8-14-25 Regular School Board Meeting For C.U.S.D. 95

001I call the August 14, 2025 regular meeting of the Board of Education to order. Kate, will you please call the roll? Mr. Aitken? Here. Ms. Timm? Here. Mrs. Danniger? Here. Mr. Goldberg? Here. Mrs. Warren? Here. Ms. Maloney? Here. Dr. Pinter? Here. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the Republic, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good evening, and thank you for joining us tonight. On behalf of the Board of Education, I want to congratulate all staff, administrators, and families for an outstanding start to the school year. We are deeply appreciative of the hard work and dedication that went into ensuring our students and families began the year on such a positive note. We want to extend a special

002thank you to our parents for continuing to partner with us and supporting our students and schools. To our administrators, thank you for making sure our staff had meaningful opportunities to learn, prepare classrooms and learning spaces, and secure the resources and supplies needed for our students to thrive. And to our incredible staff, we are profoundly grateful for the countless hours, thoughtful preparation, and unwavering care you poured into making sure every student had an outstanding first week of school. We could not be prouder of your efforts and the spirit you bring to this important work. It is this collective effort, care, and dedication that make our community and schools so special. Kate, is there anyone signed up for public speaking? No, there is not. Thank you. The next item on the agenda is the consent agenda. Dr.

003Gault. Thank you. This evening I have for the Board of Education approval of payrolls, approval of the personnel report, which includes the resignation of certified staff. I do want to point out to the Board of Education that we have two individuals who will be retiring at the conclusion of this year. So Mrs. Karen Gorman, who has spent 14 years in District 95, and we so appreciate her service and her efforts. And then also Ms. Carol Suppes, who has spent 20 years in our district and also want to thank her for her service and all that she's done to help our students and families. So special thank you and shout out to them. Employment of certified staff, change of certified staff, change of non-certified staff, employment of non-certified staff, change of non-certified staff, and resignation of

004non-certified staff. May I have a motion to approve the consent agenda as prepared and presented by the administration? So moved. Second. Thank you, Doug, and thank you, Peter. Board colleagues, are there any questions? Kate, please call the roll. Dr. Pinter? Yes. Mr. Goldberg? Yes. Ms. Maloney? Yes. Ms. Timm? Yes. Mr. Aitken? Yes. Ms. Danniger? Yes. Ms. Warren? Yes. Next item on the agenda is the superintendent's report. Dr. Dolf? Thank you. This evening I have several things to share with you. I am going to share with Ms. Stallion some information regarding the committee meeting in a few moments, but I'll start out by just pointing out that the FOIA report is included in the agenda as typical. We did have a lovely donation from our Lake Zurich Education Foundation, and that was to our entire district

005staff. They paid for the breakfast on Friday morning as staff entered our district back for the first day of the 2025-26 school year, so certainly want to thank them for their generous donation to our staff. Additionally, as far as communication of the board, I just wanted you to be aware we have had some communication specifically at the administrative level related to middle school cell phone usage during lunch and some liking it and some not caring for that. And so I do trust our middle school administrative teams. They believe that what they have in place right now is a balanced approach, and so we allow students to use their phones during lunch but then not to use them during class time, and so again, it's a balance, and it's probably not perfect for every child, but

006you should know that there's been some communication out there related to that. Then I will come to the teaching and learning committee meeting. We did talk a bit about the math plan. As you recall, we've been partnering with Loyola University. They conducted a needs assessment. They shared information with the district as well as with the Board of Education. They shared a five-year plan. Our team, being as exceptional as they are, have put together all of that information and believe we can accomplish that in four years, and so they will be working on a four-year plan, and I know some of you are smiling, but we do believe this is something that we can do. So what the board can expect is a board presentation at some point in the fall, probably late fall, and that

007will be conducted after we've had an opportunity to vet the plan through multiple groups. Right now, that plan was developed over the summer. We had some small committees that worked on it, but now it needs to be vetted out across the system, and then we'll be sharing that with you in the fall for you to have an opportunity to review it and ask questions as well and give feedback. So additionally, I did want to just share with you that we are planning to continue our collaboration with Loyola University. We believe that they will help us to continue to grow in the area of mathematics and better understand some steps moving forward, so we're excited about that continued partnership. And then I'm going to turn it over to Mrs. Stallion to brag a little bit about

008what's been happening in District 95 since Friday and Monday. Thank you, Dr. Galton. I have no problem bragging about my team and the staff at large across the system because without them, we certainly would not have been able to bring our Institute Day to fruition. This was months and months of work. We started planning this last spring with our teachers, our teacher leaders, and our district administration, determining that based upon the fact that we were finishing up putting the last school in the district with new furniture based upon the board's generous gifts for us, all of our schools now have been outfitted with some progressive, current, innovative pieces of furniture. We all talked about that. That's wonderful. How are we going to use them? And I think, Mr. Goldberg, you always ask us, you have

009the tools. What are you going to do with them? This day was about what are we going to do with the tools that you have provided us? We determined that we would anchor our learning in dynamic classroom environments, aligning that also with some of the work Loyola did talking to us about increasing opportunities for students to learn in their environments. I want to say that Ms. Katie Dangler and Ms. Brooke Crowley were instrumental in bringing this day to life. They worked with groups of teachers starting in February or March of last year all through the summer and right before we started school to bring this day to life. This is going now on my sixth year. I can say without hesitation this is the best professional learning we have provided for the staff in the

010five years I've been here, not just based on observations of my own and the content that was delivered but by the feedback that we were provided from staff and administration across the system. So we anchored that in dynamic learning. Our teachers were able to participate in three lessons. Every single teacher across the system participated in three lessons on classroom management, structures and space and something very near and dear to our hearts and I know your hearts as well which is student voice and choice in their classroom environments. We also connected that learning to portrait of a graduate which is going to be a focus for us this year and bringing that to life. We are so fortunate and I think we go back and we think about right after COVID and during COVID we struggled

011to have enough staff to have summer semester. This year we were fully staffed by our own staff with just a few outside people that were hired and we had 71 of our teachers and administrators who stepped up to participate in leading this day. Without them we couldn't have done what we did. So they attended train the trainer models where we provided them with the lessons but we also gave them the opportunity to customize those lessons to meet the needs of their individual grade levels, content areas and developmental stages of the students that they serve. Finally we had tons of feedback and like I said I was getting feedback and texts from administrators and teachers. My team was getting the feedback saying today was a great day and we really enjoyed the learning. So we could

012not be more proud of our staff and our leaders and certainly my team, the CNI team who brought this to life. I will say sometimes we look at specialized groups and they don't always feel their needs are met. That didn't happen this time and specifically we heard from our PE department that said this is the first time in six years that PE teachers from K to 12 have been together in a room learning together and growing together. And that really meant something to us because we consistently hear we want more time to talk to each other. We want more time to work together. Finally the 71 staff who participated in this day, we owe a debt of gratitude. Their expertise, their dedication to bringing this to life was essential. In the spirit of gratitude of

013which we all want to make sure that we are engaging in, each of these participants received a handwritten note of gratitude from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction as well as a little gift bag to demonstrate their powerful participation in their peers' learning and the collective efficacy that this district continues to show. So kudos to all who participated. And I just want to bring just another connection to the Board of Education over the last couple of years and we did not ask for additional funds this year but we had asked for some additional funds to work with a group called BOLD. We have DLR here and they're going to talk about sustainability. But one of the members of the team also helped support both the furniture at the high school as well as we worked

014alongside BOLD. And so we appreciate the learning that we did alongside BOLD because that helped us to be able to conduct this kind of learning and transfer the information we learned from them based on the two or three schools that we worked with and then transfer that to the whole staff at large. And so I do want to thank the Board for your commitment and your help in ensuring that we were able to receive those learning opportunities which then extended across our system. So thank you to the Board for that. Additionally, we began the discussion about the changes that are happening at the State Board regarding the benchmark scores for state assessments. Aubrey Allen who as you all know does an exceptional job keeping us connected to the changes that are happening at the state

015level and helping us enact those changes in our own curriculum and in our own reporting to make sure that our community and board and our staff are well versed in how we are operating in partnership with the state. As you know, the state has worked to take a look at the cut scores for the IAR as well as the ISA, the Illinois Science Assessment and the ACT test. And they did have a meeting yesterday at 9 a.m. where their board approved the new cut scores and at 4 p.m. we were on a call with them and we were being updated on all of that. Gave us plenty of time to put together the presentation for today. And so what we are going to share with you is what we know today. It is very, very

016high level. We'll give you more as it comes. Basically what they ended up doing was they went and they looked at the performance levels across all of the assessments and they looked at the tasks that students are asked to engage in to determine what does proficiency mean on these tasks and how are we going to use that to determine what proficiency means related to the cut scores. They calculated the metrics, of course, way above my head so I don't even understand how they did that, but they do that. And then they released those to us yesterday so that we could start some internal working the numbers to determine where we think we may fall. Remember we will not get that from the state for the next couple weeks internally and we're not allowed to share

017that until the end of October. But in the next couple weeks we'll have a much better idea of where our students will fall. If you take a look at this chart, I think this is the message that the state wants to send and I believe in this message. Illinois, if you look on this chart and we're at the very, very end, Illinois had the highest score in the nation to measure proficiency. In other words, a student in Illinois and a student in another state could have scored exactly the same on a very similar test because remember realistically many of the assessments across the nation are aligned to the common core. We move to the Illinois standards, but they really are aligned to the common core. Two students may be identical in their ability to demonstrate

018proficiency. In one state that student might be proficient or even above proficient. In the state of Illinois they might be below. The state of Illinois recognized that there was a significant discrepancy between the way that Illinois students were being categorized in terms of proficiency and the way it was happening across the other states in the nation, which is why they engaged in this work. And this chart demonstrates that. This came straight from the State Board of Education. In order for us to take a look at that, we deemed that the ELA and math scores in the state of Illinois, the cut scores were far too high in comparison with other states, other schools and other students across the nation, which puts Illinois students at a disadvantage on several different grounds. One, students in Illinois who

019actually are proficient are labeled non-proficient, which means that they may not have as better a chance to compete with students in other states when they go post-secondary or, as we talked about today, if I'm a student in the state of Indiana and I come to Illinois and I bring my state assessment with me, I might be meeting or exceeding standards in the state of Indiana. I might have access to advanced placement and accelerated learning because of that test. But a student in Illinois who takes that same assessment but because of the way that Illinois has deemed them proficient takes that test to Indiana and they don't have access to accelerated learning or advanced because they're deemed non-proficient. Same proficiency level. The state of Illinois recognized that and said we need to do something. And the

020message we need to send to community, the message we need to send to our staff is that our students haven't changed. Our students have been proficient. We just haven't captured them in our reporting. And now we're going to. So that is a good thing. And I really want our community and our board and our teachers to understand that. Our students haven't changed. They were proficient in the spring when we used the old cut scores that may have said they are not proficient and they are proficient with the new cut scores. The student hasn't changed. That's the message that the state wants us to give. We are not lowering expectations for kids. The state test is the same. The rigor is the same. The expectations for proficiency are the same. The cut scores have changed. However,

021our science scores were too low. So in science, a student in Illinois would be labeled proficient when students in other states would be not proficient because we had our science scores were too low. So they are adjusting both. I don't want to say lowering or raising. I want to say adjusting both to accurately describe our students' proficiency levels on these state tests. The other thing they did, if you go to the next slide, they adjust the performance levels. If you look at the top slide, you can see the IAR, the ISA, and the SAT. IAR had five designations from does not meet to partially meets to approaching to meets. ISA had four, not the same designations. And then SAT had four, not the same. They are changing all of that. So now you see you

022have four designations and they are all the same. The language is changing to be low proficiency, which again does not mean that the student is not able to demonstrate some level of proficiency. It just means they're not yet at grade level. To approaching, meaning they're getting there, they're approaching proficiency at the grade level at which they're being tested. To proficient, they're meeting those standards at the level at which we would expect. To above proficient, meaning the student in third grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, 11th grade is actually performing higher than we would expect you to perform against the standards at that grade level. So now all of that has been equalized. It's going to make it much easier for parents, certainly going to make it much easier for our staff to report and

023have conversations about proficiency levels. The next one we're going to just kind of move on from that because it's exactly what I said before. And then this slide demonstrates the old cut scores and the new cut scores. So if you go to that next slide, what you'll see, if you look at grades three, four, five, six, seven, and eight on the IAR, a 750 was the cut score at every grade level on ELA. What they've done now, and you can see that, and I think Mr. Entian said it best, they've just graded on a curve. Every test is not the same. Rigor is different. Expectations are different. So they've adjusted those cut scores to meet the proficiency level. What we're going to see is that we're going to capture more third graders proficient. And as

024you can see, 750 to 745 at eighth grade did not have a significant change. But we're going to capture more kids, but not as many as we will capture at third grade. So that's what that score does. And then you can see for the ACT, and we need to remember we were operating off the SAT. So this is the first year we're going to apply the ACT scores. You can see grade nine, 10, and 11 for ELA and mathematics, a 14, 15, and 18 being proficient, and a 17, 18, and 19 in mathematics being proficient. And then you can see the new science scores, which would be a 14 at grade nine, a 16 at grade 10, and a 19 at grade 11. How these translate to our data, we don't yet know. So we

025are going to be doing some internal calculations. We have all of our student data. We'll do some internal calculations. But even that's going to be a guess until the state tells us here is your data. So we'll be doing that over the next few weeks, waiting for the state to report, better understanding how to report this out to the Board of Education, our community, and our staff at large. And we will have much more information coming to you. Our next step, as I said, is an internal analysis of our data. We'll get the official data integration in the next couple weeks from the state. Then we will be working with our building leaders to help inform their school improvement plans and help them continue to write those plans to identify the next steps for them.

026And then we will be preparing our school report card report for you, our achievement report for you, and finally you'll get that comparable report. Once the comparable report comes out, it's going to answer a lot of questions about where are we in comparison, because everybody's getting adjusted, right? So more to come, but we're really anxious and excited. We are excited about what we're seeing so far in our student scores. Thank you, Mrs. Stallion. At this time, Mrs. Warren and Mr. Etienne, I know you were a part of our meeting this evening, and so do you have any comments that you would like to share with your colleagues related to the hour-long conversation we had that Mrs. Stallion just reviewed? Just one item that I don't believe Mrs. Stallion touched on that I was very impressed

027about was the Loyola study was presented to us, I believe it was in June? Correct. It was in June, and not only did they start the next day in creating this to figure out if a four-year plan was feasible, but they actually started some work that they felt was too important to put off that really needed to be done before the school year started, and so having staff that were willing to come in and do that work that actually were seeing the effect of some of the Loyola suggestions day one of school I think is really impressive that that was accomplished in basically two months. So that was great to hear. I don't know that you touched on that, but it was really nice to hear that the eyes were opened, as we said, having

028a third party come in. A lot of times you see things that you just aren't seeing yourself, and it's just amazing. It'll be very interesting to hear the effects of taking that step in the summer and seeing it in action this year as opposed to taking a year to figure out what the four-year plan is. Kudos on taking that quick approach. That was a lot of work. I know it was a big lift, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Etienne. Yeah, and the team continued to work on consistency, and I think that's exciting. I think sometimes that's part of the Loyola work, and it's a long journey. It's going to take some time, particularly in the math, as obviously the Loyola work focuses on the math area, to see the full effect of

029that work long-term, but we're excited about the steps that have been taken. On this one, I joked with them that on this data that kind of reduces our bragging rights over Indiana, but overall I think it positions Illinois students, and for those that are labeled to be not proficient, it allows parents to really fully evaluate where the kids are and give them the confidence that they need going forward. So I think that's a good thing Illinois did, and as Dr. Gault said, it's something that anybody who's in the field have known that that's an adjustment that should have been made many years ago, so it's good that the state agency is going in that direction. Thank you, Mr. Etienne. I do want to go ahead and continue. Excuse me, Kelly. I had one question and

030comment. So I listened to Dr. Sanders. I actually read the text of his remarks. I think it was on Tuesday where he rolled this out, and he did a really good job, I thought, explaining the rationale and the normalization of the data across the country. I think really good stuff. He made mention of some international standard that apparently is available and that the state is benchmarking our students against. And I guess it's a benchmark where you have to be invited to participate in it, but there's been some sampling of Illinois students across that. Are you aware of that? The only one I know that's international is the PISA report. Yeah. So if that's what he's speaking about, that's an international assessment that basically samples students across the nation of the United States, and then we

031are compared against students internationally across the world to see where we fall. Do we have that data? No. I'm just curious. Okay. Again, I thought he did a wonderful job explaining this is certainly something that was long overdue, and clearly just looking at the data, you know, we were penalizing students that we shouldn't have been done. So I think this is a wonderful move. I'm really happy to see Illinois do this. The only thing I would say about the PISA that we always caution about is that the schools in the United States don't function the same way that schools outside of the United States function, specifically sometimes when you're looking at nations like China or Russia where students are put on a path pretty early as to whether or not they're even able to attend

032school, and if they're not deemed to be able to achieve at school, they're put on a work path. And so our students, of course, in this wonderful nation, they all have a right to attend our schools. And so when we compare in the PISA, sometimes we don't always look like we measure up, but we have to be really careful at that because we provide free and public education to all students. And that's typically not what I've seen accounted for in the PISA report. I think he was simply making mention that's a benchmark that they want to look at more to understand, you know, are there areas where this is nationwide, this is in Illinois, nationwide are the areas where we don't compare favorably and why. That's, I think, what his point was. Thank you. Thank

033you. Okay. We'll continue on and go to the opening of schools. I do want to celebrate some of what I know Ms. Stallion already celebrated, but this was, and I sent the board my report, and so you should have received an email with some photos that helped you to have just a little bit of a sense of what happened as well as I sent you my presentation with my notes. If you did not see my notes, they were included. So you have the gist of what was shared that day. I will pull your attention to the picture on the right in the upper right-hand corner. That is an activity that, one, our staff were able to participate in prior to entering the Performing Arts Center, but as well as after. So some people participated beforehand,

034others after. We're going to be displaying that here at district office. If you want to take a peek at it before you leave tonight, it's in the corner back here. So you can see this was when we first started it. You'll see that there's a lot more ribbons, and those ribbons mean those are the areas, three different areas that each staff member were able to say this is an area of focus for me for the upcoming school year related to the portrait of a graduate. So every staff member, regardless of their area of their role in our district, were able to complete that activity. And then we'll continue to have it here at district office. And so those who didn't have a chance on that day, they'll have a chance through committees and et cetera

035who are in this facility throughout the school year. So very excited. This was a lot to do. This slide just really showcases all of the learning that took place over the last couple of days. And then we'll kind of continue on. I shared with you that the kindergarten groups across our district had the opportunity through our PTOs for some play dates. So not all children attended, but some did. I had the wonderful pleasure of bringing Baylor to the Isaac Fox celebration. We had a great time. We were able to meet parents of children who are going to be in kindergarten at Isaac Fox just like they did across the system. And then for Baylor to meet classmates prior to the first day of school, which is always important to help, you know, minimize some of

036the anxiety that sometimes comes in play to kindergarten students as they're entering school for the first time. So great, great thing. And then I also want to point out Isaac Fox did get a little bit of a facelift by their teachers and PTO. So I wanted to showcase that. We are Isaac Fox. They make this little symbol there. And so that's very important to what their expectations are across the school. And then you'll see in the right-hand picture that is a mural that was created by their staff. And it displays the portrait of a graduate and those five characteristics. And so really excited to see that come to life in each of our buildings, but specifically there. You'll notice some other pictures we have showcased here on opening day. I do want to point out

037that Mr. Jackowitz just happened to be, I think they call him Wolfie, but he was Wolfie that day. So he surprised staff at the request of the new principal, Brooke Crawley, but he was Wolfie that day for opening. You'll notice all of the schools had their mascots going and getting kids really excited as they entered the school buildings. And then this just kind of showcases some of our students and some of the things going on. I'll just give a little shout out. If you could go to the next slide, please. We do have Vivian who belongs to Dr. McArdle. She was showing off her picture that she drew of her first day in her classroom, which was a great piece of artwork. I will say as I walked into that classroom, not only does Vivian

038remember me as Coach Kelly, but another student in the classroom yelled out Coach Kelly because I happened to have been her coach for soccer. So it was an exciting day at Seth Paine in kindergarten on the first day of school. But lots of really great things going on. I'm going to ask Mr. Nardiello if he can play that clip very quickly that Mrs. Malik put together. She's been Mrs. Malik's staff. Okay. There we go. But Mrs. Malik and her staff have been instrumental to all kinds of work, as well as Kate Pavich, over the last couple of days to make sure everything came to life. I could not have done it without them. So we'll just wait just a moment, and it'll just showcase some of our schools on opening day, maybe. Oh, that's right.

039I forgot to say that. Mr. Nardiello was the Wildcat at May Whitney. So students were excited, and hopefully his daughter knew that he was the Wildcat. She did not know. Well, I'll have to tell her your secret. While you're pulling that up, I'll just share with the board. The last slide has some important dates on it. I did place the homecoming football game and the alumni event, as well as our community partners. First responders and board recognition event will be on October 17th. So please put that on your calendar. And then our joint annual conference. It is the one time that the board gets to come together and go and attend a conference for the sake of learning with other board members across the state, which is also really important to participate in. Friday, Saturday,

040Sunday. Yes, correct. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mrs. Malik and team. So it was an exciting start to the year, and I just really appreciate everybody making it a great start. That's my report this evening. Thank you, Dr. Galtz. The next item on the agenda is we are going to move to discussion without action. First, we will have a long range sustainability plan overview. Mr. Erstad, Dr. Czar and Dr. Galtz, please introduce our guests who will present the final sustainability long range plan. So I am actually going to ask our guests to come up to the table. We have a table there for you with some microphones. And so our guests are from DLR. They have been just incredible champions of the work we've been doing in our district. And I would

041be remiss if I did not share, we have a small leadership team that has worked side by side with DLR all summer. And McKenna Sawoka, she's been a huge, huge contributor to everything that we're doing in the district for sustainability as well as a part of this small group team. Mr. Erstad, Dr. Czar, and then myself, we join them for many meetings to make sure that we got to the point today where we can present a long range plan, three year plan. And so I'm going to ask that they go ahead and introduce themselves and share just, you know, what you do so that the board understands your expertise and your role in our work here in District 95. Thank you. Sure thing. Thank you. Hi. My name is Erin Burke. I am a project

042manager with our K-12 team at DLR Group. I myself have about 15 years of experience in K-12 architecture and design, ranging from getting anywhere in the weeds during construction as well as starting to move into more planning projects like the Sustainability Action Plan. And I'm Patty Mason. I'm a climate action strategist at DLR Group. I'm based in Denver, Colorado, but I've really enjoyed my opportunity to collaborate more with my colleagues in the Chicago office. And a climate action strategist spends a lot of time working across three disciplines, our high performance design team, smart buildings, and our renewables team. And so we get into the data as well as the client engagement in order to align sustainability plans to the values of the work that you do. Good evening. Thank you for having us. My name

043is Helen Ho. I'm a senior design researcher with DLR Group based in Chicago. My job with DLR Group is to serve the firm nationwide and teams like this one here to really help with stakeholder engagement, client engagement, hearing stories, and setting measurable outcomes and tying those to strategies, which is exactly what we were trying to do with the Sustainability Action Plan here. All right. So with our presentation today, we're going to go do a high-level review of the Action Plan, starting with the phases of the project as well as the engagement we conducted as part of the plan, and then the final focus areas that became the main focus of the plan itself. So starting off, the purpose of this Action Plan was to create an actionable plan to guide your future decision-making over the

044course of three years. Those are really the big three important pieces that really drove this plan. And, you know, aligning with the district values and interests is we did focus on strategic partnerships, innovations where they could be integrated, as well as a commitment to continuous improvement. And I think you will see that in the plan as we go forward. This project went over four different phases. We started off in January of this year on an alignment phase, and that's when we really worked with the district to set the goals of the plan as well as review any existing kind of actions and activities you had related to sustainability. We then moved into research and analysis. In this phase, we really dug into the data of your district and really dug into those existing policies and

045also set some benchmarks that would help guide the Action Plan moving forward. Through all this, we had an engagement phase where we engaged with stakeholders in the plan to kind of understand where people are within the district in the current day and also to work with you to set priorities for the plan. And then finally, this summer, we worked on the review of all the phases previous and then also worked on the deliverable, which is the report that we have provided you. So we've been really lucky that there's so much already done at this district to really launch a plan like this, and we wanted to make sure that we weren't redoing any of the great work that's already been done. So you'll see in the Action Plan that it's really driven by a lot

046of existing initiatives and frameworks set and driving existing actions at the district. We were really driven by and wanted to structure the Sustainability Action Plan around the three major scales of impact defined through the values charrette described in the report as part of the sustainability guidelines process previous or prior to this Action Plan development. And then, of course, Empower 95, and we've talked a lot about it here already tonight, the portrait of a graduate characteristics among others. And you'll see those throughout the plan for each of the focus areas as what drives some of the actions that we recommend in the report. We've mentioned a couple times already, the district's already doing a ton of great things. We wanted to make sure to center or focus on that in this presentation as well as the

047report. The Action Plan, a big portion of it, is building on what you already do. I won't read this wonderfully long list, but I just wanted to highlight some things that really became a focus and an important piece of this plan. Just the notion that the sustainability guidelines were already completed, and those became kind of a foundation and the value session done as part of those guidelines. It's also great that the district continues to look for other opportunities for sustainability, like reviewing a new vendor for waste management as well as continuing your studies of feasibility of renewable energy, you know, while already making such great strides of installing those systems at your buildings. Also highlighting some ongoing air quality and water quality testing and upgrades with energy savings in mind at all your buildings. And,

048of course, the big highlight here is the district receiving the U.S. Department of Education green ribbon schools. That is a great achievement, and we want to celebrate that as well. As mentioned before, we had several key engagement activities as part of this plan, and Helen will go through what we went through. Yes, so our sustainability action plan process was really built on a foundation of engagement because we know that that matters to this district and it matters to us, honestly, as a firm setting guidelines for folks. So what we did was really build a process built on aligning existing commitments that you see here, initiatives, frameworks with stakeholder voices that could be brought then to leaders and champions at the district to really build that consensus and buy-in and meet people where they're at. So

049we'll talk first about our listening sessions. We heard from a diverse set of voices across the district over two days. We held 16 sessions. Patty, Erin, and I heard from 124 unique voices across the district ranging from pre-K teachers all the way through to high school teachers, district personnel, and our favorites, I think, were middle schoolers and high schoolers over their lunch breaks. And the goal of these listening sessions was really to get the conversation started, hear about what folks on the ground thought about sustainability, where they identified challenges and opportunities for the district to improve, and to really use these opportunities as well to build momentum and support and consensus around future sustainability action plan items to build that sense of ownership. So you'll see here four major themes emerged from these listening sessions

050focused on waste reduction, energy use, curriculum, and space. All four of these areas had amazing things already going for them. And then, as I said earlier, opportunities for improvement. And we used that as a way to launch into recommendations for the sustainability action plan. So what we did after that was we brought these four areas to the sustainability committee at the district, came with many recommended areas that we could all could easily have been part of the sustainability action plan. But we had recommended some most feasible ones, now next later, and had a really great conversation with the sustainability committee where we built consensus and began to start talking about feasibility for the focus areas that generated the most support at that conversation based on stakeholder listening sessions. So out of that conversation, we had

051seven major priorities established for the action plan that you can see at the bottom of this slide. We consolidated those into five major focus areas to really drive the first three years of the plan. And the focus was not to eliminate any of the other priorities, but really to hone in on what could really launch and be focused on the first three years of this district's sustainability journey. So we'll quickly go over these five focus areas at a high level. You'll see on each of these slides as we go over each area, we'll have some of the drivers of these areas, why we chose them, what they align with, and mostly we'll just highlight sort of major goals and the major milestones for each year. So the first one is sustainability literacy. And something that

052really stuck with me throughout this planning project was Dr. Gault pressing on how do we operationalize sustainability? How do we really make this come alive? You're an educational institution, so really focusing on literacy makes so much sense. And so in this particular focus area, aligning a shared definition of sustainability is kind of the first step to doing that. And creating a culture of sustainability at your school district involves kind of that alignment. And then doing what you all do best, and we heard all about it at the start of the meeting, assessing the effectiveness of your shared definition, celebrating it, communicating it in various different tools that you use across your district, and then documenting that throughout your building and actually letting your building come alive, which again we saw that in the earlier presentation.

053So sustainability literacy is like the leading focus area for the plan. The second focus area is elevate and celebrate. As we saw in that previous slide, there's so much this district has done and is doing and will continue to do, and a lot of people don't know that it's happening for various reasons, just too much information or just so much going on. We really wanted to make sure that there was a plan in place to be able to celebrate existing investments and investments that have been made, the history of sustainability commitments at this district, and then a communication plan in place to continue elevating and celebrating champions, whether that's staff, board members, efforts like waste audits, and most importantly as well students as they begin to take ownership over these action plan steps. So this

054involves things like creating a communication plan through various newsletters, school-wide, district-wide, and then most sort of fun is a sustainability award process across the district that we think would be a great way to add an element of competition, but also recognition and elevate those efforts and show that we're recognizing them and noticing them annually for staff, students, community members, etc. And then, you know, a district dashboard that might be able to track some of the success metrics, thinking about how to establish that as regular communication pieces to the district and community partners as part of the efforts that the district has invested in. The third focus area is strengthening student involvement. We really believe that this action plan won't be successful without the buy-in and the support of students. It's the one way to keep

055it going and growing and to really commit to that portrait of a graduate that we've been talking about a lot here tonight. One of the things that came out of this conversation was a way to increase equitable access to involvement opportunities, and a component of that is also building community relationships and partnerships with green businesses as well, and then empowering students with the sustainability action plans campaigns. So really getting them invested in club involvement, that might mean standardizing the many sustainability-oriented clubs across the district, perhaps investing more in stipends that every school can have, a sustainability club, and then endowing those clubs with the responsibility and accountability of moving some of these action plan items forward, like recycling efforts, composting efforts, waste reduction efforts at each school. Gardening as well comes into play in this

056focus area in terms of piloting a summer garden program, and then thinking about how students might be able to report back to this board about their own sustainability efforts throughout the school year. A big one. So we spent a lot of time talking about waste reduction across the district. It came up with all of the students we met with, and so a big focus area is around waste reduction in year one, focusing on just standardization of bins and signage, launching some education campaigns related to some of the myths that we were hearing related to recycling, and then in year three, shifting your focus to just overall reduction. I think there's an ongoing conversation around composting. We're excited to check back in in a year and see where that's at, if it's a pilot or if

057it's across the district, but we're really hopeful that there's a commitment to that standardization so that a student that's moving through the district from kindergarten through high school sees the same colors, has good consistent signage, understands what goes where, because as we all know, even us as adults, it can be a struggle to understand what is recyclable when, you know, colors and signage and the language around recycling and composting is different throughout the spaces that we exist in. And finally, the last focus area for the action plan is procurement standards and criteria. This also really gets to the part of operationalizing sustainability within your district and really using the purchasing power that the district has to carry out your sustainability goals and values. So the goal of this is to develop an environmental purchasing policy

058to set sustainability goals every time you go to buy a good or purchase a service for the district. You know, you'll start out by auditing your existing procurement practices and identifying three vendors or supply categories that will have the biggest impact. And then you'll move to actually developing that environmental purchasing policy focused around those three categories that you identified. And then it's really about adopting that policy and training your staff and making sure it's implemented when you do go to make those decisions as a district. That concludes our presentation. I just wanted to take the time here to say thank you so much. It was a great collaboration with the district and especially the core team we worked with, and it was great fun digging in and attending those listening sessions and building this team,

059building this plan with all of you. So thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. Really appreciate all the hard work that the entire committee put in. So thank you very much. Alicia, do you have any questions? One of the partners that was in the listening sessions was part of the group that I was part of previously on the board of the Ancient Oaks Foundation. And we're a hyperlocal conservation group doing restoration on village-owned green spaces in Lake Zarek basically. And I've always been excited about using some of this grass around here and planting native plants and working on rainwater, better rainwater usage. And there's so much that is possible. But I also think about the practicality of it, who is going to spearhead the project, what finances are required, who is going to

060follow up. So I get excited about it, but I know how volunteers work and how it's just like a consistent effort that has to take place. So I'm excited about all the different areas that are looked at here and how comprehensive it is. I'm really glad everyone got a chance to speak from different stakeholder groups. So I would just say I think sometimes we tend to use national groups that are experts in certain fields, but I think it would be good to keep focusing on local groups like the Ancient Oaks Foundation and who knows the land here and knows what maybe some best practices are. Just some other things like community partners, like we have the SWALCO, which is the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County, and we have clothing and textile recycling bins around

061the area. So ELA Area Public Library and the ELA Highway Department, they have bins just to communicate those types of things. And obviously composting is near and dear to my heart because of methane emissions. So I'm just sharing my thoughts about this. I'm really excited about maybe using district land to protect and restore local ecology. I'm really excited about increasing diversity of vegetation on our properties. I'm really excited about possibly doing any of this gray water reclamation and rainwater use harvesting. So thank you for all of that. And I'd just like to keep it as local as possible and make people realize that they can make the biggest impact here. So thank you. Can I respond to that very briefly? One of the things that I very carelessly forgot to mention in the student involvement

062section of the focus area, number three, I think, was an audit of service hours and considering linking service hours for students to green businesses or green efforts locally. And I think all of the businesses and partners that you mentioned would be great places to start to see if they have hours available for students. And then using some of those hours as a way to launch or kick start some of those efforts. We do have a group called G2 Revolution that won a green business award in town. And so, yeah, I think it would be amazing if they had internship opportunities. I know Angel Nokes, we went with their employees and designed a native garden in front of their signage. And that was really fun for the employees, too. So we can get the employees, we

063can get district people, we can get the students. And another group that we should remember to include is not just the environmental groups that are doing environmental work in town. We also have like the Interact Club, which is like a rotary junior in the high school. And they were showing up reliably alongside React Club students, the National Honor Society students. So they're ripe for picking these kids. And it's really a fun time. Thank you, Alicia. Dr. Pinger? Well, I just want to say that I'm very, very excited about this. I was a student here in the 90s and there was no talk of any of this. So I think it's fantastic what you all are doing. As I was listening to what you all were saying and as I was reading this packet as well,

064I thought that there was a very, very strong focus on environmental sustainability. And it sounds like when you give your backgrounds, I was just listening to what your credentials are. And it's like a lot of architecture, climate, researcher, like that stuff is really, really important. And so I want to make it clear that I am excited. But there's this part of me that's also a little bit sad about like I want to understand the social aspect a little bit more because as I'm reading through it, I keep reading through these and I'm like there's so much we could be doing with the social aspect of sustainability that I feel like is what makes students really excited about this type of work. So my first question is like what does social sustainability mean to you all

065since you're leading this? Like what does it mean? That's my first question. And then like do you have somebody who is like kind of has a background expertise in social sustainability when it comes to equity? Because when I look at all of this portrait of a graduate, like we could be nailing so many of those with the social aspect of sustainability like the equity, the communication with diverse groups, all of those things, global understanding. And it's just that's the really fun stuff in my opinion. So that and then like when you all went in front of this group, because again equity is important to me and I think it's important to have community engagement, which you all did. But my question is like it didn't seem like they were like touching as much on social

066sustainability. So when you all did that group, you had that group, like how did you talk about social sustainability so that they understood it? Because most people, when they think of sustainability, they think of the environment. They think of the ozone layer. They think of composting. But the social aspect of equity, environmental racism, understanding food deserts, all of those things, people don't think about that. So those are my three questions. And I can repeat them because that was a lot. Do you want me to say the first one again? No. So for social sustainability, I think where it comes through in the plan is related to the purchasing policy and prioritizing a diversity in vendor selection. That's a real tangible way for us to advance social sustainability, that we have a actual policy in place

067that prioritizes women, minority-owned businesses, local companies, local partnerships. So as a board, that's really your opportunity to use a policy-making tool to advance social sustainability. And then I would say as far as the committee, a big piece of adopting sustainability as a plan into any organization is that we meet you wherever you're at, that we don't force our own beliefs, that we come to the conversation with, that we allow for your values to come through. And so even you'll notice on one of the slides it said climate literacy, and that we evolved to sustainability literacy as a result of the committee not feeling like climate literacy was the right word for the district. So even subtle things like that have to evolve again to meet our clients where they're at on this journey, because it

068truly is a journey. And it won't be effective if it is too informed by what we think these issues are for your community or what we believe. Well, I understand that. It reflects what the committee and the stakeholders shared with us. Yeah, I understand that. But I don't know if the average person understands the aspects of sustainability or what social means. So that's what I'm trying to get. So I'm going to interrupt for just one moment. Can you speak to maybe more of the values workshop that we participated in? And there was, we went through all of it, which included the social aspect, and maybe you can speak to some of the work that we did as a part of that values workshop originally. And Helen, you led that out. I did. I was going

069to say I was lucky enough to help lead that workshop as part of the sustainability guidelines development, but now Dr. Gault has put me on the spot because I can't possibly remember all of the things that were chosen. And that was first. That was last summer almost, I think. And so that's a charrette, a workshop that we run where there are 61 priority cards for people to choose from that fall under 12 themes, including social sustainability. And there was a lot chosen by the sustainability committee at that point in terms of equitable access to green spaces, equitable access in schools to nourishing food, movement, light, nature, the earth through gardening programs and those sorts of things. That sort of naturally evolved into this phase because it's just a different committee. It's a different time. It's

070a different context at the moment. And you started with the question of what does the social sustainability mean to us? And I think for our team, and I think this is why we align so well with Lake Zurich, is that it's about building capacity in the community for community resilience and community awareness and efforts over sustainable action. And because it's so rooted in that, it really is what is the community context and the ethos wherever we're at. Lake Zurich, in some ways, the district is much further along than many other districts we work with, and we applaud that. But there might be a mismatch with the community writ large or communities that you serve. And so it's a matter of what is possible in the first three years. We can't just run in sticks. I

071would love to. You know, let's talk about food deserts and environmental racism. People are going to be like, what are you talking about? You're totally right, yeah. So one of the reasons why we focused on things like building a communication plan first for the first three years is getting that normal, getting that normalized, getting folks socialized to, oh, we're going to hear about this topic a lot. And the district is a player in this, and then we can build. And having the students, having a structure and a framework, too, for students to get more involved and get their excitement and momentum going is really going to help carry that back out to the communities as well. So to me, that's a very social aspect of this plan. Fantastic answer. Yeah, and Kelly, too, in many

072of the discussions that we had both in our earlier work, we talked a lot about to get to that social sustainability piece. We really had to talk about the promotion of systems and policies that allows and encourages that to happen. So woven throughout the plan, you'll see a lot about the education of all the students because, you know, maybe sometimes there are students that can't join a club for some reason. Not that the club wouldn't love to have them, but maybe they can't stay after school. Maybe they can't go on Saturday. Maybe there's family or other things that don't allow them to do this. So this whole idea of building the capacity in all our students through courses they can take, through education, through even the signage itself is showing every child, every student how

073they can be a part of leaving the world a better place. Thank you. Thank you, Kelly. Lisa? So I'm very lucky to be part of the sustainability committee, and I actually was able to accompany these lovely ladies on a couple of the listening sessions, which is super interesting. And I would argue one of our first sustainability committee meetings that we had with members and teachers and people from across all the buildings that there were people in buildings that didn't know something was going on in their building. So when I hear you talk about textile recycling and you don't mention that we haven't been at the high school, that's a communication problem. So a lot of this is just getting people to understand even what we're doing. And so to me, the point number three of

074strengthening student involvement is the most important. I think what we heard a lot was, why? Why should I care? Why should I bother? I've got to go all the way over there if I'm going to recycle this. And I actually had the privilege of going to every single lunch room during lunch and just observing. And Lyle was with me at one, and I know he went over and took water bottles out of the trash and put it in the recycling because you're just like, I can't see you do this. And you couldn't step in. You really just had to see what people are doing. And a lot of it, and I think we heard it in the listening sessions also, was there's some people that care a whole lot. And some are like, why does

075what I do matter? And I think that's the hugest hurdle we have in a lot of these things. And so having student voice with the campaigns, I guess we've seen the success and the partnership that the coalition has with the district in doing a social norms campaign on drinking and vaping that's at the high school and the middle school. And we've started having kids create this messaging because who better to talk to a fellow high schooler than a high schooler creating it? And I really think that's going to be key in using that student voice to explain why you should care. At the high school, the custodians were like, we don't even bother. There's recycling and trash right next to each other, and the kids don't care, and they just throw it in whatever, so

076it's all trash. It's all contaminated, and recycling costs more. If it's contaminated, they charge you, and the whole thing is lost. So the effort for the 99% of the recycling that was in the dumpster. So I think this is just huge, and it really is going to be a huge hurdle, just this defining what this is. What is sustainability? Why does it matter? Why should you be involved? Why should you care? We have some really passionate students, and we just need to help them to ignite the passion in everyone around to sort of figure this out. But thank you. Thank you. This is great. I think this is doable. A lot of it was give us – I know we started sort of looking at this going, but what do we do first? And it's

077as basic as defining sustainability, defining recycling. Because I went and talked to – every teacher thinks the recycling rules are different at the same school. What's allowed to go in a recycling bin? I got 10 different answers. So it's just as simple as that, which you think, oh, we're doing such great stuff. And it's like, but we can do it better. And building on what we already have, I think it can take us who knows where we'll be in 10, 20 years. It'll be amazing. So thank you for all this work. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Natasha? Yeah, this plan is excellent. Thank you very much. And thank you for all the community partners and Mr. Oka for always being a spearhead in the sustainability work in our district. This plan was – what I

078was impressed with was the intentionality and the explicitness. So I do think it makes it doable because it basically lays out a perfect framework to check. I love a good checklist. My question probably is more for Dr. Galt. How do we – Operationalize. Yes, thank you. This plan, who's kind of spearheading that this checklist is getting checked off? Great question. That would be the sustainability committee. So I do facilitate the committee alongside Dr. Czar, and it will be our charge to move forward. And part of that will be conducted within the team coming up with ideas for who's going to take on what. And then there will need to be champions within each of our schools. Additionally, it was a part of the plan. We did add it that we will have two student interns.

079So I definitely have had students ask if they could intern with me in varying ways. And so I have worked with Mrs. Finn, and she has found two students who have a definite passion and interest in the area of sustainability and environment. And so we are going to take on those two individuals. They will be helping to lead out the charge. And I think the important piece there is that student voice piece and making sure that we're thinking about this in terms of what our students are experiencing and what they believe our students will commit to and how we can get them to commit. And so that's a big part of it. So I think it's going to be a unified plan. I certainly will be accountable to the entire plan, but there will be

080individuals as a part of the committee, champions at each building, as well as our student interns that are going to support that effort. So just like we did with the core values, and we operationalized those, and we're doing with our portrait of a graduate currently. So I'm really excited about it. I did want to just add one thing, so I really appreciate, Dr. Pinter, what you said about social sustainability and making sure that that piece is not lost. And I do think as we work through, certainly everything they said is true, but as we work through that literacy component, making sure that we have an understanding and we connect it in that regard is going to be really important to move us forward. So thank you. I think it's great, and I love that you

081already have some way to make this actionable. And I would really appreciate that maybe in a year we would get a report back to the board. Well, our action plan for our strategic plan is designed to do just that, so you'll have an update mid-year, and then you'll have an update at the end of the year, the progress we're making, and the work that's going on, and then our next steps, and whether or not did we meet what we said we would in year one, if not why, and if so, you'll have an opportunity to celebrate with us, and then you have two board members who are a part of that committee who will also ensure that we are taking action in the way that we said we would. I wouldn't expect anything less. Thank

082you. Thank you, Natasha. Peter? Thank you very much, and thank you very much for coming here. Along with Lisa, I'm part of the sustainability committee, and I'm just amazed at how far District 95 has gotten in a couple years, and you're a great part of that, and we're just, you know, first of all, I think what we're doing is not in a vacuum. The village of Lake Zuri, you know, goes around and provides sustainability awards to people. I've talked with the mayor about it. Lake County has sustainability efforts of its own, and so what we're doing, we're just building, and we've talked about ancient oaks, of course. We're building upon some existing structures. There are student groups that have been doing that for years, and of course, I mean, it's a passion for McKenna here.

083She's been involved in it for many, many years. So what we're seeing here is building upon the great foundation that Lake Zuri has had for many years. Now, as Lisa said, we just have to tell our story even stronger. I'm excited about student involvement in it, the community partnerships, and a lot of the efforts that we have there, obviously, as part of the committee. I can't, like, critique the report. I'm part of it. Of course, I will say that, you know, I only more recently saw it, and it's a very long report. Great job, 48 pages. It took a while to read it all. So great job and a lot of work there. And again, back to where we are, Illinois became, and it's right in the report, Illinois became the fifth state to require

084climate education in schools, starting in 2026. So we're ahead of the curve right here at District 95, and I'm very proud of where we are. I have thoughts on the definition. You know, we've talked about that. I certainly think, you know, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs, I think that's a nifty one. I like that one personally. Other people prefer, you know, environmental, social, and governance. Different people have different definitions, but we'll get to one that we all agree on. And let's see, I thought, you know, obviously I would have liked in the report that our solar efforts get more prominence, but I see it's in there in one of the small sections, and we couldn't make promises without the board giving us the

085money. That's exactly right. Thank you for stating that, Mr. A.T. Right. But may not make no mistake about it, I think that's a priority for us in the district, and I'll say that at every opportunity I get to make sure that that continues. We do have about decarbonization here. So just another comment I will say, but before I ask the one question again that you have asked, which is if you have an opportunity, again, and obviously it's a big report, go back and read the letter from Dr. Galt in the beginning. You could tell. She is so passionate about it. I know she did a report on it for one of her, I think it was the national superintendent Certification, yes. Effort. Yeah. And it's just been amazing to see, you know, Dr. Zahr and

086Dr. Galt have just become such passionate sustainability people over the past couple years, and I'm very excited about that. I do, just again, I supported Dr. Pinto's point on the social aspect of sustainability and the governance aspect as well. It's a little bit light on those two. Honestly, I agree with her on that, and so maybe that's something to keep in mind as we go forward, and even occupational safety, which is near and dear to my heart. You know, we have no mention of it at all. So there are some opportunities for us as we go forward to enhance what we're doing there. And finally, as my colleague shared, we have to make sure that we execute, that it's not just a loose bond of volunteers around that are doing things and then they don't

087get it done. So I'm glad that we'll have a committee that, and resources to make sure our dreams become reality. Thank you. Doug? Thank you, Eileen. Ladies, first of all, thank you so much for coming this evening. I know some of you have traveled out of state to be with us, so we really appreciate you. I've got to tell you, I've looked at many of these reports from third parties over the years. This is one of the best ones I've ever read. You guys knocked it out of the park. In terms of, you know, the quality of work here, I thought it was really phenomenal. I don't know if you guys, they shared with you all the questions I asked. I asked a bunch of questions. Did you guys see those? Okay. I did. We

088didn't know if they were from one member or all members. Yeah, I'm that one. I did not share that, but I did share the questions and the answers, and I felt it was important that they had that information. We reviewed them, yeah. Good. So, you know, I think this has two pieces, right? One piece that we've talked about is really our mission is to make sure that the students that come through our district understand the importance of environmental sustainability, right? That we have to do that, right? That's our mission is to educate the students, and clearly this is an area where, you know, I think you guys talked a lot about it, and I love the fact. I'm a huge fan of student voice and student involvement, so any and every opportunity to do that

089I think is critically important. I think, you know, Lisa mentioned it before. I'm a believer you have to find champions, right? You have to find a group of champions who are passionate about it, who will help, you know, spread that. I think in order for any initiative, I don't care what it is, to be successful, that's a key thing is identifying those champions and getting them to spread the good word as it were, right? So I like that that's embedded in the plan. The other thing is, you know, if I look through all the data, and I think back about, you know, 10 or 12 or 15 years ago in the district didn't really do much of any of this, right? We talked about wanting to put LED lighting and, you know, sort of base

090things we could do, and when I think about how far we've come over the period of time, and as you know, we've put a lot of capital of our, you know, constituents' capital into infrastructure things like solar panels and, you know, like geothermal cooling and heating to reduce our carbon footprint. One of the things that I found fascinating in your report was you guys had this chart on energy use index, right? Which I've never, that was a really great way to kind of visualize over the course of time on a building-by-building basis because clearly the district has a million-plus square feet, right? We use a ton of energy because these buildings, especially high school, runs 24-7. We use a tremendous amount of energy. You looked at the energy usage per square foot and compared it

091even to an industrial application. We're way up there just because of how much usage the buildings get. So in my mind, you know, that data point was really interesting because one of the buildings, our newest building, I would expect to see the numbers way down. We've got solar, it's got geothermal, it's built with modern building materials. You know, it better be low or we messed up. But some of the other buildings, there was, you know, one of the other buildings that's low, was it what building it was now? I wondered why was that? And some of the other buildings that are high, I'm like, wow. So I'd actually like you guys, if you have any thoughts on what is driving those numbers because, you know, I'm a big believer in how we can make the

092biggest impact. You know, what investment strategies are we going to use that are going to make the biggest difference, right? And again, focusing on educating our students and the importance of this, that's job one. But secondarily, because we have to set an example, is how do we do it ourselves, right? We've talked, you know, recycling, composting, those are great things. But what's going to move the needle the most is reducing the amount of energy that we use. I mean, there's no question about that. So I'm really interested to see what your thoughts might be. First of all, why do we have those outliers, number one. Number two, what are the strategies that we can employ to try to reduce that? Because again, I'm all about how am I going to make the biggest impact, right?

093We don't have infinite resources, obviously. So what are the best ways to do that, whether it's solar or whatever it is? You know, I don't know what the answer is. But if you have thoughts on that, I would love you guys to give us feedback on that. I think that's critically important. But I do want to say again, this is one of the best third-party reports I've ever seen. So, you know, kudos, you guys. And I've got to say, we've interacted with DLR and other things, and you guys have done, for everything you've done for us, phenomenal work. I'm super impressed with your organization. You know, I really love it. So once again, thank you for coming this evening, ladies, really appreciate it. And kudos to you guys for generating this report for us. Thank

094you. Thank you. So as far as the energy use intensity metric, you hit it on the first piece that you're mentioning. So high school will always be higher. Your elementary schools are where you can really, you can see a net zero energy elementary school in your portfolio already. We talked a little bit about that, you know, maybe kind of perhaps exploring if you want to do like an actual third-party certification of one or many of those two of those schools and get recognition for that. I am curious, I believe one of the things that I saw in the school is perhaps related to the EV charging. Like maybe that is in the meter that's being read, and maybe that is leading to that one that we would think it would be the lowest, and it's

095not the lowest. Yeah, that's at May Whitney, and that's one of our lowest buildings. I mean, the other building that's really low is Sarah Adams, which is a legacy building. Yeah. It's probably 30-plus years old. Yeah. You know, it has geothermal, but that's about it. Is that the window? Is that the one with less windows? Yeah, it's got the skylights. Right. Yeah, so different architecture style perhaps has led to a benefit of energy savings. I believe there's been an LED project in a handful of these schools, so that will help as well. Oftentimes, in some of our newer schools as well, you have perhaps an emphasis on improved indoor air quality, which can lead to an energy penalty. So we never want any school to prioritize one of these over the other. You know, you

096should be able to get both, but by adding additional ventilation and air changes, you'll sometimes have a little bit of an energy penalty. So those are some of the things. You have the envelope. Yeah, so perhaps Lyle lives in this data as well. Any thoughts on your highest performing school in the portfolio? Best performing? Mae Whitney and Sarah Adams are our two best schools. Yeah, and both elementary. Yes, correct. Mae Whitney being our brand new flagship elementary building with every accoutrement we could think of relative to being environmentally friendly. The board is looking at potentially making further investments in things like solar. And we can certainly monetize the return on investment from that perspective. We know we can save X amount, et cetera. But my question is, what does that actually do from an environmental

097sustainability standpoint? Does it make a big difference or not? So again, we have a couple of buildings that are elementary that appear to be outliers. Again, if you have any insights into why, I'd love to hear about it. Again, I mentioned we're resource providers, right? That's what we do. And so as we look to deploy our resources, we want to do them as efficient, as moan as possible. And so we need help from experts to help us do that. Yeah, well, and I mean, as we all know, sustainability is very holistic. So when you're looking at a building like May Whitney versus some of your older legacy buildings, one of the biggest differences is your exterior envelope. So as you have a newer building, it's going to have more improved insulation, not only in your

098solid wall itself, but also in your windows and your roof. So as you look at roofing replacements throughout your district, as buildings get older, you can also choose to upgrade your insulation value of your roof assembly as well. That's going to have a big impact on your energy usage. So it's just kind of looking at ways to make sure that the energy you're pumping into the building isn't then escaping out your assemblies. That's a big one. Another big one, of course, is the efficiencies of your MEP systems. We've mentioned LED. It also goes to the type of mechanical equipment. Not being a mechanical engineer, I don't want to throw too many technical words around, but definitely looking at things like energy recovery and balancing your healthy IAQ with energy efficiency. Can you help me? Are

099there benchmarks for like, I'm going to say you have a 100,000 square foot school. Are there benchmarks for what good numbers are? What is the best EIU? So we know, oh, we can get to this level. We're in the green zone. So can you give us some ideas of what benchmarks might be? So those elementary schools, anything in the 20s, you are on the path to being a net zero school, especially schools that have the added renewable energy. And then high schools, I would like to say we could get them into like the 50s, but I think the plan suggested some benchmarks. But yeah, a lot will go back to the age of the building. Our newer energy codes are certainly requiring us and kind of pushing the baseline up. Our systems are becoming more

100efficient, certainly. But we're also plugging a lot more into our buildings. And so sometimes we're trying to be careful about managing the plug loads. And we provide a lot of services related to modeling that information, kind of anticipating what the buildings are going to be consuming over time. And then you guys have been doing monitoring-based commissioning projects, retrocommissioning. So it's interesting, when we got started, I really thought we were going to focus a lot more heavily on that. But it felt like the facilities team had a lot of that kind of routine maintenance dialed in, had a path and a plan. They're awesome, by the way. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it was really impressive to understand even the business side as well, like when we started talking about the buses, what we do. And he

101had all this information about the buses. And it's like, OK, well, no. So there was a lot of items already being addressed that sometimes when I get involved in a school district, we're going after those low-hanging fruit, the LED. And I think you even had your utility provider out here in the last couple of weeks walking buildings. So taking advantage of the local resources from your utility company, always. They are available to walk buildings, to give more ideas. But I do think better visibility into the energy across the portfolio. You've got a couple schools where you're looking at data on a regular basis. And we didn't talk too much to the whole team. Lyle was like the spokesperson for his team, which makes sense. But kind of understanding the training of the whole facilities team

102could be another area to look at. I know you're at one point saying you're going to look and see who's really responsible for energy management. Larger school districts, larger clients have a full-time dedicated energy manager, whose full job is to look hourly at 15-minute increments of energy, because the second highest expense for a school district is your utility bills. So any money we can save on the utilities is a good thing for a school district. I keep looking at your beautiful stadium. I think it was the football coach in one of my listening sessions. He's like, yeah, the LED sign, our scoreboard, it's always on. And he's like, does it always have to be on? And then he was explaining why it's always on. And I'm like, well, let's use it to communicate something, a

103message to the students. Maybe there's an opportunity there about recycling. I don't know, but everybody that I talk to is putting kind of that lens on it. What role would I have as the football coach? I love hearing that, and I think you nailed one comment, which is, and we're all in the same boat in our lives, everything we have plugs in that needs to be charged for everything. And I think if you looked at our – you plotted, and I asked Lyle Deuce for years, you plotted our energy usage year over year. It continues to go up, and it's because of that reason. And that's why it's so critical to figure out ways to have more efficient use of it, because that is our biggest contributor to the environment, is our usage of energy.

104And so if anything we can do to increase the efficiency of that usage, to me, is the biggest single payback we're going to get. Yeah, the added metering. We talked a little bit about some of the projectors, and again, the perception that I think it's supposed to always be left on. Well, no, it doesn't have to be left on. So even working with the technology team to understand just behavior change is ongoing training for everybody is always a good investment. But then, I mean, truly it feels like the program is in place to be kind of fine-tuning buildings as they go and as it makes sense. But then also looking at it as a whole, because you're paying the bill for all of them anyway. So you're going to always have the high performer and

105then the one that's kind of like struggling a little bit, and then redirecting resources to that one when it makes sense, looking at like long-range planning to understand the bigger investments. And we did – we looked through the long-range facility plan as part of the project to find those opportunities for roof replacement. Great. Now we're thinking solar readiness on the roof. And that was the kind of conversations we were having. Yeah. Well, this data, though, was incredibly useful because it's a good way to look at that at a macro level and have some kind of metric. Yeah, because it changes. Weather will impact your data and your usage. There's a lot of variables that go into this. Even occupancy, as one school gets more students in it and another school perhaps that you see your

106population move around a district, that will also impact your EUI. Yeah. I think our goal in sharing all that data, though, is to have – to prompt these exact conversations. One was to give that sort of portfolio-level understanding of how the district is functioning. And then also hopefully using this data and all of the amazing facilities' work and data that's been collected already, and it will be collected, to make those more equitable decisions for future capital investments with those outliers. Yeah, that's exactly right. So great job getting all that conversation. Once again, you guys – I'm really impressed you guys knocked it out of the park with this. Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Thank you, Doug. We want to come back. We want to come back in a year and

107help with the checklist. All right. We're inviting you back. We are. Thank you. Thank you. I just have a few questions or comments. A passion project that I had 15 years ago was the IAQ, and I worked collaboratively with Lyle, and we instituted the EPA's Tools for Schools and did a phenomenal job. And at that point, our buildings were different. We struggled with many of our buildings, and IAQ was our start and our solution. And so I love that you started there. And so thank you for that. Also, I just want to thank everyone, including McKenna, for your passion on this. And I have a bag of textiles at home ready to donate. I thought you were going to say compost. No more compost. No, no, no, no, no. No textiles. But on that, on

108the composting or the recycling, I work for Zurich, which is a Swiss company, and they're green as green as green can be. And the messaging about recycling and garbage is phenomenal. And I almost want to invite people there to see how they do it, because in every social hub, which is another word for kitchen, we have a mile-long island, and on the island is a definition of garbage, a definition of recycling. And it's all very much part of the landscape and what is what and what goes where. And then they have it color-coded. And there's a big banner as you walk in saying only 5% of recycling actually makes it. So the message is get this right. And we're not allowed to print. There's no waste baskets at any individual workspace. You have to take

109all of your garbage or waste to the social hub where you get this messaging on where to throw it around. And so the joke is that we have the garbage police at work, but it's the conversation. And so the point is the messaging works. And I really believe that there's a high percentage of what's supposed to be recycled gets recycled. And that is the point of the message. And it's literally on every floor. And the goal is carbon neutral by 2050. And so that's normal. But I guess the point I'm making is that there is the messaging matters. And I really think my company's done it right. We should hire them. Well, I think we should do a field trip and you should see how they do it. Sign us up. I know you've said

110many times you want to go and look at the building. It is a really cool building. So that came up in one of the listening sessions was the fact, and I know myself going on college visits and sitting there with the seven options and going, I don't know where do I put my fork? And how there's a lot of college students that are all in 100% doing this. And why don't you see that here at high school students? They're one, two, three years from that. It was interesting because one of the students answered, because they live there. The college is their home and they care more than the school. And it's getting kids to care. Well, literally it's part of the furniture. And it's the way you do things. It's not even questioned. Yeah, we

111noticed there was a lid over one of the recycling bins in the high school hallway. And I have high schools. They're not going to open it. There's a whole reason why. But somebody else said, well, maybe we put a basketball hoop over it. There's ways to get creative. You don't get too creative. But things just to make it make sense. Which is why we are going to have student interns. We need to have students helping to lead that and to help us to market what we should be doing. They're the best to tell us. Yep, exactly. And it seems crazy to have a map of all the bins. But even things like that, because they'll just disappear. So really trying to fine tune that first year and then roll out, I think, is the way

112to go. And the consistency in messaging for sure. And kudos on your indoor air quality. I've shared that with so many people, what you all are doing with your indoor air quality. I've never seen such a comprehensive program. I think it does feel a little intensive on the personnel side to do it manually. And I think now, fast forward to today, there are solutions that could be perhaps tested out to be more continuous. IOT sensors, things that you could perhaps test again, explore. So that you get more data throughout the day as occupancy changes in classrooms. But in the meantime. Bear in mind, we were dealing with 100-year-old buildings, 80-year-old buildings that had mold problems. The fact that you're doing anything is amazing. Well, thank you very much. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you. Thank

113you again. We appreciate the partnership. Thank you so much. All right. Mr. Erstad, please share an overview related to district waste and recycling bid approval. How appropriate. Exactly. If you recall, the last go-around at this point, we had to ask the board to reject all of the bids because of the fact that the lowest bid that was offered was nonconforming. Well, we went back out for bid and found out again that the lowest bid is nonconforming. Mr. Erstad, would you mind just getting a little closer to the mic? Oh, absolutely. Because I want to make sure you're picked up. Thank you. Sounds good. So at the writing of the report, I didn't know for sure exactly where we would go. But subsequent to the writing of the report, I had a conversation with our legal

114team. And guess what? The second bid is also nonconforming. Long and short of it is then the legal eagles have given me the ability to be able to choose exactly who I want to go with. So the beautiful thing is it won't be for this evening, but with a firm recommendation coming to you on the 28th, it'll be waste management for a couple of reasons. One is they're the lowest, obviously. But two, they also offer composting, which none of the other ones who are even interested, have expressed interest in composting. So that's basically my report for this evening. Great. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Does anyone have any questions for Lyle? Great. Thank you. Ms. Spicich, please share an overview of the policy press issue 119, first read. Good evening. We had the summer policy

115committee meeting on July 31st. The majority of the press policies that came forward were just up for five-year review. So there are very minimal changes across all the policies. I will draw your attention to the Accelerated Placement Act policy, 6 colon 135. We have held that for a few months as the curriculum and instruction department was working through some legal changes and procedural changes and working with the high school. And we have that policy presented with district language that was attached. And I turn it over to Mr. Goldberg or Ms. Warren, who are your board members on the policy committee, if you have any other comments or information to share. Thank you, Julia. So we had a great deal of conversation about that for quite a period of time. I think with three meetings, we

116talked about it. And I think the place that we've arrived at was a reasonable compromise. And I'll tell you that the vast majority of the policy changes were, again, just typical review, nothing special. But I do think I just I did I did want to mention kudos to particularly to Julie and her team. Just do a great job. There's a lot of work goes beyond the scenes to pull all this stuff together for us. You know, Lisa and I drop in and are able to add words of wisdom. But you got to be that would be Kate Pavich. Well, all right. We do a lot of finger pointing. Yes. All right. Yes. Kate. Well, Kate's knocking out of the park in a lot of areas. But this is another one, Kate. But no kudos to

117you guys. You make the policy committee's job easy when you can do all the homework for us. So thank you. Thank you. If I can add, I believe where we came to agreement on in the accelerated placement program has been the result of a lot of discussions at the teaching and learning committee level as well. I believe that this truly holds the intent of this legislation that came out. And but we've extended it to best meet the needs of the students in our district and be as flexible as I think it's a win win here. Oh, yeah. It's always been intended to be flexible. But I think a lot of the intention was to capture children that might be lost in in advancing their curriculum pathway. And I think this definitely does that to the

118best of our ability. Thank you to the policy committee for the thoughtfulness in this. This was definitely an area that we it's a dual edged sword. And so thank you for putting all the thought and the intentionality behind it. A lot of conversation was good conversation. Does anyone have any questions? If it is OK with the board, can we place the policy second read on consent next time? I have no objection. Yeah, if I if I have any additional comments, I'll get it to you before the consent agenda. But other than that, I'm fine with it. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. OK, moving on to reports to the board. Dr. Romano, please share the long range facility plan update. OK, thank you very much. There is a lot of information that was prepared and presented

119in the packet as a way of a very brief highlight. What we've done and what we've done over the last couple of years is that we've broken out different components of our long range facilities plan. Specifically, we've ranked all of the projects with a high or low designation. We've also taken into consideration where the funding comes from. So, for example, our long range facilities plan is earmarked or has been earmarked at three million dollars this year, which is highlighted in the report. We've added another half a million dollars to that. And one of the things that I wanted to also highlight there, and it's on the screen right now, which is perfect, is the fact that in twenty twenty six, we had about just under three point five million dollars. And if you could scroll

120down, you'll see that in the same year, twenty twenty six, keep going to more. There you go. There are no low priority. This is intentional because every single year we go back and make sure that everything is moved out of a low so that it is continually captured in the long range facilities plan in a future year. We do that so that we can make sure that we have a good understanding of where we are with the projects. Can the project that was initially slated for X year? Can we extend that out by the good maintenance that the team has done and the preventative maintenance that we've invested in a lot of the equipment? And so that's how it's set up. The other thing that we had in here is again for our DSEP. This

121has been our ongoing about every five years. Well, it is every five years. We have extended out through debt extension service, debt extension service base, our funding to provide for our facilities. One of the things and if you could scroll up just a little bit. Thank you, Vanna. For the twenty thirty year, what we have here is that is actually dollars that are planned for a future DSEP bond. So and one of the things that was shared because there was a good question that was asked by the board. What about twenty eight and twenty nine? Well, because we have so many things out there under consideration right now, we have about one point five million dollars worth of DSEP money that we still have. We have not earmarked because we wanted some level of flexibility

122so we can move projects from the high into DSEP to utilize those funds. That will be something that will be a part of our fund balance analysis when we can take a look at all the dollars that we have from all the places and how that plays out with the long range facilities plan being what comes first. Before we look at anything else, it's everything that comes from the long range facilities plan. With that, I'll pause and it back to you, Madam President. Sure. Alicia, any questions? Dr. Pinter, Lisa. So as you were talking about the DSEP bonds, I have to say I have a problem with the way this is presented in that we issued DSEP bonds two years ago. So have we spent all the five million of that? No, and it was

123about six point six. Okay. So what we have is once we spend what was earmarked here for 26 and what we spend for what's earmarked for 27, we'll have about $1.5 million left that we will then earmark for other projects. Okay. If we could show that somehow. We will and that's what shows up in the fund balance. Where does it show up? In the fund balance? Okay. Because it would just be helpful to know that we've paid it off and now we have another, depending on where interest rates are, five to seven million coming in. But it's just helpful for me in knowing where this cash flow is coming from because in my mind that's, we have the three million we commit to every time in budgets. We have this, who knows what the number

124is going to be depending on how operations and interest and everything goes. But then this DSUB funding I can somewhat plan on. Sure. And I think that's key to know what we can plan on and what's still out there. Because I think that affects some of our decision making. Sure, absolutely. And I'm happy to add it in the future when we have this type of report where we're looking at all the different. Even if you were just doing it by... I'm happy to put that in saying, hey, where we are right now is this is how much we brought. It's helpful. This is how much we brought. This is how much is left. Because I thought you didn't have anything in 28 and 29 because we had spent everything. And then we would be reissuing

125for 30 and then you would have another chunk of money available to do. I'm anticipating to be a little over seven million. Right. The board chooses to do that. And then when you give the detail by location, I have to say like a roof is a roof is a roof. Paving is paving. Electrical or doors. Well, those are sort of obvious. I think it's capital improvements. I mean, I was looking at this going, where's some of these projects you've been talking about at the high school? I can't see them. So this is sort of hard for me. We're talking about possible projects. Do you have them in there? Do you not? If they're planned for like and I guess maybe some of that you can't do because you don't have board approval yet. No, actually,

126the way that this is set up is that this was the most clear way for us to be able to categorize what we have that we thought. So, for example, when this database is available and I'm looking at it, if you were to ask me what's the capital project or capital improvements, I click on that. It'll list all the projects that are associated with it. It's just that the some of the way to it's just a there's just a lot. We tried to break it down and some of these items may not be clear. What's excellent is that if you were to ask me about anything specific, I'd be happy to break that out because some of these athletic improvements. I'm like, well, what what what are we doing? Are you thinking maybe we need

127to put I wonder if some examples next time could be a part of your report. Or the bigger when these are bigger numbers, it's probably several things. That makes sense. And we can just list a few examples so that the board understands what they approved and what's common here. Correct. Because we do want this to be something that is manageable and easy to understand. So I appreciate the feedback. This is definitely something that we're continuing to grow into, especially as we're in the process of trying to merge some of the databases so that we can find a good one. So that we can find a good export that would provide us with a way of. I guess I was just because I was expecting to look at this and get an idea of like, oh,

128this is I should have two years seeing culinary. I should have seen, you know, like when I look at this, I'm like a second floor high school in here. It is not part of me. It is not in this document, but it would be interesting to see what athletic improvements you're planning on. Or, you know, I guess. And then there were some like at a grade school level that I'm like, what what athletic improvements are we? Is that playground? Is that the gym? So some aren't as obvious because I know you're trying to keep categories consistent between. Just trying to find a way to break it down so that it's not a massive. I mean, it's about 600 different lines of information, but we'll find a better way to articulate some of the larger. I

129mean, roofing is easy, paving is easy. I mean, that's doors are easy. Electrical is easy. I think it's there's a couple of things that I'm like, OK, this could be a lot of different stuff. And I would love to just get a sense of what you're thinking about. Sure. Happy to try. But no, it was great to see this. Thank you very much. I know this was a lot of effort to put together. And it's something that's supposed to be live and something that we touch every year. And so for us to be able to have some some good feedback. And now is a really good time to to ask some of these questions about the data the way you want it. Because our goal is I think I mentioned it at our previous facilities

130and business and operations committee is we're going to be building a new way to house the data. And then we're looking to have a better overlay so that we can split it out and share it. So it's a little bit more easy to understand. So that's helpful. And I think having some of that DSEB information. I know I have a million five this six eight for twenty seven doesn't look as scary. Yes. It was supposed to come together. I'm sorry. No, that's OK. It's ran out. I'll be honest. I ran out of time trying to work on. Yeah. Right. And I will I will say I feel comfortable about this this year. I did I did give Dr. Romano the go ahead to move that to the next meeting because of all of the work

131that had to take place as it related to transportation. And he was a critical member of a team to ensure that we had transportation services for all students to start the year. So just so the board understands, he did plan to have both. But there was no way physically possible for him to work with transportation and get both of those reports to you. So I do appreciate his focus. Oh, totally. I'm not saying that this I guess my feeling was the concern has been is three million enough. And when I start looking at your numbers, I keep I start feeling three million isn't enough. And I know that goes into our fund balance discussion, but it's also just this like knowing there's a million five that you could put somewhere sort of makes that a

132little less. So thank you, Natasha. I want to thank Lisa for the line of questioning because that helped me understand a lot more the funding because when I first came to this, I was like, and being on the facilities committee, I was like, oh, there's no way three millions enough. So that helps me see it as a different number, which I think is really helpful. And also along Lisa's questioning, which I agree with, I would love a little bit more detail, especially on the really big numbers. While while electrical sounds regular, like there's at the high school, there was like one year the electricals a million dollars. So obviously that's not like typical electricals. So that's the and I could tell you that that's the PAC and a whole lot of electrical, which is one

133of the things that we were still going to go back and have some conversations about. So I understand. I mean, I think it's impressive enough that the second we have mentioned every single project, you know exactly which one it is. So it's a testament to your knowledge. I really just sitting on facilities committee, I know how big of a project this has been, and it is really impressive. And I think as a board, one of the things that we'll be proud of and part of our legacy is that we're allowed to leave this for future boards. And that's that's mainly to you. And I'm really grateful because it's giving it's giving a structure for everyone to follow. And we're not blindly just throwing money around into buildings or haphazardly. And we also thinking 10 steps

134ahead, which is what should have been done all the time. And I'm really, really proud of this. And I'm really proud that we will be able to leave this for future board members. And thank you for that. Thank you for that. I do want I would be remiss if I did not point out Mr. Erstead has been highly engaged and involved in this process. And so while Dr. Romano shared this work this evening and he is working on the database, the information and all of the work and understanding what comes next is Mr. Erstead. Yes, thank you, Lyle. And I know that you've also had to be part of the building, each of buildings administration to create this too. Also, Joe, who's no longer here. And I think Kate will be Miss Culver will be

135a big part of this moving forward too. So I'm I'm just extremely grateful. I really I just said it, but I will say it again. And I know, Eileen, this is a big testament to things that you pushed for. I really think future boards are going to be really grateful that we left this for them. So I'm really I'm really proud of this work, not even doing much other than listening to you do it. Thank you, Natasha. Peter. Thanks. I think most of the comments have been shared about the detail that we might need going forward and the initial work. And I echo what my colleague just said, the value of the long-range plan. So thank you for your work. And I look forward to the additional enhancements that you have in mind. Thank you,

136Peter. Doug. Thank you, Eileen. Dean Lyle, thank you both for the amount of work. I know you guys do behind the scenes and things like this. And we'd asked for this in committee. I appreciate that it's preliminary. There's more details which we'll get to in committee. But, you know, this is like this is like somebody throwing a glass of cold water on you when you're waking up in the morning. Right. So this suggests that if we include the second floor, we need like seven million dollars a year to close these numbers in the next five years. Right. We need to more than double the three million dollars we have. And, you know, so I think as a board, we have to have a conversation about how do we get that money. Right. How are we

137going to fund those things? We know based upon the budget predictions that we're not going to have that kind of money available to us in the next few years given, you know, where we think we're going to be at. And I also learned some information this week about things that are coming from the state that I think are going to further deteriorate our financial position. But I do think that we need to have a conversation about I love the fact that you guys bucketized this into into the, you know, the high and low. And we may have having moved some things around, by the way, because I don't think all this is going to be affordable. But I want to note that in the current plan over the next five years, if you roll in

138the second floor, we've got a twenty five million dollar bill in the high school over the next five years. So, you know, we've been making huge investments in that building and I'm proud that we're able to do it this summer. In particular, you know, some wonderful transformations. So nobody should think that we're not investing in that building. But I do think we're going to have to have some hard conversations about what what can we really afford to do. What's affordable? You know, we when I look at your your previous fund balance analysis and showed that the low point we were right at 50 percent. Right. That was our low point in fund balance this year. They're right at 50 percent in June and May. Excuse me. So, you know, we we we we just need

139to be careful about having a plan like this is great. But I think the real the realism we have to have is what we can actually afford to do. And I'm not sure today unless we make a decision to substantially burn down fund balance that we can afford to execute this this today we have. Right. That's going to be the conversation the board's going to have to have. But I think this is a great place for us to start at least at a high level to see what the asks are. Right. You guys have to give us the asks. But I do think there's going to have to be some very serious conversations about what's going to be affordable going forward. But I do want to appreciate I know the amount of work you and

140your teams have put in. So thank you. Sobering. Thank you, Doug. My comments are that this the long range facilities plan is a roadmap. What we definitely we those of us that were here during the dark years and that's kind of how I refer to it. When we barely had enough money to survive let alone think about what what will tomorrow bring and and we never want to be back there. And so that's the point of this is to say look at these expenses are on our horizon. We have to always be mindful of them. And if we don't respect these expenses we'll get there. And that's unacceptable. So I don't know. And I agree. We we can't afford everything on this plan. But I also think that we are phenomenal in our maintenance or

141phenomenal in how we are addressing issues that come up. And you know whereas we may have created a roofing 20 year plan we might stretch five more years. So like there is flexibility in that. It's really line of sight into all the things that need to happen. And I agree. Thank you, Natasha. It is a tool for hopefully our future selves that we can look at and rely on that. Look at this is a good roadmap for the expenses that we have to keep in mind. And so as a tool I think it's very effective and great job. You know because it doesn't necessarily speak to it. It's a priority but there's many competing priorities that are not facilities that also will pull our attention away from spending money on facilities. And so that's not

142this isn't a promise of payment. It is a line of sight to things that need to be addressed. And I think that this tool and we use that as a tool is immensely effective in doing that. So thank you. All right. Well thank you Dr. Romano. We are going into closed session for the following reasons. Collective negotiating matters between the public body and its employees or their representatives or deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees. Five ILCS 122C2. The purchase or lease of real property for the use of the public body including meetings held for the purpose of discussing whether a particular parcel should be acquired. Five ILCS 122C5. Security procedures building safety and security and the use of personnel and equipment to respond to an actual threatened or a reasonably

143potential danger to the safety of employees students staff the public or public property. Five ILCS 122C8. May I have this motion. So moved. Second. Thank you Doug and thank you Natasha. Kate please call the roll. Mrs. Daniker. Yes. Ms. Maloney. Yes. Mr. Aitken. Yes. Mrs. Warren. Yes. Dr. Pinter. Yes. Ms. Tim. Yes. Mr. Goldberg. Yes. We will not be taking any action after closed session this evening. Thank you.