talked to both my boys who are graduates and they're very deeply Disturbed that there was no DND Club when they were here um but we keep adding these things and I think it's just really important and I'm very proud that we recognize that I agree I told my daughter who's in eighth grade who does not like joining clubs that in high school I will make her join at least two clubs so she will find something to be involved in that's okay roll call

154please Dr Huntington yes Mr Coffee yes yeah Mrs stiff yes Mr Fitzpatrick yes Mrs Lynn yes Mrs Guerrero numer yes action item e Transportation contract with afsme Council 31 local 197. let me have a motion so moved questions comments Excuse me yes um this is a recommendation for a one-year contract um to roll over the existing language and Provisions for one year and we will begin a full opening of the contract for next school year sometime in September so the recommendation is to a four or four percent increase and this Union group represents uh transportation I like to think all the bus drivers and everything that they do for us and I miss their shortage for staying with us and being here roll call please Mrs Guerrero new mayor yes Dr Huntington yes Mr Coffee

155yes Mrs stiff yes Mr Fitzpatrick yes Mrs Lynn yes action item F memorandum of agreement with Transportation regarding Transportation attendance you have a motion someone second comments yes this is a recommendation to continue the memorandum of agreement for perfect attendance for transportation for the upcoming school year roll call please Mrs Lynn yes Mrs Guerrero numer yes Dr Huntington yes Mr Coffee yes yes Mrs Smith stiff yes Mr Fitzpatrick yes and you're right action item G Personnel reports one through ten I have a motion sold second question comments I I have a question there's there's a lot of um extra pay recommendations for um like PPS staff and I'm assuming that it's contractual but the volume it would seem it would make sense to have a salary schedule that reflected all of those agreements it's got

156to be hard to keep track of all the stipends is that something that has ever been considered so ask that question again so when I was going through the um the list there were um extended day social worker extended day counselor there was extra pay counselor extra those kind of things and it looked to me like everyone that was in the the this department was getting those stipends so I'm assuming it's contractual yes okay so is that because you don't want to have a separate salary schedule for that category oh yeah I mean no it's just does that make the way the contract reads yeah it was never recommended to have a separate salary schedule that is just part of a stipend so like things just stipends um that's not something that could change like

157year to year that's kind of established in the contract that changes from year to year in terms of the the amount received out so it's tied to the salary to the actual salary schedule and then there's a percentage based on the lanes so they move with with the salary scale right okay so it doesn't like it wouldn't like go away is what I'm saying okay correct yes it seems like a lot of extra work thank you roll call please Mr Fitzpatrick yes Mrs Lynn yes Mrs Guerrero new mayor yes Dr Huntington yes Mr Coffee yes Mrs stiff yes unfinished business none no new business the um policies uh within the board packet they're for first read if you have any questions um please please let me know I know I sent out additional information about

158these policies most are just due to legislative changes and um some mandates and then um The Five-Year review that's just best practice to look at those every five years so we're prompted to do that so they'll come back to the board next month for action are there any board reports um I just wanted to thank the staff I believe they were district-wide staff for the summer enrichment program I had the opportunity to go to the Celebration ran in here during lunch I didn't have a snack but I was able to meet the presenters and talk to them a little bit more it was really nice to meet the Reverend and the kids were so excited to be able to share their work the video was awesome so if you hadn't had an opportunity to look

159that over um it's it's a good 10 minutes well spent so 15 maybe okay I'll move to an announcement in public comment s thank you um the reason I was thinking about the board is um and this was alluded to today I'm meeting with all of the action planning teams that were adopted so on the board approved nine of the action plans moving forward and those owners have been assigned and established so um I actually met with a team today that's working on the school day schedule which is probably a multi-year plan of research and looking at that and the reason that I bring it up is because some of the action plans do dictate um committees to be formed and there will be opportunities for board members to be on those committees specifically there

160will be and it's dictated through the Strategic plan but the school Day committee which I believe is 4.3 does call for representation of the school board so uh if just be thinking about that we also have the parent teacher advisory committee which is a board directive committee as well so there's probably going to be multiple opportunities as we're working through strategic plan to be on some of these planning committees so I'll be sending information out as I work with these teams when they establish their meeting dates but if there's a specific area you're interested in just be considering that and then probably talk to Mrs stiff and then we can determine because usually on those committees it would be up to two more times I just want to just share that there's good work and

161good planning being done thank you thank you those dates will come out are those different assignments that are necessary they're going to be coming out probably throughout the year but like for example with 4.3 they're establishing the dates so that information will be coming out very soon yeah we're actually working on a um event schedule an opportunity schedule that I'll share with the board of education so some things will come out before school starts and then as communities continue their work they may start a little bit later but the school Day committee I want to say their first meeting is like early in September I did appreciate Tanya having the written dates program and seeing that beautiful I did I did appreciate that we're working a problem for the whole year yeah yeah I like

162that I'm a paper person and I go emails and then I don't write it down and I forget and it was nice to have it written in some place I can store it I I would just like to say as a founder and former member of the environmental awareness Club at Joyce Central we should start being more conscious of tree use but anyway two we'll send it in both ways I'd like to know uh what the school's starting soon the uh real problem that we have on two fronts the tardy and the absentee uh I'd like to know if we have a plan versus I know last year it didn't seem to work out real well um definitely I will and Shannon Takara are the owners of our attendance strategy so I know they've started

163to meet as well as far as attendance one of the things that we're working at implementing this year um and help me team with it as I what's the attendance platform that we okay so we we had some training on this new platform during our DLT summer workshop we're going to have additional training um this is the same platform that uh District 86 is using so one of the things that we're trying to improve upon and hopefully take some work off be more effective and efficient with communication about attendance to families um District 86 has found some success with using this platform and we thought if our families are getting information in similar ways and to overlap that might help so um that is one of the systems and new um I'm gonna say interventions

164that we're going to put in place and it's not just sending um pieces of paper home there's other components setting up conferences so there's efficiencies within this platform that we're learning and and that will learn probably throughout the year so that's one thing that we're putting into place and then I know that Mr hallahan and Mrs Parker are going to work on specific plans for that strategy so we'll report more um as we're going into this school year but thinking about incentives um and and obviously continuing to use our home a home visit Liaisons and just really talking to students about how do we engage them more so I think there's a lot of components to it but we're hoping that the new platform allows us to then concentrate on like incentives instead of communication

165all the time so that's one of the things we're doing with attendance as far as tardies when we compare tardies it's not that Hardee's got worse this year than the previous year we were tracking them differently and so that's still a work in progress um with with tardy I don't know if the team has any more to add with that where we're at right now anything else no I mean we hope that having detention in place that's obviously party's a social issue right so you're late to class most of the time when you talk to students because they're socializing instead of going to class and the hallways are crowded anyway uh so hopefully that will help um oh yeah so with attendance scanners one of the most frequent causes of tardies and period absences is

166advisory because we have attendance scanners now students will have to scan in so we're doing a 30-day moratorium on passes out of advisory so everybody will be in their advisory for the first 30 days we're also we have two whole weeks of activities planned in that 30 days we have safety week which occurs in the first 30 days and then suicide National Suicide awareness week is also in that 30-day moratorium see something say something happens so we're trying to load it up and make make advisory more impactful and just not allowing students out right um to try to establish positive habits and I want to I want to say too and I know this was already stated tonight but when we're talking about the Strategic plan there's so much overlap between the different um plans

167that were adopted for example in meeting with the um the team and it's a larger team trying to attack the school day structure like things that are in their mind so for discipline and for tardies how do we build a schedule that maybe minimizes movement of students throughout the day like so those are considerations that um that team is thinking about too so I think it's being attacked from all different areas so I don't think it's just one thing or um it's it's a bunch of things that we're gonna just keep trying to attack something we also talked about her but taking a look at our security and our teachers and utilizing them in the hallways from the very get-go so we have identified pockets in our buildings that tend to be go-to places for

168our students to hang out making sure that we're shifting our staff and our security to those places not just in the hallways but the cafeteria we've put uh same faces in the cafeteria cafeter noticing at the same students in there a second time and be able to address that quicker same thing in the PE area so kind of Shifting those things as well as technology we've been working with it won't be implemented in the very beginning of the year but putting contacts on to the doors so that the doors are popped it's not just it you know the technology will be indicating it to us so that we will be able to address that right away um you know doing that more efficiently react to that right away instead of we've now noticed you've missed

169out two days of that class and we're going to hopefully be able to keep up with that my question is is um are teachers right do they write passes the first 10 minutes or is there like so that's we've got a whole okay that will go over to Institute okay so no pass is first time the last 10 of class like just minor tweaks like the things that we all you know covet really did a number on us right so getting back to basics is is really where we're at some of this I'm sure I think Mr Johnson presents next month so a lot of it crosses over to what his team is doing so you'll hear more about absences and tardies I'm sure when he's here in August also is it possible to invite

170the roen and the truancy officer because I know we they have one right the Roe each campus is assigned uh drones they they recently expanded their truancy staff and that was very helpful this year I think we would all say that that we definitely got more response from them um that definitely is helpful uh so so the Roe did a great job this year of increasing the support to us as schools uh to to work with families on truancy and they yeah oh yeah I mean it was it was much more responsive much quicker so even though we lost the access to the tayat program at Lincoln I think this is better trying to keep students with us and intervene earlier so I think that we would all say that was a huge improvement from

171the Roe I don't I haven't heard anything I know that uh they're working through figuring out what they're going to continue I know they're continuing a lot of these resources came from our student Support Services meeting um ideas that we share with each other there I know they're continuing that meeting so hopefully that's something I mean I think it's truancy is an issue for all schools in our area so I would hope they continue when I when I with um the new superintendent from the early I've met with her twice one of the areas I said that I think all of that that JT would benefit from but all area in Will County would benefit from is a continued focus on attendance and chronic absenteeism so I know that that wasn't I was not the

172only person who shared that and so we're very hopeful that that continues because we've said it before it takes a village and we will take all the help we can get when they put their card on the door it's a little bit more yeah absolutely thanks for allowing me to come out to the podium again [Laughter] we just missed him don't tell him that that there's nothing else Matt