001I like to think he'd be more prepared, but I know my child. Will would be trying to see if there's a special meeting on Thursday. Oh, that's what Matthew used to do. It would drive me bonkers. Sam says he works better under pressure. Yeah, until that pressure. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Now, William, get the kit. Get the kit. Will you say we are now reconvening into open session. I understand. Welcome, everybody from civics class. I understand that there's actually a computer being set up in the lobby to for anybody to watch from there. Can we have a roll call please remain us. Mr. Nader here. Yes, please. Mr. Braza here. Dr. Elliott Schermer here. Mr. Heineman here. Miss Newman here. Miss Harris here. Mr. Walker here. Mr. Strzok here. Would everyone else at the table please
002identify themselves. Roomie Isaac, executive secretary. Tom Krieger, chief human resources officer. Sorry no mic. Karen Warner, chief communications officer. Tiffany Rowe, assistant superintendent for student services. Brian, chief operations officer. Ali Mahanti, assistant superintendent for finance. Gabby Finn, principal Highland Park High School. Okay. Assisting setting up the viewing for the other students. Ron is also out there. Mira Antti, assistant superintendent of diversity, equity and inclusion. Bruce Law, superintendent. Our first item of business is approval of the board meeting agenda. Is there a motion to approve the agenda as listed? Is there a second? Second. Okay. All those in favor. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions. The motion carries. Oh, and our first next item of business is our recognition of school board member appreciation. This is you, Bruce? Yes, thank you. So school board members day is November 15th.
003It's so nice that knowing that fact has turned out so many students to show their appreciation for the school board. Ron, and you may be busy setting this up, but there's a resolution in board docs that I don't think anyone wants me to read. But I do want to mention a couple things about a couple whereas clauses I think are important. And they both have to do with leadership that the school board members responsible for providing leadership that ensures a clear shared vision of public educational schools. Sets high standards for the education of all students requires effective and efficient operation district. And they give voice to the leadership, you know, through board policy in the district. And I have all the characteristics that we can think of for this board of education. It's the leadership
004that they've shown through very difficult circumstances and even in the regular order of business that is so incredibly valuable to this district, students and staff and families. And for all the reasons that we should be appreciative, very appreciative of board members, the long hours they put in the hard work that they that they give us. I think it's the leadership that they have in the district that we should all be most appreciative for. And I would also add one thing. I've never played football. I mean, always been too little to play football. That does not keep me, however, on the weekends from offering my opinions when I'm watching the game. It is a very different thing. I suspect being in the game and sitting and offering opinions on the sidelines. Board members are all in
005the game and we're very, very grateful for the leadership you've shown that you are board members for district 113. We've given you a little token of our appreciation. It's a very nice pin. It's not the cheap ones that we put out to make sure no one takes them for every meeting. But we've given you a nice pin with district 113 to say thank you. So thank you very much for all you do for this district. Thank you, Dr. Lough. Now moving right along. Next up is board reports. That's the president's report. This week I'll be mercifully short. If you have not yet taken the survey in connection with the superintendent's search, please do so. We extended the survey until tomorrow because there was an issue with the email service provider. But please, please, we want
006to hear from everybody within the community. Please take the survey if you're able to. Other than that, we're at that time of the year in which all sports and activities are ending and we're about to gear up winter. We're getting close to the end of the final assignments and classes. It was an incredible fall season for some of our sports teams and some of our activities. I want to congratulate everybody on working hard and a job well done and for playing hard. Now great, great seasons and a great fall. And finally, just everybody have a good Thanksgiving. We're coming up to Thanksgiving. Enjoy the, enjoy the days off. And that's it for this president's report. Now we move on to administration information reports. First up is the superintendent's report. My report also, I wish everyone
007a happy Thanksgiving. It's hard to believe that that's where we are in this, in the school year. The, as you know, the weapons detection system screening process started at Deerfield High School that just recently started. I'm sure everyone is very curious how that's going there. We anticipate in the very near future providing a report to the board, a security update. And that would be a good time for us to share how it's working at Deerfield High School as well, even though it's recently started. We would like to have that as part of a security report coming in the near future. That's all I have for my report. Next up we have the Illinois school report card for 2023. Is that Dr. Law or Dr. Locke? It's Dr. Locke. Hi there. Thank you. So I'll do,
008I'll do the talking here, but this is, we're going to, we're going to review our data. We're required to do this every year. We thought it was particularly important this year to spend a little bit of time and dig down and try to understand what's going on. And we've had two or three meetings as a team to refine what, how we're going to talk about this. And I'm sure Debbie, Kathy, Mira, Tiffany, others chime in as appropriate. And please ask questions as we go. So I got to turn this on. Ron? No, it's, we tried it. It's trying to remote all the way to Ron's computer. It's on at least. I'm not that much of an idiot. I have one idea. I had a joke. I know some people who do. Here's what we're going
009to, here's what we're going to do. We're going to talk a little bit about the report card itself. How is, does its calculations, why, how that all comes about. We're then going to focus on just a few of the metrics that are there. And then sort of conclude and refer back to something that Mr. Strzok said about being the best school district in Illinois. What would we have to do to get there? So the report card, it's an annual report. It shows how the state and every school in the state is performing on a wide range of goals. This isn't just a few pieces of data. There's tons of information here. It says complete a picture of student and school performances we have. It's the sort of thing that's required by law. The feds ask
010every state to do this and every state can figure out the way that they do this. But reporting on school progress is required by law. There's a few grades that come on a report card. Exemplary as at the top, it goes to the top 10 percent of schools in the state. At the bottom three are levels called targeted, comprehensive and intensive support, which based on various metrics means the state intervenes with money, tools, resources, accountability to improve. In the middle is a wide band called commendable. In high school, there are eight indicators that combine together to make those ratings. Three quarters, 75 percent of them are academic indicators. Reading, ELA, math, science, graduation rate and English learner progress to proficiency. There's some school quality and success indicators. Chronic absenteeism, climate survey response rate and the
011percent of ninth graders on track to graduate. Is that response rate or the outcome of the client survey? That's just the response rate. The state uses that as a proxy for climate. And we'll talk about that in a bit. That's a good question. In the near future, there will be an indicator about college and career readiness. We talked about that in August. And there will be an indicator about fine arts. Those are all coming. So in 2023, Dearfield High School is rated commendable. This is a new kind of infographic that the state has provided. And I've chosen to show you how each of the seven metrics score on a 100 point scale. And you can see on this that on a lot of metrics, Dearfield gets all the points that are possible, 100 out of
012100. You'll also note that because the number of English learners is small at Dearfield, they do not get a score in that area. And that comes together to result in a commendable rating. HP has similar data. Note that in HP, English learner pathway to proficiency is included here. So they have an extra measure because there are sufficient numbers of English learners at HP to merit that kind of score. Again, these are on a 100 point scale score. So let's look at these scores over time. Red, you've got Dearfield. Blue, you've got HP. And you can see that there's some changes. The most noticeable change is this year, Dearfield High School slipped below that threshold between exemplary and commendable. So now it just has that commendable score. That level fluctuates a little bit each year because
013it's only given to the top 10 percent of schools in the high schools in the state. But you can see we just were under at this year. Dr. Lock, knowing where we've all been at these last couple of years, did most schools slip a little bit? Did most of our comparable schools slip a little bit? So, exemplary means top 10 percent. Right. But did that exemplary come down even as well? It didn't. It's always the top 10 percent. Did the number for the example? The 91.24. On most metrics across the state, performance is down. Okay. Thank you. That was perfect. But it's still a relative score. That's what I'm saying. So let's look a little bit how these look on the x-axis. You've got the year on the y-axis. You've got, again, the scaled indicator
014score from 0 to 100. And you can see at Dearfield, a bunch of metrics were real level. But over time, you can see we have declined in performance on a few, particularly chronic absenteeism. We'll talk about that one in a little bit. Similar data at HP. Some improvement, some declines, mostly in chronic absenteeism. We have some work to do on EL progress to proficiency. Given that somewhat alarming looking decline in progress to proficiency, is part of that the thinking because of remote learning and COVID? I'm sure that's part of it. I'll note that on English learner progress to proficiency, we still perform better than the state. That said, we're at about 8% at HP and the state is about 6%. That said, those numbers are pretty low. I want all of our English learners to
015be making progress to proficiency. So I think we still have some. Yeah, I mean, on the 100-point scale, it was about 36.9 or something like that. That's a concern. It's a concern across the state. But that shouldn't excuse us from really looking hard at what we're doing to help those students accelerate even more. There is an awful lot of data on the school report card site. I'd encourage you and anyone watching to dig into it. Almost every data point can be disaggregated by any number of factors. And almost any data point has historical trends there that people can look at. The state keeps adding new visualizations to make it easier to understand what's going on there. I wanted to conclude and show you the 65 high schools that were named exemplary. These are, according to
016the Illinois report card, the top 10% of schools in the state. Am I missing something? Are Nutrier, the Glenbrooks, and Stevenson not on that list? That is correct. Okay. The only ones are Lake Forest, Libertyville, and Vernon Hills. When we think of our comparable. Of our comparables, there's the schools that tend to think of themselves as destination districts. Half of them are. Okay. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about some of our data. Let's talk about absenteeism first since you saw that's a driver on some of the scores we have. So the average daily attendance rate declined at both schools in last school year. What this means is on an average day in last school year, 90.9% of Deerfield students were in attendance. They were listed as attending if they are present for more
017than half a minute of that school day. Chronic absenteeism is increasing at both schools since the pandemic. You're chronically absent if you have missed 10% or more school days, including absences with and without a valid cause. Doesn't matter the reason. If you're not in school, you're considered chronically absent. So you could interpret this to say about one third of our students last year were absent for 18 or more school days. Question, how does that compare to post-pandemic what we've seen across the state? Do we know? This is in line with state and national trends. Can we go back a slide for a second? Or if we look at even before 2018, the standard was an attendance rate of around that 95, 96%, correct? Yes, that's how I read it. Historically the benchmark. Well, I don't
018have data older than that. From your expertise and just knowing the business, that has always been the common denominator. Is that 95, 96% attendance? But think about it. In a class of 20, two kids are gone on a given day. Right. Can I just go into your next slide? I want to make sure I'm reading this correctly. That students have missed 10% or more school days. So roughly 18 days of one half of the school day or more, no matter what the reason. So whether it's in the recruiting process and they're going on college visits, whether it's whatever. Now my other question is, does that include kids that are out for like medical procedures that are out of school for two weeks? Yes, it does. Okay. Thank you. This does not include. Well, let me
019go to the next slide and show you. Thank you. Here's how we tag absences. We tag them as unexcused, meaning the student does not provide a reason why they're absent and excused. There's a set of absence validation reasons that a parent or guardian can apply. Most of our absences were excused. This is not including when students are absent from a class for a field trip or a school activity, since we consider that still to be part of the educational process. So if they're going to a field trip, if they're going to something that the school is putting on that doesn't count here. Correct. If they're going to a doctor's appointment or if they're going to something outside of school, then it's excused. Correct. If there's no reason why and we don't know why they're in
020school, then it's an unexcused. Correct. Last question. I hope not. Well, it'll be my last question on this one. I want to make sure I'm really understanding the data because I think data is important, but yet once again, it's a snapshot. Students that are out at PHP programs and things like that, is that considered an absentee? PHP is. So kids who are outpatient. Outpatient. Is that considered an absence? It's a gray code. So they are receiving educational services. So it's actually not considered to be an absence in the terms of how the attendance is monitored by ISB. Exactly. So it's not by ISB standards, things like that. Thank you. I have a question too. It's a set of codes wrapped in, but yes. Are all absences that are reported excused? So if a parent calls
021in, are there certain excuses that they could give that would not count as an excused absence versus one that would be excused? Per board policy, there are valid. There are certain absences that are considered to be valid and those that are not. So a vacation is not a valid excuse. It would be a sickness, a death in the family, those sorts of things that families can find within that board policy. Okay. That's what I wanted to clarify. So those unexcused yellow areas, it's not that kids have just not shown up. It might be that parents are reporting absences that we don't count as an excused absence. Okay. We want students in school. We need them in school to educate them. We think one third of our students being chronically absent is too many. We can't
022do this by ourselves. We need help from parents, guardians, moms, dads, aunties. We need students in school. There's a list of things we're doing up here. We've done a lot of work improving our systems for tardy and absence referrals. Our MTSS teams are spending time trying to identify which of the students who are missing certain classes more often and following up with them. You heard about a month ago about all the SEL-related work we're doing to create a sense of belonging because we want students to feel that they belong in school because they do. And this week, this Saturday, we're going to start sending parents a weekly email with an attendance report so parents know how many absences they have by class for their student. Here's a draft of what that'll look like. We're going
023to get this information out to parents so they can see what's going on. We think part of what we have to do is work more closely with our parents to make sure all of our students are coming to school. I noticed when I was reading through the behavioral consequences for not attendance. I think it was the previous slide. Can you guys explain a little bit about what that looks like? What those behavioral consequences are? And the main reason I'm asking is we all know that if there are students that are struggling with school refusal, there's that balance between getting them in the door because we just leave them in the door before we can get them into a class. And balancing that with the, is there that penalty, it's a tricky walk. So for the
024most part, it is detentions as a behavioral consequence. But in addition to the general consequences such as detentions, our deans also monitor student absences so that if you have a student who has multiple absences or has received multiple detentions to look at ways to build some connections to create a behavioral plan or an attendance plan. So what is preventing the student from getting in the door? So that might include working with the parents to develop that plan, working with the student to develop a plan to set a goal so that they can reach that goal and perhaps by reaching that goal, eliminating some of those consequences such as detentions. We also work with the regional office of education, the ROE, and we partner with them to provide additional support to the families. That might include
025home visits to support them in that regard. And then we're also thinking outside the box. So for some of our students who are extremely at risk, looking at some opportunities to do some online classes, if it's applicable to them, to at least have them in the building and do an online class, for example, maybe in the building as a way to get them there. So we really try to work one on one with some of our most at risk students. It also might be things that we need to look further into, whether that is providing mental health support, providing assistance for addressing drug abuse. So really trying to look at all the different reasons for a student not being in the building and what services we can provide for them in the building and also
026reaching out to our communities to support them too. And within that, it's a loaded question because I kind of assume an answer, but within that as well, how do we help support them academically? Because as we all know, you missed two or three days of a class, you are now in a hole, and now they don't want to come back again, and they're not going to come for summer school, and before you know it, they've dropped off our radar. So how are we dealing with the academic support as well? How does that look? What does that look like? So I think that's, Kathy really said a whole lot and a lot of what she said is similar to what we're doing, but I'm going to make it I guess more when I think about like
027the support from a full perspective, right? And so when we talk about restorative practices or connections, et cetera, like I have some students, we will have an adult that meets them at the door as they walk in because getting in the door is not so easy. They'll talk about it. What are you doing today? Can we, what's happening if you're in a study hall or can I connect you with someone in the TLC? So there's part of that behavioral plan will also include an educational component very often. We have resources in the building that sometimes kids will use as well when they come back to help them reinitiate to the traditional school thing, but it takes time and a lot of times it's about relationships. Listen, we put together transportation where we literally go to
028homes and pick kids up just to help them to get to school. So it's very individualized very often, right? But it is about a relationship. It's about a connection. It's about understanding why they're not coming in the door. I tease my clock because sometimes when we're doing scanning, I'm picking on you publicly for just a minute, you know, because sometimes kids will come in a little late and it's like, why aren't you telling them they're late? I go, because I'm just glad that kid's walking in the door today. I know who that is. I'm so glad you are here. You're 12 minutes late, but I'm so glad you're here. Knowing the kids and understanding that's really important. I'd like to hear that because obviously when you're reading a slide, you see two words, right? And
029what I'm hearing you both say is that there is a nuance, there is a layering, there is that consequence, natural consequences, right? And at the same time, understanding, trying to meet those students where they are because they can't be taught if they're not in the building. So complex question, but why, and I know it's unique to every student on the why, but why is it happening? What do we know about the reasons behind why the number is so high? You know what? Okay, I have an idea of something. I think that from the student perspective, I think one aspect is once you start to get behind, it just accumulates and that just spirals into bigger issues. So I think giving more support to students who are chronically absent, more academic support to help get them
030out of their working with the teacher. But then I think the other thing is that it feels like not every day that every class is worth going to. And I think students do see that some classes many days are just a waste of their time if it's just busy work or like repetitive stuff or if it's just stuff they could do at home. Like, I think that's the ultimate reason why people think it's okay to miss is because it's just it's not always worth their time from the student perspective to be there. So paraphrase, if I, so before if I missed those two days, I miss and there's no coming back. But there are some classes that if I miss, it's busy work. Well, I missed I don't get behind, or I missed the second
031day and still didn't get behind still doing okay. So it seems like there's an interesting and seeing coming back from the pandemic that the value of time for the student and and valuing that students time and what's happening within the classroom could be something. So if I don't see is if I'm hearing you correctly, if I don't see as a student the value of being in this classroom. And I can still get the work done I can still stay you know doing okay right. Yeah. Well, I think something to add to this is post pandemic so much of what happened in the classroom went online. And so there is an accessibility issue, not issue, I suppose but an accessibility question to this where students can now access their material without actually physically being in the
032classroom, which is what we wanted during the pandemic. But now I think could be adding to this issue of their presence in the classroom. And if I don't see the value in being in my time we're in that period of being in the classroom. And there isn't the concept like that and that's one one lie right like that's one of them. That's interesting. So, then the question about like, see time and online courses convention the courses and taking courses online. That's something that we can do in Illinois. No, like I said, like, and I genuinely asked because I know during the pandemic there were some loosening of restrictions of you could take classes online you can take classes online but there's a certain number of minutes with a teacher in a class like, where do
033we stand on that. There are online options, we pay for them. And it does take a lot of work to build those classes in terms of identifying the standards that students will be meeting we largely use it as a way for students to catch up. If a student has been really struggling within a class, here's an opportunity for them to jump into the curriculum. We believe that our classes in person are better for our students in a lot of different ways, but sometimes it is the best option for students who are needing to make up some work. So, that's that the other thing to keep in mind is that teachers want students to engage with the material so if students are absent. There's usually a lot of work on the teachers to try to catch
034those students up and to provide, you know, the direction or the assignment or whatever that they provided in class all the students and of course teachers do that because they want, you know, to be engaging the curriculum. Then you know to Jada's point, it becomes this, it could create this difficult situation the students could, if they're not coming to school but they're able to get the material there to get the instructions some other way and continue to do well in the class, which we want them to do, then there, it feels like the incentives are quite lined up correctly. I made your earlier question. Why is this happening this is all over the US states are struggling with this I recently saw an article I think it was Ohio. It's a statewide task force trying
035to figure out why students are not attending school so this is, this is a big question in the country What, what's going on here that students aren't attending school, are there any national hypothesis yet as to why you see I don't know that I've seen any, I think Jada has solved all of our students typically, but I mean look at, look at, look at national trends for adults in the workforce. Yeah. I think I was going to say the same thing as we look at, you know, the coming back to the office and the whole movement of, you know, do we go back to the office do we not and all of those people I think it's happening, the conversation is happening in a different In a different context with with adults. So I think
036the challenge then comes in education, not specific to our district but the challenge comes in education to how to be maximize that time that we that we do have. So how do we maximize the time that we're face to face with with our class, or the available time that we do have with the instructor know that it's not busy work it's not wasted time but it's time that, like, here is this time that I have with my classmates with the teacher, how is that maximized post pandemic the calculus is just changed for so many kids I mean I'm stunned at hearing how many senior boys or I got my acceptance was I don't need to go to gym anymore. I'm done. I think it's just the calculus and the analysis is different than it used
037to be. Let's be clear they do because they must pass gym in order to graduate. So, yeah, unfortunately, because Jim matters and is important for them. He matters, and we've all seen those kids that go wait a minute, I have to take PE the summer after senior year. So we have to make, we have to try to figure out a way to make seat time valuable to the student is what I'm hearing is there, since this apocenteism has been growing over the last couple of years. We had an opportunity to reach out to our recent graduates to talk to them about what they, in hindsight, right. What they might attribute the not attending the classes in high school and how has that impacted them and now what they're currently doing, whether it be college or
038something else. Is there an opportunity for that hindsight view from them. Other than like informal conversations, we're going to start getting a lot of kids asking to come back Thanksgiving's around the bend and so we'll have all these kids come back in and so I'll very often have an opportunity to just say you know, what did you take what we were you prepared what did it feel like etc and one of the things that's interesting with Jada said because I think, I don't know what you were going to say but I'm guessing there was something similar in that it's, it's more than just saying that it doesn't. We need to make the classroom a space that it feels like it's important either but helping kids understand and this is what I've heard from a few
039graduates that it's not just about the work, it's about the community it's about collaboration it's about learning with other people right. And so sometimes something you're learning to both I would say just both young and old like a son who's in the workforce right now I'm begging him to go back to the office space not because he's not doing his job but he doesn't have that networking he's not So we have to help them to understand the value of that and so sometimes I think that's a it's hard right we're learning that so how do we help kids understand that value of that value of a sense of community right and it's also the idea of feeling a sense of belonging. Do I feel safe and do I feel like I belong at the school
040and that I'm important and valued and I'm important part of that classroom environment so but when they come in I'm going to ask them that question. Do we have any idea of how much of the focus of the MTSS resource is dealing with absenteeism issues like have they become more of an as their work started sort of shifted less from learning strategies more to let's let's address absenteeism. Okay. We punched up absenteeism support last year and have continued it this year in terms of staffing. And there's a definite a sense of especially they're talking about like the village area the kids are coming and drawn to that space and so then also are receiving those academic interventions and you guys are touching on something that I want to just maybe elevate for a moment and
041it's a concept of mattering that you're talking about but you're you're saying how and I think you're getting to this to at first it was well these classes matter these credits matter but I think also students have to know they matter in that it's more than belonging and connectedness it's actually that they are valued in that space and that not just because it's social but because the learning is dependent on their presence and how they're contributing to the thinking that's going on and if they knew that that couldn't happen if they weren't there then I think they would have a sense of oh yeah my you know my crew needs me to do this learning I matter to this process because they actually want to be there and it is a cool space when you're
042with all your friends but if you feel like you have something that people need then you're more apt to go and I I don't see that I think kids are brilliant and they know they see the loophole so they're taking advantage of it warm caring space with an inviting teacher with strong relationships is wonderful and necessary but if that warm teacher is only about busy work that tells the student doesn't matter doesn't matter miles did you want to jump in it's that kids don't know like that that they matter in the classroom and that like they don't understand why the class is important and I thought if I think of maybe if kids knew like we if somehow we were able to tell them like you being in here has a positive impact on the
043class and will have a positive impact on you I think more kids would actually come to class I see a lot of kids in the hallway during class and like all the time and if they were in if they were in class and they were you know where they're supposed to be that I feel and they knew they would be there if they knew how much of a how much more impactful class would be if they knew that they matter so it's twofold it's you matter and what you're learning matters and it's both it can't be just the one it can't be just civics class is important yes it is you miles are important like it's both cool how do we do that well and I was going to throw a third piece in there
044not only does miles matter the civics class matter but miles being there impacts how Jada learns and that they all three of those pegs have to be all three of those like have to be working together in order for that class to really be the high function as we wanted to be here. Yeah, and that in your question how folks know how, because they don't design group work that the kids can see through it if they're just taking notes and another person is just there to like turn it in they're like, I could do this by myself, could I please. But when staff design things that actually require jada's thinking on something and miles differently than they know it does matter and then they actually come together to do that work so they're the, you
045know, we know how to do it. We can do it better but they also can sense when we don't have it right. And that's what they're, you know, they'll put they're like a. Nihilist in some ways, but they're also just really know how to snuff it out so you have a face Rick that I'm going to do we put together a program for staff to emphasize that and don't make it happen. We are. Yeah, we actually are. That's exactly. Ever heard a teacher say that to because I feel like we talk about that all the time. I hear a lot here. How we impact, how we impact, and whatnot but not I don't hear it from teachers, it's very like class starts and they're already going and there's already kids missing they're like, they don't
046really do anything to put in the attendance and start class and Some people walk in two minutes, then there's some people walk in 10 minutes late, and they don't know that them being late is like affecting everybody. And I feel like if they knew, we would actually have more people here. So that's attendance. It's hard. It's humbling. Do we know Libertyville Lake Forest and Vernon Hills. Do we know what their absenteeism, are they having the same struggles of their. All the data is on the report card. It's all public. There's lots to learn from. Yeah, those places. Yeah, I just wonder if they're doing something better. Yep. They're giving away TVs. I think something that started before we before we move on. I think something to men to wrap up is this part of it.
047I should say at least that the absenteeism piece is sounds like we're doing everything that we possibly can as staff. Everything like teachers day in day out staff is doing like everything that they possibly can. I don't think this is here out of a lack of trying. I think it's trying to figure out what is it and like cracking that code. But I think, you know, there's sounds like we're trying really, really hard. We need to crack the code in some other way. Because I'm sure a lot of your teachers think that they are projecting to you how important is that you render them, but you're not necessarily walking away. So these are these are the things we are learning. Right. How do we do this in a way that you maybe we need to
048specific thing. I am so glad you were here today. Right. Like, what does that look like we are learning and hopefully to your right. I think we're all trying to express it. But like someone they're not if you're not seeing it, then something's not going the way we need to do it. How about free sushi for the kids with the best. Looks like. Your friends out in the hall will just take a chair. Thank you for saying that. We appreciate it. I think we feel we're working really hard. We know we haven't solved this, so we are reflecting and trying to brainstorm other things to do because this is not it's not an okay outcome that we're getting right now. So we're going to keep working on it. I think we also feel that this
049needs to be something the whole community supports. I'm sure there are many excused absences that are valid and appropriate. I'm also sure that there are times when a student says, I don't want to go to school and parent or guardian says, well, okay, just covered here at home. And in that case, we need the parent to say, nope, you need to go to school. We need you in the school. You can't you can't do your work on Schoology at home today. So we need that partnership with our parents and we need parents to help other parents to do that. And it's hard. It's really hard. I mean, all of us here are parents and it's really hard. And when you look at times, and because we got used to remote learning, there are times you're
050like, yeah, as long as you admit it, I did it, you know, sure. As long as everything's caught up on Schoology by 11 o'clock today, you can stay home, but it'll, you know, we've all got and so it is. It's very hard and it is a partnership. I do think that schools have done a good job of if you have a student that's really struggling with attendance, they will they really they can coach you about not calling them in and not excusing them. And so having leadership in the school, giving parents permission to to do the hard thing, you know, and on the same note, I think for those parents that are. Really struggling with their kids and and getting them in the door that email is going to be really hard for those parents
051because you know what it's another example of a parent as a parent that parents failed in the parents eyes. It's just like that automated voicemail. And so just being aware of that that there are some parents that will really struggle with that. And maybe it needs to be a personal phone call when we know that for some of those parents that email or that automated call is just a giant. Well, you can turn off the. Who knew didn't even know I could do that. But you know, I think there are some parents that getting that email is going to be crushing versus getting our people who have relationships with those families to have a conversation to say this is coming. Let's talk about it. And Dr. Locke at the same time, I think as a
052whole, having the whole community participate in this is absolutely key. So it's that we're hearing that balance. And working with the parent and about helping develop strategies, you know, so the one on one kind of thing. I know that we know it happens. We have a lot of kids are get their parents passwords this week. Yes, right. Okay. Let's keep going. So let's talk about climate. You've seen numbers like this before. This is the response rate from 2023 to our five essential survey, as I mentioned before, the Illinois school report card just uses the student response rate as the metric for school quality. And the audience hear that you don't answer the survey, we look like a bad school. Students and teachers and parents. Answer the surveys. The responses, we care about the responses, of
053course, but what you say doesn't affect our rating, but it's the it's the response rate that does. Do that superintendent search. So do we like know before the like cutoff or whatever like hey you're at like 70% you're at 50% that have responded like how, but we don't know who we don't know. We just know that like this is your kind of where you're aiming but we won't know. Right. Who's responder and emails with the response rate, we get the rate. Yeah, not right. Not who. Any creative way that that anyone's come up with, because this is a game. This isn't an actual value. I remember there are usually like five points. They're like five or six emails that go out reminding us. But like I wonder so the schools that are having the climate
054survey scores that are like, what are they doing, you know, that's different than what we're doing. No, I distributed right now for students like do they receive it during homeroom and they have time to fill it out or is it you sent. Okay. Yes. Yes. We do them in homeroom and I feel like sometimes, I mean even looking at this, the teachers are 69 51. Sometimes I feel like the teachers in our homeroom aren't pushing them. Like, we get to homeroom they're like, like, hey, how's everyone there's an email, the survey new email. That's all we hear of it and it's not really like, oh, there's this important survey that you guys have to take. It's more of a, it's brushed over and then they is not brought up again. My sense is that there's
055some work we can do to provide more tools for teachers so they can be encouraging, be supportive really sell this to their students and we might be able to do some more follow ups to get homerooms reporting when they've done this, all those Yeah, yeah, and it matters. Yeah. And to be fair, the data that we get from it is incredibly like valuable. Like so it's not only like do this because we have this percentage of responses, what we get from it is also helpful. We want to hear. Okay. Let's talk about academics then. So, we're going to talk about test scores. Absolutely. Couple caveats here. Our SAT scores and the Illinois science assessment scores that we'll talk about this is spring 2023. When students were in 11th grade. They are now in 12th grade.
056Students who spent their first year of high school during the pandemic in remote or hybrid settings, the D surveying work that we have talked many many times about will not have impacted these students and year to year comparisons. By definition, involve different students. So, if one year was particularly one way or another way, you'd see that you might see that in a distribution of test scores. Usually, the statisticians will say we have enough students so these year to year comparisons are probably valid and fair, but it's always important to take into consideration. Is this cohort effect when looking at this data? Okay, so on our 11th grade. SAT English language arts. We have slight increases district wide in 2023. When looking at the proportion of our students who are either meeting or exceeding standards as
057set by the state. I want to be real clear that the students in the orange and the yellow bucket those who are partially meets are approaching. I believe those students know an awful lot about English language arts. They just, as of this test, we're not able to score at the sufficient threshold. They need more time, they need more support, they need some extra help. They had a bad day. Any number of those sorts of things. They know a lot. And there's many, many other indicators. Grades, homework, papers, reading that would indicate they know a lot more than just this test score says. That said, the SAT is the test that the state uses. It's been around a long time. There's been lots and lots of literature written about it. So it's a measure that we
058should at least pay attention to. And you can see what those results look like. When you break it down across the schools, you can see, again, slight increases district-wide in last year. A little bit more of an increase at Deerfield. A slight decrease at Highland Park as those happen. And again, you can look at how the trend was going from three years before the pandemic until now. Let's look at math. On SAT math, our system trend doesn't seem like it's going in the right direction. It matches the rest of the state. But statewide, our mathematics improvement overall has been a decline for the past seven school years. If I'm reading this correctly, almost 70%, not quite 70% of students in the state are at partially meets or approaching math proficiency this year. If you added
05948.6 and 24.7, yeah, that's how to approach that. Or do the flip side that barely 20%. Right. Again, we do a lot better than the state. Yeah, but still. But as you said, we're going the right direction. Look at the trend. Look at the trend. So you can see that broken down by schools. So again, the trend isn't quite as consistent across schools over time. Deerfield sort of bounced back nicely after the pandemic and it sort of reset back then. I don't like calling it out. But if you do that same math, Mr. Strzok, this year, this is the first year that more than half of our students at Highland Park were not meeting or exceeding in mathematics. Has the timing of the SAT test changed at all where potentially the students haven't, they're not,
060they're along in the math that's covered by the SAT? I know I used to know this and I don't anymore. But is there any issue with timing? We get a window from the state where we have to administer the test and our test dates vary within that window. But I don't, Debbie Kathy, I don't think that it's been much of a, I don't think that's much of a factor. I'm asking something and I'm not by any means trying to call out 112 versus 109. For years, those two districts ran two very different math curriculums. Are they still running very different math curriculums in terms of what kids come in with in ninth grade? So 109 was geometry for all, et cetera, and 112 is not. Are they still running two very different? I don't know
061the specifics. The answer, I will say that I think there is plenty of room for deeper and more sustained partnership with our sending districts, particularly around math. I was just making some experiential knowledge between the two and that was my thing to get this going. There's such a disparity between our two schools that it's got to be more than what's just going in the classroom. You actually answered the question that I was going to ask as a follow on is how much progress are we making in our coordination with our feeder districts on math? Because this is an issue that we identified as a potential as a concern. I think four years ago. So we had a meeting in spring of 2023 to talk about math with the elementary districts. Right after that meeting, Dr.
062Locke created a template for the ways in which the three elementary districts and 113 to work together. I think this would get at what Jody was saying. What is the curriculum? What is being taught in the middle schools and how is all that going? So he created this document, spent a lot of time on it. I shared it and I'm moving on because we've had nothing back from it. And you're right. We think it's a huge opportunity that we can't, you know, as I said, Mike created this document. Mike created this document that I think was a great blueprint. It got us started, but it requires partners and work. Yeah. Math is so sequential. You don't build a foundation. Everything else after it's a waste of time. Yeah. In science, both of our schools that
063are improving at all levels. So what I want to do here is I want to talk a little bit about the differences in outcomes between subgroups because this is something that matters. I know greatly to all of us. What this table shows is the annual proficiency targets that the state of Illinois sets per the federal legislation. They set these in 2022. Our data is there in red and blue below that. One way to look at this is to compare our numbers with the states. And you can tell if we are helping the state reach their goal, if our numbers are ahead of those, or if our number is below, we are a lag on where the state is trying to go. I will also reiterate that just because some of these targets are low for
064various subgroups that in no means represents any sense of what is possible by these students. This represents the state of the current system and all it entails. It certainly does not represent our targets. Correct. Correct. This is our ELA data. Our math data is pretty similar. Again, things are redacted or there's no data. No data means we don't have anything there and redacted means the number is too small to share without the risk of revealing identifying information. So the English learner data for HPHS for both math and ELA was at zero. Correct. What does that mean? That means 0% of our English learners were meeting or exceeding on ELA or math on the SAT as juniors. And the goal was 10. The statewide average goal was 10.3. I find this data sobering. Let's look at
065it a little different way. We think there is much to learn from other high schools. This is a scatterplot of all 650 high schools in the state of Illinois. On the x-axis is the percent of students who are identified as low income, 0 to 100. On the y-axis is the percent of those low income students who scored at the meets or exceed level on the SAT in mathematics. Here's our two schools. What I take away from this is, as a for instance for, well, there's lots of things to take away from this. I'll remind you that on the website, public facing, easy to do, you can perform these same scatterplots with any demographic you'd like and do this comparison. I chose low income because it's the default, to be honest. But this set of schools
066right here, roughly, when compared to Highland Park High School, these are schools that have a greater proportion of students identified as low income and a greater proportion of them scoring at the meets or exceeds. This tells me that there are schools that can do it. This is not about the kids. This is about how do we organize ourselves, our teams, our minds, our actions, our beliefs, in order to serve our students. There are places that are getting it done, or getting it done in ways that we can learn from. Yeah, yeah, and the scatterplots are all there to dig into. You can see them. Yeah, and you can even hover over them on your computer and see the name of what the schools are. For hours. Good. It's, it's fun. Let me show you a
067couple other pieces of data that are not part of the report card, but seem germane to this discussion as we're thinking about things. With Ron's help, we pulled the average GPA by department across the highway over time. The average GPA has been increasing. Our grades are trending higher. Grades are trending higher. But our performance on other measures isn't trending higher. And the standardized test that is written so that you get good at answering the question, not necessarily good at the subject matter that's on the test. Oh, but there's also just general grade appreciation going on, not just here, but everywhere. This is a national trend. And that doesn't say, and I'll use the SATs as an example. You did really well in your math classes, but you are not at the level of math that
068those other groups of SAT questions are. So no matter how good you are at math, you have not taken pre-calc. There are six questions on the ACT that you have no way of knowing or however many number there is. Unless you get tutored and you're instructed how do you limit it down. Right. But I think we find the inclination is right that you mentioned, I think is right. But also, this is yet another sobering story. Our grades are going up, our test scores are going down, and our grades are going up as absenteeism is going up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How was that? It's a very interesting. Because teachers work really, really hard to make sure that students can catch up. I mean, that's separate from the measures that you see in SAT. I'm not talking
069about that. I'm just talking about students who are absent. Teachers work really hard to try to help them catch up. Something to think about. I wanted to talk a little bit about growth. I should have had this slide before. What we're able to do also is to, because we're concerned particularly about some of the differences between various demographic groups. This is just a sample of some of the work we can do that compares our 10th graders with 11th graders on SAT scores. And because the SAT is a big national test, they have very sophisticated statistical models that will predict performance based on levels. The way to interpret this is that in the lower right corner, we had 720 students district-wide with both a PSAT 10 score and an SAT score the following spring. And of
070those 720 students, 115 demonstrated more growth year over year than expected. 511 of those students demonstrated the expected amount of growth. And 94 students demonstrated below the expected amount of growth. Our students are doing what they're expected to do. And 115 did more than they would have expected to when compared with a national distribution of PSAT 10 and SAT performance. Does that make sense? So looking at this for, I'll do HPHS, we have a nice size group of kids that just, you know, overperform, in essence, overperformed by their 10th grade standard. Most kids are in the middle. But we also have a very large number of kids who underperform by comparing, who lose progress between 10 and 12. Yes, but I want to make sure you characterize the students in the middle are learning at
071the expected rate. They're not sitting still. They are growing. They are learning. The amount of progress that is based on the big national data set. And so we do well by the majority of our students, but there is a group that we don't. Right. Something is happening. Yeah. And I think the other thing to point out, Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, is there is a difference between growth and attainment. I know that part's right. But just because someone is making an expected growth doesn't mean that they are at the level of making standards according to the state of Illinois, which are higher than college board. Yeah, yes. So you've got that also to to contend with. But this is why, you know, students need to grow a lot and very quickly if we're going
072to get them to the level where we say, okay, now they are meeting the standards, which is an attainment metric as opposed to this, which is a growth metric. Yeah. Here's some good news. Again, not part of our summative designation, but district wide. We took more AP exams last year. And the proportion of scores on them that was passing was even greater. More tests, greater pass rate, improvement in all directions. So that's some good news. Can we just pause on this to say just how good news is. Keeping in mind that the AP exam is not an exam that we write. It is not an exam that we grade. So this is truly an external measure, if you will, because, you know, the tests are created by the college board. They're graded by people. And
073Bruce, if I could just interject, it is also a test based on the content of the course, not a test designed to sort kids. But based on the knowledge and skills, students are expected to learn based on a large group of college faculty. And this is another point I was going to make. This means this is instruction from teachers. And so I think it was last year, Mike, when you were talking about the AP potential. We were saying, look, we've got more AP potential than we have students in AP classes. And this is exactly what we would expect to see. We have more students taking AP exams and the scores are actually going up. It's good. So there's a good thing to be said for encouraging kids to push themselves or to challenge themselves to
074explore and see what what they're good at and take advantage of it. If they are in a classroom where they feel like they belong, it is a comfortable space, has strong relationships between other students and the teacher. And the teacher has high expectations intellectually and academically for them. Kids thrive. Can I ask why there are 40 percent more AP exams taken at Highland Park than there are at DHS? You can certainly ask. I'm happy to give you the data. Remember, HP is a bigger school. By some amount, yes. By some amount. But are there more AP courses offered at Highland Park than there are at DHS? Not really that different. I mean, there's more of a culture of AP test taking at HP than there is at Deerfield. Is that fair? I don't know the
075numbers, but there is certainly we don't require the AP exams to be taken. So I think that we could compare AP enrollment versus AP exams taken as a factor, too. Unfortunately, not all of the schools that our students are. Unfortunately, not all the schools that our students attend actually take the AP exams for credit. And so oftentimes our seniors who have been accepted to a school might opt to not take the exam if it's something that would not help them in the long run. Now, of course, we'd like to see those scores because we want to see how we're doing in preparing our students. But certainly that's another thing that our students have to worry about if they know that it's not going to count. So there's that piece as well. I think ultimately, this
076isn't the purpose of tonight, I know, but ultimately it's the student's choice whether they want to take that test or not. I think what we want to make sure of is that there are consistent offerings between both schools. If there's an AP class offered at one, it should be offered at the other as well, I think. I don't think there's any, we don't have any. It's not offered, we don't know if anybody wants to do it. And there's also enrollment questions too. Okay, so we're doing a lot of work to build this foundation for improvement here. So to recap some things we've talked with you about for the past six, nine months. As part of our desurveying work, school teams, course teams are aligning their curriculum to state standards. Many had done that before. For
077many, it's brand new. This will help us make sure that what students are being taught in each class is the knowledge and skills and dispositions that the state expects. Many of our course teams are adopting common team generated assessments or assessment tasks or common grading scales. We have started giving our ninth and tenth grade English students and most of our ninth and tenth grade math students star testing as a way to provide diagnostic data to teachers and provide data to course teams and administrators about performance. We're also for the first time going to be sharing those results with parents so they can take stock of their students' progress. We're working real hard to sort of figure out our, you know, sort of how to build up our data muscles. So we understand how to deal
078with questions about academic growth, year over year performance on grades, on tests and what that looks like. We've done a lot of professional development offerings. I seem to get emails from our PD coordinators almost every day about new offerings. There's a big website that includes all that. And we had a pretty rich and deep set of summer experiences called the Ready for Rigor Institute this past summer to help students really look at their own practice and how differences, yeah, staff look at issues of race and class and culture can influence and be leveraged to help all children learn even more. And we're also putting even more test data on Infinite Campus for parents because we know parents deserve to get all the information that we have and we build trust by sharing. So doing those
079things as the what, that's what's going to, you believe is going to help our students that are not, that aren't meeting the standard, being able to make up that gap. I think that's building the foundation. Yeah. Let me sort of wrap up with, I'm going to reference Mr. Chuck, your comment from last week or two weeks ago or sometime about wanting to be the best school district in Illinois. For all students. For all students. In the rest of the sense. We think we should celebrate the foundation that has been built over the past several challenging years. And as we move ahead, which will certainly be a new era here in District 113, let's be curious about our data, our system, and the implications for all of our students. So one question for us all to
080think about is about our data. How do we better understand our students, all the assets they bring to us, and what their performance is. There's a lot of stuff on the report card. There's a lot of data that isn't in the report card that comes from conversations that teachers have with students or where students go or how they interact with one another. We've got to understand all that information so we can be devising strategies and tools and supports to help them move ahead. How do we really position parents and families as partners in this work? We're working really hard. We know parents are working really hard too. We've got to make sure we're working together. We're sharing that information. We're engendering the trust. We're communicating the good news and maybe the challenging news also to
081parents in the service of their children's education. When we look at this data, it's clear that one of our foci needs to be on the instructional core. How teachers and content and students are all related and that sort of magical interchange. How do we make sure our teachers know how to work out all those different pieces and design lessons, tasks, units that really include students, push them to think, and make their classrooms inviting and believe in their students? Let's be curious about our structures and routines. How are we holding meetings, organizing professional learning, setting goals, allocating resources so that we can strengthen our collaborative culture and accelerate our improvement efforts? How do we ensure we have the capacity and the will to do this? Capacity doesn't just mean money. It doesn't just mean brain power.
082It means culture. It means routines. It means systems. It means processes. How do we make sure we have all of those so we can set the district to accelerate even more? And change takes will also. This will it be hard? It will mean saying no to parents, to staff, to powerful people. How do we make sure we think about as we move ahead, we have the capacity and the will to improve every year, not just for some of our students, but for all of them. Thanks. Thank you very, very much, Dr. Locke. I mean, these questions I think are probably evergreen. Once we think we get an answer, it's time to figure out the new answer. There's a lot of work to be done here. There is a lot of promise, but also a lot,
083a lot of work to do. But this is what everybody here is here for, is being able to answer these questions effectively and certainly appreciate all the work that went into this and all the thought and passion that went into this and look forward to having all the answers. Because you'll have them for you, right? I think one of the things that I really like, Dr. Locke, is that what you said at the very end, it's about how do we get there for all, not some. Because at the end of the day, we're about all, not some. So thank you for that. I'll say sobering is an understatement. Yeah, yeah. Look forward to the next steps and what we're going to do and how we're going to get there. I think from what we've seen,
084they're possible. All possible. So it's next steps, not what. It's happening. It's happening here. It's happening there. It's happening. So like, how do we broaden it? But yeah, I would say sobering is very much an understatement. So when do we start talking about the answers to some of these questions and those next steps, like, you know, when do we anticipate the next stage of this conversation happening? Well, as well, I guess a couple of things. One is, Mike said, we are there are things that are in process that we think are going to help. They're going to improve things. We've spent a lot of time past few years putting things into place, lay this foundation, as Mike said, one of the slides that allow us to grow. Another point I think to make is as
085part of the college and career readiness that Mike says is going to become part of the report card, one of the things we need to do is we as a district need to define what academic readiness is. What does that mean to us? And the state's giving us a lot of leeway as to how we define that. Mike's starting to have that discussion right now within the district. We're talking right now with administrators. Eventually, this will have to have to bring the teachers in the discussion because this is this is the heart and soul of what we do. Students come to us for four years when they graduate, they scatter. They don't go to one elementary school or the next grade. They go in all different directions. And so this making making them giving them
086the potential to do what they want to do because they're academically ready, whatever that is, that's the heart and soul of what we do. We should be judging our success by the students who are right now need us more than others in order to meet and exceed standards. So the reporting to the board, the work that we're doing, it's going to take time. This is not going to turn around overnight, but there are a lot of strands that are working together. The work that we're doing in groups that aren't succeeding, the work that we're doing to define academic readiness and college and career pathways, making sure that the students who are interested in cosmetology and welding just get as much career attention as the students are going to be doctors and lawyers and hedge fund
087managers. All of this is going to take time, but it's all it's all out there and starting to come together. I mean, there are no school in the world can have a simple quick fix for this. It's a lot of it's a lot of work and there are a lot of things that have to come together, not just, you know, at the administrative level, but with teachers and parents and students. You know, to to make this into not just the school district that has succeeded school district that exceeds student by student by student through their eyes. It's a it's a tall order. In some ways, this last slide, you've now done our work for us developing a set of goals, just write these in a goal sorted sort of way. This is the goal every
088year. It's always the goal. And it's also how how what the valuation should be geared toward that everybody in this room and everybody in the buildings should evaluate themselves is how how they're going about achieving these things. I mean, this is why we're here. This is why any of this is why this place exists. And it's there's a lot of work. What do we want the report card to look like next year that shows that we have moved the moved on this for these goals. Sorry, and are there any interim steps that can be taken or measurement points that we can see that we're on the right path. Not reactive. So not waiting for next year's data. Keeping in mind that this year's juniors have they have not had the benefit of being in the
089survey classes where all the the curriculum that they're being taught is that state standards and at a high level and preparing them for for these tests. So we've got we've got another we've got a few more years of lagging indicators. The other the other thing that we're we're trying to figure out. You know, Mike was talking about growth between sophomore and junior year. I guess you could say the sophomore test is the leading indicator. It doesn't give us a lot of time to do something about it, which is why I start testing. You know, we think that could be more of a leading indicator. So we could we could have more time to try to figure out, OK, where is it that on a skill level that students need support in order to to get
090at those high levels? These are all great questions because you're great to your point. You know, if what what are we going to see next year if all we're seeing is lagging indicators, how does this help? Well, it doesn't help if all you're seeing is, well, this is what happened. We've got to see something that's indicating this is what we're doing. And this is where this is going so that we can intervene before we get to a lagging indicator. But so, for example, right, we're just desurveying some certain classes. Right. What are we doing? What are what are how are we measuring the success of that? And can we do that at interim steps along the way? Can we see progress while we're doing it? Yeah, rather than waiting for a year from now or
091two years from now, you know, test results to tell us. Right. Right. And we missed opportunities along the way to measure whether it is doing for the kids what we hope that it will do. Are there ways to do that? So there are ways. Before I would commit to anything, I'd want to talk offline with my principal friends a little bit. But a couple a couple of things that that I think that we've been we've thought about that are responsive to your question. One is our department chairs and assistant principals are reviewing all of our curriculum maps to make sure that the design and the content of our ninth grade courses are indeed aligned to state standards. We are planning to look at the grade distribution within courses year over year to see how that
092compares year to year. We have some concerns about grade data over time, as you saw here, and there's cohort effects there. But that is a measure that we can use around that, particularly looking at students who previously would have been a survey course and are now in a standard level or an honors level course. So that's one way we can do it. For our ninth grade English courses and most of our ninth grade math students, we will have three star test data points over the course of the year. We should be able to see year over year. I'm sorry, test over test growth. Though this is the first time we will do that. So we're we have challenges just with test administration and tracking that we're still have to have to build out. Furthermore, by
093spring 2024, our current ninth graders will take the PSAT 8-9. Those students will have been through six, seven months of desurveyed coursework. And we should look and see again, it'll be a cohort effect how they did compared to previous years. So those are some of the data that we've already talked about internally. We have not used that data to set goals, and we have some work to do to sort of formalize it. But those are some of the indicators we could be thinking about. Does that answer your question? It does. It does. Are there any qualitative ways that we can help determine? Right. We've got teachers who've been teaching these classes for a long time. Right. Now we're doing it in a slightly different way with different kids in the classroom and in different ways.
094Can we talk to those teachers and say, hey, you're not really getting it. This is working, you know, or, of course, yes, of course. Yeah, for sure. Well, and I would add we'd want to talk to our students to do what is often considered to be that street level data. Right. Because they're going to be the best indicators, I think, of that success. Do you have anything else? Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who put this together. Thank you. Thank you for helping explain it to all of us. That too. Yes. Very instructive. Our next agenda item is our FOIA requests for this meeting. We are up on the board, on the screens. Hearing no questions on FOIA requests, we now move on to our school reports from our student liaisons. Want to
095go first? It's just you. Go for it. Go for it. All right. All right. The year's been pretty good so far. A lot. I do feel like compared to last year, I feel like there's like a new, like almost energy, especially with some of the teachers that the teachers have like super prepared and super like wanting to teach. Not that I didn't feel that last year, but I feel like it's just a new kind of amount of energy ever seen. And I feel like that's even being vocalized in some of my classes. Some teachers are actually saying like, I wake up, I woke up this morning wanting to teach well and whatnot. And so that, on that, and then let me see this. Both is my figure. Yeah, so stunts, sleepaway stunts field trip. And
096I heard about that a lot in like, well, last week in the news, and it's all over the school on TVs. I think. At a 10 place finish for boys cross country and boys football team made the second round of the playoffs this year. It's been a long time, correct? Yeah, very long. That's a really big gap. And on Saturday, there was a meet with GBN for swim, for swim, and had multiple state qualifiers and even a school record was broken. So that's all I got. Excellent. Thank you very, very much. All right. So it's also been a pretty solid year at Deerfields right now. We're kind of nearing the end of school chess, which is our like fundraising event we do every year. It's for this program called Gigi's Playhouse, which is a local
097center that works to help families who have kids with Down syndrome. And it provides them with like speech therapy and educational programs and just emotional support. So it's a great charity to be raising money for. And so far it seems to be really successful. Yeah. And it's the last week. And then last week we had the Mean Girls performance, which was awesome. And it was at Highland Park because our auditorium is still being constructed. And it was a really great performance. They sold out, I think, like a couple of the nights, which is awesome. Oh, we also started our weapons detection system yesterday. So it's still very early on, but so far so good within the first two days. And then our e-sports team also qualified for IHSEA States 1A semi-finals. So good job to
098them. Thank you very much. It's great. It's really nice to hear about what's going on in the schools and the buildings from you guys because we don't hear it that often directly. So I really do appreciate it. And I know you both probably have school stuff to do. Feel free to leave if you want to. And thank you for your input on the topic. Thank you very much. It's very valuable. It's very valuable. Thank you. It's incredibly valuable to hear your thoughts and your perspectives and just know how awesome it is that you're here and how important your voice is and how things are going. So thank you for being here. That's so important. You always add special insights. They're worthwhile. Absolutely. Appreciate you guys having us here. Thank you. And if you don't mind,
099I just want to add in two things because I know that when the students have to write their reports, it's before the weekend actually happens. So I just wanted to provide a quick update. E-sports actually are state champions again. So congratulations to them. And our girls swimming also went to state. Annika Parquet is state champion again twice. This is her third year winning two events in the same year. So congratulations to her. And then the entire team. So we had the free relay and medley relay and breaststroke and free all swam. And our girls did phenomenally well performing in the top teams of the state. So we are so incredibly proud of them. Great end to the fall seasons for everybody. Well, thank you very much. We will now move on to our next agenda
100item, which is public comments. Per policy 2-230 at each Open School Board meeting, the Board of Education has a public comment period for a maximum of 30 minutes. We are ready to listen and appreciate your comments. We recognize that it takes time and work to prepare a three minute statement. Public participation is not intended to be a back and forth discussion between the public and the board. Questions asked during public participation may be sent via email to be answered subsequent to the meeting. I don't have anybody on the sign-in sheet. Does anybody want to provide any public comments? We'll move right along then. We now are moving to our action items for this evening. First up is construction manager approval for the summer of 2024 construction. On July 28th, 2021, the district entered into a
101master agreement with Pepper Construction to serve as the district's construction manager for certain projects later to be identified and authorized by the district in writing and through the approval of project authorization exhibits. Before the board is Pepper's proposed project authorization exhibit number five for construction management services related to the summer of 2024. We are requesting the following fees for the following services estimated pre-planning of $27,503 bid preparation and procurement in the amounts of $46,363. On the motion of the board, the board is asked to approve authorization exhibit number five to the extent of and only for those services. One, estimating pre-planning for $27,503 and two, bid preparation and procurement for $46,363 for a total award to Pepper under authorization exhibit number five of $73,866. Subject to the review and approval of the district's council. Is
102there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion? We discussed this last week. So can we move to a roll call then? Hearing no discussion. Yes, please. Mr. Braza. Dr. Elliot Schermer. Aye. Mr. Heidemann. Aye. Ms. Newman. Aye. Mr. Nieder. Aye. Mr. Stark. Aye. The motion carries. This item is fiscal year 2024 round one school maintenance project grant application. It is recommended that the Board of Education authorize the administration to apply for the school maintenance grants and to reserve local funds in the amounts of $50,000 to cover the district's portion of the grants costs. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion? Did we talk about, I mean, it's all great. Did we talk about this before? No, actually. So this is a
103time sensitive grant that happens every year. And it's the state of Illinois allocates about $50,000 for each school district to apply. It's a matching grant. So what we did was Ryan and I discussed this that he has a fire alarm project. And it's a matching grant up to $50,000. The project cost is $210,000. Okay. That's obviously not gone on the board yet, but we need to lock it in because the deadline is December. So we need to approve it by December. Can we do this every year? Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Any discussion? Hearing no further discussion, can we have a roll call please, Romina? Mr. Carranza? Aye. Dr. Elliott-Shermer? Aye. Mr. Heineman? Aye. Ms. Newman? Aye. Mr. Nieder? Aye. The motion carries. Now it's the fun one. Estimate the estimate of the aggregate
104levy. It is recommended that the Board of Education approve A, its intent to levy for the tax year 2023, a total aggregate of $109,578,141 exclusive of bond and interest costs. B, $115,520,551 with bond and interest costs. And C, authorize the publication of a notice in compliance with the Truth in Taxation Act for a public hearing on the 2023 tax levy to be scheduled for Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at Township High School District 113, 1040 Park Avenue West. And Highland Park, Illinois is 60035. Is there a motion? I'll move. Is there a second? Second. Is there any discussion or any questions? Hearing no further discussion, can we have a roll call please, Romina? Dr. Elliott-Shermer? Aye. Mr. Heineman? Aye. Ms. Newman? Aye. Mr. Nieder? Aye. Ms. Shapira? Yes, please. Mr. Carranza? Aye. Mr. Strzok? Aye. Ms.
105Schumer? Aye. Ms. Schumer? Yes. Okay, we'll move on now, moving on to our Consent Agenda. Board member might pull any item for separate consideration. Does any Board member wish to pull an item off the Consent Agenda for separate consideration? It is, okay, so then it is recommended that the Consent Agenda be approved as listed up on the screen. Is there a motion? I'll move. Is there a second? Second. Can we have a roll call, please remain up? Mr. Heineman? Aye. Ms. Newman? Aye. Mr. Nieder? Aye. Ms. Shapira? Yes, please. Mr. Braza? Aye. Dr. Elliott-Shermer? Aye. Mr. Stark? Aye. The motion carries. We are this evening. We are going to be moving into closed session after this. It is now 8.45. It is recommended that the Board of Education move into closed session to consider information
106regarding security procedures, school building safety and security, and the use of personnel and equipment to respond to an actual, a threatened, or a reasonably potential danger to the safety of employees, students, staff, the public, or public property. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Can we have a roll call, please remain up? Ms. Newman? Aye. Mr. Nieder? Aye. Ms. Shapira? Yes, please. Mr. Braza? Aye. Dr. Elliott-Shermer? Aye. Mr. Stark? Aye. The motion carries. We are now moving into closed session. Thank you, everyone.