Board Meeting - November 1, 2021

00121 year 46 board of education meeting if people could stand for the pledge of states allegiance america [Music] for which it stands one nation america indivisible with liberty and justice for all the first item on the agenda are strategic plan updates mr sanders thank you madam president members of the board of education uh coming forward to present tonight's strategic plan update is brian lindholm chief of staff and matt ramonde a coordinator of assessment and accountability it's that time of year october 31st annually is the date the state of illinois releases its state report card and individual district report cards are also released at the same time because this year oh and this is part of the presentation i'm sure as well um this year school districts were given the option of either testing last spring

002or in the fall as a result we do not yet have like iar the typical test results that we would have normally at this time of the year but we still thought it important to bring forward the data that is currently available on the state report card regarding u46 and also give an update on the five essentials results from 2020 2021 which we've not yet shared with the board so with that i'll hand it over to you gentlemen okay uh thank you mr sanders as you mentioned tonight's update will include the state report card data that was published last week as well as a summary of the five essential survey that we completed this past spring is there a way are we also broadcasting this part on zoom or for people to see at home

003i'm not sure if it's if we can share screen yeah yeah i will check to see if this computer is here [Music] are you on there matt yeah okay we'll share it from matt's computer instead i don't think this host computer is that good so this year there will be three releases instead of one comprehensive release of the state report card data there are some other changes um including you'll see a lot of missing data compared to previous years and really it's it's due to several complications with the pandemic in terms of what data will be available for the state to report this year assessment data from most of the schools in illinois will be released on december 2nd and this due is this is due to delayed scoring of the spring tests that were

004conducted during the 2021 school year some districts also chose not to test in the spring and they've waited till this fall to complete their their testing so for these districts their data will not be released until april 27th and then the full state averages and final state data will be computed based on that april release so with these caveats mr raimondi will now walk you through the data that is currently available on the state report card site hello so if you were to go to illinoisreportcard.com and search for school district u46 this is what they would show on the district snapchat homepage no schools were identified across the state for any summative designations from the 2021 school year all school districts in illinois retained their status back from 2018-2019 the academic data page is missing

005basically all of the standardized test score data you can see that the state also put a little warning label across all the other that data was either delayed or impacted due to covid19 [Music] for iar they do show the participation rate a little over half of the students did take the test in the spring although our iar data has not been shared publicly yet and posted on the website our preliminary results are in line with the state's preliminary results they were really showing some declines in both ela and math now we're going to go into some of the other metrics in a little more detail this graph is from the 9th grade on track or freshman on track data the state does not present this data by student groups however we did go through and

006look at the student group data and all of the scores were within two percent of our four-year graduation rate which is on the next slide there is one one exception and i will go through those uh with the graduation rate data it's a little easier to follow that way so this graph is taken from the website and shows our four-year graduation rate uh by various student groups you can see our all percentage is right at about 85 percent where a freshman on track was at 86 percent uh next shows uh white four-year graduation rate at 93 our freshman on track was 95 percent uh black was 74 graduation and the same for freshmen on track hispanic uh 81 percent is exactly the same on both for asian freshman on track was 96 compared to uh

007graduation 94 so it's within that two percent um [Music] male was at about 82 on graduation 84 freshman on track female was 88 percent on both uh free and reduced or low income was at 79 percent on both el was off by just a tiny bit more uh they're about 71 on graduation or 75 percent on freshman on track and then there was a larger difference with iep students so 86 of our students with an iep are on track as freshmen and the graduation rate is at 70 percent for four years many students with an iep do continue their education and receive services beyond that four years so the students are passing their classes and earning the grades that they need to be successful but they continue their education beyond four years so that's why

008there's such a large difference between the freshmen on track and the four-year graduation rate so this page has one of the other pages that actually has relevant academic data is students earning early college credentials or coursework well enrolled in high school so this year 30.5 percent of all high school students either took an ap class or were in dual credit i know there are some small numbers for ib and those are mostly from students that transferred from other districts that had ib programs and still have those credits on their transcripts so where we're at 30.5 uh this last year the previous year uh if you were to look on the report card we were at 27 and a half percent uh so we increased by about 10 uh 10 where we were before very large

009gains in dual credit where we basically over doubled the amount of students that are in dual credit uh in one year so on the student snapshot page the state presents presents this data now one one thing i would like to mention is in the graph down the very bottom right corner chronically truant students um and then we have on the bottom left chronic absenteeism so chronic absenteeism counts students uh that have 10 absences it doesn't matter if they're excused or unexcused where chronically truant the threshold is down to 5 absences but they're only looking at unexcused and we did have you can see in the graph it increases uh that is from there were less uh parents that called in to excuse their students uh especially when students were on homebound instruction so if students

010did not call uh they were not called in for those counted as unexcused absences which made the truancy number look like it increased so uh next we will uh move on to the five essentials data we conducted the five essentials surveyed last school year between february 3rd and april 2nd uh other districts who had planned to give alternative climate surveys so not to use the five essentials many of them are unable to complete their surveys we can only presume the complications through the pandemic for this reason the state at this point is not planning to publish the climate survey results on the report card this year um so that was not something that uh that you saw from mr armando there but we will still go through and we'll summarize all of our u46 results

011um from our last survey that's fine [Music] so for tonight's update uh we'll provide a brief overview of the survey itself uh share our results and then discuss how the results align to our priorities and goals in our district strategic plan so last year was the ninth year of illinois school districts giving the five essentials survey of learning conditions organizing schools for improvement the survey generates valuable data districts can use to guide their ongoing efforts to improve schools and offer students an excellent educational experience it's an improvement tool that allows districts and states to share data as a means to inform parents and community members about the school's learning environment and the illinois five essential survey is administered online by the university of chicago on behalf of the illinois state board of education this slide

012shows the five essential areas that the survey covers and they're listed here with the specific measures provided within each area so we have ambitious instruction collaborative teachers effective leaders involved families and supportive environment the university of chicago has produced research that shows schools that have strong results which means they were scored as in the more or most implementation categories in three or more of these areas are 10 times more likely to improve student learning than schools that are scored in the less or least implementation area in three or more of these areas so at this point i'm going to hand it back to mr armandi and he will present the results of our most recent five essentials survey uh so this is the overall results for u-46 as a district um u-46 is considered average

013implementation in four of the five areas on the survey and then in the area of supportive environment we are considered more implementation and this is a graph of the five um the five essentials so u-46 improved in four of the five areas during the most recent survey the largest gain was in support of environment which increased five points and that moved to the category category of more implementation and on all of these graphs they're in order from the highest value on 2021 to the lowest value so that top line goes with supportive environment 63. and then you can follow each one below on the next few slides we're going to go through each essential one by one and it's a little easier to uh to follow them so this slide shows all of the measures

014within the area of supportive environment note the impressive gains and peer support for academic work student teacher trust and academic personalism the only measure that was down was safety and this survey was conducted between february 3rd and april 2nd of uh at this point nearly half of our students were at home and not considered for full distance learning and some of the questions are how safe do you feel at the school how safe do you feel at some of these locations and we had a lot of students that were not in school at that time i think that could have influenced influence those results effective leaders in this category we saw gains across all of the measures and each measure is at a you know at least a four year high collaborative teachers overall the

015overall value did remain flat but there was movement within measures so school commitment teacher teacher trust and collective responsibility all moved to recent high values well on the opposite side quality pd professional development and collaborative practices did show declines involved families was also flat overall improvements were seen in parent influence on decision making in schools and teacher parent trust and then a decline in parent parent involvement in school ambitious instruction so most measures did decline in the area of ambitious instruction with the exception of english english instruction did did increase and uh brian i think you're going to well so ambitious instruction is is one of the areas that that we paid particular attention to here with our focus on the u-46 rising work so the five essential survey describes schools with strong ambitious instruction

016as providing classes that are challenging and engaging with instruction that is clear well structured and encourages students to build and apply knowledge so that definition is very much in line with the renewed focus on core instruction that we've emphasized through the u-46 rising effort and the shift to academic teaming that has been a major focus of our work this year so really in closing then uh in 2015 the board of education established metrics that leaned heavily on our five essentials data as a rich source of feedback to gauge our success against the district's strategic plan prior to kovid we had a series of productive work sessions with the board to think about how we may want to refine the metrics to better align with our strategic goals and priorities and we look forward to resuming

017these important discussions this year so this uh concludes our presentation are there any questions at this time do any board members have questions done so thank you for your presentation um i know with i mean with everything copied obviously this is gonna be highly affected and especially like looking at the data moving forward there could be issues um i am looking at slide five and it appears as though the participation rate that we have been testing has has gone down went down significantly how do we do you guys have a feel for how that may have been just like affected the test scores and the data that we got out and do we have any idea of how we can like uh how we appropriately use the data we got knowing that we have a

018lower participation rate this year yeah so the participation rate uh is normally required you have to have 95 or higher but given uh the circumstances we were not required to have 95 percent you know there were students who didn't feel safe coming in so that year of data is definitely difficult and at that point we want to look at other sources of assessment data we've had a really strong push on using our comment assessment and formative data the data that is directly from the the teachers curriculum it's very timely so we we do value the the state tests and you know we'll use it the best we can um but at this time we kind of we're trying to use other sources thank you and it makes sense i mean my own daughter didn't take

019the test this last year with everything covered what was going on so i i mean i know that the information we're getting for it well normally useful it's it is questionable this year because we just don't know who took it who didn't like it makes it more difficult i just wanted to make sure to kind of see how we were going about looking at other metrics so thank you yeah i think it's an excellent point because it's not just the low participation rate it's that we know the kids who took it were almost entirely the kids who were back for in-person learning and our students who chose to stay in distance learning next year i mean that that's a certain sort of sub segment of our of our students who were more likely to be

020at home and those kids in turn then likely were not included in our test numbers all right that makes sense thank you so much melissa so going back to slide also on slide five um slide five and slide six so that in seven um the freshman on track and then the graduation rates um i appreciate the comparison between the two because it seems like freshmen on track is a really good leading indicator for us then to you know anticipate what graduation rates might look like across all of these subgroups with the exception of the of the iep students is that typical i don't remember comparing those numbers before yeah um it is very typical and the freshmen on track actually came from research done at chicago public where they found that there was a very

021high uh relationship between the two and then the state ended up adopting that so uh yeah it is to be expected it's just it's good to see that in practice right we'll have you know people say that you know some of these indicators that that's you know why they put these in here to to because of their significance but it's it's good to see that actually bearing out in practice um so as we go forward in rethinking some of these metrics for our strategic plan things like that are really important are there other data points that you saw i mean i know the data is really kind of you know sparse right now but are there other things of this nature that jumped out at you on this report that pharaoh's looking at um and

022i'm putting you on the spot a little bit right so um there they released a lot of like different data uh one major change they used to have a one-page snapshot uh it was called at a glance where for every school or district maybe a one page front and back and the state eliminated that report and replaced it with a custom report builder that generates anywhere from 70 to 150 pages per so um that that is something that i haven't fully uh gone through yet but it is something that's interesting to see what they chose to include there okay i think the early college uh coursework um data that we showed i'm sure there would be high correlation there as well and that i mean that's a good leading indicator starting all the way back

023in ninth grade um and you know disaggregated in all the different student groups okay all right thank you if you don't mind is adding outside of the state report card data moving forward as well some of the other leading indicators that we should certainly contemplate as we return to thinking about the strategic plan number one attendance is always going to be a leading indicator for for students and i think a lot of the data we're starting to get back now from the u46 rising work with the rigor walks the rigor diagnostics that we're doing and when those start being reported back to the board would be much more leading than anything at the state level um so look forward to having those conversations with the board about what those what that data is showing us

024now and then what we could expect from it moving forward as we continue this this work and i think even some of the common formative assessments that that we push out to teach and ask them to administer students and that there's still a lot that we can gain from those as those um as we return more to normal this year and a lot of those those assessments can be delivered in more of a normal classroom setting i think that's great leading indicators as well john i'm sort of piggybacking on that a little bit there as you mentioned at the website there is a sort of a one click 40 page summary you don't have to define it yourself and that 40 page summaries i found pretty good i looked through it to a degree today

025there's more to look at it's got the information you're presented along with a lot of other details again metrics that i think we might be interested including a lot of the disaggregated information sort of highlights you know equity issues and achievement gap issues that you know are present and still need to be uh resolved certainly there's a whole section a couple of pages which i i think is new that was really interesting on um specific sort of equity targets the state says you know are you doing these things and then there's a great yes or no for by district and so some of that information is in there and that's interesting so i'd suggest folks look at that 40 page click through if you have questions i can send a link but uh click through

026a couple just a couple of clicks you can get the 40 page report um and on a similar note if can we get a copy of the full five essentials results i'd be inclined to you know and i don't know if it's if it's in a 40 page report or something of that level i'd be inclined to just have a look through all the details yeah it's available so we can definitely provide you that that'd be good thank you okay yeah so i'm looking here um at slide eight um and i'm finding these numbers really interesting about which kids have taken advanced placement the baccalaureate um and that kind of thing but i just have a concern and and i guess maybe i just want to point it out as an area that i know

027we need to improve on if i'm reading this correctly there are no black students in our dual credit program is that an accurate am i reading this accurately it says n a across all four grades it uh it could be or there could be a minimum and count threshold where they don't display numbers if they're under under a certain value so okay um can can we definitely follow up can we get some more specific breakdowns then on on the um different groups that are taking dual credit um because that's such a great opportunity for everyone um and if that's not in our equity goals we definitely need to be putting those kinds of things in our equity goals that all of our students have the opportunity to take advantage of dual credit because that's a

028great program and to follow up on that dual credit is both the kids who are taking the classes full-time at ecc and the kids who are taking ecc level classes at our high school is that correct yep yeah any students that are taking the class with ecc would count yeah so i'd be very concerned if um like there's so many opportunities and we didn't have any of our black students being able to take advantage of that how do we reach out to those families how do we make sure that they're aware of it and then what can we do to make sure those students have that opportunity yeah yeah i'll check and make sure if it's really zero or not yeah that'd be great thank you and i think the same thing holds true when

029we look at advanced placement and even in the enrollment went down but for 8th grade 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade there's no african-american students that's in the advanced placement classes they only start in 11th grade and it's 33 percent 33 total or percentage we're talking total totals total those are counts and then there's only 21 in 12th grade so we need to make sure that we are looking at that as well yeah we had the exact same reaction we looked through this data um i think what one thing we could do is we could put this into percentages which would help quite a bit like you know to um to get a better understanding of which students are represented here which aren't that you know black and asian students you know that the numbers

030should be much closer in terms of how many students are participating based on the demographics of our district and you can see you know it's nowhere close so yeah we need to make sure we're looking at that yeah [Music] and also the five essentials i assume each school is given its own data so we can the school teams can look at it and decide what they may need to focus on yeah okay yeah they all received that um like at the end of last school year so we got the five essentials data i believe like in may um this was just the first time that we had a chance to bring it to the board as one of these strategic plan updates well and that would be helpful when we're looking at the individual breakdowns

031of the um ethnic groups and racial groups is one school doing a better job of getting one particular ethnic group into those ap classes and um so forth is there a way we can help the other schools kind of model what they're doing sure yeah any other questions thank you i know this is a tough year for getting results for the test okay next item are comments from the audience [Music] good evening and welcome to the board of education meeting we are now at the public comment portion of the meeting attendees wishing to make a public comment in person or be assumed tonight were asked to complete a request to speak form in advance those who chose to speak the assumed were provided with a webinar id number to call in promptly at 7pm tonight

032as always speakers will be given three minutes to share their comments the board listens to the speakers but does not respond to individual questions or comments during the meeting a written response will be mailed to the speaker if requested on the form those who provided a public comment but chose not to speak publicly in the meeting were asked to submit an email to board u-46.org those emails were posted on the board agenda for public viewing buenas noches okay and i believe we have one public comment tonight murray snakeman from you could come up here and take a seat i think any of the seats are fine thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my views right superintendent and board members today's and tomorrow students deserve everything each of you have experienced as americans

033to live in a democratic society under the legacy of freedoms written for us by the founding fathers through the constitution of the united states the power plays and misdirected pandemic policies that are put in place and those not yet disclosed work against the rights of our students you could have been so amazingly stellar in protecting students and parents and employees but why hasn't this happened is it because of the 6.6 billion dollars given to illinois for cobalt mass and vaccine compliance at schools last year's u-46 audit indicated 5 million dollars of federal league-funded money but that was given specifically to coronis a coronavirus aid it looks like this year's funded dollars is 83 million dollars plus under the elementary and secondary emergency relief aid it's obvious to me that the money is a great temptation

034to enforce unconstitutional mandates in an email from mr sanders on august 24th he stated please be aware that we do not teach critical race theory in k-12 public education i really do find that incredulous u-46 the second largest district in illinois is surrounded by smaller districts where crt or social emotional learning or equity is present you mean to tell me that in this 57 school district there is not one person indoctrinating our students with zrt or marxism stop enforcing current and future unconstitutional mandates such as mandated masking vaccines and curricula that messes with kids mental well-being and never stoop so low on another exploitation the explicit national sex education standards beginning at the innocent kindergarten age and upward stop eliminating freedom such as forcing students who have not received the vaccine to be placed in

035quarantine per the esser document and stop your suping parental rights instead concentrate on your true purpose in educating our young by raising math and reading scores and show every student their value as a human rather than a monetary value to you each time you follow an unconstitutional mandate you are shutting the door to freedom and stepping into the evil principles of marxism that violate key american morals thank you okay next item is other business board member and superintendent update any updates i will note that um we received um [Music] an a charter school application from a dramatic blue uh foundation i i voted to fellow board members and i just wonder if mr sanders and results can sort of outline what happens next absolutely first of all we'll make public the uh the filing of

036the charter school application on our website uh we also will have to make notice in the local newspaper um the board will have to have a hearing on it but i'll let ms olson explain the process that we have to follow statutorily happy too we comply with the school code requirements under 27a of the school code which addresses charter the charter law we have 45 days from receipt of that application to convene a public meeting to obtain information to assist the board in making our decision the district also has implemented its own process that we have utilized in the past regarding how it reviews decisions on on whether or not to accept the application or not we have certain requirements for convening the public meeting including noticed in the newspaper a notice to the public

037that we will be working on appropriately posting and once we convene the public meeting we will have 30 days to grant or deny the charter proposal and since we're running into the holidays since 45 days is about mid-december does the 30 days are they 30 working days are they 30 calendars it is not specified within the statute so according to the statute on statutes it's supposed to be read as calendar days okay i estimate that this will be done right around beginning to mid-january okay if any questions thank you veronica um so you said that we have an established criteria that we evaluate with and i don't remember how long ago that was put together is that something we can look at and review uh we absolutely can i anticipate that that's something that when

038we review our board policies that we will um review in conjunction with that policy review process but as it uh currently stands we comply with not just uh the law that's on the books in 27a and the implementing regulations but also our policy that is on the top i am having a hard time hearing you so i don't know if your microphone is on or if it just needs to be closer it is i will do a better job of speaking into it my apologies no problem thank you if you don't mind me also responding to the review document that we have essentially just spells out what's in required by the state statute pursuing you know these demographics that represent the same as the district but we do ask for more specifics about their plan

039and their curriculum as well as part of our process that um we can certainly share that back out with the board it's starting to sound familiar it's just been a long time it's been a while um when will we be publishing all that stuff so we can start anticipating questions from the public so our intent was to publish this week to make at least make the public aware of the filing of the charter school application um making sure it's on the website and scheduling the date then for the public hearing and the date that the the organizer will be able to present to the board oh they'll pres the organizer will come in yes the organizer has the ability to come in and present to the board of education and then the board will have

040an opportunity to ask them questions and then typically what we'll do is provide a response to um after our review of their application um and and point out any deficiencies that may exist or not okay thank you you're welcome melissa so the organizer comes in and presents to us before the hearing or is that part of the hearing that is part of the hearing that's part of the hearing okay that's what i thought i just want to clarify that thank you thank you additional yes all right i just want to say on october 23rd was whenever they had the moved closer to mike on october 23rd is when they had the ribbon cutting ceremony at the new welcoming center and several of us were there and i tell you it is a beautiful facility i

041was just marvel i marveled throughout the whole uh walk through there sue and i was like look at this the boardrooms and everything it is going to serve our community well and it is money well invested and i am so proud of you 46 for doing that it is great if you get the opportunity to stop by please do so anyone else okay next item are the report to membership the 2021 iasb delegate assembly cable will be representing us and there are i believe 16 new resolutions and one amended resolution and three they've just recommitted themselves to so we need to give her advice on how to vote she is one of 600 votes probably or 500 because each school district gets one vote um i hope we all received this this item and probably

042have had time to go through it i i was going to try to summarize it some of them are related so i don't go and have discussions about the ones that are related at the same time um and just get a sense of how people want kate to vote so starting out number one and number eight both deal with something called um scientific foundation of reading and number one uh advocates having teacher training that teachers pass certain pass a test and take certain classes for to be accredited in reading uh resolution number eight wants the uh isb to actually implement mandate the science of reading in the k-5 k-5 curriculum so i guess the resolutions committee liked the idea of the teacher education and licensure but did not like the idea did not recommend to

043adopt these signs of reading curriculum as a mandate so thoughts well if i could add i thought it was really interesting the number one is just a rehash of the one that didn't pass last year and as i read through it i didn't see any substantial differences so i was very curious well there's a number that have rehashes yeah well but i was very curious that last year the um resolution committee had said do not adopt and this year they're saying adopt so i thought that was really interesting um and it's the same group and on wednesday night they're having the meeting to let go and i will go to do that so if anybody has any specific questions i can ask um but i remember last year feeling like they really weren't defending the

044position well so any thoughts concerns melissa i i agree with the isb position and number eight um i don't like the idea of a mandate in this regard that is you know applicable on all of us but i guess i i'm not clear on number one what that actually would mean for us in practice yeah my concern with number one is with the teacher shortage this could exasperate it because you'll have if you don't pass the test and you don't get your license well and and i was frustrated kind of on on behalf of teachers that they're operating from this assumption that teachers don't know how to do that or they're not being prepared properly in schools and in universities to become teachers and and having gone through that process like i don't feel like

045that's accurate so yeah was there much discussion last year there was there was quite a bit of discussion um and the the one representative of the school district um you know had lots of details and lots of information she was very willing to share as i recall she sent me a few emails but i never really felt like they ever adequately addressed the statement of what are they doing wrong now that needs to be fixed and and i mean i don't who knows maybe they'll have a better answer for that this year but i don't feel like they had a good answer for that last year and i guess that's where i'm saying like i don't understand what this really yeah means in practice because i don't see clearly what the problem is that they're

046trying to address right right and it feels almost like i don't know maybe it's like an internal problem for them i'm not saying you know stepping out of my school board role yeah my personal role there is a science of reading study i mean you you should pull it up no no no it very much goes against a lot of the way reading is taught currently yeah and my point number one was repeated number eight is is um is not repeating that's brand new to this year and absolutely the science of reading is important and all that but i'm not a fan of insisting that every school district teach exactly the same curriculum no matter what i think it's using a slide chamber to try to impose something right that needs something and i think

047for that better ways if this is the best way to do it then get iasb to no not isb isb to develop programs so that schools can adopt things that are you know encourage them make it give them incentives yeah um yeah so are we leaning towards no on both one and eight yes definitely done as an educator myself i would say no so no one wanted it okay two i think we've seen a few times um this is from mercer county and um they have a very long detailed explanation but basically they want to allow individuals to do concealed carry in the school they have you know certain requirements or they have to have a firearms owner identification card have a illinois concealed carry license have additional training and so forth their argument as

048it has been the last few years is they have their their schools are in a i think they said a 250 miles square mile district and it's difficult for some of their local police to get to the schools um this was i guess the resolutions committee is recommending to adopt yeah but if you didn't read that last paragraph i thought it was interesting the way that they they seem to have trouble getting any sort of motion passed for that for um number two yeah um so thoughts on this melissa i i was the delegate for two years before kate was a delegate so i mean this has been yeah around quite a while this this version of this resolution was around when we were when we had resolutions in front of us to armed teachers

049um and i'm i'm i'm very sympathetic with mercer county and with other school districts that don't have a police force to the degree where they can expect a a fast response time i mean that's a precarious situation to be in or potentially a precarious situation to be in and mercer county has been very upfront about why they want this and i think that you know the resolution i i i can really appreciate what they're what they're saying here the one issue that i have still with this resolution is that this then applies to any district no matter where exactly they are in the state and no matter whether they have a police force like we do right where we have um an active relationship with our local police departments ideally i would like some qualifier

050on this that you know if you don't have that right then this is the avenue to go to that would be my ideal resolution so leaning towards not adopting this again um yeah that's definitely where it is to the situation that they're in and i totally agree with you melissa because that's just one out of everyone else and i just can't say yes whenever they need to give some more examples or exemptions to other districts that do fall into the category where we do have uh student safety and a protection plan in place john yeah actually miss hans you had i thought a particularly compelling argument in the past again against this being there are other solutions the state could fund this at every single school district the state could provide or help assist with

051manpower to do this those are better better options in my opinion yeah and again one of my concerns with this is as you sort of allude to while we as a district you know take responsibility for ourselves and our students and within our district every single day our students are at other districts they're out there for sports they're out there for speech they're out there for other activities so in effect we'd be outsourcing that decision you know what we believe is right for our district and our safety to other districts uh to make that decision so yeah i'm not for this one still done yeah i mean i agree with everything that has been said i would lean towards the do not adopt on this yeah okay so i think we do not adopt okay

052the next two items have to do with school board member uh one has to do with school board member compensation as people know we do not get paid and the other one has to do with board member child care reimbursement the resolutions committee recommended do not adopt for the school board member compensation and do adopt for the um child care reimbursement you're looking at three and four sue right three and four yes yeah i i you know i mean i know kind of like the idea a little bit of helping figure out a way to help pay for child care when that gets difficult but i feel like it could be difficult to manage and maintain regulate i don't know if school would code wouldn't allow a district to reimburse for child care yeah it's

053like other expenses it will often reimburse so if a district the local district decided to i'd go ahead and listen well i mean i feel like either we're going to compensate or we're not going to compensate right yeah i mean they're kind of splitting the baby here and saying on the one hand not to compensate on the other hand compensate for a very specific purpose and i again i i i don't disagree that child care might be a barrier for somebody holding this position but so is senior care right so is you know a number of of factors that play into whether or not you can volunteer yeah for anything and so i'm not in favor of either one of these porn i i see that point and i think that's a really really good

054point you know to line item one particular expense you know the the argument behind these is you know i'm fortunate i can be here i can spend my time here you know without economic concerns and so again the intent i believe is to open up the opportunity to serve to more people but i'm not sure that either of these necessarily i while i understand the ration the argument that you know picking one option um excludes others or doesn't take into account others that happens all the time in other areas think about mileage reimbursement you might be offered that but not bus fare reimbursement i mean you know it happens um i do recall those days when i would pay to volunteer and i did it a lot but i was able to and not everyone

055can and so if this would allow more inclusion in the opportunities for people to serve in this role i'm for it so for both both of these yeah i mean yes okay yeah john so um i'm gonna go i'm split on them um as far as the full conversation full compensation i would be opposing that i don't um i know there are states that do i think it adds a different element into who runs once it becomes basically a paid political office um there's something to be said for being a volunteer position and the people who step up like why you're doing it and why you stick with it um the child care thing um i kind of agree with veronica on this i mean myself as a community member one of the reasons i

056didn't run for school board even though i've been living in bartlett for 20 years is that i have a husband who travels and i had small children and we don't have local family so i can see the point where i was always able to able to volunteer within my schools volunteering um at the district level or board level was never possible like it it it was something that like you know you fund those things where you know people you try to take advantage what you can of neighbors and family but you never want to be a hardship so i could see that being more difficult for families so i would i would lean no on the full conversation but supporting the child care portion but i do think there would need to be some sort

057of clauses maybe limits on the child care that's some more information and like once if it ever were to become um an actual actionable law there needed to be limitations on it yeah and then i imagine when they this again this is all this what iasb would support if it became a bill eva well for school board members compensation um you know at one time i voted no for it but now i realize that you know people who serve in the village they get a com they get a stipend so i mean the gas that i spend back and forth to different functions it's unreal you know we've kind of been encoded a little bit but prior to that i was trying to go to everything that i could but i ran because of the

058passion because there was a need and because i wanted to but i could see you know i don't need it but i could see where someone in the future might say well just a little stipend for gas would offset some of the cost my husband is a trustee and he gets 500 a month i'm just saying for number four i'd say no i'm actually i would i would be opposed to number three but we'll be open to number four but i think that only leaves three of us who are sort of open to number four is that right are you four okay four of us so i guess we're one two three four four i guess we're yes but three were no okay yeah i would yeah and then i mean again if you think

059of a question you want me to ask that during the meeting please let me know well you know eva brought up a good point that you know her husband gets five hundred dollars a month is his trusted village if if a school board member would pay it even 200 a month for some districts that would be fine i mean no well not fine but it would not be a burden but for small districts down state it could really hurt them so i don't know whether they are envisioning a set amount or what they're envisioning for for things but i mean i've got to get a new cell phone because of the district emails you don't have enough memory okay okay what you got next sue all right the next one is from us it's of

060the remote virtual school board open meetings actually i believe we're technically having a remote virtual school board meeting at the moment we put this in and other newspapers have been saying we want to do it so we all can hide from the public that's not the case we want to expand the open meetings act so people are able to join for example when they're on vacation when they have something to come up comes up such as taking your kids college i would say child care issues so child care this is a solution for child care issues right that would give something help for that it's easier for staff we have staff who can dial in from home we have that many times with staff just has to give one little be around for one presentation

061and you know sometimes we don't even call on them and they've been here until 10 o'clock at night it increases opportunity for public comment we've had young children make public comment through [Music] by having a virtual meeting it gives access to committee meetings previously you had to come to this room to see committee meetings they weren't on youtube and now they are on zoom yeah i know csc has taken great advantages as well so that that's this is ours people so yeah can you uh you seem like you've got a great list there can you share that with me later we'll share that you just snap a picture even and you know like whatever i think you'll have to figure out how to send it back okay yes so wait we're a yes on this

062question i mean given the fact that it's i mean i know that we're only supposed to have the one delegate and in the but this is the first time that i've been on the board that we've had a resolution do they allow more speakers from the district to come in for that i i i don't know like as far as i know i mean i'm registered as a delegate and as far as i've been able to tell has reached out to me i mean usually it seems to me there's usually a couple members of that district giving the rationale for the so i guess what i'm asking is if that is okay do you want some support with that sure i love your company at the telegram meeting [Laughter] you know i don't know if

063there's covered i don't know what the rules are because they're doing this at yes at the yeah saturday morning right oh it's back to its traditional way is it back to the way it used to be traditionally yeah they used to allow two delegates and then if there was room in the back of the room they might allow more remember that right i don't know if it's still that way or not i feel you know what i know i have an email about it i'll go back and look and see if it gives any specifics but if you're game to to be prepared to come with that'd be great i'm nominating soon i'll be wrong that's fine yeah we can figure out how to yeah i'll take whoever i can get yeah that's fine okay

064uh number six reorganizer board after school board election uh currently you have 28 days to swear in the new ward their uh high school district is proposing making it 40 days because sometimes you need to have a special meeting to do this and i think we even had that a couple years ago that we had to have a special meeting so are we in favor of this they recommend to adopt yeah it's it's barely two weeks i think it's reasonable yeah um number seven is interesting is by berwin they have their one indigenous people curriculum inclusion um as you know if you've looked at illinois school code we have i think uh curriculum includes a lot of other groups i'm surprised that we did not include indigenous people but i guess they don't so they

065are recommending that and the recommendation is to adopt yeah i'm in support of it okay uh we covered nine is the health and sex education curriculum this is from mercer county um they want uh let's see be it resolve that the illinois association of school boards shall support and advocate for local school district control of content and curriculum for health and sex education courses offered in their district so this is in response to senate bill 818 that has passed both the house and the senate but not yeah it has been signed by the voter yes so it's a bill now so comments reactions done um so i agree with the ias based iasb saying that um we should look at adopting this i do think local districts when it comes to any curriculum should have

066control i mean a district like ours is you know i think 55 hispanic or traditionally more catholic more conservative i think a curriculum that we put in place is going to be very different than one that would be suitable for a district that has um you know a different makeup of different nationalities so i do agree that we should push to make sure we still have local control when it comes to the curriculum for i mean honestly for this or anything i would support local control of a curriculum other people's thoughts yes yeah i don't i don't disagree with what's what miss martin said okay so that's fine 10 is interesting they want to use money for cannabis sales 20 of sales of state tax revenues from cannabis sales should go to public education program

067does that support youth development violence production and health education um they emphasize that this should supplement not supplant i think that was the whole thing that people remembered years ago from the lottery yeah we were supposed to go to education it did but they just took money out of another portion of the budget and gave it took it away from education yeah um this is a recommendation to adopt so yeah okay that's okay with me i i shouldn't know if it ever would get we we can support it but they would ever get to figure out supplements to ever get to supplement instead of supplant yeah there's it would never happen i know i know i agree and the next three two are also these are all from champagne um and they involve the federal

068government so one involves clean energy infrastructure one involves having electric school bus charging stations and one involves landscaping um for some reason the resolution committees did not like the first two but like the landscaping um i wouldn't done the other way but um thoughts i mean i to be honest with you i'm not sure how much pull iasb has with the federal federal government two thoughts on this one what the resolution committee suggested well number 11 i would agree with okay and well we we kind of talked about in the future having buses that will be electric right actually not electric no uh and for us the electric would probably not be a viable option there are other alternative fuel vehicles we could consider but right now the the electric buses would not be viable

069really for a district our size what are your thoughts on federal funding for solar panels for the high school roof side um i think if it came uh curricularly as a potential pathway in the future for us to consider a clean energy pathway i think that could be beneficial uh if if it came with dollars um but we do have i think there's one solar panel up at streamla high school if i remember correctly uh might be a few others but if there's money available for it certainly we could look into it i think the issue with the electric school bus charging stations and i think part of their rationale was that there are cleaner burning fuels such as the compressed natural gas that are much as efficient but um are more viable for school

070districts than the electric ones are currently anyone else have strong feelings either way no i mean i i feel like i should i should like number 13 because that's kind of my area of study in with my master's degree but i you know the problem that i have is that we can advocate for that but then to john's point you know we're just shifting dollars right so i i don't know that that is the best resource for us to go after so i'm picking up no on all these yeah that's what i'm picking so it's all time i actually support number 11. i mean the recommendation is to not adopt i don't really see their rationale as i don't really agree with their rationale to not adopt it so but i i don't feel super

071strongly about it either i just support it so that's three to 11. or do we want to let kate listen to the arguments if they are arguments and yeah delegate our decision okay so what's interesting is and i don't know the nuance of the the law but illinois did just pass it and clean that clean energy green yeah bill that will have funds available for i presume commercial enterprises including school districts to do you know take on some green initiatives so that's something that's out there again i don't know the nuance of the detail the details of the law but uh i understand it to be the case so and again devoting state efforts to make you know a statement that will ultimately have little to no bearing on federal activities is yeah so so

072how about i put us down as as no for now and if i get a compelling argument come back to you with hey i got this compelling argument okay so how many people say no for you i said yes i think you said yes and i think veronica said yes and the rest of us were like i might know yes it just feels like an unfunded mandate like if there was money available and things i think it'd be a great idea but we have a lot of spend our money on yeah all right so that's 11 12 and 13. 14 is expand broadband internet access this is from champaign again um you like that idea hasn't this one been around over and over again i don't know the internet yeah expanding broadband why do i

073feel like i've heard this year after year maybe i'm remembering it wrong but i don't remember it last year as a resolution but certainly the idea of expanding broadband has been popular and a couple of years a bunch of years um and it sure that would help a lot of the royal commerce communities down states so so a yes on this one sure sure yeah child safe gun storage i believe this has been around oh yeah a couple years now and the um this is from glenn allen um and this is advocating that uh advocate for legislation which strengthens child safe gun storage laws in the state of illinois requiring gun owners to store firearms whether they are loaded or unloaded in a securely locked container if a person under the age of 18 is

074likely to gain access the committee recommends do not adopt their argument was that this is not really the school board's business yeah and that was the main argument that came out last year like it's a perfectly fine idea it's just not the school or purview yeah so we're okay with knowing that one uh let's see and then finally from champaign again school code review i mean i'd love to see the school code reviews it's gotten rather unwieldy but this this goal um this resolution was the resolutions quickly recommended do not adopt because they thought they would there was that the whole resolution was too broad it didn't say exactly what they wanted done yeah and i think once you open up school code you're opening up lots of stuff so they need to be more

075specific so yeah i would agree with that okay so do not adopt and then they amend okay they've mended their existing position on financing public education just adding um public education and they add equitably serves students and provides an equitable education to all students within the state of illinois without regard to their race social and economic status gender gender expression sexual orientation nationality immigration status disability or a zip code so they missed just basically that okay yeah and then they reaffirmed interest in the three positions on charter schools they've been around for a while and i don't think do you vote on the reaffirming no no well right oh okay and it's on the support page okay so all right i guess i'd better keep going then all right um so these are uh charter

076school um let's see okay the first one is renewal of charters if this this is all from woodland um ccsd50 they have a charter school that was also approved by these charter school commission so it is not controlled by the district so they have three items one is to have when the charter comes up for reauthorization to have input from the local school board second to have the charter school be able to attract and service at-risk students and third to if it is an authorized charter state authorized charter school to have the funding come from the state i believe that's what they're saying um so the these are all recommended do a dot do we agree with that i agree with all yes yes and then finally again a position statement that um funding special

077education programs um and this is urging congress to fund special education idea um commensurate with the mandates required by the act so which i believe they do not fund as much as it's supposed to be not even close okay so for action and we will say do adopt them yeah and they have a couple of new belief statements one to prepare all students to succeed and they and they amended the physical and mental health student i think it was a physical health and they must have added physical and mental as well and they include dental and physical examinations for children so are we okay with those yeah okay and then you can see all the other current physicians we have so nice today sorry so can we look at the uh number 22 that prepare

078all students to succeed real quick sure so i read through it and um it looked like the original uh the original language was changed because it included like giving minimum grades to students and things of that matter right yeah um which one are you talking about so then when i was reading uh the new language reads um believes that school districts should prepare all students to succeed and cultivate learning to that end urges school districts to consider adopting a policy encourage students is encouraging students to complete assignments within a reasonable time frame even after the due date by developing guidelines on how to grade a student's lead assignments so i understand that like we want to adopt this but it isn't actually what we do so like students are not brain but graded on formative

079assignments in our district so i was trying to figure out how if we support like supporting this but we don't actually grade assignments in our district like i was kind of confused because i feel like what the statement is isn't actually what we do in um in practice so i wasn't sure how we should actually vote does that make sense mm-hmm i mean i know students aren't busy it does seem to be assuming that people are using a grading system that is not homework and we don't do that right so that's why i was just i just wanted to just briefly discuss it since it it would seem odd i guess not on about or hypocritical i don't know to support something that we don't actually do in practice i just thought we should take

080a quick look at it so were you you were reading the the language that's after be it resolved at the front of the i'm sorry so when the part i read was uh at number 22 it's the very end that says the new language reads okay so this is in all school districts okay i apologize i read it quickly so you're you're reading the end of the third paragraph yes so for number 22 it's the uh very bottom right so the new language right that to that end isb urges school districts to consider adopting a policy encouraging students to complete assignments within a reasonable time frame even after the due date by developing guidelines on how to grade a student's lead assignments so it's just weird because we don't actually grade formative assignments in our

081district and there are in some cases students aren't even required to turn them in like you don't have to have assignments and now would you have a summative assignment that when i'm looking at jessica if that you'd have to turn in yeah like i was gonna like add on to this um we like most often like we don't grade formative assignments so like any like quizzes worksheets anything like that but we do like most of my teachers do have summative assignments so whether that's like weekly tests or essays or anything in that matter like those are all graded but in my experience most teachers already have a policy for grading late work like they're already either like say like if it's over two weeks like you're going to take a deduction or like if it's

082in by then then like you know you'll still receive full credit so there's already policies in place like by the teachers in a way that works best for their classes and how they conduct it and so while i understand like what it's trying to achieve i think for our district it just doesn't make that much sense and for me when it says prepare prepare all students to succeed we might not have that situation in our district but there are some districts that if we vote yes to adopt it will benefit all students wherever they are so that's a point well and i would submit that some lots of teachers do look at the formatives and double check i frequently get notifications on infinite campus that my kid turned some turn to formative and turned it

083in and um yeah i mean this fits with the guiding principles of our standards-based learning and assessment this this line does yeah so maybe it's really going after districts that are you know using more the traditional type of yeah i definitely think and it certainly seems like it wants to and not again this is the this becoming laws is will be interesting but they're not penalized but it's even a it's not even a very definitive law it says that iasb will urge districts will suggest adopting say hey school districts should consider doing something like this so there's not much in that either the fact that it's even written says that in some places kids are being penalized for late work and this is to alleviate that so are we still okay with do adopt you

084want to go yes no thumbs up thumbs down [Music] i'm still in favor of adopting okay considering this is something we do we should model it if nothing else all right any other comments sorry this took so long they had a lot okay moving on before you request mr sanders there are six freedom of information act requests before the board tonight available on board docs and those will be made available on the public website uh this upcoming week i'm available to answer any board questions any questions on the flyers consent agenda mr sanders on the contingent agenda we have a personnel report in workers compensation cases minutes of the board meeting october 18 2021 resolution regarding the 2021 levies the determination of the 2021 tax levy a bid from food nutrition services for packaging for

085commissary production line a bid for plant operations for vehicle replacements a change order from plant operations for hilltop elementary school for site paving project number 950 and one occupancy permit which is for mckinley elementary schools site paving and drainage improvements are there any items board members would like to remove from the consent agenda okay could i have a motion to approve the consent agenda so moved second this is veronica will call please mr devereaux yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owens yes ms porter yes ms thomas yes president kerr yes motion passes discussion action mr sanders our first item under discussion action they're itemized bills for november 1st 2021 mr bernice is with us to answer any board questions administration recommends the board of education approved the list of bills in the amount

086of 11 million 728 dollars and one cent any questions well we get a motion to approve the list of bills in the amount of 11 million 157 728 dollars and one cent so move to this is dawn second this is melissa any questions for mr burnidge hey roll call please mr devereaux yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owen yes ms porter yes ms thomas yes president kerr yes motion passes and next is the approval of settlement agreement for case number 18-23538 for sears holding corporation at all uh the new york bankrupt court school district 300 at all versus hoffman estates 2018 ch12683 and the county circuit court and sears bankruptcy proof of claim document number 19 uh 19977 administration recommends the board of education approved the settlement agreement um and of course there's

087specific language that needs to be read for the motion does anyone want to read the motion or shall i read it you can do it too i could i can do it okay well we'll let you do it okay i moved it into only the second and i moved at the board of education of school district 246 approved the settlement agreement for case number 18-23538 parentheses rdd closed parentheses sears holding corporation at all new york bankruptcy court school districts 300 at all versus hoffman estates to 2018 ch 12 683 cook county circuit court and sears bankruptcy proof of claim and substantially the form and for the sum is reviewed in closed session said agreement being incorporated by reference here herein and that the board president and secretary be authorized to execute the agreement i need

088a second second this is veronica any questions comments roll call please mr martin mr deborah yes it isn't yes there's no one yes ms owens yes miss porter yes ms thomas yes president carr yes motion passes next is the approval of settlement agreement for case number 2019l00421 christina johnson versus u-46 at all in the dupage county circuit court administration recommends the board of education approve the settlement agreement and this one also has specific motion language so i'll read that and get a second i move that the board of education of school district 246 approved the settlement agreement for case number 2019 l000421 christina johnson versus u-46 at all and substantially the form and for the sum as reviewed in closed session said agreement being incorporated by reference hearing and that the board president and secretary

089be authorized to execute the agreement so i need a second second this is veronica any comments or questions we'll call please mr devereaux yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owens yes ms porter yes ms thomas yes pressing her yes motion passes in our final discussion action item is a notice remedy for teacher b the matter before the board is whether or not to approve the notice to remedy for a tenure teacher b the administration recommends the board of education approve the noticed remedy for teacher carolyn gilbert i need a motion to approve the notice to remedy for tenure teacher b carolyn gilbert so this is kate second melissa any discussion we'll call please mr deborah yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owens yes miss porter yes ms thomas yes president kerr

090yes motion passes other business cac update i know we have shonda with us let me pull up the participants and i will let's see here shonda if you're with us can you raise your hand in the participant there we go sorry you are with us shonda good to have you good evening superintendent sanders board of education members and attendees the next cac general meeting will be held this thursday november 4th at 7 pm via zoom the specialized student services committee will host a presentation by advanced behavioral solutions on anxiety and depression this presentation will occur immediately following the cac business agenda this is going to be a two-part presentation part one will be during our cac general meeting on thursday and part two will happen in february of 2022 this week's presentation is titled normalizing

091emotions for an abnormal year supporting childhood anxiety and depression and i'll just read the brief description join to learn what anxiety and depression can look like what impacts your child's emotional functioning and what you can do to help with the pandemic constantly changing the last two years and the upcoming holidays stressors for many adults have been at an all-time high our children are not immune to these same difficulties and it may not present how you would expect this presentation will speak to the impact on children and teens up to this point and provide guidance for parents navigating the holiday season and continued uncertainties surrounding how the pandemic is changing the world their children are growing up in the link to pre-register for our general meeting on thursday along with additional details of the presentation will

092be posted on our cacfp page the cac website calendar as well as the district calendar and that concludes my update thank you any questions for csc i just went through my two cents and that's a great presentation i highly recommend that that group has come and presented before for specialized student services and they're wonderful they know their stuff good great thank you sanja thank you at the business mr sanders our first item under other business is the july august and september financial reports and here to provide those as dale vernich director of financial operations good evening we have for the uh statements um those are the lowest two months of revenue and expenses um and that's because the payroll that's paid in july and memphis is related to the previous school year and also any

093revenue that's received in july in august that's related to the prior year uh is recorded in june the september 30th fund balances total 442 million 483 156 dollars uh as of the end of september we have received 106.5 million in early tax revenue compared to 154 million 154.8 million last year and this is due to a timing issue uh due to cook companies sending the same portion of the tax bills out one month later this year so we've received 50 million in tax revenue in october so this will close the gap next month we've also received 43 million in state revenue including the evidence-based funding payments and 3.5 million in federal reimbursements as of the end of september the estate owed 5.9 million in categorical payments and then primarily for the first quarter of this

094fiscal year uh overall our expenditures are 1.2 higher this year uh and it's pretty early than neither but it looks like things are pretty well on the expenditure side uh if there's any questions i could answer them at this time are there any questions i had one question it has to do with the developers fees um it looks like our what we've received so far this year is far above what we projected in our budget is that because of all the new growth in the south elgin area we yes we do uh we request those fees once a year and um we did that earlier in the uh summer so we ended up getting the check of course after we prepared the budget but it was amount than what we had expected okay that's interesting

095because i have seen a lot of growth over that way so any other questions hey thank you next item all right next is a report on our september 29th 2021 enrollments uh annually this is a presentation we provide to the board to give you an update on where our enrollments are and here to present it is brian lindholm chief of staff and it looks like she's he's trying to get the powerpoint loaded as he does so i'll let you know that um statewide there's a report today that and it's actually in the state report card summary that the enrollments across the state are down in u-46 we're not down as significantly as the state-wide numbers are down in terms of percentage-wise but we are down again as as we expected to be with that mr

096lindholm yep thank you mr sanders so yes this is the annual update to the board of education that uh dr king had done in previous years uh summarizing our enrollment numbers as of september 30th that were provided to the state this slide shows the overall enrollment in our district over the past several years as you can see we experienced a steeper decline in enrollment last year as we opened the year offering only distance learning and many families scrambled to make other arrangements for their students this year our enrollment is down an additional 533 students which is more in line with the declines we've been experiencing in recent years you may note the number shown here of 36 090 students is off by approximately 100 students from what was presented earlier by mr ramondi as shown

097on the state report card site apparently this is fairly typical as we report our data up to the state and they do their own categorizing of enrollments by program by demographic so there's usually some some reconciling so we have already put in a request to reconcile some of our data with the with the state to make sure that agrees with what's posted to the state report card site a few other points to note as mr sanders mentioned statewide enrollment is apparently down by over 70 000 students this year which is a little over three percent so actually our rate of enrollment declined from 2020 to 21 was not as steep as as what the rest of the state experienced we also have 240 students who have returned to you 46 schools this year after leaving

098us last year many were homeschooled due to covet concerns so it's great to have these students back in u46 schools and then finally in case uh the question will come up the elgin math and science academy which opened in the fall of 2018 is now serving students in grades k through 6 which would mean maybe up to approximately 350 students and we realized that certainly many of those students would have likely attended our schools and reside within our boundaries this slide shows the enrollment trend per grade level over the past several years and what you can see if you look to the right side of this chart is that our middle and high school class sizes have remained fairly consistent but we've seen declining class sizes in grades k-6 over the six-year period shown here

099on average each elementary grade level is down approximately 450 students during this time period and these will be the smaller cohorts that will be working through our middle and high schools in the coming years which will further drive down our total district enrollment the projections that we've been modeling moving forward would would represent us establishing a new normal of more like 2500 students per class which would mean that our total district enrollment would likely fall into the low 30 000 range and there are several factors that are impacting enrollment declines but one of the most significant is the declining birth rates in our district over the last 15 years the number of births within u46 is down by approximately 1 000 per year the children who are currently aged 5 to 17 which means they

100were born between 2004 and 2016. during that time period the number of bursts per year averaged 4 124. however over the last three years the number of births has averaged only 3 375 per year as you'll see on on this chart the last data point shown here is 2019 this data typically becomes available one year in arrears so we are working with our demographer right now to update our enrollment projections going forward with our latest enrollment data as well as the 2020 birth data that will become available so next we'll look at the enrollment shifts for this year by grade level and as you can see our pre-k enrollment is essentially flat from last year however it's still well below the approximately 1 300 students that we'd been averaging in previous years because preschool attendance

101isn't required by law we've seen many families electing to keep their three and four-year-olds home during the pandemic next looking at elementary schools as was shown in the previous chart our enrollment declines are really being felt most in our elementary schools so total enrollment in grades k-6 is down 545 students from last year several schools are experiencing significant declines of 30 or more students wayne elementary is the only school in our district with a with a marked increase in enrollment this year and it's mainly due to a large number of students who were homeschooled last year uh during the height of covid that have returned this year our middle school enrollment is also down from last year uh 159 fewer students or about a two and a half percent decrease uh the largest decline was

102at ellis middle school where they have 60 fewer students um which is an approximately eight percent decrease in in that building and then our high school enrollment is actually up slightly from last year three of our five comprehensive high schools are serving more students this year than last year we typically see a small increase in our ninth grade enrollment at least partly due to incoming students from uh private schools that offer only k through eight schooling if you recall from the previous chart our current ninth grade class is our largest at over 3 300 students um however however as i mentioned previously the current projections would indicate that we will have smaller classes class sizes coming through our middle and high schools in the coming years and and that is what will drive some of

103the continued enrollment declines so that concludes this very brief presentation are there any questions at this time any questions don hi thank you so much as far as how the breakdown is like the loss of students whether it's you know elementary versus middle school versus high school are those um i mean it sounds like the elementary decline is is on average like that's typically we lose the larger number um for years prior to covid is this in line with pre-covered years as far as the largest elementary laws and then sometimes an uptick at the high school like have are things kind of falling back into their normal pattern i guess now that we're starting to come back to the normal schooling yeah i really think that um just prior to covid this is this is

104very consistent with where we're feeling the declines and it really is more due to those birth rates they're just fewer kids coming through our system um so so that was a little bit inevitable just based on on birth rates that that was what we're going to feel that's it thank you okay melissa i i appreciate these numbers especially at the high school level i've i've heard from people at elgin high school larkin high school in south elgin high school that this school feels full and these numbers support that it's interesting to me i mean i know that's that freshman year is our largest year of enrollment in high school but even even so this year it's the second largest enrollment freshman year that we've had in the last six years sophomore year it's in the

105top half of enrollment and there was a spike in 12th grade do you have any sense of why that number jumped so much in 12th grade well the the 12th grade number if you actually look like one to the left miss owens like the blue bar uh that were 11th graders last year so actually that was just a large class that kind of oh okay i see okay and i think the ninth grade uh spike part of the reason is we do see some students who enter our district in ninth grade and perhaps is to attend some of our our magnets our selected programming um as well as some of the private schools that are just k through eight the other thing that impacts these numbers sometimes is if you have freshmen who did not

106um achieve enough credits the previous year they would be reported as ninth graders again the following year so okay there are some creators that are not on track exactly right right right but clearly we're looking at the years coming up behind there i mean we'll probably you know always see that spike like you've said in ninth grade because of the the circumstances but the the grades behind that are are clearly smaller yes i i think even though we know that we do pick up some new students in ninth grade most of those kids that are in high school now were probably if they lived in our boundaries for you 46 students all the way through their academic career and i don't anticipate that our high school classes in four or five years from now will

107approach the size john i'm sorry i had one more question so on slide uh slide two with the uh trend data you had mentioned that um so last year we lost almost 1400 with the pandemic and schools being closed you mentioned that we got a little over 200 students of that number re-enrolled do we know if that was at a specific grade level or just sort of spread across the district there were families who brought their kids back in i can pull that data forward because we literally looked for individual students who had u-46 enrollments uh in 1920 and not last year and now they're back in 21-22 so i don't have that top my head but we can share the data because we have individual student tied to each of the 240 so yeah

108i was just curious if um it was a certain just a certain grade level right where parents are more uh eager to have kids back in buildings you know if it's a high school thing or an elementary thing i was just curious so thank you yeah i'm sorry i thank you yes so yeah yeah it'd be interesting to to see if that number is um central is located in one area of the district versus another is it spread out everywhere is it located in just these three elementary schools or whatever too i mean the one data point that i did mention like wayne elementary is one of our smallest schools yeah they actually had a pretty significant yeah they had a lot of kids who were homeschooled last year who who came back so interesting

109absolutely yeah do you did any of this help our i know we don't have too many overcrowded schools i know it certainly didn't help south belgium which already has mobiles but were there any schools that had mobiles that saw a decrease that made it a little less painful maybe they don't need to use the mobiles as much i don't know that that we've decommissioned any any mobiles this year no we've been decommissioning this year no it certainly like even ties into some of the facility work that we're doing as we're looking at enrollment trends per building i mean that's certainly one of our goals is to get out of the mobile so yep any other questions thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you that settle is work session our next uh underwork

110session our first is a proposal from business services for ipad ipad 8 and obsolescence replacement mr phelps director of business services here along with karan his assistant buyer and asset management manager administration recommends approval of the proposal from apple incorporated in the amount of two hundred and fifty eight thousand and twenty dollars and request authorization for administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged to the elementary school emergency relief grant and the emergency connectivity fund the cost will be or is included in the budget for this fiscal year any questions for mr phelps in this proposal thanks our next work session items are both change orders the first is a change order from plant operations for sunnydale elementary school pavement reconstruction project number 1460. ms downs is here along with mr phelps to

111answer any more questions this is a negative change order uh with abby paving company in an amount of minus 21 543 and 62 cents any questions about this change order okay next item our next is the change order from plant operations for south elgin high school tennis court reconstruction project number 279 again with abby paving company this is a minus uh oh i'm sorry i'd say change order in the amount of thirty four thousand five hundred and sixty one dollars and three cents sorry any questions on this change order okay since that is the last order of business we need to move back into closed session something i just want to thank mr phillips and ms downs for a job well done on the welcoming center it was a pleasure going through there as i

112said before but publicly to thank you and miss downs for a great job of managing it thank you thank you very much all right can i have a motion to move into closed session to discuss individual student disciplinary matters pending probable or imminent litigation the appointment employment compensation discipline performance of dismissal of specific employees specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in the park recreational or educational setting or specific volunteers of the public are legal counsel for the public body the purchase release of real property for the use of the school board the setting of a price for the sale of lease of real property owned by the school board collective negotiating matters between the school board and its employees or their representatives or deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or classes of employees review

113of closed session minutes and individual student matters so move this is veronica second this is kate roll call please mr devereaux yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owens yes ms porter yes ms thomas yes president kerr yes we're in closed session at eight i need a motion to adjourn so move second roll call please mr deveraux yes ms martin yes ms nolan yes ms owen yes ms porter yes ms thomas yes president kerr yes we're adjourned at 9 27 pm