Board Meeting - April 12, 2021

001so um i'm waiting on a couple of board members [Music] so okay i guess we will resume the april 12 2021 board of education meeting if we could stand for the pledge of allegiance and then afterwards remain standing for a moment of silence [Music] of the united states of america into the republic which it stands one nation under god liberty and justice we'd like to take a moment of silence for a u-46 employee an e-46 student who recently passed away first you would like to remember ada and sanchez she had taught in classrooms and as a substitute in u-46 since 2004 most recently at coleman elementary school ada passed away on march 9th born in puerto rico ada was devoted to helping her students learn and grow she is survived by her daughter eunice m

002machos sanchez her brother raymond f sanchez two nieces and two nephews and a niece a memorial service was held at laird funeral home in elgin on march 21st and church services will be held in puerto rico this summer we will keep ada's family and friends in our thoughts and prayers we also remember malik michael brown who is a junior at south elgin high school he was a fold on the school's basketball team and a member of the track and field team as well malik passed away on march 22nd he was known among family and friends and fellow students for his kindness humor and gentle spirit he is survived by his mother racial hitler and father lee michael brown siblings grace liam and maya and a large extended family visitation was held on march 30th at

003laird funeral home in elgin we will keep malik's family and friends and our thoughts in prayers thank you everyone all right mr sanders first item is the strategic plan report thank you madam president members of the board as we've done with uh every time we've made a shift in instruction or made changes throughout this school year we've tried to endeavor to keep the board fully informed of everything we've been up to tonight dr johnson will take the lead on the presentation regarding our return to learn that that has occurred here recently after spring break with more of our in-person hybrid students returning for in-person days i just want to note before dr johnson shares the the brief update that we could not do this without quite an amazing team we have a great administrative team

004that you see on the screen principals assistant principals and and others in our buildings amazing custodians support staff education support professionals and of course our amazing teachers who have done an incredible job this year and deserve all of our accolades for the amount of times they've had to shift and pivot their instructional practices to best suit their kids so with that dr johnson i'll let you share the update and some of the wonderful photos that we have from our return to more in person learning thank you mr sanders and thank you board of education for the opportunity tonight to provide this update uh also as we continue to uh just note our immense gratitude tremendous gratitude to all of our students all of our learners and u46 for their flexibility and their ongoing commitment as

005well to instruction and to us as a system and of course to our families and our households as well so thank you to all of our families in our households throughout the past year and all of our efforts to provide our support and instructional opportunities for our students over the course of the most challenging 13 months that we have all seen so with that this first slide looks of course very familiar this is something that we have stressed all along this flexibility for our continuum of instruction and we know that it's very exciting that we are at a place where almost half of our students have returned for in-person classroom instruction and meanwhile about another half are still learning online and those of us who've been able to be in classrooms be in schools over

006the course of the last week again seeing our teachers and our support staff personnel our students and again our households navigate what that blended learning looks like as well across many of our classrooms very impressive to see this shift so thank you again some of our mitigation strategies that will continue and and have been ongoing of course um as many of you are aware our ongoing efforts with our universal masquerade social distancing even as that has shifted and has changed and has provided us that opportunity to bring more students back contact tracy i do need to acknowledge our tremendous health services team and the work that they continue to do with our contact tracing of course while we see that we've brought more students back into our schools that means that that that is also

007picked up so i need to say a thank you to all who have been certainly committed to that effort also um our ongoing school-wide and i'll say system-wide effort with cleaning and disinfection hand washing and and all of our etiquette when it comes to making sure that everybody is as safe and as healthy as possible our self-certification and of course following all of our occupancy restrictions those things are in place and again as we visit our buildings our shared accountability efforts with all of those pieces and then of course our ongoing additional mitigation strategies so working with our waiver for testing and then vaccination efforts as well and as mr sanders highlighted here including some of our photos of our students and our staff members as we have returned to increased in-person instruction so on

008last wednesday our students returned for full day classes we had three days of full day instruction for our students prior a b designations are no longer in place so those were the designations that identified the two days a week that students would be reporting for in-person instruction and of course we celebrated what was at least a fourth first day in u46 and quite possibly more depending on the program and the site and as this picture highlights at our garfield elementary school it was actually their 131st anniversary they had intended to celebrate that a year ago this past spring the 130th and we had to put it off for 13 months but garfield elementary school would would not let that be passed by of course and so it was a really exciting day and i think

009a great way for so many of us to start our return last wednesday as we've had approximately half of our students return there was almost 18 000 students who returned for in-person instruction last week and today of course marked our fourth day tremendous thank you and recognition though to making that happen because school is very different than it was a year ago all of these terms that i'm using even here tonight were not part of our vocabulary and we didn't host meetings and events as we did and so when we think about how school has changed that is a significant accomplishment to bring 18 000 students back tremendous kudos and recognition for our professional development sessions providers and participants and the effort that is ongoing and our commitment as it is ongoing uh recognition of

010classroom structures that have changed greatly in sight and system-wide as well in addition to planning updating and adjusting the curriculum and the implementation of those prioritized standards utilizing resources differently online and in person and of course those blended instructional strategies that we've heard so much about how do we engage learners who are in person engage learners who are online in classrooms that have a combination of both across a multitude of age and grade levels and programming and that is the commitment that the system has made and it's great to see that occurring across our sites additionally of course what we also need to recognize would be our operational team members as well for making this happen including our ongoing meal distribution as well and shifting to lunch something that many of us have taken for

011granted for all the years we've always been in our buildings lunch and providing hot meals to our students we are still doing that it feels great to see kids and to socialize with students as that happens but that is no small feat and to continue to provide meals for families and students who are not in person our transportation team rerouted our system again to be able to shift to greater in-person instruction and we continue to deliver technology to our sites that is an ongoing effort do not expect that it will end anytime soon and we continue to identify needs and and provide all of those uh techno technological advances and then finally as anyone in a site can attest we have arranged rearranged measured re-measured measured again to make sure that we could fit all

012of our students and our staff members into instructional spaces following all of these efforts and again a tremendous thank you to our plant operations team who has helped and certainly been part of those creative problem solving pieces so a couple of other important dates that are coming up tomorrow we have our high schools the asynchronous and distance learning as we have the sat in place this is still a requirement for us and so it needs to be noted highlight that here the next non-attendance day comes may 14th that's a school improvement planning day for our sites in preparation for next year and conclusion of this year and then finally during the month of may we will be providing an update here to the board of education concerning our instructional model plans for the 21 22

013school year and with that i will conclude our presentation for this evening thank you thank you dr johnson does anyone have any questions i have a couple um for the sats are we bringing the remote students back as well or how is that working uh so our students have the opportunity to return we are providing that opportunity if they are able to and wish to return to complete the assessments okay so it's really up to them and their families and i know also that lunch was a big concern not only in this district but other districts as well how how are we handling that particularly at the high schools well i get to tell you from visiting the high schools each had to kind of tackle it in their own unique way so i know

014at south elgin high school they have the cafeterias open as well as one of the half of the auxiliary half of the larger gym actually is being used so using multiple spaces to divide kids out so that they're at least separated by the six feet while they take their mask off um and then same thing stream with the day they have smaller groups of kids back in so they're able to fit um half in the cafeteria and half go to study hall and then they have halfway through the period they shift and so each school i think is making their own accommodations based on their their site specific needs that that's that is accurate and it's it's really across all of our grade levels where we see that the approach that's most common as mr

015sanders shared is that most of them have actually doubled the number of lunch periods because they can't have as many students in a location and so that looks a little bit different at the secondary level the other half than typically of that lunch period they're in a study hall location and then at elementary it might need it might mean additional opportunities for recess supervision organized and structured opportunities for students as well okay thank you other questions okay yeah so you had mentioned that at um streamwood high school you're used no south african high school you're using part of the auxiliary gym what are the gym classes doing doing during that time do they have enough room to meet their needs yeah absolutely so that's it's huge so it was actually um it's actually a third

016of the main gym so they had a third is the students eating the third was where students playing basketball and another third was uh volleyball so they were doing all three at the same time okay and that didn't put too many people in the room no they've got it all they've got it partitioned off so you can't okay you can't get through oh it's not the old curtain that's partitioned yeah the curtains are fully down that's accurate yes yeah any other questions well thank you and thank you to all of our teachers our staff i know this has been a big change again um and and we really appreciate their their resiliency and and their hard work so thank you okay next item mr sanders uh public comments so this time we have nobody that

017has filed a public comment online to to share with the board i know we have a gentleman here with us i'm not sure if you're here to make a public comment tonight sir or yeah you were did you felt one of the cards for us to no um that's okay would you mind if we let him speak for the three minutes and then we'll just have him fill out the maybe you could say to the record your name and address and everything for us if you want to just come up to the presenter's table uh this one any one of the mics will be fine absolutely yeah my name is george henry okay i have i had three sons who went to u46 i like to know is u46 teaching is critical race theory and

018the schools so the board doesn't i'm sorry we didn't usually do our topical script because we usually have people sign up in advance the board does not actually answer questions during this portion of the meeting but but if you ask your questions what we can do is make sure that you get a written response from the board secretary who does the state or federal government mandate what's taught in public schools again we the board does not respond to the board the questions but if you want to read them another record i'll make sure you get a written response all right are you 46 students taught being transgender is okay again if you want to keep reading your questions we'll make sure you get a response all right are students being taught two plus two equals

019five i get this information off of knew it like fox news now they say that there are is the school district teaching two plus two equals five our boys and girls using the same bathroom and i had heard now i don't know if this is true or not i had heard school districts are teaching third grade and up how to masturbate no more that i heard that did you know down in california where all these illegals are coming in by the thousands there's probably like 120 150 maybe quarter of a million already those those people that are coming into our country are being taught in public schools and the kids the taxpayer kids or parents those kids aren't being taught in the school it's on like tucker carlson fox news so they're they're going to

020school all day and i wonder why you 46 kids aren't found back in school restaurants are all open everything's open florida's all over how come now you 46 kids aren't in school full time i guess that's it thank you for your comments if you don't mind on the way out uh mr mackenzie could you help him find the card and make sure we get it filled out so we can respond in writing thank you sir thank you all right other business board member and superintendent update mr sanders i have just a few um hopefully you can see this on the screen everybody but we received a really nice proclamation a resolution and proclamation from the board of commissioners of cook county illinois um recognizing uh the uh lead program which is living elegantly ambitiously and

021dauntlessly uh enrichment program uh which is led here within you 46 by jocelyn ashford yarborough jamie mccutchen and mary harrison and we want to thank them for all of their efforts and it also recognizes our brother's rise up program led by jim cook so i just wanted to share with the board and i'll pass it around so you can see the wonderful resolution that they received from the board of commissioners of cook county illinois i also just wanted to note i know if we've had some board visits but i want to thank the american association of school administrators for arranging a small meeting for me and a few other superintendents to meet with secretary cardona since our last meeting so i had the opportunity to meet be part of the first group of superintendents to

022meet with the secretary and it was it was quite an honor so any board members okay um for your request mr sanders there are uh seven freedom freedom of information act requests that the board has received since the last board meeting that we've replied to and that will be posted this week online and i'm available to answering important questions are there any questions okay consent agenda mr sanders on the consent agenda we have personnel report and workers compensation cases minutes of the board meeting march 15 2021 termination of mina evans custodian termination of ruth rumbles bus driver contract renewal for human resources for frontline absence and substitute management a bid for plant operations for the educational service center roof replacement project number a bid from plant operations for larson middle school gymnasium floor restoration project

023number 505 a bid from plant operations for hillcrest elementary school boiler replacement project number 926 a bid from plant operations for elgin high school stadium improvements phase 2 project number 241 a bid from uh plant operations for lowry elementary school library relocation and wall repairs project number 1177 a bid from plant operations for 1019 e chicago street interior build out and conference room furniture purchase project number 2058 a bid for plan operations for willard elementary schools main office hvac system replacement project number 1580. a bid for plant operations for independent center for early learning group replacement project number m0062 and finally we have three building permits for 1019 east chicago street phase 3 project number 2058 ls middle school lentil and window replacement project 427 and larson middle school gym renovations phase one project number

024505. are there any items board members would like removed from the consent agenda okay could i have a motion to approve the consent agenda please so move this is melissa second this is veronica any questions roll call please mr deveraux yes ms noland yes ms owens yes mrs porter yes mrs smith yes miss thomas yes madam president yes motions approved 7-0 discussion action mr sanders under discussion action our first item were itemized bills for april 12 2021 mr burnage is here with us to answer any board questions administration recommends the board of education approve the list of bills in the amount of 13 million 771 428 dollars and 16 cents could i have a motion to approve the list of bills the amount of 13 million 771 thousand four hundred twenty eight dollars and sixteen

025cents some of this is veronica secondly reporter any questions roll call please mr deborah yes ms noland yes ms owens yes mr supporter yes mrs smith yes ms thomas yes madam president yes motion is approved 7-0 our next is a bid from the deputy superintendent of instruction for summer programming um the administration recommends award of the lobby meeting specification to the following community agencies in support of summer expanded recreational programming and the amount of one million one hundred and eight thousand six hundred and forty two dollars and fifty cents and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents and that includes three fires council in the amount of three hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars boys and girls club of elgin in the amount of 214 200 the learning tree uh of elgin east

026of the amount of thirty two thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars learning tree on the west side uh for thirty two thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars side street studio arts in the amount of 16 537.50 streamwood park district for 53 550 city belgian for 147 735 000 and golden corridor ymca in the amount of two hundred and thirty three thousand one hundred dollars these expenditures will be charged the educational fund and reimbursed with funds from the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund and american recovery act uh the costs will be included in this year's fiscal uh program with leave of the board i'd like if once you do a motion in second i would like dr johnson to walk through our summer programming options so you see how this fits into the current

027at least continuum of offerings that we're considering uh and in that way but we're trying to at least try to get this wrapped up for our community agencies as quickly as we can okay so i will entertain a motion to approve the low bid meeting specifications for the community agencies listed for the summer expanded recreational programming in the amount of one million one hundred eight thousand six hundred forty two dollars and fifty cents so move this is veronica second this is john okay so we won't vote yet we'll have the presentation then you'll have to remind me that we have to vote okay i'll do my best on that one uh so thank you very much for the opportunity to provide this update this evening i do want to thank the team and all that's

028gone into some really creative thoughts about how we've been able to update summer programming and potentials for updating uh that for this year looks very different from what we have been offering in years past so you can see certainly a focus on the whole student the whole child is really what we are looking to provide opportunities for this summer on behalf of u-46 at the elementary level we have a number of opportunities and options here that we are continually continuing to finalize so obviously we have our extended school year program which has been made available during the summer to our students who qualify with ieps through specialized student services we expect that that will likely be hosted at at least two sites this summer for this level we also have a coordinated early intervention services

029program this year this is new for us this is summer programming for groups of students who are frequently over identified for special education services for us specifically in u-46 that is our african-american students who are being identified and then qualified for our emotional disabilities programming in e46 and so this is of course is an early opportunity for us to intervene and provide extended programming we are also working through the potential of providing additional early childhood engagement and instructional opportunities as well as our more traditional summer instruction for grades one through six which would have a numeracy and literacy focus as well as an integrated afro-centric experience for students also and then finally you see the summer expanded programming and that would include those partnerships that we just identified in the proposal and again those come

030with from the opportunity for rfp that we announced earlier this spring and opportunities to be able to again engage students in learning and experiences throughout the summer to focus on the whole student at the secondary level we are also pleased to identify uh some new and different opportunities for student engagement as well so you can see our traditional summer school which will this year also provide an opportunity for some acceleration for learning as well hosted at three sites focusing on transitions we are going to also be offering the middle school experience for students transitioning to middle school this year so our rising seventh graders similarly a freshman connection so to focus on that transition component for our students who are transitioning to our high schools and as well as a college jump start across all

031of our sites as well really focused of course on our rising seniors and then finally extended school year again available for our students who are identified and qualified through our specialized student services program i do want to note again that our programming is very different this year and what we're really looking to do is to expand that programming to meet the needs of our students so looking to connect with students to have them re-engage to accelerate learning and to be able to participate in different levels of instruction and experiential learning prior to the start of summer programming we will be asking once uh students are registered and enrolled be working with families to complete some qualitative surveys so that we can gather some information to be able to utilize that as baseline information we'll complete

032that again at the end of the summer session and then we'll be working to align that to quantitative data that we're gathering throughout the fall and winter and spring of course next year that could include components such as grades attendance test scores positive behavior responses within our sites to be able to identify the the successes and outcomes i do want to note as well that as we prepare for our post covid response to learning our programming this summer we feel really does align uh at least with our our preliminary and on as we start working through the learning renewal plan from the state of illinois by re-engaging our students in creative ways that are certainly based on their needs and interests really looking at the sel components as well the social emotional learning pieces of

033our students building upon their needs and interests focusing on early learners and other prioritized groups of students as well as transition programming for our students so again really trying to focus on building those strengths for our students as they rise to different grade levels and doing so again with a focus on core instruction and for us that's that numeracy and literacy piece as well and so we do look forward to finalizing all of this information and we'll be hiring for our programming so you'll see that that is ongoing you can expect to see announcements we will be working on updating and providing additional communications out to staff and households that will actually occur a little bit later this week and continue through the month of may we will also be enrolling students of course later

034this month and early may as well that piece is really most critical because we will be our goal will be to provide transportation for our students and in order to be able to meet that need remove barriers for our students including transportation and also cost it's going to be really essential that we get our students enrolled in may and then as you see they're finalizing those operational components transportation is one of the most significant because we want our kids to be in the programs and in order to do that we will we will we will prioritize the work that needs to be done in order to do that so that concludes my update on this evening if peter might just want to share two more quick things as well you know the the saying it

035takes a village in this case it will take more than to school district 246 to really bring all of our students and give them the opportunities that they might have missed not i'm not going to say learning loss i'm going to say missed opportunities for stretching themselves they've done a lot of learning so this is a great way to work and partner with our various community groups and use these funds coming in from the federal government to really uh use our municipalities and these other groups to their benefit to our benefit and our students benefit and secondly i just want to note that our teachers have like we've been saying all night have gone above and beyond the school year and since i know there are several who are listening tonight to the board meeting

036and many that watch on youtube if you have any inclination to teach this summer please feel free to fill out an application our ability to continue our learning through the summer is going to rely on our ability to have teachers who are available to come in and and help our students out this summer so if you have it in your heart please fill out an application so other questions are we doing anything with the libraries this summer i don't even know if the libraries are having reading programs to be honest with you um so we are going to be working uh still through that with a number of our libraries so i know that we we've been in communication with at least one of them and what our opportunities would be to do that um

037i certainly think we have every interest in of being able to work with them to provide that opportunity for our students whether it's students going there and a number of them have the ability to come out to our students as well with their vehicles okay great thank you i have a question for some of the students that have had the most missed opportunities in learning the marginalized groups how do we plan to reach them because we know in the past sometimes they're the ones that maybe don't respond and take advantage of the opportunity so do we have a plan in place to try to really really reach out we we certainly will so at this point as we finalize the numbers of sections and what we will have available we will then be identifying through

038our data sets that we currently have in place and then working with our principals and our sites to really reach out to those students and those those families and households um so that's that's still that is still very much in the works this border and i certainly i i'm sure the board would would welcome another update for me a little bit later in the spring when i can tell you exactly how many students we have in all of those sections and and what our student groups look like um what training or collaboration would be in place with all of the partnerships that we have to make sure that they are targeting the areas that we need to target for the social emotional um you know the things that governor pritzker mentioned to make sure that

039our students are getting the update on the missed opportunities of education sure um so the the um the programs the proposals that you see that have been brought forward really do highlight i think those those again extended learning opportunities so for our students that might include arts research environment leadership active learning as well so our effort was to start from the very beginning with identifying proposals that would bring forward those options and opportunities for our students that we might not be able to meet the needs of uh we then will start with a meeting with all of these providers uh wednesday morning i believe is that is that point and so um at that time we'll outline our collaboration and our work moving forward and how we'll continue to monitor and partner in that work

040with them as well thank you any other questions okay i guess roll call please mr deborah yes ms noland yes miss owens yes this is porter yes mrs smith yes miss thomas yes madam president yes motion is approved 7-0 all right next is a bid from information services for classroom monitors uh mr phelps is with us this evening as well as laura macias director of information services if the board has questions administration recommends award the lipid meeting specification to dell technologies in the amount of four hundred and sixty six thousand nine hundred dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the educational fund and the costs will be included in the budget for the 2020 2021 fiscal year could i have a motion to approve the award

041of the low bid meeting specifications to dell technologies in the amount of 466 thousand nine hundred dollars and requested administration to execute the related documents so move this is veronica second eva porter any questions roll call please mr deveraux yes ms noland yes ms owens yes mrs porter yes mrs smith miss thomas yes madam president yes motionless approved 7-0 our next is a notice remedy for teacher c sandra coyle administration recommends the board of education adopt the noticed remedy for sandra coyle could i have a motion to approve the notice to remedy for teacher c sandra coyle so moved second this is veronica any questions roll call please uh miss deborah yes ms nolan yes miss owens yes mr supporter yes mr smith yes ms thomas yes madam president yes motion is approved 7-0 other

042business cac update any cac people on tonight i don't see any but i know we just had the meeting this last week mr devereaux i think several board members were in attendance mrs owens was in attendance if others were forgive me if i missed you um and we had a nice presentation from dr teresa lance so um i'll give that update on behalf of cac okay great thank you all right work session mr sanders our first item under work session is a proposal from the deputy superintendent of instruction for learning sciences international similar to the summer school if you don't mind i'll read into the record what we're proposing and then we do have a presentation after a motion in a second um actually this one does not require a motion second i apologize it's

043a work session item so mr phelps is with us dr johnson is with us as well as members of the learning sciences international team administration recommends approval of the proposal from learning sciences international for five years in the amount of eighteen million eight hundred and forty one uh four hundred eighty one thousand nine hundred and eighty eight dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged to the educational fund and reimbursed with funds from the elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund and the american recovery act and therefore would be included in our budgets for the 2020 through 2021 to 2025 2026 fiscal years uh dr johnson again is here with you to with us to kick off the presentation uh and then i'll let you introduce the

044member of the uh lsi team dr johnson thank you mr sanders uh so this evening it's my pleasure to introduce connie sell and dina sun who are going to walk us through this overview of our partnership and collaboration as we look to transform learning with our post-covet response thank you dr johnson i'm penny sal executive director for leadership development in schools for equity and breaker and deena sen is also with me tonight and she'll introduce herself when she gets to her portion of the presentation we're very appreciative of your time tonight and i know that you've gotten some background on this work and our goal tonight is to briefly walk you through the specifics of the proposal what all the components entail and then what it might look like over a five-year implementation plan and

045then have some time at the end to answer any questions that you might have about the work so just to reorient you um to the work of our company our mission at lsi is to really transform core instruction to develop both agency and academics within students to allow them to break the cycle of generational property so when we're looking to move students to a different view of what instruction looks like where teachers are developing lessons for students that allow them to explore learning to explain and coach and to get to higher levels of rigor and agency within that classroom and to develop teachers that are really master coaches and facilitators of that learning and to support them in that shift this is not a program this is second order change and it does require a

046lot of effort across time and that's why we're so excited to have been able to work with your leadership on this to develop a proposal that really addresses change at every level of your organization and the reason we know that that is what it takes to make this sort of a shift is because we have to align our thinking your principles your administrators they're making a lot of non-trivial decisions every day in their work and the average classroom teacher is making 1500 instructional moves throughout the day that's the action cloud of your people so when you think about a school of just 20 teachers making thousand instructional moves per day multiply that by the teachers in your district there's a lot of people working very hard for students but what we find as we look

047at the work is sometimes those actions are not aligned in the same direction it might be because we have different priorities we have different initiatives happening within the district or sometimes we're just not aligned to the same vision in a strong enough way to really build the the work that we need to so in our work we want to shift all focus to what's happening with students our focus is on student actions on student work on student achievement and how students are learning and growing and so the actions of people at every level in your district aligned to that same vision are what's going to really move your district over the course of this proposal so we're very very excited about this work what are we really looking at we're looking at a theory of

048action where your decisions as a board impact the in the um work of your superintendent his actions impact the principal supervisors uh principals school leadership teams down to teachers and so again we just really really want to focus the actions of everyone in your district on what's happening with students so that the student achievement is predictive we know what's happening with students it's predictive and proactive towards student achievement so that's what we're looking for and let's see if i can get it to go there we go we also want to make sure that we're aligned with your vision as a board so we're going to sort of point out some areas in this of this work that align with what you've already determined your vision to be in that first bullet leadership development pathways we'll

049show you how we would focus on building leadership capacity and a leadership pipeline within your district of people who know believe in and can implement the work and also to open up new opportunities for teacher leadership within your buildings as well obviously we're focused on poor instruction that's the heart of our work um dina will be able to speak to how our academic teaming addresses both academic and social emotional needs of kids um as well as the job embedded professional development for your teachers in u46 in terms of technology we're excited to support teachers in using technology for rigorous lessons but also to establish a partnership between teachers and students so that students have an opportunity to monitor their own learning to track their own progress toward the rigorous standards that we're presenting for them

050so just to give you an idea of some of the components of the proposal it's going to start with executive coaching at the district level for your superintendent through your principal supervisors that executive coaching will carry through throughout the proposal the five years of the proposal with gradual release which we'll show you as we go through we'll start with some professional learning around our metrics and around our vision of what we are looking for in classrooms calibrating on student evidence teacher actions monitoring and tracking student progress to standards we'll have consistent calibration rounds so that everyone is calibrated and giving the same feedback and identifying the root causes of any barriers to the work so the instructional rounds in the leadership coaching will focus on looking at the data that's coming out of your schools

051achievement data trend data and also implementation data so that we can remove any impediments to the work that might and and will come come up as we go through this project together at the school level our leadership instructional leadership institute is going to address leadership capacity um in every building and we have designed this to be set up so that every director of schools will have a cohort of their schools that they're responsible for that will go through instructional leadership institute together and when we are bringing these leadership teams in from schools we request that there always be teachers on those leadership teams we cannot do this work without teachers we need to have their input we need to hear from them what's working in the implementation what the barriers are what kind of supports

052they need what kind of supports their students need and they also um you know are a crucial voice in order to lead um the implementation of shifts in core instruction so we want to build capacity in leadership at all levels um and also it's uh you know kind of important to know that within our instructional leadership institute every school is designing their own action plans as they leave each institute because we know the schools are in different places and schools have different needs so it's never going to be a cookie cutter approach your leadership teams in conjunction with their director of schools will be designing their action plans throughout the work so within instructional leadership institute we also focus on the building of effective teams we've all been on on teams throughout our lives and

053we get placed on teams and we work as teams but we don't always pay attention to how effective we are as a team so we have had the opportunity to do some work um one of our partnerships is with some researchers out of harvard who have done a lot of work around effective teams and we have built that into our leadership institute to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how teams are working together and then our model for that work is to always be clear on our vision where are we headed what actions are we taking to to move toward that vision and how are we influencing others in terms of our leadership our relationships and our building of collective efficacy within our teaching staff back in our schools and all of those are based

054on data so there are four days of instructional leadership institute and within each of those days a large portion of that is for school teams to be looking at their data see where they're making progress see where they need to address their actions to continue to show growth so what does that look like over five years in terms of coaching and instructional leadership institute what we've tried to show you through this slide is not only what's happening across the five years but the colors in the slides show where the release is we have built this implementation so that at the end of the five years we are gone and the work is sustained throughout your district as a permanent change so in terms of instructional leadership we conduct the pd for the um first two

055years on those four days your principal supervisors will always be in attendance with us but as we get into years three and four they are now co-conducting with us and co-creating the content of that training based on the needs of their schools and by year five um instructional leadership institute will be led by your principal supervisors we will always be available for support as needed school leadership coaching will happen in every building on the first year we will be conducting all of those coaching sessions our number of coaching sessions will decrease over the five years as principal supervisors begin to take on more of the responsibility for that work even in year five we will be there with a light touch just to ensure that school buildings have what they need to sustain the work

056and now i'm going to turn it over to my colleague dina send to talk about the teacher professional development side hi i'm dina sign i'm the senior director of academic teaming here at learning sciences i wanted to talk about three different levels of support that we're providing with to teachers as we're talking about helping teachers become masters of facilitating and coaching on the left hand side you'll see there that we provide two different types of professional development one of them is academic teaming i will def i will cover a little bit more about that in the next slide the other is student evidence tracker where we're getting teacher-student partnership on formative assessment so we provide professional development but if you go to the right hand side of this slide not only do we provide professional

057development but we provide resources that go with that professional development so we're not going to have anyone stand up and talk at your teachers for six hours it really is how do we use resources that we have created to really help students learn and grow the other piece i want to talk about is job embedded coaching we have two different types of job embedded coaching the first one is really honing in and helping instructional leaders and instructional coaches coach classroom teachers so helping them with how to identify the student evidence that's that's occurring in real time in classrooms and how to give actionable feedback on that the other piece that we know is good lessons don't happen magically they happen through planning so our our lsi experts have the ability and have the expertise to

058coach in plc's so that throughout not only do you get do your teachers get professional development but they get support in their plc's with their planning so i'm going to go back and continue talking about the resources in academic teaming we provide academic teaming toolkits and you have one being delivered tonight to your school district office every teacher in a training gets an academic teaming toolkit for each of the levels and what you'll see in this in this slide i don't know if you could see me holding up a tool kit but if what you see in the slide is on the left hand side these are team resources that are given to students so the way we make master students or the way we help create master students is this idea that we give

059them the supports and the structures in order to have collaborative conversations so all of our tool kits have two different types of resources one of them one of the types focuses on on what students can say or get support in doing as they collaborate with each other and on the right hand side is the supports for the teachers to implement those resources so our training isn't um a day filled with hey this should happen in classrooms our our training is filled with a day of how and who will benefit from these resources how would you implement them what lesson could you implement them in so so that the academic teaming is focused on putting the resources in the in the classroom and helping the teacher with the troubleshooting what might come up as they're implemented

060and as we look at academic teaming we can talk about the different levels of skills that students will be able to use in their classroom i know that ms porter asked about social emotional learning in summer school and what the support for students would be one of the things that's really important in academic teaming is that we support students in their social emotional learning and so when we created the toolkit components we created protocols and resources to really support students as they're growing their social emotional skills so what you'll see here is we sometimes i think people when they think about teaming they think of it as an on off switch kids aren't aren't doing it and now they are and we're done and the reality is that it's skill and we have to get

061better at like we can learn more about that as we go and so when we look at academic teaming not only are kids deepening their ability to talk to each other but they're deepening how they interact with each other socially socially and emotionally throughout thank you dana so this shows you what that training will look like and i'm going to explain that a little bit more in depth the academic teaming training is a three year cycle so there's academic teaming 101 through 601 teachers get two two every year so um we would be conducting the the training cycle for the first three years in 38 elementary schools now we are aware that there are more than that but we have another slide to show the other four so we would be you know conducting training

062in all of the elementary schools beginning in year one and then at the middle and high school level we're recommending a consortium model where there would be cohorts of teacher volunteers from the middle and high school to get them started at that level and then you'll see that in year three all remaining middle high school teachers um would begin so that by the end of the five-year cycle all of your teachers throughout your district would have received the training what the slides at the top that are that show the graduation and color address are the fact that we again want to release this training um to teacher leaders so we will be conducting all pd and coaching support in year one in year two we're going to be asking you to identify teacher leaders and

063instructional coaches who have shown really strong implementation of this work to begin training and coaching alongside alongside us so that by year three those teacher leaders and instructional coaches begin the training support for any new teachers coming in to a year one and all of the remaining middle and high school teachers would receive training through our online training system with coaching and support from your internal teacher leaders and instructional coaches again so that by the time we're gone in year five we have fully supported um leadership capacity and pipeline within your district for the work to be able to continue so that addresses the majority of your schools we are also recommending schools for rigor and equity for four elementary schools and that would be one elementary school in each under each of the principal

064supervisors in year one bringing on two middle schools in year two and then an optional it's not even optional i should have taken that out it is in the proposal for a high school to begin in year three and what schools for rigor and equity means is we've we would be providing a much higher level of coaching and support in those buildings both leadership coaching and teacher coaching to accelerate the implementation so that you have buildings throughout your district that are a little bit ahead of where other buildings might be and have really strong classrooms that we can eventually turn into model classrooms and model schools so that when you have a need to bring other people from in the around the district in to give them examples of what this academic teaming um looks

065like in in classrooms we have um strong implement implementation in places across the district where we can you use them for model classrooms and then the last piece i just want to mention is the metrics that will be used throughout this implementation we are strong believers in measurement theory that includes short mid and long cycle data so if you think about student data you've got end of your testing you may have benchmark testing quarterly throughout your district and then you have teachers that are collecting small amounts of formative data throughout in the classroom and we follow that exact same measurement theory so within the proposal you'll see our rigor diagnostic and our rigor walk our rigor diagnostic is our research validated metric that looks at the critical components of rigor autonomy and use of data

066within schools to look for continuous improvement so this is our more formal measure that we'll be doing three times per year in every building so this is what we would call our you know mid you know mid-cycle data and then the rigor walk would be conducted by um principals in the buildings on a more regular basis so that's a continuous improvement metric where we're really looking at trends across the building so we can use that trend data to define our actions in our action board process which i'll also show you in just a minute so these are our measures of core instruction and you will be able to have access to data of the work of of the implementation work in the schools and how that implementation work is impacting the growth that we're seeing

067in addition to that we also have a measure of school leadership team functioning that's our team diagnostic survey and that will be given twice a year and that aligns to the effective team conditions framework that i mentioned through our partnership with harvard university so it shows us leading indicators and assessment of effective teams so that we can so teams can use that data to increase their effectiveness together through the support of our instructional leadership institute and coaching so with these metric tools we can see trends um by the the pillars of of effective instruction we can use it for root cause analysis our action board and we can also disaggregate the data across schools by grade level subject area and other ways for you to be able to see where implementation is showing great success

068and where it needs more attention so this is an example of some of the reports that can come through the rigor walk history we're always looking for growth trends in standards-based student evidence in how students are working together to achieve this standard and also the third pillar is tracking student progress toward standards we can see growth history by the rigor walk and again trend data in a school we don't identify this this data by individual teacher but we're looking at trend data across the schools so that we can look for systemic implementation that data is used in our action board process so every school within your district will have an action board that their school leadership teams will use to drive the work to focus their actions to make sure that we're working on the

069right thing um so they have 45-day goals and then they break out actions that they need to do to get to those 45-day goals using their short mid and long cycle data and then what we do is we walk classrooms for evidence of done so we might have an action step of delivering pd to teachers but the evidence of done is what is the evidence of that pd impacting student learning in the classroom so if we if we don't see evidence of that in the classroom then that is an action step that we do not consider done and it goes back into the cycle so those metrics across five years also are designed for gradual release so for the rigor diagnostic we will conduct that in all 57 schools in year one we will continue

070that into year two but begin to bring principal supervisors in to calibrate scoring with us and then in years three and four we begin to turn over some of the responsibility for one-third of the schools in year three and two-thirds of the schools in year four and by year five with our support and calibration all of the rigor diagnostics would now be conducted by your principal supervisors the rigor walk metrics are done at the school level so we will conduct training and calibration for all district and school leaders in year one and then we will begin to look for principles with high scoring accuracy they will co-train with us and assist with that calibration in year two and in year three they will begin to take over that training so by years four and five

071again that is a system that has been turned over for sustainability to your district so as a summary we're looking at a multi-tiered approach across five years focusing heavily on leadership development teacher empowerment with a strong focus on rigorous core instruction and metrics based coaching so that we're always using data to adjust and look for root cause analysis of any concerns that we might see and before we go to questions you mind if i just go one more quick first of all thank you penny and thank you deena for being with us tonight and sharing that out with the board of education we have not really had a this level of systems level work around instruction since the stubsy foundation was with us back in the early 2000s all the way through 2008 they were

072leaving as i was coming into u46 that's actually what brought me to u46 was that foundation um we we consistently bring forward proposals of the board around eureka math you'll see that tonight we can bring uh the integrated curriculum but we never bring anything that really is a system level approach to instruction across u-46 and i know this is 18 million dollars over a five year period of time but i want to re remind the board and the community that we uh as a as a board and as a community spend about 25 to 40 million dollars every year investing in our operational infrastructure roofs boilers parking lots foundation work and the proposal here before us tonight is really to reinvest in systems level work that's infrastructure for our instructional programs across u46 and so

073with that before we open up the questions i just wanted to make that tie back that number one it does support a new direction for our school system it's tied to the post codewood response and therefore we can use the funds from esser and the american recovery act to support this work and it really is essential for trying to create a different system for kids to experience in u-46 in the wake of this pandemic and dr johnson if there's anything else you want to share but i just wanted to close with those remarks thank you mr sanders i don't have anything else to add at this time but look forward to uh addressing questions okay uh questions anyone melissa so i want to thank the presenter for the presentation the presentation that um have back

074in march um so i have just a couple questions to start off with as mr sanders said we're looking at i'm looking at um exactly how the dollars go back to the students right and how we're going to know that those dollars are reaching students so to go back to the [Music] the diagnostics that are going to be done throughout this proposal how are we benchmarking those to start with and then i just realized my microphone wasn't on i'm sorry um to go back to those slides at the end where we're talking about the rigger walk and all of the diagnostics how are we benchmarking those to start with and then how um how exactly are those measurements done are they being tied back to measurements that we are already doing like testing that we're

075already doing how's that all going to calibrate into what we are doing right now sure so um the focus really is going to be identifying lita leading data points for us so based on instructional practices and practices of our students in alignment with our standards-based curriculum it will be looking at those formative data pieces and the practices that are occurring in the classroom so really leveraging what are the most powerful instructional practices that we can see and and so in this example looking at teaming of students and how we build capacity of students to also move instruction to share accountability in the learning to provide feedback on a regular ongoing basis two standards that are are at the appropriate level of rigor or instruction and then that formative assessment pieces those formative assessment pieces for

076us as a system one of the places where certainly our edge of growth is that alignment between our formative assessment pieces those data points so that we're not waiting for some of those lagging data pieces whether that be the sat the psat iar map all of those are are parts of a healthy assessment calendar and certainly needed an instruction but we really need those other data points so that we're not surprised either way when that data comes back it should tell us far in advance based on this system what the outcomes will be for for our students because we're seeing that occur regularly in classrooms and we're able to measure that so how quickly does that work i mean i'm not expecting that this happens in june right or in you know september um but

077you know what's the i mean it's we're seeing a a timeline here without dates right right but you know when do we reasonably think that we're going to be getting information that is informative to our practice i mean i'll turn to penny for in a second to follow up but um i think really starting off in a really realistic fighting this off in chunks making sure everybody has access to the same level or the same professional development but also taking to start with four elementary schools that are schools for rigor and equity in advancing them a little bit ahead of everybody else which is similar to how we've done other processes before we should be able to report back to the board on a regular basis on how those four schools are doing and actually

078provide evidence of to support the work as it moves forward and adjust as we go um but you should be able to demonstrate pretty early on um i would say penny i don't know how you've worked in other school districts but at least in our conversations those those schools for rigor and equity really is where you should be looking for those early wins am i correct because of the stronger level of support there you're going to see stronger implementation more quickly but you are you know you are addressing all of all 42 elementary schools right in year one the first rigor diagnostics will be done in the early fall and that's what we consider our baseline data right that's our starting point rigor diagnostics will then be done again in january and in the spring

079but in between those rigor diagnostics every school's doing rigor walks right so your principal supervisors will have access to that rigor walk data that's showing growth in trends and so weekly i mean principals should be looking at rigor walk data and if we're not seeing growth in trends we're immediately of revising our actions to say where do we need to um to put more support right at a board level probably the rigor diagnostics three times a year that definitely you will get a district report that will show the growth in trends across your districts we can break it down by school director we can break it down by elementary middle high so you know we will work to provide the data for for you that will that will show that growth and then of course

080that's going to be combined with your student achievement data which is most important any of you know me adding just one more piece we've been talking also about how we could use these leading indicators to bring back to the board for regular review so that it's transparent not just for administration but for the board to see here's the progress that we're making i know we've talked about that with student attendance and with with some of the disciplinary stuff that we've been you know referrals and so forth but the same thing with the data walks that would be a good i know there are tools that are that you can make available to the board to show that that work as it happens absolutely we would be happy to you know provide any reports or data

081or access that they would like to have to have with those i think it would also be great um you know for them to see some of the action board work that's happening in the schools where they can see how it's directly impacting the intentional focus of leadership teams how are we how are we baselining this so are we taking information that that we have currently in the system and then using that as the starting point and that's we yeah we do so we currently have our common formative assessments that we have in place um as we move into next year i'm sure we could we also know some of the standard areas that um and we have grade level database on some of the standards so we'd have to benchmark it against the data

082that we currently have um i know we are taking iar and the other assessments right now which you know is another data tool that we would have too at our disposal although it's not in capturing every every student but yeah we would have to use the current data that we have and then how are we identifying those those initial schools where we're going to accelerate the implementation so right now we're in the midst of hiring the executive directors the under the new organizational structure certainly we want to onboard the executive directors first and engage them in the conversation but i believe the intent would be to for the other four elementary executive directors to each have one school for rigor and equity that they would lead so we're not that far along in the process

083to say how they would be identified but certainly that would be a collaborative conversation with that site and make sure that we we have buy-in and as part of our um readiness work at the district level you know part of our designing implementation those will be conversations that we'll support as well okay i'm going to let anybody else ask questions they have them kate go ahead um yeah so actually it's perfect then melissa because i want to piggyback a little bit off what you said thank you for first asking about the four elementary schools being identified that was one of my questions um and like this sounds great right i'm an educator myself i've been an educator for 20 years i i got my start here in u46 right but this is just one more

084thing that we are adding to teachers plates and and while the end goal is is laudable and amazing and and worth a while what are we doing to get teacher buy-in where they feel like they or they feel like they're a part of the process where at no point like i'm concerned about these rigor walks are those gonna fall into place looking like an informal evaluation and then it's just one more thing for them to have on their plate right does my question make sense i guess i want to be sure that i'm speaking for our educators oh absolutely that that this is something that that they they buy into right absolutely if if they do not buy into it then it's not going to work so we will absolutely and i i'll let dr

085johnson speak to i know we've had meetings with the elgin teachers association they've sat with lsi and had some presentations um certainly just like any other major initiative that we've had we've always brought the teachers along with us and we will strongly encourage them to do so um i think this is um we have to get out of the change our language around mtss and really get back to what is good core instruction what does it look like how does it function and i think working with these at least starting off with the four schools for rigor and equity there are additional supports we can put in place within those schools relatively quickly that would make it attractive for a school team to want to buy into this for example instructional coaches so right now

086we we had to peel back instructional coaches as you recall one of the things we've discussed pretty heartily is the need to make sure that we have a strong instructional coach at each of these sites okay so there's additional and we've not worked through all the logistics of what each site gets specifically but i think we can make it attractive enough that we'll have schools wanting to be a part of this work okay and i think once you see once once once uh teachers start to see the work that happens at these four schools and maybe with even within their own schools what they're implementing locally that i think the buy-in will come can we add teacher buy-in as a metric that we measure actually i think penny can you speak to that i know

087you do surveys throughout this right i believe there's there's built-in surveys for teachers if i recall there there's a school culture survey that we do throughout this work um the other thing is that we are very very well aware of the need for teacher collective efficacy around this work so we are intentional in you know attending to the input from teachers we also when we're looking at implementation in terms of our action board process we follow an implementation curve right where we're working really hard in the beginning with what we call the coalition of the willing you've got teachers who are are going to see this work and are going to know that it's the right thing for their students and you know we we have different personalities and different approaches to work right we

088have some of us you know every new initiative that comes along we're in we're willing to try it um and and other people are more cautious and we're we're very conscious of that with teachers so we want to get strong classrooms in every building everyone is going to have the same exposure to the training but we understand that the coaching is going to look different for different teachers and some people just kind of need to wait and see what happens next door before i'm really ready to jump in so um this is not a forced approach this is we don't spend all of our time um focusing on resistors we we really want to work with teachers um and and get to that place where um you know it's it's becomes a matter of influence

089within the faculty themselves so um very aware of it so kind of i'm backing on that a little bit penny and um dina can you tell me within your organization do the majority of your folks have classroom experience or are they coming from outside education no absolutely not all of our all of our school coaches our faculty coaches all have both teaching and coaching experience and our leadership coaches have all been teachers and administrators so and you can have the best of intentions but if you don't have classroom experience it's hard to tell someone how a classroom should be run 100 sending anyone into your buildings who do not have education backgrounds and i want to add that penny and i both come from education as well both classroom teachers and leaders in schools thank

090you i have a question eva okay go ahead okay so i i kind of understand this because when i was a teacher we had teacher leaders as well as um instructional coaches and whenever they came in correct me if this is kind of the same um they they took grade level teachers and we planned together there was modeling where actually the teacher leaders and the coaches would actually go into the classroom and teach a lesson and then they would tell us how to pretty much how to group our kids um in certain ways with the curriculum that we already had in place as well as how to make sure that we were making sure that our students were independent thinkers and that we would do the gradual release of the students so that they we

091wouldn't be standing in front of them all the time teaching that they would be thinking for themselves in groups the thing about the um the assessment piece is the assessment that we already had in place and then we were able to not add to that the only thing we did differently was the common assessment when the teachers were planned and what would happen is we would also make sure that the teachers um the instructional coaches were making sure that they were at the planning table with the teachers so that if it was literacy or if it was math that we were all on the same page being taught the same thing and this is how we were supposed to go and implement and teach it to the students so when we did common assessment if

092it was three third grade classes we the teachers were supposed to all teach it the same way so the outcome would be exactly the same of course the same kids are not in the same classroom but we would look at the data and so then when we would look at like map or the other type of testing that was mandated by the district we were looking to see if our test scores were going up so nothing else was put into place and of course we had the teacher leaders or instructional coaches that would have appointments where they will come into your classroom and you would model a lesson and gradually they would release and go someplace else to another teacher my concern is we're not doing this throughout the district if we decide to do

093this only a couple of schools what happens to the other schools they're not it's like we we some schools will be on this uh new teaching frame and the other schools will not so what i describe penny and is this is this exactly what you're talking about um it's it's not exactly it's similar some some similar things um but it is just to to um clarify for you the training is going to be for every teacher in your district okay the four schools that we identified as schools for rigor and equity are going to get the same training as the other 38 elementary schools they were just they will just have higher levels of coaching and support for implementation of that training to move them along a little more quickly but by the end of

094um at the by the beginning of the third year all of your teachers will be at least in year one of the cycle of training so it is a district-wide implementation the thing also that happened is the teacher leaders or the instructional coaches all became principals and there we were left with a deficit so it was constant training ongoing training all the time so after five years do you just um at that time is that's when you're expecting for everything to be in place in teachers to be able to teach in a new way but you're constantly having teachers that are always retiring right and that's why we want to develop that leadership capacity in teachers coaches and administrators because we want to work ourselves out of a job and we we you know our

095our nightmares are um you know investing you know having districts invest in something like this and then six or seven years down the road go oh remember when we used to do such and such right no we we want this to be second order change for your district and at the end of those five years to for all of us to be confident that it will be sustained so in this plan do the teachers get together and plan and collaborate with each other dina yes so yes they the intention is that during their planning time they would talk about how they could integrate academic teaming into their into their lessons one of the things i do want to clarify is that there is not the expectation that all teachers are teaching the same way on

096the same day we are providing um student we're providing teaming resources we're helping the teachers understand how the students can use them one teacher may choose to use it with one lesson one teacher may choose to use it with another lesson one teacher may say that resource isn't going to work with me and my students this week i'm going to use a different resource so what we're really what we focus on is how do the teachers collaborate and plan together and leverage each other's knowledge and on academic teaming and use the resources but i don't want us thinking that this is going to turn into on monday we use this resource on tuesday we use that so i call that clicky color teachers so say the teachers get together and they are planning and you

097don't use the same resource but you use the resources that would get to the same goal because you have different kids in different classrooms but at least you when you do the common assessment you're doing the common assessment ex on the same goal or strategy that you have implemented is is that how it works yes that is definitely cool what we do find is that a lot of a lot of the plc's that plan together tend to use the same resource because they can like then get into the nitty-gritty of how to use it but there is no mandate that they do thank you and to clarify too the walk-throughs when we do the those are not calibrated on are you teaching this lesson on this day in this format that is that is not

098the intent of anything like that what we're really looking for is the student evidence and is this the evidence that students are producing aligned to grade level standards then we're also looking at the level of teaming that students are engaged in right are we sitting together but doing independent work are we sitting together sharing answers or are we are we truly explaining and coaching each other to get to the um to to be able to provide evidence through a rigorous task so we're looking at how teachers are tracking student learning within the lesson right your achievement gaps of students you know year after year are the result of multitude of daily achievement gaps right so we want every student to be able to meet the target within an individual lesson and so the focus for

099teachers is really on looking for that evidence and making adjustments as needed to get as many students to the target as possible john you had a question yeah so i again thank you for all that information i really like the prospect here um i read your des moines public schools white paper and again i find it really quite interesting it's good read i'd recommend it to others if you want to see because it seems to be a pretty close representation of our district in terms of size and demographics etc and one of the remarkable things in it showed um the gains in year one and year two and it'll be interesting those are i think it's only in year three or four right now so it'll be interesting obviously there's been some learning disruption it'll

100be interesting to see if you do a follow-up to that in years four and five and six to see how that continues um are there other sort of represented representative data or examples that you have in your sort of portfolio that you can share with us or direct us to sure we we can share additional resources for you um we you know some of our data that we're really very proud of is our data in working with low-performing schools right we've had a couple of schools in florida that were some of the lowest performing in the state that within one in two years came out of um came out of that status and and students are thriving so that's great data to be able to share um the des moines study dina can you think

101of anything else that we can send them so that they can have more there's a case study i was actually re-reading today um from caroline county maryland that we could send them so yes we can i wrote myself a list and i will send that to dr johnson and i appreciate that and i think you know um dr johnson maybe you know too i i my sense is some of this is happening here in u46 and in particular in swaz slash ignite um there's a lot of sort of student empowerment there's a lot of teaming happening there's a lot of self-direction in terms of setting goals and things of that sort and since i've seen that i've often thought why not roll that out more comprehensively and i know if you would agree that that

102is present in some degree in some of our classrooms um yeah absolutely i would certainly agree that um some of the characteristics and the strategies that have been shared here this evening are present um across your numerous classrooms and sites i think of course though the question you know similar to you mr devereaux is really building a system though where it's not by chance and that every student has access to the best strategies to leverage opportunities and outcomes across an entire system and within every classroom in that system and so i think that's that's really what this is an opportunity for us to do um and to bring forward also then that that mechanism for that ongoing regular monitoring of that and and that focus um you know i think i think that's also that

103makes this the priority if it is something that we will be measuring and reviewing and sharing through plc time and plan time and leadership team time that this this is the work this this is the priority um so i appreciate that it's you know connected to a continuous improvement cycle it's connected to school improvement plans it's aligned to the district strategic plan um so i would agree thanks and and to follow up a little bit on what you're saying you know our schools do school improvement plans we saw them a few uh meetings ago with the action plans that were described here replace those pretty much they they would certainly become a significant component of that so when we look at our school improvement plans and standards-based learning and assessment is one of those strategies

104or one of those um one of those goal areas as is sel i think this becomes a strategy that we would be looking across our sites for implementation and it also then brings that data forward for monitoring it as well so i don't think it becomes the entire but it certainly becomes a common piece for us as a system which again would allow us to move forward collectively still needs space which everyone has spoken to to differentiate and identify those other needs for our sites based on on what's what's most most pressing for the students in the the programs at those sites so one thing that might change though and relates to the school improvement teams is is the cabinet reviews and how you know we're in year three of doing the cabinet data reviews

105which we every member of the team really enjoys at least i mean i i know i get a lot out of it um but with this we might need to shift that a little bit um to free up the school improvement team's time to focus on this maybe some additional this work rather than preparing for a meeting with me and the team the other that i just want to remind the board is a year ago on march 9th of 2020 we brought forward a proposal uh to do the harvard data walks uh for the board you approved it and then of course coveted hit and we never implemented uh this also takes into that that that work this becomes that work that contract was never executed so that this now becomes that that format and

106a couple more and i know melissa and kate they have more questions but um this is a five-year contract if we decide after two years you know this just isn't for us is there an out clause or will we put one in sure uh mr phelps do you um you've been working on the contract end of it do you want to answer that question that is correct we have the ability to back out of the contract with no penalties for the 30-day notice and two other questions one is i know kate mentioned teachers getting teachers on board we're also going to have to get parents on board because i assumed schools will look a little bit different than they do currently and um you know parents need to be educated and and explain why this

107is a good thing so perhaps that could be a cac meeting in the fall and then my my my last question for now is we're all very hopeful we're going to be back to normal in the fall but if we look like this can this work even if we're half hybri or half remote half present yes it can work we and i were both waiting to say yes we are seeing it now we are seeing schools where students are participating in academic teams with two members of the team are in the classroom and two are online and they're still teaming together i i was sent a picture this week that i just absolutely loved of um it was a classroom that was completely online um but the t the students were in breakout rooms for

108their academic teaming and the teacher had set up four computers four laptops and he had each team on one laptop so that he could monitor and he would be able to monitor and then turn up the volume to listen to what was happening within those teams in a virtual environment so and our pd can also be done virtually so yeah our pd and our coaching of both leaders and teachers we have moved them to virtual formats if that is what is needed or wanted melissa and i appreciate the the offer to get us additional data um as mr deveraux requested i would also like to see um some instances or perhaps your your insights on where implementations ran into a a barrier or ran into a snag or you know when you had a difficult

109implementation and what was done to overcome that um we you know i i'm i'm continuously concerned about the implementation of this um you know i know we're we're kind of saying two different things right that this is not going to be forced and that you know we want to develop teacher buy-in and and you know to to to bring this about in a more holistic fashion but at the same time we're wanting dollars to reach students right so we're still paying for the service and so if we don't have enough usage of this then it's not going to be worth the amount that we are signing up for in this contract um and so you know i'd like to hear how you have overcome hesitancy in logistics that you've worked with how you've overcome challenges

110in the implementations that you've done especially in districts that that looks similar to ours i don't know if that's something that you know you could you could get to us along with that other data i'm not expecting a big presentation on that this evening but that's certainly something that i would like to hear okay and then this is i think this is more for the the districts um you know realizing that we're using some of the the post-coded funding that we are receiving to to bring this work into the district there are other pieces though that we're going to need to look at as we think about postcovid we're looking at a five-year plan here so this does not really address post-covet learning for especially our juniors and seniors right because they're going to be

111exiting before this even really reaches them um this doesn't address expanding early childhood which is part of the the mandate in that those those american rescue plan dollars um so you know at some point and i know that we have a lot of work to do with our strategic plan um but at some point i really want to take a more i realize this is system-wide but you know a very comprehensive look at how we are driving to those other pieces that this is not going to touch um and to make sure that we are investing money that will touch all of our students and all of the students that are going to be coming into our system in the next few years absolutely so and i certainly don't have that in front of me

112we do not have that finalized obviously for tonight um i know that many of you participated when the governor came to announce the p20 council's recommendations on how to use esther funds and the american recovery act funds i also continue to work on the isb committee working on the considerations for the safe returned in-person instruction and the need for the funds to go towards some of that as well so we will be working and bringing forward to the board a more comprehensive proposal maybe not dollar for dollar but at least the big bucket items that we need to invest in over the next uh four years using these these federal funds uh it is certainly something that's in progress but is not yet done obviously um and then i think ms kerr brought up a

113good point about engaging all of the stakeholders in this especially our families i know um you know there's been a lot of talk about that at the state level when they passed the culturally relevant teaching standards that that family engagement is a huge piece of that um especially when we're talking about addressing achievement gaps and addressing equity within our system um so i'd like to hear a little bit more also from lsi about how you may have been successful with engaging families in this whole process as well donna did you have anything good okay eva yes um after going to the learning renewal resource guide that's um on the illinois state website and that 184-page document that i do want the district to narrow down for me as to what i should focus on when

114i look at one of the things they have is road to renewal vision the role to renew a vision guide to short and long term actions towards learning renewal then the other one is featured initiatives to drive learning renewal when i think about this i think about a new way of teaching a learning renewal tool and even as an educator sometimes you know we've been in college for a long time we do take courses for masters or whatever but what i experience is having a literacy a teacher leader or coach come into the classroom and demonstrate model and teach me new ways of teaching to teach my students it was new to me but it was exciting because sometimes as an educator you can get stagnant and you forget that there's new ways of doing

115things so we have to keep that in mind but i do know that whatever we do we have to implement it with fidelity because what comes to mind is the i think it's the eureka math that we purchase and then we found out only 50 something percent of the teachers were implementing it and using it so we don't want to purchase something and it not be utilized so we won't know the outcome and i think that's that's part of the reason for going with a holistic system level system-wide approach because the the data that we get from lsi and the work that they're going to train our executive directors me and dr johnson everybody that's on the uh principles teachers will all be on the same page and we'll know what it's supposed to look

116like when we walk through classrooms so that we can monitor so i think penny i don't know if there's anything else you want to add to that but um i think the key the key difference here is is the leading data we're going to get out of it will demonstrate whether or not it's working pretty quickly is that right penny it is true and you know the alignment at every level is so important and over those five years we're going to find that there are also systems within your district that need to be either revised or built to support the teachers in the work and when you look at a five-year implementation and i and i talk about those um early adopters right that coalition of the willing that's where you begin but that's not

117where you stay right you you continue to coach and support teachers until you reach this tipping point that this becomes the way of our work so um i i would not want you to leave tonight thinking that at the end of the five years it's only the teachers who really you know are on board and want to do it because the systems and the monitoring and the support within your district and the expectations over that five-year period are going to build that implementation across many layers of teachers any of the questions okay thank you very much given the size and the questions what we'll do is we'll put this back on discussion action for the next meeting then and bring it back with the answers to the questions and that way if there's additional questions

118uh penny and dean if you don't mind being available for the next meeting as well to answer any additional questions that may come in before final approval or or disapproval that that's okay be happy too great thank you thank you very much appreciate your time our next work session item then is our contract for educational pathways collective equity proposal uh mr phelps remains with us and dr lance is also here to uh as long as well as mr breese meister director of educational pathways if the board has questions administration recommends approval of the contract with core one in the amount of twenty five thousand dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged at the career and technical education innovation grant and is included in this year's fiscal

119budget any questions melissa i did i just wanted to thank the administration for the question the answers to my questions i'm my computer is doing this thing where it closes out all of the windows when i close out one window so i'm always constantly trying to find where i am again um but one of the questions that i had was this is just one component of the the grant that we're talking about there's other components um specifically to address how we are presenting the the academy and how we're drumming up you know or soliciting interest in the in the academy to help drive um students into that program so just i thank you for the answer to that thank you dr lance and mr breezemeister for the responses anything else on that one here all

120right our next is a contract renewal for curriculum instruction for eureka meth uh miss banks director of curriculum instruction and mrs angente math coordinator are with us to answer new board questions administration recommends approval of the contractor enroll with great minds for seven years in the amount of three million forty one thousand two hundred and twenty dollars and ninety cents and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents the expenditure will be charged the educational fund and is in the budget for the 2021 to 2028 fiscal years are there any questions okay all right next is a contract renewal for curriculum instruction for the uh for k-12 science and planetarium for biozone resource and miss uh mcmullen is with us this evening as well as celia banks continues to be with us administration recommends

121approval of the contract renewal with biozone for six years in the amount of three hundred twenty eight thousand six hundred and seventy six dollars and twenty five cents and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the educational fund and is in the budget are there any questions and i just want to thank ms mcmullen for giving us access to our information about this program it looks like a great program my pleasure i'm glad it was helpful all right next is a contract renewal for equity and innovation for advancement via individual determination dr lance and again mr phelps are with us administration recommends approval of the contract renewal with avid center and the amount of sixty thousand six hundred and fifty two thousand dollars at sixty thousand two hundred

122let me start over sixty thousand six hundred and fifty two dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged to the educational fund and is included in the budget are there any questions i just want to say how much i'm enjoying abbott as a parent this time around i'm kind of getting a first-hand look at it and it's pretty cool so thank you for keeping it in our district and the teachers that teach our rabbit are pretty pretty pretty cool uh our next is a contract you know for school safety and culture for raptor uh dr braza is here the interim director of school safety and culture if you have questions administration recommends approval of the contract renewal with raptor technologies for three years in the amount of

123ninety eight thousand eight hundred and twenty dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents the expenditure will be charged to the educational fund and will be included in the budget for those corresponding years are there any questions okay our next is a contract renewal for school safety and culture with ombudsman educational services limited administration recommends approval of the contract renewal for with ombudsman educational services limited for three years in the amount of two hundred and eighty six thousand three hundred and eighty dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the educational fund and is included in the budget for those corresponding years are there any questions just oh go ahead john just a quick question so obviously the uh the reduction in slots is

124a that's an intentional function of some of our expansion of in-house kind of um efforts to for the alternative education dr brazil you want to answer that um yes that is correct um we are not anticipating a need of more than 15 slots and that reduction does correspond with expanded offerings in our alternative programs great any other any other questions okay our next is a contract renewal for specialized student services for news to you uh joining us this evening also is dr satter white director of specialized student services and ms fabiancic assistant director of specialized student services administration recommends approval of the contract renewal with news to you in the amount of one hundred and thirty five thousand five hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents and request authorization for administration to execute the documents

125this expenditure will be charged the federal idea grant and is included in the budget are there any questions okay next we have our bids and proposals the first is a bid for curriculum instruction for library management system mr phelps is with us so again and mrs banks and miss ryan coordinator of secondary literacy are here to answer any questions administration recommends awarded the low bid meeting specification to fallout school solutions inc for two years in the amount of one hundred and forty two thousand seventy six dollars and sixty cents and requests authorization for district administration to execute the documents the expenditure will be charged the educational fund and will be included in the budget for those corresponding years are there any questions next item our next is a bid for financial operations for time keeping

126an absence management system uh mr burnage is here to answer any board questions on this item administration recommends award of the low bid meeting specification to kronos sasher inc for five years the amount of one million thirty three thousand two hundred forty dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the educational fund and is included in the budget for those uh corresponding budget years any questions melissa i just have a comment um i had asked about the um difference in scoring between two of the vendors since we are not awarding to the the lowest bidder on this and i just wanted to thank i don't know if it was mr burns or mr phelps that gave a very comprehensive answer to my question so thank you you're

127welcome next steps our next is a bid from fine arts for secondary music construct uh instrument replacement uh jimmy geraldo is joining us tonight along with mr phelps to answer any board questions and congratulations jamie to you and the entire team on the recent re-recognition of us being a community of choice for music so congratulations uh throwing that in there is a little side note administration recommends approval of the award or award of the lobby meeting specification to music and arts in the amount of 222 401.93 and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will recharge the educational fund and is included in the budget any questions i just have one general question how long do we expect instruments to last that's a great question each instrument has a different approximate

128life span so it really depends on a lot of factors the quality of the initial instrument how well it's been up kept and maintained and also the materials from which it's made so um currently we still have some instruments in our circulation from the 1930s and 40s oh my god so we're very very excited to be able to replace some of these instruments thank you yeah we should with cellos good cellos and violins and violas can be back in the 1800s and they're actually more valuable now so that's not a bad thing in all cases absolutely next item i'm sorry okay next is a bit from food nutrition service for kitchen replace kitchen equipment replacement ms hildreth joins us tonight director of food nutrition services administration recommends award the low bid meeting specification to hps

129equipment in the amount of two hundred and four thousand twenty two dollars and forty cents and try mark in the amount of 297 245 dollars as well as the installation from major appliances for fifty four thousand eight hundred and fifty two dollars and fifty cents for a total of five hundred and fifty six thousand one hundred nineteen dollars and ninety cents and request authorization for administration to execute related documents this will be charged the educational fund and is included in the budget any questions okay next item our next is a bit from plant operations for bartlett high schools cogeneration power plant elimination and generator installation project number 207 ms downs joins us tonight uh director of plant operations administration recommends awarded a low bid meaning specification to ams mechanical systems inc in the amount of

130eighty 881 thousand one hundred ninety seven dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the operation maintenance fund and is included in the budget are there any questions i have one question i remember when bartlett high school was built and they made a big deal out of the co-generation why didn't it work i guess or maybe it stopped working if it worked for a while well at this juncture it's at the end of its life cycle so it was used for both heating and electricity at its inception um i think that there were some staff turnovers um it is very specialized equipment it was the only co-generation plant in the entire district and i think over time as staff turned over i think that that was a

131contributing factor but also i mean it is really complex equipment and we had a handful of staff who were skilled enough to operate that system and so um now that it is at the end of its life cycle um there is a desire to streamline it just so that the entire maintenance department can fill in absences and work on that equipment as needed now that makes sense thank you very much you're welcome next item all right next is a bit from plant operations ferelgen high school final phase domestic water piping replacement project number 240. administration recommends awarded a low bid meaning specification to northwest northwest contractors inc in the amount of 962 354 dollars and request authorization for administration to execute related documents this goes to the operation maintenance fund and is included in the

132budget are there any questions next step next is a bid for plan operations for south elton high school's tennis court reconstruction project number 279 administration recommends award to the low bid meeting specification to abbey paving company inc in the amount of six hundred and eighty five thousand fifteen dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute the documents this also will be charged the operation maintenance fund and is included in the budget are there any questions okay have a few parking lots now a bid from plant operations for hilltop elementary schools parking lot paving project number 950 administration recommends a board of the low bid meeting specification to abby paving company inc in the amount of six hundred and eighty three thousand three hundred and fifty dollars and requests authorization for administration to execute the

133documents this also will be charged to the operation maintenance fund and is in the budget any questions our next is a bid for plant operations for mckinley elementary school paving reconstruction project number 1203 administration recommends awarded the low bid meeting specification to schroeder asphalt services inc in the amount of 314 thousand 391 dollars and 80 cents and request authorization to execute the documents this expenditure will be charged the operation maintenance fund and is in the budget any questions our next is a bid from plant operations for sunnydale elementary school paving reconstruction project number fourteen sixty administration recommends awarded the low bid meeting specification to abby paving company inc in the amount of four hundred and thirteen thousand six hundred and thirty dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this we charge

134the operation maintenance fund and is in the budget any questions our next is a bit from plant operations for 955 east chicago building demolition and parking lot renovation project number 2055. the administration recommends award the low bid meeting specification to chadwick contracting company in the amount of eight hundred and forty nine thousand eight hundred and sixty one dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this expenditure will be charged the operation maintenance fund and is included in the budget and i know several board members have gone over to see what this will what this entails so oh yes next to nine yeah yep any questions okay next our next only one board member probably knows what i'm talking about on this one this is a bid from plant operations for the olds

135ground shop demolition project 2062. administration recommends awards a low bid meaning specification to file our enterprises llc in the amount of sixty nine thousand eight hundred ninety dollars and request authorization for administration to execute related documents this will be charged the operation maintenance fund and is included in the fiscal year budget and this is the building behind ellis this is the building behind ellis that also has a yard that used to used to be the original uh home for transportation and has been used for our maintenance department grounds department for quite some time any questions and i would say that we need to demolish this bill yeah that building needs to go sheila's shaking a lot there all right our next item is a proposal from business services for drivers education car replacement mr phelps

136and mr winter will answer any board questions administration recommends approval of the proposal from jerry baker chevrolet in the amount of 459 thousand seven hundred and eighteen dollars and request authorization for district administration to execute related documents this will go to the educational fund and is included in the budget any questions okay all right next is a proposal from curriculum instruction for library ipads library ipad purchase in addition mr phelps we have dr carpenter assistant superintendent of teaching and learning and ms banks remains with us administration recommends approval of the proposal from apple inc in the amount of two hundred and four thousand ninety three dollars and requests authorization for district administration to execute related documents this will be charged the educational fund and is in the budget are there any questions all right our

137next is a proposal from specialized student services and information services for a technology purchase dr satterwhite is with us as well as laura macias director of information services administration recommends approval of the proposal from dell marketing lp in the amount of fifty eight thousand twenty three dollars and request authorization for administration to execute the documents this will be charged the idea part b flow through and idea part b preschool grants and is included in the budget i have any questions and our final proposal for this evening is from information services for interactive board bundles ms macias will remain for any questions administration recommends approval of the proposal from dell technologies pay systems inc and insight for a total of six million five hundred and sixty seven thousand eight hundred nine dollars and request authorization for

138district administration to execute related documents this will be charged the educational fund and is in the budget are there any questions okay mr rodriguez i know we have to go back and close can i just do a motion to move back into close or to have to read the whole thing again i would read the whole thing read the whole thing okay find the whole thing here all right can i have a motion to move into closed session to discuss individual student disciplinary disciplinary matters pending probable or imminent litigation the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in a park recreational or educational setting or specific volunteers of the public or legal counsel for the public body the purchase of lease of real property for

139the use of the school board the setting of a price for the sale or lease of real property owned by the school board collected negotiating matters between the school board and its employees of the representatives or deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees review of closed session minutes and individual student matters so move this melissa second this is veronica roll call please uh mr deborah yes ms nolan yes ms owens yes mr supporter yes miss smith miss thomas yes mr president yes morrison's approved seven zero you