001Welcome to the Township High School District 113. We are a regular action meeting for Tuesday, December 14th, 2021 at 7:00 PM. A roll call please. Mr. Struck Here. Mr. Barraza Here. Ms. Byck. Yeah. Mr. Fishbain. Here. Mr. Heineman. Here. Ms Shapira. Yes, please. Our first thing is our tax levy public hearing. Okay, pardon me. We have to do a roll call again after this. I'm sorry, I messed up my order here. No, that's okay we could use this roll call for the public hearing I believe. Thank you, I'd like everyone else who is here to please identify themselves. I'm Krieger, Assistant Superintendent, Human Resources. Michael Lach, Assistant Superintendent Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment. Karen Warner, Director of Communications. Tiffany Rowe, Assistant Superintendent for Student Services. Brian Ahmer, Director of Facilities and Operations. Ali Mehanti, Assistant Superintendent Finance.
002Debbie Finn, Principal Highland High School. Kathy Anderson, Principal at Deerfield High School. I'm Ron Kasbohm, Chief Information Officer. Mirah Anti, Director of Equity and Inclusion. Ramina Isaac, Executive Secretary. Bruce Law, Superintendent. We'll be doing public comments, but just as a reference point, public comments at this point are only in relation to the tax levy. We will have a second public comment period later on, correct me if I'm wrong. Or we're only doing one program? No, we have another one. Yeah, we do. We have a second one later in relation to other issues, this is strictly regarding the 2021 tax levy. Public comment is not time for back and forth discussion. It's a one-way statement. If you have questions, please send an email to the superintendent for response. I ask that the Board of Education members
003to treat each other respectfully. Public comments can be provided in person and via Zoom. If there are both people live in via Zoom that would like to participate we will alternate between the participants. Registrants who wish to speak live via Zoom during public comment time will need to use the Raise Hand function in Zoom to indicate that they would like speak. Ron will call on those registrations who have activated the raise the hand feature. Is there anyone here who would like to speak on public comments in relation to our tax levy of 2021? There's no one here. Ron, is there anyone there who would like to speak? No one has their hands up. Perfect, and that is 7:04. Is there a motion to adjourn the public hearing? So moved. Is there a second? Second. A
004roll call please. Mr. Struck Aye. Mr. Barraza Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain. Aye Mr. Heineman. Aye. Ms Shapira. Yes, please, motion carries. I have decided this is an open session call to order, a roll call please again at 7:04 again. Mr. Barraza Here. Ms. Byck. Here. Mr. Fishbain. Here. Mr. Heineman. Here. Mr. Struck. Here. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please, motion carries. We're next moving out to our approval of our board meeting agenda. We did, still met the agenda to table item 7I policy 6-300 our PE requirements. Is there a motion to approve the agenda as amended? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? Seeing none, a roll call please? Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain. Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms Shapira. Yes, please, motion carries. Next we're off
005to our president's report. (speaker distorted) pardon me. Okay, as we end 2021, on behalf of the Board of Education, I wanna once again, thank Dr. Law and his team for joining us on this journey and for all the hard work that he and his team have put in this year, particularly going forward with our new plan of one District two schools. We are so grateful to have the benefit of all of your wisdom and experience and education to help guide our process. We all stand ready to offer our support to you in any way that we can and record what the next session of our next semester will bring. There no District out there with as much passion and pride as District 113, whether you HPHS, VHS, red or blue, it makes no difference. The
006personal investment in sense of ownership has started with students, staff, and community alike. One of our greatest assets is our staff. We truly have the best staff. And we know just how much our teachers and staff impact our students through their dedication and commitment. Please remember that our staff has worked tirelessly this year and give them their well-deserved time of a break. If you can refrain from emailing our staff over winter vacation, we would all appreciate it tremendously. We'd like to offer the support to our staff and want them to know that we are here for them. We could also not be the District we are without the community that we represent. We thank you and we want to remind you that we do wanna hear from you. We wanna hear your ideas and your
007feedback. Of course, we love the positive feedback, who doesn't? But understand that sometimes we must hear the good with the bad. We have our opportunities for growth, and shining a light on those opportunities is vital to that growth within our District. As we end, I also wanted to remind people of what it is our Board of Education actually does, for that matter what we don't do. Why do we volunteer to run in public campaigns only to win the opportunity to volunteer our time and to sit in this hot seat known as the Board of Education. As crazy as many of our friends and family tell us we are, we are not. We are in short, a group of seven people who represent more than 50,000 human beings who live in our District 113 community. We
008are parents, grandparents, your neighbors and friends. We are here because we care about the kids who attend our schools, and because we care about all of you. We tell our stories that led us here to this table, but no matter how we got here, we're here to do a very specific job and it all centers around the main job, which is our employment of our superintendent. From there, we delegate the hard work that it takes to run this $100 million organization funded by those 50,000 people who are outstanding educational professionals. We know at times that it can be frustrating that we can't share information or that we can't share what we know fast enough. Sometimes we read conflicting or upsetting information on social media that make it even more confusing. But please know that we
009do not intend nor want to upset or frustrate you though, or frustrate you. And we are working hard to improve our communications that we can all the time. Remember that 50,000 number. That's how many people we have to think about when we make each and every decision in our District. And as far as duty of confidentiality, particularly on all student and staff members, here's something for everyone to think about. May you never have to understand why that confidentiality is so important. With that being said, let me end my last president's report, 2021 with a little cheer. May you all have a happy and healthy holiday season. May you be with those who support you, bring out the best of you and be surrounded by the warmth of those whom you love. With that I will
010turn it over to our next report. Awesome. Thank you, thank you. With that, I will turn it over to our human resources committee for their report. Okay, so the HR committee met on November 29th, and we discussed cabinet administrator employment contracts, which you'll see as an agenda item later on in the meeting. We usually consider renewals of specific individual cabinet administrator contracts in the spring. But this year we wanted to talk about renewal of cabinet administrator contracts as a general topic, not related to the (speaking faintly) Yeah, I don't know why they're going in and out. By having this discussion now, when the renewals of specific contracts are an added, we are able to focus on process as opposed to the performance or compensation of any of the staff members. The question of the meeting
011was what should be our cadence for, where was I? Renewing cabinet administrator contracts in the future? The current practice is that newly hired cabinet administrators are given three year employment contracts. The HR committee likes this practice and we recommend continuing it. Three year initial employment contracts provide stability and helps to recruit people into these roles. With respect to renewals, the practice has been that cabinet administrators receive a new multi-year, generally a three-year contract when their contract is nearing expiration. Several Board of ED members have expressed reservations about these multi-year renewal contracts. The HR committee discussed moving away from offering multi-year contract renewals to cabinet administrators. We invite the full board to discuss this topic after my comments. It is appropriate that we have this discussion in public so that everyone has the same information. Moving
012forward the HR committee expressed a preference for one year contract renewals for cabinet administrators. In terms of the timing of these contract renewals, the committee likes the idea of doing one year renewals around the late spring, early summer of the year that the cabinet administrator is going into the final year of a contract. For example, someone whose contract is expiring June 30th of 23, can expect the Board of ED in the late spring or early summer of 2022 to approve a new one-year contract through June 30th of 24. By doing renewals this way, the Board of ED ensures that cabinet administrators always have between one and two years left on their employment contract without committing to three year deals. Contract renewals are always contingent on meeting performance expectations. There are currently three cabinet administrators whose
013employment contracts expire June 30th of 22, so this coming June. Assuming a quorum of the Board of ED is okay with this course of action, the plan is to bring three, one year employment contracts as action items on January 11th, 22, so that the board can vote on approving them through June 30th, 2023. I know that was a lot, so. (Gayle chuckling) Guess we'll talk about it during the related session, yeah. During the next item, yeah. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Gayle, and it was a lot, but it was well said. So thank you. Our finance committee, Ken. Finance committee met on November 30th, three major topics all of which are on the agenda. So as I said in the news broadcast, so stay tuned Stay tuned. And we'll cover each of them. The three
014are the teaser. So the audit was, it was a clean audit really well done. All good news, we'll talk about that in the agenda. The second item was the alternate revenue bonds, which is a mechanism to finance construction projects. And the third one is the budget and discussion of the structural budget deficit that we've talked about before. We continue to take a look at, that is a result of the expense side of the equation. And it's a structural budget deficit due to expenses, which needs to be resolved by a structural change in operations to handle those expenses. It's not the revenue side of the equation. It's the expense side. So we'll talk about that more, that's it. Thank you, I like the teaser there. Moving on, it's this size of tables tonight, Ken, we're moving
015on to policy committee. Thanks Jody, the policy committee met last Tuesday, December 7th. We are I think rounding the band on our goal of having a biennial review of all the policies. We're not pride in the home stretch, but getting there. And last week we reviewed a number of policies concerning construction and students life. The policies that we have reviewed proposed revisions and I believe are ready for a reading of the board or up for first reading tonight. There were a number of important policies concerning law enforcement and discipline issues that we are going back to ask administration and council for further review because of some of the important issues involved. And we'll be talking in greater detail about the policies up for first reading when we get to that on the agenda. Thank you,
016and I have to say, I was at the policy committee meeting (speaking faintly) what I said then, I really respected our policy committee remembering that our students have rights and remembering that's important that our students know their rights. And that was an important piece of a lot of policies that went in the report (speaking faintly) are part of those policies. So thank you all for remembering that. Okay, moving on to our superintendent reports, Dr. Law. Thank you, Ms. Shapira. A couple of things before we get to the school operations report under my report. As the board knows ISBE has notified us that we have general education classes that are by definition not general education classes that are in fact special education classes because more than 30% of the students in those classes have a IEPs.
017So as we also report to the board that this compliance issue that we have with the state, which of course, we have to respond to and fix has work a lot of work to do in the general education program. The curriculum instruction assessment there's a lot of work to do there. We have a remediation plan that's due to the state this Friday on December 17th. So we have been working to begin the planning of the work that needs to be done and not having started on the work yet. We're just trying to plan all the work and really try to understand all those areas in which we need to work. And it is a significant amount of work and it's not just the amount of work. It's the expectation that District 113, the work that
018we do is that at the quality that the parents, the community, students and the teachers have come to rightly expect that is District 113. So it's not just the amount of work, it's really trying to figure out how to do this in such a way that it will be at that level of quality. The other thing that I've done is I started working with TrueNorth superintendent, Dr. Kurt Schneider. We are in a special education co-op. We are in the TrueNorth co-op, and most people understand special ed co-ops as providing services to students that the Districts could not provide on their own. And so many Districts come together in a co-op by working together. As member Districts, we're able to provide our needed services to our students with disabilities. TrueNorth does that, but that's not all
019they do. They truly understand that all students, those without IEPs and those with IEPs learn best in inclusive learning environments. And we'll be working with TrueNorth, who has a lot of experience in working with high schools that are eliminating the practice of tracking students. So we've been doing a lot of work. As a result of all that work, and we're really beginning to understand what lies in front of us. We have approached ISBE, just informally that the remediation plan that we would be submitting on Friday, would say that we are going to spend the rest of this year, and the summer to the extent that's available to teachers and spend next year planning and working to implement not in 22-23, but in 23-24. We thought we had to implement in 22-23, but in talking to
020ISBE and letting them know how seriously we take this and how well we want to do, they have indicated support for a plan that would say; we plan, we have a lot of deliverables when it comes to curriculum instruction and assessment. But the actual implementation year would be in 23-24. So I wanted to let the board know that the remediation plan we submit on Friday is going to request that, but of course, we need official response back from ISBE, but we really think it's important that we develop the capacity. So the work we're doing in general education that's needed, provides opportunities to all students to access the full instructional program. As the time it needs, and we're not just checking a special education compliance box. I wanna let the board know that I'll pause on
021that moment. That point there are questions, but.. The only thing I wanted to say for those who are listening that don't know TrueNorth is formerly NSSED. And this will be the last time I will ever tell people that. At this point, let's jump on board. They are now the TrueNorth 804 Cooperative. And we are a member with 17 other Districts in that cooperative. Thank you, yes. The other thing I wanted, sorry, gentleman? Oh, no, I was just, I mean, I thought I'll make an observation that certainly as one board member appreciate all the effort that is going into this, because this is central to the District's mission. The mission of this District is to provide the opportunity for all students to achieve as fully and in the way that they're best able to. Part of
022that is following what is a state law, a state mandate that is going to change how classes have traditionally been structured in this District. The model of the survey class, which is the de facto special ed class is not something that works under state law. And this a very, very careful process of rethinking how classes are taught, making sure the classes are taught in a way that is effective for all students and for teachers as well is so central to what we do. I certainly think it's worth taking the time to do it and making sure that we get it right. It's a phrase that I guess has fallen out of favor. We don't want to have any children be left behind, this is about meeting the needs of every student and meeting it in
023a way that is consistent with what the state requires of us. So it's going to be new, but we hopefully it's going to be something that we achieve and reach excellence in the outcome. Well said, I think it's important that we do it right. Not necessarily right now. We need to make sure we are doing it right. And we are doing right by all of our students. Okay, thank you. Jodi, I really appreciated your referencing the much needed winter break that's coming. It's hard to believe already we're at that point of the school year, they just go by so fast. So I do wanna say that as we have done, and I think last year was the first year, IT will be setting up an automatic device for teachers who really wanna make sure that
024teachers are able to get a break. I worry about all the people I work with, make sure they get a break. You really have to be a teacher or work in a school organization to know this is demanding job. But I have to say, I think this year is even better than last year I don't know how that's possible, but it feels that way. So we'll be putting out an out of office reply and ask people to, if you have questions or things that you need to know, please save those until January 3rd. The week of January 3rd, when people are back and responding so that will be set up starting in (speaking faintly) happy holidays, however, celebrate holidays 'cause they really are (speaking faintly) good winter. All right, so moving on to the school
025operations. This is a normal presentation, this is a right. I should say a regular presentation we make. At board meetings yes, I prefer. I hope the day that we can get rid of this. Yeah, well, at this point, I'm looking for one of the more normal, boring ones. But I just wanna start off as we typically do. But also Suzy Spychala is here. She's our coordinator of COVID response. And if you'll recall, this is a position that we recommended last summer in anticipation of someone to do what Susie has been doing night and day and weekends. And I have to agree recently the fact that we have her and her dedication and her hard work plus the other nurses we've hired, this has served us extremely well. As we'll kind of get you, (speaking faintly)
026but my question. So we go to the next slide please. Start through this. As you can see, we're seeing a spike in cases in Lake County, and our metrics reflect the breakdown (speaking faintly) Why don't you switch Gayle, I don't know if we can hear you. Oh, next slide please, I just. All right, so a couple of things. And this point is obviously in Lake County Health Department, I think everyone knows that children aged 16-17 are eligible for a booster if it's past six months from the day of full vaccination. This is the point I want to focus on. And I should probably, I should just turn it over to the Suzy at this point, 'cause we've gotten notification from Lake County Health Department about changes in their operations due to the number of cases
027so Suzy, go for it, go. All right, so Lake County has notified us that they are no longer going to do a ton of contact tracing within our school buildings unless there are two or more linked cases. We will still report outbreak if we identify them and they will help us with those. So the team created at District 113, which is composed of nurses and a contact tracer. We investigate every case that's reported. We work diligently with staff, students, the parents, and the guardians to try to determine close contacts. We work closely with Lake County Health Department to determine those contacts or in unique situations, such as an outbreak. Once we were made aware of close contacts, the parent and guardian of those close contacts are notified within 24 hours and are given the IDPH
028and Lake County Health Department accommodation's. Next slide, Ron. Yep, question. Sorry, this is a really important plan. And this is being modest. Given the Lake County Health Department, and they're at capacity. We are fortunate that we have the people we have doing this contact tracing. I don't know how other Districts are going to cope. It's gonna be seriously, certainly a challenge for them, but our contact tracing from what I'm hearing from the health department and people who are making calls to us is exemplary. And so I just wanna thank Suzy and her team for all that. The second thing I wanted to make, the point that I wanna make, I think it's important is we are following the rules here. So if they want to partner with public health, say these are the rules if
029you've been in contact or close contact with someone and you're unvaccinated or whatever they determine the rules to be changed of course. We're following those rules. I know there's a lot of frustration right now with what we're trying, what we're telling people need done. Someone needs to change the rules so that we will then follow those changed rules. Until then we're following the rules. So I know Suzy and your team has had a difficult time, with people who are rightly finished with this pandemic and despite the fact that the pandemic doesn't appear to be finished with that. So I wanted to say thank you on the one hand, on the other hand, just to make sure everyone knows we're just following the rules when it comes to placing students in quarantine. But I wanna make
030sure I'm understanding you correctly. These aren't rules that this board or this District determined. These are rules that the Lake County Department of Public Health has given us. That is correct. IDPH. Yeah, IDPH. Illinois Department of Public Health, yes. And thank you for being on the other side of those phone calls. Yes. (both laughing) We will get you a bubble wrap soon. We'll send it next time. The team that's been created is wonderful. They are doing an excellent job. Right, Ron. This is our SHIELD screening, nothing new here. Next slide, Ron. So as presented last time at the meeting, winter break testing is going to be testings out offered, but optional. Monday on the 20th, we will have it at DHS from 10:00 AM to two. On the 27th, there will be no testing as
031the lab is closed. Will resume testing and the requirements on January 3rd. With one caveat. So the sports team, we currently have a DHS is in an adaptive pause, and there is different requirements when it comes to that testing. So I wanted to go into a little bit about that. This came about because we did identify linked cases within the team. And we worked with Lake County Health Department to determine the next steps. We then immediately tested both vaccinated and unvaccinated on the team. We saw another increase in cases from the original outbreak. So after consultation with Lake County Health Department, we placed the entire team on an adaptive pause. We will continue testing the whole team twice weekly until there are no positive cases for 28 days for the outbreak guidance. There will be
032special testing for this team on December 27th, to continue testing during winter. Any questions? Next slide, Ron. This is our normal daily view dashboard. It is hard to see the weekly spikes when you see the lines because they do overlap and you have to count up each day. So we have decided to add in a weekly view graph to help see the total amount of cases reported through the school between Sunday and Saturday weekly. And there it is. These are the questions we got in November. The board member were saying, it seems like there was an increasing cases that your graphs aren't showing. This is like misinforming, we need to change so that we could add all those up and you can.. So I have one question, during this break, are the request reporting right
033now parents used supposed to call if the student has COVID, what is the process going to be during winter break? They can still call or email. We do have staff working on winter break and monitoring. But that's the one email parents can send. And the people they made. And we want you to sign. And we want you to to sign because truly we come back safer when we know what we're left with, and I'm not trying to be trite about that, but it really is. COVID is not taking winter vacation off. Unfortunately. No, as we see based on this, it didn't take Thanksgiving off. So as you can see, this represents the weekly cases reported at each building and holds the same data, but the data are just displayed differently to show a total. It's
034more easily shows the spikes in cases that we might have, and as you can see last week, we did have the highest number of cases reported since the start of the pandemic. As always, I encourage everybody to continue masking, continue the mitigation's, watch your distance and have a safe holiday break. Get your booster. Yeah, get the booster and being on vacation is not a reason to not mask and keep social distance. Even if folks are going on vacation in places where the rules are not as rigorous as they are in Illinois, please be careful. Because we don't want to have a hiccup to start the semester. Agreed. Susie, just thank you so much and to your team and in your new role. And we look forward to talking about other health and safety programs for
035our students that I'm sure you're excited about doing. And I'm sure that some point we will be able to roll that in as well. So thank you again. Thank you, you are definitely our frontline there in this situation with this particular thing was exactly why we have this in place. And I can only imagine how many kids we have kept safe because of these protocols. So thank you for being that person, having to make those phone calls and your team having to do so. Thank you. Anyone else? Two more slides. The slides will only show up for eligibility. Why we're showing these are still the unvaccinated students and the extra curricular activities are required to test. So don't confuse eligibility that is coming through these data, as opposed to other issues that we're facing because
036we have an outbreak on our athletics team. We were going to do side slides until you're replaying all these vaccines.-- They're so much better than I can, so thank you for. You did it great. And then the last slide simply breaks it down by activities versus athletics. Thank you, Suzy, and thank you for there to monitor those phones of winter vacation emails. Okay, moving on to our FOIAs report. On the screen are the FOIAs that we have received and processes since the last Board of Education meeting. Thank you, any questions? Moving on to our 2021, 2022 goals update, SEL. Thank you guys. We are gonna give you guys an SEL update. As you recall, we have SEL goals. So we want to talk about those tonight and presenting with me tonight is Ken Williams, Assistant
037Principal at Deerfield, Alesia Margetis, Assistant Principal at Highland Park High School. Some of you have met and some of you have not met Dr. Roslyn Martin, who is our Director of Student Services. And so we'll be presenting on SEL goals and an update for that. Ken is gonna kick us off. Ron, next slide please. Okay, so welcome everybody. I'm Ken Williams, Assistant Principal at Deerfield High School. I'm gonna start us off tonight with an inclusion activity. And we're gonna explain a little bit more later on in our presentation about what this does and what this really is. But to start it off, we're gonna be asking our Board of Education members to give me two words. You get two words to say that tell us how you're feeling at this moment. So if I were
038to do this, I would say I'm optimistic. I feel optimistic and I feel grateful. Those would be the words that I would share. So I'm gonna ask each person one at a time, think of the words that you wanna say. Mr. Struck, if it's okay, I'd like to start with you. What are your two words, and how you feel this evening? Lucky me. (board members laughing and chattering) Yeah, no, I'll take that. I'm determined and hopeful. Terrific, thank you, Mr. Fishbain. Optimistic and, I don't know about this one. Cautiously optimistic. Mm-mmh, Ms. Byck. Tired. (Ms. Byck laughing) That's fair. I've been up since 1:30 and, that's main feeling. (Byck laughing) It's fine, thank you, Ms. Shapira. I'm going with grateful and hopeful. Great, thank you, Mr. Barraza. I was gonna say hopeful. You can copy.
039Yeah, you can. We'll share. So I would say the first one is proud, proud and hopeful. Thank you, Mr. Heineman. Hopeful and driven. Super, so the idea behind that right there is to start us off with something that includes all of us. If you were my meeting members, or if you were in my class as a teacher, I would have a read right now on how people at the pulse of my classroom is, how people are kind of feeling. Other members of the group you heard each other. So you get a read or everyone kind of checks in. That's informative for me in terms of moving forward in any meeting that I have, but it brings into the center of our work, a piece of social emotional learning. Some more about that as we go,
040but I'm gonna turn it over to our next person. So next slide, Ron. Thank you, Ken, I'm Alesia Margetis. I am an Assistant Principal at Highland Park High School. And it's my turn. So you're gonna see on the screen, our goals that were presented to you this summer regarding our work with social emotional learning. Each school has goals set up for staff and students. And we are being very intentional with with both groups. For students, SEL is built into our new homeroom program at Highland Park High School and has been, and continues to be the focus for the Deerfield High School Homer program as well. As well as for students, we are providing supports for students that are evidence-based an education that supports mental health. Examples of these educational opportunities are through our check-in connect
041program, which is basically it's at a core as a trusting relationship between a student and a caring trained mentor that focuses on the challenges that students have that keep them from being successful in school. Then we focus on attendance, behavior issues and grades. At both of our schools, our MTSS social workers are working with identified students to support them through this program. And actually at Highland Park High School, our deans and some of our counselors will also be trained to support students through check in connect. The other program is called Signs of Suicide. It's a suicide prevention program that educates students about the relationship between suicide and depression. Ron, next slide, please. You're looking at, those were the Highland Park goals. These are the Deerfield goals. As for our staff, the purpose is to cultivate
042a community of adults who engage in their own social emotional learning. Collaborate and strategies for promoting SEL and model SEL throughout the school community. Next slide, please. So as you can see by the slide, each school is intentionally focusing on the importance of adult SEL. Which we equate to putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Without adults focusing on their own SEL, they will not be able to help support and teach SEL to our students. Social emotional learning is a pathway or a road to mental health. With that said, each school has focused their professional development this year to help staff engage in their own social emotional learning. Well, next slide, I'm gonna introduce Rose. Hello, I'm Roslyn Martin, Director Student Services. (speaking faintly) Thank you (Roslyn chuckling) And so a couple of
043weeks ago you accepted the policy 6-65, which is defining the definition of SEL, social emotional learning. And so part of that is the definition, you can see it to get up there. It's really highlighting the acquired knowledge skills, managing emotion and achieving personal and collective goals feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain support relationships and make responsive and caring decisions. We're not ready to make this definition ours yet. It's going to have some tweaking to it, but however, we will continue to revisit this as we go through this and make it ours. Next slide. What it's based on is the CASEL framework, and I'm sure by now everyone's heard of the CASEL framework. And it says self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. If you look at the framework, you'll see
044that those self awareness they're all inside, but in casement is the classroom. Then outside of that, it's the schools, it's the families, caregivers and the communities. So it all comes together in different layers to how we support the students through SEL. Next slide. We thought it would be important to share data about the mental health concerns that we have with our students. On the next few slides, you're gonna see this data from each school. The data focuses on the last three years, with the number of safety assessments that have been completed in our schools. This year, the numbers are as current as of last week. Safety assessments consist of risk assessments, which is harm to self and threat assessments, which is harm to others. The bar graph shows the following. So this is risk assessment.
045So you look at the number of assessments that are done per year, and you can look at from 1920 up to currently. As you can see, we do many risk assessments throughout the year, but many of them are low risk. What we are seeing this year is that several are at higher risk, which has required students needing additional assessments occurring at the hospital. In Highland Park High School, half of the sophomore class participate in the Signs of Suicide program in November. And that's what brought us to 26 assessments. 10 of those assessments were from the Signs of Suicide program. What is invisible on these graphs, are when we tend to see these higher numbers of risk assessments during the calendar or season. The peaks tend to follow the same pattern. We tend to see students
046struggling usually in the late fall, around semester exams and early spring. Next slide please, Ron. You have a question? So whenever data looks weird, it's always good to ask. And so there is something that really jumps out Yeah. On this graph, which is the 2021 school year. Yes, now and that's great. And Highland Park and still so many at Deerfield. So do we have an explanation for that? So I think what time did it happen? And I can talk a little bit from the Highland Park perspective, that when we have a student who might've been in crisis, we worked with the parents last year during remote instruction and have them go immediately to the hospital. We didn't do that virtually in terms of providing a risk assessment. I think, and I'm gonna ask Ken, I
047know virtual risk assessments were probably occurring.. Yes. In at your fields. Okay. So that's the difference. And that's also are very low threat assessments for last year. Our threat assessment numbers tend to be low anyways, thank goodness. But that's why Highland had kids zero last year and your field had one. Again, we were in remote instruction for most of the year. Right, I just didn't understand why such a.. Yeah, no, great question. Absolutely, and especially as you see the numbers were only in the December and where our numbers are right now. Right and Highland Park as everyone knows has more students than Deerfield, but yet we're seeing higher numbers at Deerfield over the past three years. I don't know if there's any explanation for that. Great, that's another really good question. In terms of why,
048I mean, you would think that Highland Park would have more money, more numbers because of the numbers of students that we have. I don't know how to answer that question, but that's a great question. Something we can look into. (speaking faintly) Yes. But I gotta say they're in the (indistinct) because sometimes (speaking faintly) That's right. They're not gonna come forward (speaking faintly) someone. To say. Okay (speaking faintly) Yes, absolutely, for remembering it continued. Thank you, absolutely. So with that though, what I was gonna say to continue is our patterns tend to follow national trends. I mean, we're seeing this over the years, same national trends. This is a year though, that has concerns because we're still in a pandemic that has caused a collective trauma on our students. We are in a school year after
049almost all of remote instruction and due to remote instruction, students are in different places developmentally. Which is things that we haven't seen in our students from the past. And so we're trying to manage all of that. And our students are trying to manage all of that. Please know that each building, we are incredibly responsive to students as they exhibit levels of concern. This is from doing safety assessments and those are conducted by our psychologists and our social workers at both buildings to provide in-group counseling, individual counseling, as well as working with parents and guardians to help support them as they look for outside support for their child. Next slide, unless you have questions. So on this next slide, you're gonna see kind of a deeper dive into the goals that we showed you on the
050first couple of slides. And I'm gonna give you some acronyms. Actually these are not special ed acronyms, believe it or not. But ILT stands for the instructional leadership team. And IC in this case refers to instructional coaches but these are the teams that are doing a lot of this work or pushing through the SEL work and implementing it with the rest of the buildings. These are just four ways in which staff are learning SEL this year through the professional development plan, which you're gonna see more of in a minute, their instructional coaching, through integrating SEL at staff and grade level meetings and modeling from our school leaders through all stakeholders. Next slide please. So you'll see on this slide, this is an example of the professional development at Highland Park High School. So there is
051a building SEL committee and you can see that they've mapped out for much of the first semester the activities that bring SEL to the staff. So they've modeled and I'm gonna talk about this, three signature practices. One of those signature practices is what you started this evening with. There's wellness and staff sessions that they took advantage of for the late start. They've gone through the CASEL wheel that you just saw again, this evening and CASEL self-reflection tool, they focused on self-awareness and for December, they've got a theme of gratitude. Next slide, Ron. This, you'll see now Deerfield High school's Professional Development Plan. We also have an SEL committee. That SEL committee focuses on developing personal SEL skills. And we're also using, you'll see that we've mapped out a monthly theme design that kind of follows
052a number of these various strategies. And these strategies come from Yale University science of wellbeing course. I think some of you might recall, I think you were included on like our October, the savor activity. That's where we collected pictures from people and people shared pictures of anything that they savor in their life. We had a lot of family pictures. And so it was a photo album that was put together electronically and everyone enjoyed just going in and seeing their colleagues, seeing other staff members, seeing what it is that they clung to in terms of something that they savored. You'll see that we've gone through gratitude, make sense with November and then December right now is kindness. So there are different activities. There might be notes that we're sending to each other, or there's a glass
053wall up in our mail room where you can write a note of gratitude about something that you like, and you know your colleagues are gonna see it. The you'll see that we also have additional school-wide PD that covers our administrative team. We did a CASEL workshop this summer. We've integrated SEL into staff meetings. I'll talk a little bit about that. And then department SEL goals are set as well. Next slide. So these three signature practices, this comes straight out of CASEL. And the thinking behind this is and you can read that there. What would I want to know about with related to SEL? How can I kind of bring that into my system, my meetings, or my school in a very simple way? And so CASEL will recommend, well, do the three signature practices. The
054first one, welcoming inclusion activity. That's what we modeled here with you. And that's a variety of different things that you could do. We just asked two simple words for how you feel, but it could be much more complicated than that as well. Engaging strategies. We're going to have here in just a moment to kind of a centered engagement strategy that involves an SEL component. And then we would close a meeting with an optimistic closure. So a little bit different from like a summation of what was taught over a lesson. That is a different opportunity for the group again, to come together, to include everybody and to share something that's really meaningful here. So we modeled these in all of our administrative meetings. The principals vote for their leadership teams, building administrators and AC open and
055have meetings that include the three signature practices. Our team meetings at Deerfield, and at Highland Park do the same thing. Department chairs are encouraged to do this in their department meetings. So that we're modeling for each other, we're modeling with our teachers so that we can also then talk about how we bring this into the classroom. So many of our teachers are automatically doing this. So this is an example of bringing SEL kind of into every kind of a good, simple, easy way into what it is that we do. Next slide. So it's kind of discuss the importance of doing the CASEL three signature practices. We thought it was important for us to do an engaging strategy, which could be a brain break to anchor thinking and learning. And so an example of this is
056a mindful minutes. This allows us to decontrast and refocus that you're ready to re-engage with learning. This promotes self-awareness, which identifies emotions, and self-management; two of our CASEL competencies. Well, let's take a moment to participate in a mindful minute. This will focus on deep breathing. So please follow the instructions on the video. Ron, could you start the video please? (smooth calming music) Thank you, Ron. This is gonna continue for another minute, but since we talked about it being a mindful minute, we're only gonna do this for a minute. So I hope that taking a brain break, you are now ready to continue with hearing the rest of our presentation. Bring it over to Tiffany. Next slide please. So we felt like you needed that mindful minute, and this is kind of what we want it
057to look like in the classroom too, right? We kind of gave you an overview of what SEL has been looking like this year, what we've been working on in our goals. Now we're gonna kind of dive into a little bit deeper data. And so you needed that brain switch for a second, right? So I wanna talk to you a little bit about Panorama. So in this slide, you're gonna see some surveys. In the next few slides you're gonna see some survey results about Panorama. And if you'll recall, Panorama was purchased last year to assist us in providing live data on grades, behavior, attendance, and SEL of our students. The following slides will focus on SEL data provided by Panorama. So we're not gonna give you the whole overview. We're just gonna focus on the SEL
058data from Panorama. We conducted a survey back in September, to gather baseline data of our students. There were four areas that were chosen in the data collection by the SEL survey committee. There were two categories within those four specific areas. We focused on SEL and we focused on wellbeing. And under SEL, we specifically looked at learning strategies and emotional regulation. While under wellbeing, we looked at supportive relationships and challenging feelings. If you think about wellbeing, you're thinking of like the bottom of the hierarchy of Maslow. Those safety, belonging, that kind of thing. When you look at this chart, this is the chart of our total number of students, our total number of responses and our non responses. We do realize that our non-responders are much higher than what we would want them to be. So
059we're strategizing now to find ways to get a better and higher response rate. We are gonna be doing this again, January or February, and then we'll do it again at the end of the year to show our progress over time. Next slide please, Ron. So I wanted to give you a snapshot of the Panorama Survey. So again, this is like the big picture, and we're gonna kind of dive a little bit deeper as we go through these. But this is Highland Park High School. It shows the overall data from the survey results. Looking at the top down, you can see that 36% of our students showed strengths and all SEL topics, 29% showed strengths and at least half, and then 18% reported no strengths. And I'll explain that in just a minute. In Panorama if
060I were to click on that box next to the 18%, it's going to automatically show me all of the students in that category. So I get live data on those students so that we can really focus on the kids that need the most help or the accolades, however you wanna look at it. Next slide, Ron. The next slide is Deerfield High School, very similar results to Highland Park High School. What I wanna say is somebody is gonna be asking me, why there's zero or these low numbers in this yellow area. And that's the way the survey is built. So it's built out of five question or five responses that students can answer. So a threshold of 3.5 out of five, still shows some strengths for the student. So it doesn't really mean that a student
061has zero strengths. It just means that they have less than 3.5, that makes sense to you. So we're gonna continue to take a little bit deeper dive now. So this is just the overall thermometer of SEL. And so when you go to the next slide, you're gonna see some overall results that Ken is gonna go over with you. So if you figured that we started at around 20,000 feet, now we're coming to 1,000 feet. You're looking at a bit of, I guess you could say, it's our SEL slash wellbeing report card. And the report cards look nearly identical between the two schools. But what you see here, are the four different areas that make up from the survey, the SEL component and the wellbeing component. And you can look at Deerfield high school here, you'll
062see at the very top supportive relationships with our students, the percent favorable is 89%. What that means is that 89% of those students who took this survey answered items that would suggest that's favorable to their identifying supportive relationships. That's really nice and positive, we like that. This does not at this level, it doesn't dis-aggregate across different groups, or let's say students identified with an IEP or not. We can do that and that's coming next. But we see here, like I said, at 1,000 feet, okay, well, that's where our students say they are supportive relationship wise. At the bottom there, you'll see emotional or emotion regulation. 57% of our students identified positively about emotional regulation. Those items might've been, here's some of the sample questions. When you were feeling pressured, how easily can you stay in
063control? How often are you able to pull yourself out of a bad mood? Or when things go wrong for you, how calm are you able to remain? That's an example of what the students were asked. Ron, you can go ahead to the next slide because then you will see Highland Park. And like I said, the results are nearly identical. What's interesting when you look at, say the bottom of emotion regulation, 52% answered favorably, but look at the percentile on the far right. For that's rated within the 80th to 90th percentile nationally for all of the schools, grades six through 12 who have Panorama. So it's very deceiving. I think that's an interesting piece of data because while it rates high percentile wise, 52% suggesting that they are answering favorably about emotional regulation tells me, well,
064that's kind of the nature of the adolescent as well, but it does kind of direct us towards an area to work on. And again, like what we saw with Deerfield High School, our students endorse good supportive relationships. But every time we look at this, and even though 86% feels really good, it also means are 14% of students who don't have or endorse supportive relationships. You can always look at that other side. The beauty of Panorama, the real beauty is that now we can continue to drill in even further. And that's what Ros is gonna show us. We're gonna take a look at some of these elements here, and then expose what that looks like across different groups. As Finn just mentioned, we're gonna dig down deeper. When we dig down deeper, we also pull up,
065the groups are doing really well as opposed to the groups that need extra support. So we're gonna look at the two extremes. And so on this one, if we look at it, African-Americans as far as supportive relationships, 63% said they're feeling supported. All over response was 89%. So they're coming in lower. So one of the questions we asked is, why are they feeling like they're not being supported or having supportive relationships? The flip side is Latino though is coming in at 64% and overall it was 57%. So they're feeling like they are emotional regulated in this sense. So we're able to look at this and say, okay, what's going on in this group? What are we doing right here and continue to do it right so this groups can continue to feel supported. This is
066Deerfield, let's look at Highland Park now. In Highland Park, we're able to look at it and say, our Latino is the extreme. So they were 52% out of the 63 respondents saying, in learning strategies, which is how well students deliberately use strategies to manage their own learning process generally. And so we're looking at saying that is a group rate, there are subgroups that we continue to have to give support to. On the flip side, that confidentiality protected, which means, 'cause I had asked this question myself. It protects the student group when the numbers are so low, that particular demographic group, they don't want to identify who they are. So they're gonna protect them 'cause the numbers are so low. And that group though came in at a plus 14, which means out of 52% respondents,
06765% felt like they were being protected. So again, we have the two extremes, but it's good because we can look at and celebrate those that say yes, I really fell in there above that. Then we have the other group that, where do we need to support them? What else are we doing? We are, next slide, please. (speaker distorted) Yep. (speaking faintly) what it mean at a number of levels, wanted to protect confidentiality in such a small quota. Is there a way that you, as the staff, et cetera, you actually, if that number was negative 14%, that you'd be able to access that and be able to see who those students are then? We know exactly who it is, yes. (laughing softly) I feel the story is the fabricated though. No, it's a protected group. Right,
068it's a protective group, right? And yes, we can dive into that data. Thank you. So next slide please. So here's that third part of the section that we just talked about, the optimistic closure. And so we're excited, optimistic with all the hard work everyone's doing addressing staff and students SEL policy. Because of the data we collected, we're able to celebrate areas they're doing well and identify areas that require more support. We want to thank you for allowing us to share the District SEL progress. But before we close out, as we mentioned before, we would like three volunteers to shell, and you get a moment to think about it. One is wondering and other ones that reflection. And I will model for you and that's exactly what we do. My wonder is even though we're still
069in the pandemic, if we respond to the data, are we going to see a positive outcome throughout the year? And then my reflection is, this platform is allowing us to respond to student needs in a more efficient and effective manner than in the past. So I would like three of the board members also to reflect that of the one wondering and one reflection because the time. Before the presidential bid, some of it, no. (board members laughing) The quicker we get three volunteers the quicker we move on. All right, I'll start. (clearing the throat) Yay! Heineman, thank you.* So I think one wondering is so now that we have this data now what do we do? Now where do we go with it? That's a quick one. The less quick one is the reflection. So as
070I talked about being proud as the opener, I think the reflection is it would be really easy to not go this route. It'd be really easy not to look for this data and not to really look under the hood to see what's going on and understand what's going on. But research after research and study after study shows that these are the skills, these are the conversations that we need to be having for the reality of the world that our students live in and preparing them for the future that they will be facing. So a huge amount of kudos to everybody on the team and everybody on the staff who's focusing on this while also focusing on the high academic standards, high academic goals and juggling both. It's not one or the other, it's both at
071the same time. So incredible amount of pride in the work that's been done and continues to be done, especially in light of the events that transpire nationally. This is incredibly important for us to continue to have that, our finger on the pulse to see, where are those potential issues and mitigate those issues as best we can, so thank you. Well done. Thank you. (speaking faintly) what now, but I'm gonna go with my reflection. Why don't we admit when we started talking SEL, when you were talking to that person. I admit, I was like, oh, what about our kids, what about our kids? And I loved your graphic, and it made sense to me. I sat on your plane many a times with Barbara, as they may say with your map before your shoulder and you
072know what, we must make sure that students develop students mentor and we thank you for pointing out that he did and he always tell us you're working it out and you're getting there, yeah. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. So this was great. My wondering I guess is, and this came up in an ENI committee meeting last month too. I think it's really important to be looking at data like this by race and ethnicity, but I think are also other types of you know subgroups we could be looking at to make sure that we're not missing others, LGBTQIA plus low SES, special ed. So there's other ways to cut the data and I'd be wondering how that looked as well. Oh, I'm sorry go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. On reflection, I don't know that I can
073say more than what's already been said. It's really important to, I think it's just so critical for our students and our staff as we're still in the pandemic and just everything that, there's another school shooting. These are things that worry people in the schools, whether they're students or adults, and we need to keep focusing on this. So I did just wanna respond, Gayle real quickly. We are able to in Panorama cut the data is there for lots of other subgroups. So we can pull that data instantaneously for kids with 504, kids who are identified as EL kids, who are identified as free and reduced lunch. All of that data is also in here. So we can literally just click, but I mean, what took me weeks, and I'm not joking weeks to pull data similar
074to what's on Panorama literally takes me seconds now. I mean it is absolutely incredible tool that we're able to use and address this. And thank you to you guys because the support of some of these MTSS, we talked about the MTSS social worker, having those supports in place this year is how we're addressing a lot of these needs, right? Using our resources to help gather groups of kids and make sure that we're addressing their needs when we see this data in Panorama, super helpful. You're all right? Yeah, don't worry about that. So yeah, thank you guys. So I don't know it's the right word on the reflection, but so I do remember when we had the CASEL study and we had a journey at it, so this is great work on that journey and we
075committed resources. And so the wondering is gonna, I don't wanna make more work 'cause this is a long-term play but as you're gonna go into next year, what more resources? How did these resources pay off from that challenge? So we had a gap, invested some resources, you guys executed a plan. What was the payoff? And then what's next? What resources do you need? Because we've got a lot more to go. So what resources will you need, and I hope you guys go off and enjoy the rest of your evening. But later on, we're gonna talk about how limited those resources are. You're right. And because that's right, 'cause this board really supported us and this looks great. This was really a smart thing we did for kids. How are we gonna keep that going? 'Cause
076you're gonna ask for more and you're gonna look around the room and go, I'm wondering how this will stack up to all other resources? Sir. I hope I kept that in a really positive note. You did. But it's real. Okay, thanks. I actually have a comment. Whenever I the hear the word data, even though at NEST, I immediately think of ECRA and the 440 group. So while I don't want to say expected national at this point, and I don't have a problem if we go in on our own, if it's an important tool and it's something we need to do, terrific. But if there's a way to fit it in with the other organizations and with the other data gathering tools, we should just try and do that. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Illinois school
077report card. It's going to you. After what? I like the fact that. (board members chattering) To each other yeah. I'll try to go real quickly with this one. Per policy and school code, we are required to share with you the current Illinois school report card each year. You have a memo that does that. In the subsequent presentation, we'll talk a bit about the data. Do you have any questions? (laughing gently) well done. Wow. Okay, who wants to start? The natural question for somebody, for the typical parents in this District is going to be looking on the charts of page 404, on those spread charts, how can we get the District even higher up than it is right now? We're ahead of most of the state, but we're still, what can we do? What practices can
078be used to help us even achieve more than we're doing right now? And get up those dots that are at the very top. Are they doing something we're not doing? So there's books and libraries with answers to that question. (board members laughing) I'll refer you back to what we showed you on June 14th, which was a long set of plans about how to move some of this work forward. It's clear from these charts also as you pointed out that there are some schools and Districts that are doing better than we are, and we ought to learn from them. These are pretty good scores, but we need to continually get better. And that means learning from others. And that means not just getting better as individuals, but getting better as teams and systems so that we
079can create a cycle of improvement. Creating a culture that, yeah, thanks. I'm gonna just go a little bit with Dan. I'm thrilled seeing where these are. I always worry about that 10% that's partially meets et cetera. For me, the other thing is just between our schools. I just challenge us all to continue sharing data across, sharing strategies, sharing successes across the highway so that my ultimate would be seeing both those schools sitting right next to each other. Don't know if that's remotely attainable. But like I said, I just, for me. I continue to encourage the idea that I know goes on, but to continue doing it as sharing things across the highway. And I love your brevity. Okay, anyone else on that? Moving on, thank you, Dr. Lach. Our project 440 initial data overview. You're
080not giving me any intro either, all right. (board members chattering) I hear that. Ron, can you let me take over please? (board members chattering) I'm gonna go quick, you've read these slides. Happy to talk offline with any of you individually if you'd like. I will try to give you headlines here, and we can have a bit of conversation or we can not. We wanna give a picture of the District. We wanna do this in the context of our feeder Districts. And we wanna focus on really broad and course measures of academic performance and student equity. There's a lot of conversation within and after this to talk about, what does this mean? Where do we go? What should we do? What are the decisions? Right now it's just about sharing a picture. So as a high
081level, we have a pretty, we have three Districts that feed into one District. North Shore is 112, is pretty big. Bannockburn 106 is pretty small, slightly different distributions of students across those. Interestingly, about 90% of the eighth grade students from the feeder Districts end up going to our high schools. And that make up about 94% of our incoming ninth graders. So there's a small number between five and 10% of kids who choose to get educated elsewhere. As we heard before, our outcomes are pretty strong. About 2/3 of our kids are proficient in English, language, arts. You'll notice there's two different proficiency levels here, ISBE the Illinois State Board of ED has a higher threshold for proficiency than the college board. That's because they've done some equating of the SAT around the Illinois state standards. So
082this is pretty good news. It's also news that should tell us all there is room for improvement. There's 1/3 of our kids who are not proficient in that should be the sort of thing that we aim to improve on. Our results in ELA are pretty similar to our results in math. I'll highlight the graphs we talked a little bit about, these are the same ones there. Our SAT scores have dropped from pre-pandemic times. This shows 2019 percent meet or exceed versus 2021. All sorts of caveats about these are different students in different cohorts, but you can see like most schools, 2021 percent meeting exceeds was less. Our schools are not as less as most of the rest of the state. The gray line represents the trend of the state average. You can see we're above
083the gray line, but we're below the orange line, which would be if those were the same. Similar results here in both reading and mathematics. This is again, another course histogram. And you can see that the shape of those curves, isn't the same for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White students in ELA and in math. When you look at our performance versus the number of low-income students, you can see, again, compared to most Districts, the proportion of low income students we have is really pretty small. That said there are other schools with more low income students who are performing better than we are. There are things that we could learn from those schools. The feeder Districts, I'm gonna show you IAR data, which is the state mandated reading test. It's given grades three through eight, similar on
084a lot of designed to the SAT in that it's focused on common core state standards and the like. You can see a similar distribution of student performance around race and ethnicity. You'll see that I've rolled up all the feeder District's performance here. Individual scores are available on the website. Dr. Lach, thank you for doing that. Thank you for putting them all together. 'Cause we are looking at it all as one group, not as where they get that. So thank you for doing that. It's what they are when they come to us, not where they came from as in dis-aggregating or amongst that. So thank you for doing that. Yep, and some comments about performance. Our feeder Districts, here's a chart that shows performance over time compared to the state average. And you can see generally
085consistent performance over time on the IAR slight dips last year due to the pandemic. Again, similar sort of data in math. And in 113, sort of the same story. A slight downward trend in ELA from 2017 to 2021, generally flat performance in math across the table. So couple highlights. We have a pretty close system. Like most of our students start here young and they stay in 440. We're at about 2/3 of our kids are proficient according to the state. We've got some inconsistencies when you look at race and ethnicity among our student groups, our performance is better than most Districts in the state and the nation. And like most Districts, our average performance dropped during the pandemic. And our performance has been pretty steady. In doing this a bit of analysis to sort of think
086through what's coming next. We've had a hard time getting the data out. Rick, as you had mentioned like ECRA took the lead and built these slides together and put the pictures together. We've had a challenge extracting and sharing that data From ECRA? With ECRA. Okay. Ron's team has been great, but it's taken them a bunch of time. It's taken me a bunch of time. It's something we need to learn to get better at. We've got lots of charts and graphs, and that's hearing out what those charts and graphs mean is hard. And we've also had a challenge just organizing the entire 440 team around. What does this stuff mean? How does this stuff work? How do these sorts of things together. ECRA is gonna continue to support this work. They've begun some work around mathematics
087sequencing. They're gonna look at growth rates so we can see when a kid takes the PSAT eight, nine, how much do they grow to the next grade into the next grade. And we're gonna explore figuring out the ethicacy of some of our English learner and dual language programs K through 12. That's all coming up. Thank you, thank you. How do I stop sharing? Here I go. Okay, any questions? One of the big, like you said, Dr. Lach, the big issue is taking this data and actually acting on it and figuring out what needs to be done and how to approach issues. I was concerned in the SEL presentation that there were two groups of students who had much lower score or had significantly lower scores on their satisfaction with learning strategies compared to the typical
088students. And it was a Latin X students and Black students. And then when I look at these performance charts, it's the students who are expressing as a group that they're less happy with learning strategies who are experiencing lower performance. What can we do about learning, and it looks as though according to these charts, that pretty much, this kind of minority students peak in grade school kind of a little bit higher than they sort of just level out in high school. What can we do with learning strategies to make students feel more engaged? So there's another library with the answers to that. I'll make a few comments. My sense is that, we need to be careful and go from data to understanding what the data means. And then start to think about what are the implications
089for our strategy, and our budgeting and all of those sorts of things. And I think as a District, we still have a lot of work to do top to bottom to sort of understand what that data really means. We need to realize that in our classes we may have kids who are scoring at the 30th or 40th percentile. And we may have kids who are scoring at the 70th or 80th percentile in this SAT and learn how to address those different kinds of students in the same sort of classroom. You just heard a really wonderful presentation about how to sort of deal with issues of engagement and mental health and build those social connections. That's certainly part of it. As you heard last week, like we have some work to do to make sure our
090courses are teaching what the state expects us to do. Aligning our curriculum to standards is a big job. And it's a job that we need to improve on that will certainly help. And then providing teachers with the instructional materials, the curriculum and the tools so they can design tasks for kids that enable disengaged kid to be interested, that enable the really facile and adept kid to go beyond, that bring groups of kids together even if they might look different or come from different backgrounds. There's lots of strategies that the teachers can be taught and we can all learn together to do to help do those sorts of things. And that's actually I like, because that's taking something that is a little bit scary and actually identifying the positives that we can learn from. I mean,
091there's a lot of work to do. I mean, the things we've taken for granted for a long time in this District need to be rethought a little bit and reconfigured, but there's an opportunity for people to be collaborative. Absolutely, we could see, oh my goodness, 1/3 of our students aren't proficient and we could think that that was reason to panic. I think it's concerning, but it's an opportunity to learn and to grow and improve. That's what we're here to do. Thanks. No, thanks. Just a question just for the future. So when a way high in the deck is that diversity and it's got IEPs as a category it doesn't may have been there in dependencies. It doesn't look like it then breaks things out on scores by IEPs. And, but as IEP do they also
092categorize 504 in elementary schools? Or is that a high school term, 504? Tiffany is trying to get her mic on. And yes, they do. Okay sorry(Tiffany laughing) It's actually adulthood too, right? Like anybody can get a 504 too. Okay, so maybe planning interesting to the whole thing of how we're planning curriculum and how we're getting kids. What's the numbers of kids 'cause I've always had a sense without comparing, without actually seeing data of other school Districts that we have a high number of 504s than an IEPs. And then it would seem that the feeder Districts do as well. And then how does that translate to looking at how we roll things out? We're actually average in terms of the state for IEPs. Okay. So we're at 15%, which is the state average as well. But
093504s.. Were through the roof. Yes. Yeah. And we could get that data, Just a thought about that. And then the big question that you know that I'm gonna ask that is four months from now is again, is, I remember the investment in ECRA, it was significant. Is it paying off as we might come up to have to continue investment as is it's a good investment for us and how will we measure that, that it's a good investment for us to keep going? And that's rhetorical. Agreed. Yeah. Okay. Thank you all very much. Moving on to our, where are we here? We are to our Board of Education policies. First reading once again for brevity we're gonna go through this Dan, if there's something significant that you think we need to jump on, if not, we
094are all adults and should have read this before then. And we are going to try to do this as a going forward basis. That unless there's something you think there's significant change that we need to know about, let's assume that we can all read these before walking in. Okay. I'll just hit on the highlights. Technically I have to name each one technically No, I know I have, we have to read each one. Yep, so policy 7-15: Student and Family Privacy Act. Is there anything you want us to know in particular. This is a policy that does not currently exist in District 113. We are recommending adding it to 113. For the most part, we've adopted the model policy, but we have also recommended some changes that emphasize the privacy of student information student information should
095never be used for profits. And that's pretty much what we've done on that one. Privacy, privacy, privacy for our students. Policy 6-260: Complaints About Curriculum, Instructional Materials, and Programs. It's also as a policy that is not currently exist in 113 and has been in the model policies. We're recommending adoption of this policy with some changes for language, not more gender neutral pronouns and the like, and recognizing that there are different family structures other than simply parents. Thank you. 7-10: Equal Education Opportunities Ah, let's see. This is a policy that currently exists in 113, but it was last amended four years ago. The recommendation for adoption is to adopt the PRESS language as it is. It's consistent with what we had before. 7-20 Prevention of and Response to Harassment, Including Sexual Assault. This is a policy
096that does currently exist in 113, but it was last amended in 2018. The recommendation is to adopt the model language with minor changes to reflect District terminology. And this policy looks lengthy, but it also a lot of it refers back to other policies that have previously been approved. That 2-260 and 2-265; the various grievance procedures. Thank you. And if anyone has any questions on these jump on in. 7-70: Attendance and Truancy. This is a policy that currently exists in 113. I guess we could say because it was last amended in 2014. The recommendation is to adopt the model PRESS language, but there are some amendments to allow for some discretion within situations where there might be repeated truancy or problematic circumstances. Thank you. That will give you some additional flexibility. 7-90: Release During School Hours.
097This is a policy that does not currently exist in District 113. It simply addresses what's safe, what's necessary for a safe and secure early dismissal. And the recommendation is to adopt that as is. 7-130 Student Expression- Rights and Responsibilities. This policy exists within 113, but it was last amended in 2017. The recommendation is to adopt the PRESS language, but to adopt it with some modifications reflecting District 113 values, including giving the administration a certain amount of discretion to determine what is appropriate and also including language or protecting the rights of students who are not participating that their rights not to be interfered with, which we think is an important backstop. Like yeah. 7-170: Vandalism. Vandalism, this is a policy that does not currently exist in 113. It was put out by PRESS in 2019. The
098recommendation is to adopt this policy, but with some amendments to reflect discretion in terms of seeking restitution, that there are some circumstances in which restitution might not be appropriate. Policy 6-300: Graduation Requirements: Update World Language Requirement. This is a graduation requirement that is, let's see, all right, it's here. The recommendation is to adopt the changes to reflect upcoming state's statute changes and state graduation requirements changes that require additional world languages or alternatives to graduate. Thank you. And then the last thing is policy 6-300: Graduation Requirements For New Computer Literacy. This is again, reflecting upcoming state statute that won't go into effect for a few years, but because it is something that's so important that identifying which classes in the District offers are consistent with the state's computer literacy requirements. And Michael, and we have to
099say that on this one, Michael, and the leadership of all the departments within the school District did an amazing job of thinking about the classes that are offered and what classes further the upcoming state requirement that students be taught computer literacy. And there was a Yeoman's effort and working on thinking that through. I like the fact you used the term of "Yeoman" on that one. Okay, ask your question. I'm no expert on curriculum. But I just, I guess, wanna say like, in looking at the classes that were listed, I'm not totally convinced that they're all really computer, like, world history kind of jumps out as like, does that really meet the spirit of the requirement? Is that really something that gets at everything that the requirement is getting schools to address with students, maybe some
100of the others. Like, are we really meeting the spirit of it or are we just trying to make a lot of classes? Obviously every freshman has to take world history. So that's an easy way to get the requirement met, but is it? The spirit of the law versus the letter of law. It's a wonderful question and I absolutely appreciate the push. So let me try to clarify a few things. The law requires a one-year computer literacy course that can be fulfilled in any graduation requirement starting fall of 2022. So we had to move pretty quickly on that. ISBE does not have a definition for computer literacy. They have a task force working on it. I talked to the chair and a few members of the task force, and they recommended that we adopt what they
101believe the task force will adopt, which is the International Society for Technology Education Digital Literacy Standards. Now digital literacy is not the same as computer science or programming. It is about digital safety, computational thinking, digital creation, digital communication. It's less about creating code and more about using technology broadly to do this kind of work. Based on those standards, and we are fortunate to have two directors of instructional technology and one assistant principal who knew those standards well and had worked hard with them over the course of their career here and in previous careers, they worked with course teams to articulate how certain courses met those standards. And you can see in the, I believe it's an attachment there for each of those courses, a three or four page memo was written that I've fought with
102people about to make sure was precise enough to get there. Some of those courses as you'll see in the memo are real close to meeting those standards but didn't quite do it yet. And we have commitments from those course teams and the assistant principals to fix those courses so they're ready for the fall, if they're not ready, we'll be here with you and we'll pull those right off. So we think it's a pretty good process. We think those are the right standards, even though we're frustrated that ISBE didn't have their guidance ready when we needed it. It goes with the rest of the frustration of guidance. It's sort of, and it's a process that we'll continue to iterate on and improve. And we've also used this to start some conversations to say, computer literacy is
103important. If we are serious about preparing kids for college and careers in the future, actually being able to create code on a computer is probably something some of our students should have be able to do as well. So we're thinking about that also. I'm gonna ask a question with that. And I'm putting on my hat from another District that I used to sit on a board for. Is there any discussion that coding will be considered a world language anytime? And has ISBE given any thought of, have they given anything out there that coding would actually be considered a world language? So as a former, oh, I'll toot my own horn a moment. Go ahead toot it. In my former career, I used to lead science and mathematics and engineering and technology for the US Department
104of Education. And we dealt with this issue and pretty clearly the consensus among educators and computer scientists is that computer science is not a language. it's its own discipline. That's why I asked it. And we should do it even though there are various languages that people code. In fact, most progressive computer scientists downplay discussion of should you be coding in Ruby or Java or C++ because it's about data structures, algorithms, sequencing, those sorts of concepts that is important to teach. Thank you, by the way, I only knew Java. I had no idea the other two (mumbling) Thank you, any other questions? Okay and thank you, Gayle, that was a great question. Thank you to our policy committee. I'm gonna say it again I said at the beginning, I think one of the most important things
105that come out of these policies is that's making sure that our policies reflect who we are as a District and who we want to be and who we represent and who we represent is every student in our District. So thank you. Moving on to our discussion Course Proposal for 22-23. A course proposal a board action item. I'm assuming this is you again, Dr. Lach Yes, it is. We're just gonna continue. You have a memo about course proposals. I'm happy to talk through it. Do you have questions? I have to say I loved that I think it was our third diversity equity and inclusion committee group that started two years ago, year and a half ago. And this class was discussed and I'd love that a year later it's sitting in front of us. So thank
106you to our staff that worked diligently to do this. I can't wait to see what happens with it. Any questions about it. No, moving on. Alternative Revenue Bonds. Woo hoo! Here we go. Funding District 113 Construction Projects. Okay, we have Ken in here to answer questions. I know Ken likes to take a step back right before we get into these things, even though we've talked about this a few times, I think it's worthwhile here. First, the facilities committee and then the Board of Education have determined, at least at this point, what the scope of the Highland Park library and the Deerfield auditorium should be broadly speaking. And then the finance committee had a meeting as Ken alluded to in his report to discuss the possible funding mechanisms for those projects. So we brought this to
107the board tonight because the next step would be to have a parameters resolution in front of the board, which would be on January the 11th, which is the next time that the board would meet. So that really in my simple minded way of thinking about this, that is the direction that administration needs from the board is that do we need a parameters resolution on January 11th to begin the process for funding these projects? So I think we know that alt revenue bonds are and all that, but I just wanted to make sure that that's the direction we need as a primary. Let me, is it okay if I, can I say up top I didn't wanna report on the finance committee and then do this again. So yeah, let's recap the discussion, it's most important
108let's recap again. What we waited for was waiting for the facilities committee to land on a plan. They did, came to the board last meeting, and the kind of consensus of the board was let's keep going on this plan. And I remember it's $35, $36 million for the Deerfield auditorium slash fine arts center. And then the library comes to that. So then it comes to the finance committee and here's the way we looked at it. We said, well, given that the projects are on the table, how do you pay for it? Alt revenue bonds becomes this, hopefully it's only a year they tell me but it's a smart, given the timing of the market with interest rates, given our triple A rating, given everything else, the alt revenue bonds becomes a financially smart tool, a
109$51 million to pay for it. And I use the, whether it's the right framework or not, I liken it to the home equity loan. So we get a chunk of money upfront to pay for these so we can go forward on these projects in a timely manner, but we have to pay it back, right? So this is an alt revenue bond. And for anybody who might be listening, this is not an addition to the tax levy. It's paid back over the 20 years or so out of our own operating funds, we have to pay this back. Okay, so in terms of the, and Tammy's just done a really great job through the... it's gonna be a year and a half that we've started on this journey about the alt revenue bonds. To keep explaining how
110it works. It fits in my opinion, the alt revenue bonds, it's a puzzle piece. It fits the piece of what the project wants to do. But I do wanna say, and we talked about it at the finance committee though, is to make it very clear that this makes a commitment to future administrations and boards and our budget it makes a commitment of about 3.3 to $3.5 million a year that we have to pay. Just go to your budget, look at next year's budget and boom that's $3.5 million that's already accounted for to pay for the payback alone. And years from now let's say we'll go ahead and do this. So it's more of kind of opinion, but so years from now, boards and administration will look at this and go, okay, we're doing our budget
111for next year. Well, we forgot about that. Remember what that was? You see that shiny objects. That's what that was. And if, and when, and we've tagged them to these projects for the puzzle piece. If and when we look at another, the facilities committee, then at some point comes back and says, okay, that was great finance committee. Now we have this whole other wave of construction facility projects we want to do, right? And that it could be another big amount of money. Then we say, well, okay, we don't have that. That either gets tagged slowly, or it's a referendum, which school Districts typically it's not atypical for school District to add that tenure chunk so that's a referendum. Well, in that referendum for those projects, wouldn't be this fine art center. 'Cause that's already done.
112But remember that is putting you in a position, that's it's adding to the complexity of having to do that because we've already committed so much funds to this. Am I making sense? So it's just real important to understand that this decision is really key. For those, right? And for those of you, for the new board members, I mean, the presentations we got for the Deerfield Fine Arts Center, are a ton were fabulous. Presentation for grade students centered, the needs were terrific. I mean it was just really fabulous. And so it certainly it makes sense to say we want to do this 'cause this is really good, but the decision is (indistinct) And I will stop there and Dan and Rick, I have to ask did summarize it okay? No, you summarized it very accurately, ken.
113I've had this concern throughout this process that we're not doing, we're getting too caught in the details of two particular projects without looking at the large picture. The proposals, the preliminary plans for the auditorium are wonderful. They make sense in isolation as plans for an auditorium that is going to be an auditorium that meets all the needs that were identified in the various focus groups. The problem is that we aren't simply talking about financing an auditorium in isolation. There is a master facilities plan. That is a much larger picture that is going to call for somewhere in the neighborhood of spending the number is still subject to clarification, but let's say 150 million over 10 years. The auditorium in isolation. Yes, it's a wonderful idea for an auditorium, but it's not at all clear that
114it's an auditorium that will be used by the District as a whole, or simply by one school. I think I know which way most people are leaning though. And I think we need to make before deciding on a $35 million auditorium, I think we need to work hard at where it fits in within the big picture of the other $100 million of work that needs to be done over the next decade. Looking at the, what is the usage of the auditorium? Is it going to solely be a Deerfield auditorium, or is it something that we can find economies of scale and cost savings by doing it at a District level? And we haven't looked at that yet. Whether or not that is even feasible. So we're in this situation where there is, we know that
115there's a lot of work that is going to need to be done in order to keep up the District and maintain the District. We have a means to finance these two projects, but we're talking about these two projects outside of the bigger picture of all the other projects that need to be done within this District. And so we're talking about spending a substantial amount. I mean, raising alternative revenue bonds, which the District can do as a right, but we then have to constrain our capital budget to pay for those bonds. And I'm very worried that then there are going to be other projects that haven't yet been vetted through the master planning process that haven't yet been placed in a prioritize list, that are going to become emergencies, but there isn't going to be the
116money to pay for them. I'm not comfortable approving saying, let's go ahead and an issue and have a resolution until we have a firmer idea that where everything fits within the master plan and where these two projects fit within the master plan. And it very well might be the case that yes, what has been proposed for the auditorium is a wonderful idea, it's great. It meets all of the needs that were identified by the focus groups, but it doesn't make sense within the context of the other $150 million of work. If we look at, oh, District has $150 million of work, it stinks, but maybe the best solution is, you know what, we'll spend 12 million, 15 million on an auditorium, get it better. But so it's not the perfect auditorium, but it's an auditorium
117that fits within our entire master plan. We're doing the audit. We're doing it in isolation right now. And I'm just worried about the possible. I'm terrified of the possible financial consequences of doing it in isolation that it could leave us in trouble down the line because we haven't vetted everything else yet. Okay, Rick, did you wanna add anything? But you gotta turn on your mic. Since your time at the finance committee here and not the facilities committee, the one comment facilities committee is about 40 million of that money that you talked about Dan is just infrastructure. That stuff that's gonna break, we know it's gonna break and we're gonna have to replace it. So that's gonna have to happen no matter what. Back to the finance committee. It will definitely constrain the capital budget as
118it currently exists. And one of the things that we're gonna have to look at is can we allocate more money to the capital budget so that we can accomplish the other task that need to be accomplished? And that's something that the jury still are on. We haven't really developed a strategy to do that yet. We conceptually understand that I think that we need to do it, but we haven't gotten to that point. So I totally understand the issue, but we haven't really, as a finance committee, we were not presented with a plan B. And so we kind of have to go with plan A, if that's all the facilities committee is gonna be giving us. And then we need to decide if we can afford it. So my tendency is to go ahead with these
119projects and go ahead with this alt revenue process. But I totally understand the concerns that are being raised and they're valid. Okay, go ahead. I was gonna say, so question about that constraining of the capital budget, what are some examples of over the next 10, 20 years if we allocate those funds, what are some things like examples generally, of things that we won't be able to do or that we would have done had we not done this? And I know it's a super general question, but I guess I'm trying to get it as, like, what is the cost of like, what are we not doing because we are doing this. Yeah, I'm not Brian, Brian's gonna be accurate. I'm just gonna take a guess at things. So there's some real tangible things that I know
120are gonna come up in the next couple of years, it's replaced in (indistinct) the replacement of field turf. That's a lying box in each place, right? And if we do it exactly the same way we've always done things, that's gonna (indistinct) And then if you look at your capital budget again, to Rick's point, if we keep it pretty much the same that we've had in that year, it's gonna be $3.5 million towards paying back the bonds. But field turf, that's $1 million now, now then infrastructure thing is right, we're tight, right? So there are some things on that schedule that'll just pop up at you and you'll take a look at it. And it's some obvious things like things with a lot of facilities. And then you'll see things that's a boiler first and other
121things that.. if at an isolation to kind of with Amazon. If this was the only thing we had on our plate, the idea would be that the $1.5 million or $1.7 million per year. We could handle planned ways to be doing the roof next year, the lights, the next year, the windows, the next year, the other one, but it's gonna be tight. How'd I do there, Brian? You did good yet. I wanna answer that question very technically yet I don't have that prepared of.. Would you like me to give you the list? That's the concept and so really the point of the tennis ball back and forth, you can find out some facilities it's okay. We finance, we heard what you said. We've got a canvas smart financial solution to it back to facilities but
122this now, when you guys come up with your next wave of plans, it's gonna be tight. And to Dan's point, what are we missing by making that commitment today, right? So my question is a couple, I think I know the answer to one. Correct me if I'm wrong, alternate revenue bonds. If we sell them, we have to actually say what we're selling them for, correct? Well, we have to do that. We have to spend 85% of it in three years. We have to submit a draw down schedule. We can replace. Right, so we can go back? And there's a look back. That we can say that $51 million, that it's money we already spent on architecture. I think that's unlimited as to how far back and go on that. And then other projects, if it
123was the roofs or big lighting or some big project we recently did, we could target for that. So the 85% has to be done in three years. You could, if we say, here's our initial draw-down schedule, we're doing it for these things. Tell me it's not, if I'm right, we could change it out, correct? True, correct. Yeah. It's good to have an idea. We have to submit something but then we can.. Let us put the scope of the worksheet is as long as we keep our capital projects over that per year. So from again, with interest rates and the amount of money and that %$3.5 million will always, I don't think there's any worry that we've got 85. We've got an idea of how to spend 40 some million dollars of that. I don't think
124we'll have a worry of those guys, but we can flip it out. Okay, so I'm gonna say a couple of things with that. I've said it to you before. I'm really uncomfortable with selling all of them. I readily admit that. To me it's like liquidating my savings account and it terrifies me. So I readily admit that, like, in my mind, I don't know what is the fail safe to keep there, but to do all 51 million, I admit that does terrify me. In relation to the performing arts center. I don't know how much longer we ask the students at Deerfield High School to not having a learning environment. By the same token, I'm very leery of building a $34 million auditorium that's only gonna be used by one school. And when we were discussing this
125whole concept of thinking of our facilities District-wide, $34 million for one school to only be utilizing it, I readily admit that's taxing future boards, future things for only one group of students to be using does concern me. But like I said, I think Kathy, you would know better than I do. We are three years from that initial shutdown, we will have an entire group of students go through Deerfield High School without a learning environment that is up to our standards for our students in the fine arts there. And I sit there and say, if that was any other department would not have been three, we would have been jumping and that's for me. So that's kind of where I'm at. And that just help us did, it'd be far from our standards. Far from our
126standards. Yes and so that to me is this is three years. It will be four. We will have an entire generation of students go through our building without that piece. And we wouldn't go through an entire four years without a science lab. We wouldn't go through entire four years with Chromebooks that didn't work. Without a football field, my God. The earth would revolve the other direction. So I'm really struggling with this. But like I said, I'm also struggling with taxing, however many years of students with that bill, if it's only being used by one school, for one thing. That Gayle, you wanted to say something. So my understanding from hearing Debby and Kathy talk and people who have come from the Deerfield fine arts department to present to us over the past. The overlying is
127that the performing arts center at each school is used so frequently that it's not possible to really share one for the whole District. So correct me if I'm wrong on that. But that's my takeaway from what maybe you guys have presented over the last couple of years. I think that (speaking faintly) And I think the idea, what I heard is that Highland Park will continue to use this auditorium because it's, obviously there's some issues that (indistinct) any auditorium but it's an auditorium and it's (indistinct) Why are you gonna do this? I mean, it doesn't mean this. So Highland Park will continue to use the auditorium but my question really would be under (indistinct) Yeah. That if we were going to consider a larger scope for the use of the auditorium it would be, the outstanding
128debt our service to the in charge of (speaking faintly) I'm going to memory. 'Cause I recall the 75 foot fly loft and the adding the balcony equivalent to 800 feet that got us the 37 million. Yeah, that's the number. And if that additional install of balcony and 35 of fly loft that we said, okay, it's just the Deerfield auditorium. Those two pieces, part of the scope was reduced. Now if we remove 50 foot fly lofts that will reduce $3 million. That's a round number. Yeah that's the right number, but a round number yeah. So, if it's the case that we're talking about here, this is going to be an auditorium for the entire District 'cause 75 feet fly loft from the balcony. And I think that they, this is not an older. This is a
129separate conversation. I mean, I've not really had the opportunity to say, given our current performance schedules in all our areas, how would it work if we had District performance that 113 but I have to say it makes me a little concerned that the decisions are riding on those kinds of plans. Because I think that as Dan said, I think right, sounds right to me. We haven't been, the facilities meeting the board and looking at the projects as what this projects do standalone in isolation. What do they want? If we're going to looking at this in a larger way, I guess there'll be time to do that on the one hand, on the other hand, isn't it for $3 million of scope. Can I ask you all, I'm getting messages from people that they can't hear
130us. Let's make sure we are talking into our microphones, the upside to text during meetings. (both laughing) Yeah, so in terms of scope, that's what we talked about at the last meeting was really that marginal delta of the balcony and I think the point that we didn't focus in on, is is there an alternative that is very undesirable, but is there an alternative that makes that auditorium safe and functional, just safe and functional at a 10-$15 million project. We kind of hinted at it once, but we never really. The facilities committee did look at it. The facilities committee did get a plan on that. And speaking to the educational people from within the building, Mr. Clack and Mr. Leash Achres all you did was pardon me to be so trite. We put a whole bunch
131of ramps in to make it ADA accessible and didn't make it any more educationally enriching for $12 million. We put new seats in there and a bunch of ramps. Yeah we looked at it like, there was a complete renovation. The facilities committee looked at a lower scope project. I don't know if it was that $10 Million more than that. Yeah I think it was 15 to $20 million if I remember correctly. We looked at a lighter, we were reusing the existing auditorium with a.. Right. Keeping that shell. We keep the shell. No, I thought it was more than 10 million. That option was more than 10 million. Our prior architects and plans that looked at a smaller option, even going back further. This is something we haven't done a couple things, (speaking faintly) certainly in
132terms of where we're hearing numbers. One of the things that the board could say is because I'm hearing that $37 million performing arts that will be something for the District, $34 million auditorium oh thank you. A $34 million they don't sound any better though, but okay thank you. $34 million auditorium, if it's just gonna be for one school, these are big numbers. So if the board said, here's the number that, I mean, architects correct me if I'm wrong, I believe they do this. If the board said $20 million. What do we get for $20 million? I mean, if I were renovating my kitchen, that's how I, but not for 20 million, but that's how we would. I wanna go to your kitchen. There'd be a number. And the designer would come back and say, okay,
133for this amount of money, here's what you get. So I assume the architects could do that. The board said, here's the range that we need to hit 'cause 34 million, 37 million too high, but we don't wanna just spend millions of dollars and have something that's just not the learning space that Jodi's talking about. Okay so I'm gonna kind of redirect us here because we're not in a facilities thing right now. We're in the, and I'm sorry, But we are though. But we are but I'm just trying to say like, we are, but we have to. So yeah, so it's kind So the question is do we use The alternative reference, so back to the agenda item. Yeah. It's a financial mechanism to fund $51 million in construction project. Of which case do we so
134we have three years to use them, correct? Three years. You have to have a reasonable expectation to spent on this 85% a year. And do we have to sell all 51 million? Or could we say that we're going to 40 million? We can break it into two. It really gets into some detail of your costs and do that. You can break it up. And there's a reason that we do 41, Ken by the way. Ken can explain, but there's a very good reason. I guess one of the things is that if we do move forward, we're effectively, I mean, leaving aside the infrastructure who knows what might come up, we're effectively saying that every other, we'd like to do an item on a master facilities plan is being put off until they're paid off, which
135is 20 years, which until maybe the current referendum bonds are paid off, which is what nine, 10 years. And so we go to another referendum. Anything else on that list that would improve but it's not infrastructure is basically not happening now. It's not happening until there is a referendum. It's not happening until, it's just not happening probably for 10-15 years. Are we at that stage in the master facilities plan where there's, I'm not comfortable saying that everything on that list is a no go right now. But if we're looking at a $20 million auditorium. We're the client, I'm sorry we can be unreasonable. We can say, architect, give me 20 million. That's it you're not getting not a penny more. We can do that as clients. Agreed, I just don't think looking at what we
136saw for those numbers, it was worth and I believe anyone who's listening, believe me, $20 million is a huge amount of money, but I felt like we weren't getting what we should get. Because we're effectively saying that if we don't do that. We're effectively saying anything that was grandfathered in as ADA accessible in the previous rebuilding in the previous referendum, that we were able to do it because, well, the building's old, so we don't have to make it fully compliant. 15 years we're not going back and looking at any of that. That's what we're effectively saying. Well, Okay, so you got me worried. You knew you would. Again, I respectfully disagree. I think that you're making the assumption that the capital budget cannot change. That it'll be $5 million forever. Whereas in fact, in between
1372005 and 2017, it went from zero to 6.5 million based on increasing $500,000 dollars each year. In 2017, a decision was made to roll it back to 5 million. If we make that decision and do that, we'll have to make sacrifices but we have to be sure. Well, there's no question that it's about, but that's the job. Is the allocation of scarce resources, that's the job. No, it is the job, but it's also an order of doing things. I understand. I'm not just going to say. Oh, let's sell bonds before. I'm not talking, well, I understand but the point is is that there are other options than to never do anything again. I only have 1.5 million a year to work with. That option is, is to increase the capital budget each year by finding
138the money in some way or other. And we have not yet figured out how to do that clearly. And I will be honest about that, but that's what the District did for 12 years. And just for some reason that is unclear, stop doing. That's the leap of faith, but we can do that and not hurt education. If we can do that, that's wonderful. But, and I'm all for increasing the CapEx the budget, but. All you have said in the next, in the soon agenda items on the budget. Yeah. Okay, I think we've kind of done this, yep. And I guess the last thing I would say back to the sites videos, the other thing we did is the $37 million project compared to the database across was all, I mean, granted I'm sure if another
139School District was going out for bid on their new one maybe that's just gone right. But it was 1/3 higher than the highest one. So it's a big number. It's a bigger, yes. And all we're doing from finance is saying here's the mechanism. So if I'm hearing this correctly, well, I don't know what I'm hearing. We are just in a discussion. We haven't taken action. No discussion but my initial question was, are we bringing back a premises resolution on January 11th? I would say yes. Bring the resolution. Yes. Right. And we've had a good discussion here, and we all had in. Shall we watch the film? And well. And watch. And then I think we as a board, I think we understand what we're facing. Let me come back the next meeting and if there's
140consensus and we go for it, and then we vote for it and then off we go. Again, it doesn't stop the administration, the facilities committee, the board, saying, well, wait a minute, we've got $51 million to spent. Probably we've given a spend-down schedule for this. And you know what, we've got a different spend on schedule. We can go and change that, right? But we just have to be committed to doing the projects and we gotta pay the loan back. So I think we bring it and we bring it and we discuss it. And then, well, that's what I think. I think at this point we should kind of bring it to a vote as well. I would agree. But like you've heard my concerns too. Okay, moving back to you again, Ken, the fiscal year
14123 budget parameters, I'm assuming this is you. I'll start because it was discussed at the finance committee. So you guys saw it in your packet. Again, it had a projection, a five-year projection of the operating budget and the deficit ahead. So kudos to the administration. I wanna make sure we always recap and bridge what has happened. So a year ago, going to this current fiscal year budget, we were looking at a $2.4 million structural deficit. And administration came back, worked really hard, found a bunch of savings. 500 and some thousand dollars in savings were in purchase services and things like that. And came in at a $1.2 million deficit. That was just terrific. And from my standpoint, as a board member, it did not impact student experience. So that's fabulous. I mean, that's just smart
142management and kudos to you guys to doing that. So now you're looking at it for the next year, and the recommendation is, here's our structural deficit. And again, as I pointed at the top of the show, this deficit is expense related. The structural deficit is because of the expense side of the equation. The revenue side of the equation is not in our control. It's not a revenue issue, it's not a revenue issue. Kind of guessing what CPI might be, what the state might give us in refunds, what fed money. It's not that it is this expense item. This is how our District. This is how it's built. This is our staffing. This is what we got. And this is where it is. So the challenge is to reduce it. So Ali presented to us and
143said, okay, we've got a plan to reduce this by around $500,000 looking behind me, so $500,000. My concern from a finance standpoint is this, is that last year you guys did a great job and you found it. I don't know, I think I'm confident. It's gonna take much more creative thinking in this year's budget to get that. And you guys are creative people but it's gonna be more creativity to get to that. And then the next year you've got another 500,000. My recommendation is, is that plan that comes to the board for FY23 is definitely construction input also has the plan for FY24. The thing that there's already the thinking, what you would be asking the board to is approve a budget deficit. Which we won't be doing. And I think we would feel much
144better about that knowing that these kinds of very creative hard work change and processes 'cause a structural budget deficit due to expenses requires a structural response to the way we operate. And we wanna do it with great experience for kids. So how's that gonna happen? So it may take two fiscal years to execute a very creative change, I get that. But I think it would be our fiduciary responsibility much better to see the beginnings of that plan with this budget. Sorry, kind of long-winded. Now. back to what you were talking about, Rick. So when you look at this number, already in there is going forward and then Ali has got a plan that kind of takes us into a surplus, but that's before then you're gonna know we got $3.5 million of paying back our
145loan starting in FY25 I think. Danny, is it 24? We're gonna do. FY24. That within that budget expense item is $3.5 million to pay back for. Madam chair, back to you. Thank you, Ali, anything we wanna add to that? Yeah, I mean, I just wanna make sure what Ken mentioned that within that budget of FY24 3 1/2 but that will only give us about 1.5 or $1.7 million allocation for more current capital projects. I mean, as Rick mentioned that if we need to enhance our capital project, if we do that by additional 500,000 every year, then we'll obviously have to reduce the additional $500,000 of expenditures every year to do that. So I just wanna make sure that everyone's clear on that note that the $3.5 million principal interest will leave us with by $1.7
146million of capital projects. Let me come in and then, so Rick would make the point of, well, let's make that bigger. But what I said in before, when I started talking about the other presentations or the SEL and everything else, as you guys go to do this budget and find $500,000 reduction, and then Brian, I'll pick on Brian. Brian says, hey, you know what, I need more than the $5 million in their construct by 5.1 we don't need seven, we need eight. Then it becomes, okay, what's our strength? Wait a minute, we've got to get to this reduction. So where's it gonna come from, right? What's all the other great creative work we're doing attrition changing out programs, finding a different, but where is it coming from? And that's why I think, so Ali you
147could do that. We're not tying to that, but that's gonna be where the numbers gotta land, right? Yeah, or put another way, I guess. And Rick I think I'm right. In order to increase the CapEx fund by 500,000 a year, we're adding 500,000 to each of these deficit reduction in parts. On the expenditures side, right? In order to do it on the expenditure side. In order to, and that's a challenge. That's a big task. That we're not talking about revenue at this point. Yeah, it's.. We're not talking about revenue. Just get me right. Actually what I was gonna say my report. In a lot of not-for-profits like universities and other things, in years past, there's been this bump that we've gotten from investment interest income. You can count on that. And a lot of not-for-profits
148that's below the line items. You don't do (indistinct) District has already supported a tap. You see that, that's coming below the line. So we've got to look at this from the expense side of the equation. Mm-mmh, yep. So then a couple of things that we should also mention about what we're seeing, Rick, we will get this question. So this budget, this deficit reduction input, that that line is 550 in FY23. That line, that does not include pandemic expenditures? Correct. No. Correct. That's right. So the amount of money that the board improved in June, which includes MTSS, which includes a lot of things that you've heard described tonight, they're not even in that. That is part of those pandemic expenditures. These budget projections assume all go away. So once all those reductions meet then there's $550,000
149out of FY23. That may make absolutely sure that if we're reducing pandemic expenditures, we can't say, well, look we reduced $1 million pandemic expenditures. We're there that doesn't count. It's after pandemic expenditure. I'm glad you brought that up. The other thing I wanted to mention, 'cause I've already started to hear this, and I don't know how, if anyone listens to news, and if you don't hear, that this is the month that we're gonna see the percentage difference in CPI between December, 2020 and December, 2021, which will be announced in January as PTL. It's gonna be higher than 2%, and Ken's talking about we're not considering the revenues, but these are questions we're giving, just to make sure you put this out. That 5% that we're anticipating that doesn't imply at all, that the board will
150take all of that. But that's what PTL will be in January for sure. What we don't know, and that will be FY24. What's announced in January 2022 will be FY24. What we don't know is what PTL will be in FY25. Historically, if what we saw back in 2000, and I think it was seven, it went up then the next year, it was 1.1 or something really low. So if historically, that's the case, then that is gonna have an impact. There are a lot of people who are saying, prices are gonna come down. There are a lot of people who are saying, are predicting the prices will go up. I have my own prediction. One of those people will be right. There you go. This is one of the reasons that our efforts are focused on
151the expenditure side, because we don't know if PTL is 5%, well, it's gonna be higher than two. I mean, everyone knows. But because we don't know what's having in FY25 and 26, what we're focusing on, because we think it's the right way to right size is, is on the expenditure side. Yeah, and another point to that is our expenses are also related to the inflation. So it's not like there's gonna be found money. Nope. No There's a direct relationship between the inflation number and our expenses. So there is no huge windfall panacea On this side of the world. 'Cause expenditure is also indexed to inflation. Right. Your salaries are indexed to inflation. Exactly, so.. So in terms of the direction to us, what I'm hearing, two things just wanna check on this, that the 500,
152'cause we need a number as we start planning for FY23. And then, but with the second thing I'm hearing is, and learn kind of talk through that and make sure I'm understanding is as we are working on FY23, which starts in January, which is one of the reasons that this is on the agenda tonight, we've gotta get to this. As we start working on the budgeting process for FY23, when we start in January next month, we need to know what that number is. So that we'll pause on that to make sure that, and the other thing I wanna mention about this is that there are gonna be changes. We all know, at least I hope we're used to by now, the idea that in a budget projection there will be changes. Things will go up,
153things go down. That's what happens. But if that bit of 550,000 is the number for FY23, if our renewal rates are high, if other things come in that cause that deficit to fluctuate, we can't keep solving all along the way. Then it's becoming a moving target. Now we'll have to get there, obviously, we might see, for example, that the budget deficit and FY24 is higher than we anticipated because of these increased costs. But we've gotta get to a number they say, this is what we're driving to no matter what changes we see in cost moving forward, for this budget planning season I'm saying. My view is we move ahead with what you've got here. And my recommendation that I had at the end of the finance committee was there's thought behind this, you guys have
154some thoughts going into January on how you're gonna come up with a, what do you guys call it? A deficit reduction input of $550,000. My recommendation is that when you do this work, you also do the work of what's our best plan today. For what we know today, where's the other 550,000 for FY24? Exactly, always think of a year. Because they could be linked together. It could be something that I've got a plan for my division, for my section that could work. It's gonna take me two years to get there. And I get that. But if we don't press you, you guys like deadlines. And if we don't press you to give us that plan for the next year, what I'm worried about is we'll go into next year and go, and when we kinda
155got it, but we don't have it for this year. Go ahead. It's just my recognition that, when you give it to us, you give us a plan for the next year too. In my view in terms of the, and it's something I think we need to always keep in mind, in this really big picture is, at all costs we want to avoid having to make reductions and things like providing a multi-tiered systems of supports for students that who are struggling. That's something that I think we've seen an impact to it in real life. We always seen how it helped throughout the pandemic. It's something I think we want to keep, and that's all costs, avoid things that are going to have an impact on students. And as we were in this big picture as we
156talk about funding capital projects and adding to the capital fund potentially, at what point are we going to start getting the pressure that there is the risk, that there will be an impact on students. That's something that I want to avoid at all costs, and it's awful, and it's difficult for a board to do, but sometimes we also have to ask when we're thinking about the impact for students is that is the greatest benefit for students be the best we can do in an auditorium, if it means losing something that affects other students someplace else. We have to do a balancing for some of these things, and that's really, I think in light of where we are in the grand scheme of things, in terms of the long-term structural deficit, we need to take a
157step back and prioritize. I think we need to have eyes wide open about the challenges that we're facing. These numbers, these 550, this wasn't because we had something in the mind that we knew that we could do that would get us to 550, but it wasn't that at all, we were looking at numbers. There was a discussion at one point that well, if there's $1 million deficit in FY23 that should be the reduction for FY23. And the discussion, the finance may list what administration presented was, if we're gonna have $1 million reduction year, let's do it in the year when we have the largest number of retirements, it offers us our best chance to make those reductions. Okay, but that 550 was the number just to get us there. I think once we do that,
158as Ken pointed out and I appreciate your doing that, that we made reductions. Every year when you make reductions, you're making increasingly more reductions every year, you're getting closer and closer to the bone. I don't know how you avoid that. They're going to be. Of course, it's our goal but we do not impact students in any way. I don't know that as we go through this, that something is not gonna be reduced. That someone would say, this is impacting students. We should just buckle up because this is gonna be hard. And we'll of course, anything having to do with students touch the last but if we're adding MTSS expenses while we're also making these reductions, that just means by my math can get reduced more, to hit that target. And as you'll see in the
159pandemic expenditures, there's quite a bit of expense. And in our response to the pandemic debt, we did not solve for this year, but now if it's gonna be in the budget, we're gonna have to solve for it. Okay, anything else? Okay, moving on to our Contract Renewals and Timelines for District Administrators and Principals. I know this isn't me. Tom, I think it's. Tom, if you (mumbling) Thank you for being here. The rest of the people are thinking they gotta find a new District to work with. Good evening, everyone, I'll tee this up for discussion. So this is going back to the item from the human resources committee on November, 29th, that Gayle talked about at the very beginning of the meeting in her report. We are looking for guidance on the, I guess, administration of,
160and the cadence around contracts for cabinet administrators. I think November 29th was not the first time that this had been talked about as a topic in an HR committee meeting. It's been talked about a few times and it's kind of been intimated at, as you will, if you will many times also in the spring while we were actually approving and considering administrator contracts. A couple of different times we've gone in and looked at comparable school Districts to see how this is done there. But I think the takeaway from that has been that there's definitely not one way to do this. There's no commonly understood best practice if you will. And it's really very unique based on every school District in every board's preferences. We also kind of asked our consultants from three C to add
161this in as something that they thought about and reported back to us on. We got the initial part of their report back in, and the consultant kind of talked about this, but didn't really provide strong guidance other than to say, there's a lot of different ways you could do this. So we're not going to be really able to look anywhere else for help on this. And it really just comes down to what the board thinks on this topic. I think the one clear thing that we came out of the HR committee with was that everybody kind of likes the idea of going with three-year contracts for new administrators in these roles, Assuming everybody's okay with that, the real discussion then comes, what do we do after that? So that's, I guess, kind of what we're
162hoping to hear some discussion about tonight and come away with some guidance for where we go. So I know I gave a long, it was good, a long summary, but I think just to get down to the main point is that when there's a year left on an administrator's contract, assuming they're doing well, they'll get a year extension. So they'll still have two years of security from that point. You know what, and that should be sufficient. And the graphic that's up, I'm sorry, on the board attempts to kind of show this in timeline form. This is what I love about committee work. You guys did the work, you brought it to us with your recommendation. Thank you for doing so. It makes sense. For me, it makes sense. You gave it a great visual. So
163now I understand it even better, but this is one of the benefits of committee work, no different than policy and all of our other committees. You guys do the legwork and you present to us the summary. Someone took my very poor drawing during the HR committee and turned it into that. Well, it was lovely graphic. (board members laughing) Thank you very much. Okay any other questions on this? No, looks great. Fantastic, okay. Moving on to our external audit for fiscal year ending 2021. Ali, this is for you. Why is this shooting? There's Ali. Yes, and this is for the audit, correct. So I just wanna use it right now Yes please. All right, so yeah, the external auditors, they audit us every year. So what do they do? They're legally required to do our financial
164statement audit and render an opinion on whether those financial statements are accordance with GAAP, which is the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. And they fairly represent the financial condition of the District, they also review internal controls for material weaknesses, fraud checks, and obviously check for compliance with laws, rules, regulations. How long does the audit last in case someone's wondering? The audit process usually starts in June. So in this case, it started June of '21 ends in November, 2021 so it's about six months. And then we create a document called comprehensive annual financial report, which is also attached for a review. It's 140 page document. And just keep in mind that this is not a required document, but we've been creating this document for the last 25 years to be fully transparent. And the bond rating companies
165appreciates this document. We go out of our way to be fully transparent. So based on their unqualified opinion of the auditors, according to them, the financial statements are in compliance. No material weaknesses, no findings. So to summarize all of this, that this year's audit has been flawless with no findings. And I wanna give kudos to the business office staff, as you can see the timeline on the audit, there's this a lot of work that we need to do. We're processing $100 billion of transactions bank statements, reconciliation. So I just wanna give kudos to the business office staff for putting their hard work into this and making sure that we completed our audit in a timely fashion with no findings. So that is my report. Thank you, Ali. I know Ken's gonna pipe in, go ahead.
166Yeah and just our opportunity to Ali but you gave the kudos to your staff, and kudos to you and to Bruce and the whole team. We really appreciate this. When the auditors come in and say it's a clean audit, when you're a board member, that's exactly what you wanna hear. It's the highest report rating that we can get. We're well-funded. The other nice thing they told us was during that month long process, great cooperation with management, they didn't have any issues. I did offer the auditor's an opportunity if they had issues, I gave them the opportunity to meet with the board privately and said, absolutely no problem. They do not need to meet with us. Everything was clean and it was just an excellent audit. So congrats to everybody. It's hard work and well, we'll
167learn the rate. That's it. Thank you. Okay moving on to our next, oh yeah go ahead, Ken. So I would recommend that, to this discussion I have recommend next agenda. Then we have an action item we formally as a board we formally accept the audit. Perfect, thank you. Moving onto our next discussion item. This is an item that I put on here. Social Media Communications. I know that we're at a late hour. So I guess at this point, I would like to just have a very peripheral discussion about it and let's bring it back onto our January meeting. 'Cause we are running late in time tonight. My thought process on this was I'd like everyone to give some thought to how we respond to some social media communications. This is not about responding to your
168kid pushed mine on the playground. This is about if we choose to, as a board say, we'd like to respond to things that are factually incorrect in terms of non-student non-teacher et cetera issues. How referendum money is spent, or when someone says this was voted on at a board meeting, those are the types of things that I'm not sure how we want to if we want to et cetera. But the problem is is that once someone puts it out on social media, everyone thinks it's true. And when we don't correct it, it becomes truer in the community. And it's not that I want our board to be run through social media, but the reality is that's how our community gets their information. And once again, I wanna say, we can never, we'll never ever get
169involved in student issues, staff issues, et cetera. That is about as confidentially protected as we can get. But this, my question was anyone's thoughts about things that are either procedural or like I said, financial, that people are just putting wrong information out there. Do we want to have one of our board members, possibly not with our own name, but like maybe an account that says like board what your thoughts are on having someone correct the factually incorrect things. And that's why I didn't know if anyone wanted to say anything or what, and like I said, we can bring it back to January for more discussion or possibly action, because I know it's late. Gayle, go ahead. I just related though, there are so many times I see posts in some of these groups where someone's
170saying, does anyone know the answer to blah, blah, blah. Right, another opportunity. And then community members answer as if they know, and if anyone is actually listening to the meeting right now, just reach out to someone in the District who does get that information. That is the best way to get correct information. And also just be critical thinkers when you're reading social media posts. It might not be the full story and it might not all be accurate. But my thought on this is, and I agree with you. Someone says there's no parking for any seniors next year at DHS. Okay, it's a very quick process. That's not true reach out to Kathy Anderson and she'll be happy to tell you how the process is to go. As an example, (both laughing) Yes, sorry, I am
171not saying there is no parking at DHS next year. Not enough. Exactly, I'm ready for the emails to start coming through. It was just an example, but something that is factually easy to remedy and to say that's not true, here's the person to reach out to. That's my thought on, if it's even something we want to get involved in, I don't know. There's an alternative to the board doing it. Perhaps if a board member felt that it was something that needed to be responded to, they can communicate with our craft communications team and has something going out from the District. But our craft communication teams are not in these private Facebook groups. That's the problem, and I say that honestly, because believe me, that's where I would love it to be done, but they are
172not in these private Facebook groups and they are intentionally kept out of them. And that's where the problem arises. And that's where this festers and it becomes that Highland Park doesn't have parking for an extra night, just kidding. Also not true. I think it's so frustrating to read so many posts that aren't accurate. On the other hand, I think it is so dangerous for us to start getting involved in those conversations, even under an account that isn't one of our names. I mean, for one thing, what one of us thinks might not be what the whole board is agreed on or what everyone thinks. And then it's, I mean, I can think of a time we were with Dr. Law, there was something going on on that sounding board. And he asked me to write,
173"We're aware of this situation". And then I added "Thank you everyone for your concern". And I got attacked for writing "Thank you for your concern" 'cause people thought that that was flippant and meant that we didn't really care what they thought and people were attacking me. So it's so easy to, I don't know. It's just easy to like something so well-intended people are, especially these days, people are so worked up and so angry. I want there to be a way I just don't know what the right way is. I don't know how to get there, but I think that we should limit ourselves. The limit would be referencing and showing a link to a District web page. And that would be a way to go. Now, how we get that to happen is a separate
174issue, but that will be the only way that will be appropriate for us to respond going. Okay, can I not trying to be.. Yes. Is this enough that we say let's bring it to January discussion to have a further discussion when we have one more board member here, is there enough to say let's bring it to that? This is a broad topic, that's worthy of discussion at length. Great, so at 9:42, I'm saying it will be on our January thing for further discussion. Okay, thank you. Public comment, our favorite time of night. Public comment is not a time for back and forth discussion. It's a one-way statement. If you have questions, please send your questions to the superintendent, his office. I ask that all participants and Board of Education members treat each other respectfully. This
175is a time for community members to speak out on a specific item and concern and not a time for cross discussion. Public comment will be provided in person and via Zoom. If there are people both live and via Zoom, that would like participate we will alternate between those participants. Those who signed up to speak live will be called in the order of which they signed up. Those via Zoom will be called upon in the alphabetical order. Tonight, starting with D. If we have more than 30 minutes of public comment, we will continue with a second public comment period as we've always done in the past after the business portion of this meeting takes place. Registrants who wish to speak live via Zoom will need to use the well, and those, I will have the timer
176for three minutes, which is the time allowed. Ron, is there anyone there with a "Raise the Hand" feature? No, there is not. Thank you, okay. And just so all board members know, and I'm putting out for the public record. We have gotten emails from a couple staff that wanted to make public comments, but have not done so this evening because of the late hour. So please make sure you read those. Moving on to Action. It is recommended that the Board of Education approve the anticipated field trips for the 2021 school year as presented, is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Roll call please. Mr. Fishbain. Aye. Sorry, if you responded, I couldn't hear you. He said aye. Thank you. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye.
177Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. It is recommended that the Board of Education accept the bid for Deerfield High School marching band uniforms from DeMoulin in the total amount of $42,397.8. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? A roll call please. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Nay, motion carries. It is recommended that the Board of Education adopt the supplemental levy authorizing a supplemental tax property levy to pay the principal of interest on the outstanding limited bonds of Township High School District 113 Lake County, Illinois, and file it with the Lake County clerk on an annual basis no later than February 28th. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Thank you. Any discussion? A roll call please. Mr.
178Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. It is recommended the Board of Education approve the resolution to approve the 2021 tax levy and resolution authorizing tax for special education purposes. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? A roll call please. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. It is recommended the Board of Education that policy 7-180: Prevention of and Response to Bullying, Intimidation, Harassment as presented. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? A roll call please. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries.
179On the motion of the board to award contracts, to trade contractors for the Highland Park High School school library renovation project, I'm sorry. After due advertisement pursuant to the school code the board here by finds the following subcontractors are the lowest responsible bidders and accept the proposals of, and make an award to the following contractors subject to the legal review of the District's council. Roofing, A-1 Roofing Company, $494,900. Glazing 3F Corporation, $93,000. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? A roll call please. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. And the motion of the board to award contracts to individuals possessing a high degree of professional skills, I like that. The board accepts the proposal
180of, and makes an award of the contract the following professionals for the following projects subject to legal review of the District's council. Survey, Daniel Creaney for $33,950. Geotechnical engineering, Terracon $19,200, which includes a $3,000 additional allowance. Environmental consultants, Camplin Environmental $32,500. Owner representative Cotter Consulting for $210,000, which should get Cotter pay for sitting through all these meetings. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? A roll call please. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. Next is our Consent Agenda. A board member may pull any item off for separate consideration. Does any board member wish to pull an item off our consent agenda for this evening? It is recommended that the consent agenda be approved as
181listed. Is there a motion? So moved. Is there a second? Second. Gayle, would you please provide a report on the bills? Yes, so Ali and I met and as usual, everything was in order. The items we went over included security for the Highland Park High School football games, which I learned we're spending about $3000 a game on security. I don't know if that's high or low, but I was surprised. We talked about our staffing for our school nurses. Were using a staffing agency and we went through that bill. Also, a bill related to the fire at Highland Park High School. And that's their blow UPS Rental. UPS does not stand for United Parcel Services, who knew? Also some brick paving that was done that had to be repaired and our contracting for speech language pathology
182for our students. Thank you. Okay, any other discussion? No. A roll call please. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. Before Gayle, we're closing. Once again I wanna wish you all a happy healthy holiday season surrounded by those you love. Oh, please, my pleasure for all of you, you can go and fight each other on who wants what flavor. On that note is there a motion to adjourn our meeting? So moved. Is there a second. Second. A roll call please. Mr. Struck. Aye. Mr. Barraza. Aye. Ms. Byck. Aye. Mr. Fishbain Aye. Mr. Heineman. Aye. Ms. Shapira. Yes, please motion carries. And we are out, woo hoo!