001Good evening. The District 21, November 13, 2025, [clears throat] excuse me, regular board of education meeting is called to order. Carrie, would you please take attendance? >> Jessica, >> I'm here. >> Debbie, >> here. >> I'm here. Arlin >> here. Ilana here. Bill >> here. >> Angelica here. We have a quorum. >> And the student representatives, please. >> Belma, >> Alex is not here. Do we know he's not coming or >> uh he might just be running a little bit late, but >> Okay, I'll wait for >> I'll wait just a few minutes. >> Okay. Would everyone please rise for the pledge? I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice. >> Thank you. Welcome again everyone.
002[clears throat] Excuse me for attending tonight. Uh oh there's Fared. Welcome. Welcome. Um, I see we have Sue Stein in our gallery from the Wheeling Park District and former Holmes teacher. Thank you for joining us on this fine evening. Um, any individual physically present at the meeting tonight wishing to address the board must complete a comment card and provide it to Miss Del Rail. Written public comments may also be submitted by emailing us at district21cccsd21.org. I'm going to move right into announcements and celebrations. We have quite a few tonight. Um, first I would just like to note that November 15th is school board members day. Yes, we get our own day. [laughter] Um, I would like to thank and recognize all of our board members for your steadfast and reliable service, your leadership, your commitment
003to our students, our staff, to Dr. Connelly and your staff and to our community as a whole. You've all shown your willingness to consider challenging and often controversial topics and come [clears throat] to consensus on issues of disagreement civily and with dignity towards each other. Your leadership helps guide our schools, shape our priorities, and ensure that every student has the opportunity to belong and feel successful in district 21. And on a personal note, I'm grateful for your faith in me as your president and your counsel and your wisdom. Dr. Connelly. >> Uh thank you and good evening. Um so let me just uh add a little bit to that and um on behalf of myself u the administration and the entire faculty and staff uh thank you for the work that you do as board
004members. Um, and you know, I think one of the things that, um, you really don't know until you're sitting at the at at the table, uh, is the kinds of decisions that you are asked to make, um, for the exorbitant salary of zero dollars. Um, and also quite frankly, um, putting yourself out there at a time when public officials, um, are under a lot of scrutiny, uh, are open to a lot of criticism, uh, and you do have to make some very tough decisions. Um, and you're not making everybody happy. Sometimes you're not making anybody happy, um, but you're still making decisions that are, um, what you feel and are best for kids and best for your community. Uh, and not everybody is willing to step up and do that. Um, and uh, I I
005appreciate you. We appreciate um, the work that you do on a daily basis. It's not that you just come here once a month and vote yay on things that I put in front of you. Um, you're engaged. You're part of the decision-making process. You're setting policy. You're giving us direction. Um, and that is something that, um, we would not be able to be successful um, without your willingness to be part of the process. So again, thank you very much. Let's give our board members a round of applause. >> Thank you. Thank you for those kind and thank you for the gift of appreciation. >> We do have some other celebrations um and acknowledgements that we would like to um to do this evening um as we are getting into wrapping up getting deeper into the
006fall. I guess we're not really winter yet. although was watching weather at 3:00 a.m. on on Monday morning trying to see if we were going to make it or not and we did. Yay. Um we wanted to recognize um our cross country program at all three of our middle schools. We had a number of students um at uh at Cooper Holmes and London that qualified uh and were uh sectional uh uh competition uh participants and then we had some state qualifiers as well. So uh I am going to turn it over to Mr. Latino um to go ahead and recognize um our teams. >> Thank you so much. Um what a wonderful season it's been for our cross country teams across the district. Each of our student athletes demonstrated incredible dedication, perseverance, and teamwork from
007the very first practice to the final finish line. We're especially proud to celebrate the handful of runners who represented our schools at the sectional level and a select few who went to on to compete at the state meet. What an incredible accomplishment and reflection of your hard work. Cross country teachers teaches lessons that go far beyond the course. Resilience, self-discipline, and the power of encouragement. Those lessons will stay with you long after the season ends. Um, if you are a part of the London cross country team or the coaches, could you please stand? [applause] Thank you. You want to do that right now? We'll have the London. All right. Why don't we have Actually, I'm so sorry. Uh, can we have the London coaches and the students that were just from the London cross country
008come up and we're going to do a picture with you guys real quick. So, if you can come on up, it's okay. Oh, okay. [laughter] Station. You can go. They didn't know what to do since they were standing there so long. They're always running. Next, uh, could we have please the Cooper staff and students from the cross country team please stand, be recognized, and then we're going to have you come and join. Now, would you be able to please come up and come for a picture, please? Or Mr. Duth, too. >> [laughter] >> One note, Mr. Thson, if you could stay right over here, please. >> Um, so this is Mr. Thson. Uh, this season also marks a special milestone. Uh, it's officially coach Theon's final cross country season before retirement. Uh, Coach Theon has
009been a steady and inspiring presence at Cooper, shaping not just strong runners, but strong people. We're so grateful for your years of leadership and commitment, and we certainly hope this isn't goodbye for good. Hopefully, we can keep you around around the track in one way or another. Congratulations again to all of our runners, and thank you, Coach C. I just wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anyone. Were there any homes um staff or runners here tonight? I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Um so again, congratulations to all of our runners, coaches, and families for another successful season. Uh you really make us proud, not only with your finishes, but also with the heart that you show every step of the way. All right. So, we're going
010to move on from from running to a different different type of of celebration. Is that okay? Um, so for our next celebration, um, we're moving to our 53rd annual District 21 and 214 orchestra Festival. It was an evening filled with collaboration, creativity, and music that moved the audience from the very first note. Each year, our middle school orchestras from Cooper, Holmes, and London join forces with District 214 for this cherished tradition, a celebration of the arts that highlights the growth and talent of our student musicians. This year's festival was especially memorable thanks to a brand new commission piece written specifically for our students titled Caribbean Tides. The piece conducted by our special guest conductor Dion Morales was inspired by the energy, enthusiasm of our young musicians. It's also carries a lasting legacy. It was picked
011up by a publisher on its very first submission, which means orchestras across the country and around the world may soon perform a composition dedicated for the Cooper Holmes and London Middle School orchestras. This was also a wonderful evening not only to celebrate music and and our orchestras coming together um but we also want to celebrate um if you are one of our orchestra staff could you please stand up please the the number of hours it takes to coordinate and support and and help our musicians grow is is not unseen. So, thank you. Um I am going to ask though, I'm so sorry, Heidi. Um um this also marks a another heartfelt milestone for one of our own, Miss Heidi Flowers. This was the final orchestra festival for Mrs. Flowers, who will retire at the end
012of the school year after remarkable career inspiring generations of student musicians. Miss Flower's passion for music education and her dedication to her students have left an enduring mark in District 21, and we're deeply grateful for all that you have given to her. Thank you. [applause] And we want to if we could play a little snippet of this Caribbean tide. You guys are ready. Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Okay. I just Leiana and I were at that concert. It was phenomenal. Am I right? It was just absolutely phenomenal. U I was mesmerized by the music, the kids, the conductor. The whole event was of course I love our music program to begin with, but this was really a special night. I also want to thank Coach Theson who coached my two kids a 100
013years ago. Well, [laughter] not quite. It only feels like a hundred years ago. Um, what a great coach, what a great teacher, and I appreciate all you've done for my kids and all the kids of District 21. Thank you. >> And can we bring the music teachers up for a picture as well? The music teachers, come on up as well >> for a picture. If everyone in the back further and further [clears throat] and I want to just recognize the state participants from Cooper, if you can stand, if you're still here. I think we skipped over this slide. >> Congratulations [applause] awesome job. This year we were our our entire sectional state team was sixth and seventh graders and uh they took 15th at state. So it was a great great season for our girls
014and uh I'm excited hopefully that watch what they do next year. So they're going to have a great year next year. So [applause] >> do you want to come up for a quick picture? It's a quick picture. You already did. Okay. [laughter] That was some really nice proud moments of our our student athletes and our musicians. Um, okay. Um, do we have any other >> No, that's it for the uh announcements and celebrations. Thank you so much for coming out tonight, everybody. We really do appreciate it. We know it's a busy time of year. So, thanks again and congratulations to everyone. Great job. All right, we're going to as folks are transitioning out, we're going to move into staff communication superintendence report. We have a couple exciting presentations tonight. Um starting with the presentation on
015the 2024 2025 Illinois state report card. Dr. Panel. >> Yes. Thank you. Um so as is um pardon [clears throat] me um every year uh on on or about October 30th, the um Illinois State Board of Education releases the um uh prior school year's uh state report card. Uh and so this is um information that is um provided for each one of our schools. uh and um kind gives an accounting of of uh a range of of pieces of data, demographic data, uh test performance data, so on and so forth. So um Dr. Childris, our deputy superintendent, is going to take us through this year's um report card at the district level. >> Good evening. We'll just wait just a second. That's okay. [laughter] So nice to see such a great turnout of our students
016this evening. I'm sad they didn't want to stay for my riveting presentation work hard. It's a long presentation. So there are some slides that I'm kind of going to scoot through a little bit faster. There's so much information right in the state report card and when we want to look at district views and then right some people want to look deep we look deep you know as administration into school views it's really hard to try and pick and narrow things down so I I did the best that I could but please if you have a question stop me if I move too fast off of something that you wanted to hear a little bit more about just say that and I'm happy to do that I will go to a rabbit hole if you allow
017me to. So, I'm going to try not to unless you ask for me to go down a rabbit hole this evening. One of the things that I think is really important as we look at the state report card is remembering, right, we're comparing our district to the state. And so whenever we want to do that, we also should spend time looking at our demographics in comparison to the state because that absolutely impacts the performance of our district um and our buildings. And so the first few slides I'm just going to highlight right those pieces on how our district compares to the state in terms of a variety of demographics and that will help you understand perhaps some of the reports um and some of the performance and growth pieces. So first piece that we look
018at is um racial and ethnic demographics. And so you can see here our demographics in comparison to the state. Um so we have uh a much higher um minority population than there is across the average of the state. Um particularly with um our Hispanic subgroup in looking at other important demographics and comparisons. uh looking at our lowincome English learners, students with IEP, and our our Mckin Bentos students. So, you can see that our district has higher um percentages of lowincome students and EL students um than the state and our IEP average and homeless pretty much on par with the state. Um these two pieces are important things to note because those are two groups that are typically flagged as higher risk groups. Right? So the higher um lowincome student population you have and the higher
019e population that you have right there there is definitely some correlation with achievement when you have um large populations of those demographics. So, kind of along those same lines, as you know, right, we have such a large EL population with almost um just over 54% being ELS's. And what we see and we know, right, we we talk about it all the time that one of the things we love about our district is our diversity. Absolutely. Um and one of the pieces that um is displayed through that diversity is EL populations, right? we have over 70 languages that I the latest I think is maybe about 74 languages in the district. Um and that varies across the buildings. But when we look over um across the buildings, you see there's some buildings that have a really
020high EL population and a couple of our buildings that have a lower EL population. And you will see um how that kind of correlates with some of the achievement levels as we move on through the presentation. And again, right, noting just our district Yale population at 54% in comparison to the state at 17.5%. That's pretty significant difference there. And then um these are the percentages of the EL population across the middle schools. One thing I did want to note was we have seen a decrease in our EL population um at homes and I think that that's for a variety of reasons program programmatic changes that we've made over the you know years and so um that number is shrinking at homes but still more significant uh e population than the other two middle schools. One
021of our um definite celebrations that we have here in district um is uh some of the progress that we've made with our exit criteria. So, right, one of the things you want to do is measure against the state average exit. So, the state average exit is at 7.1 for 2025. Our district average was 9.7. you see that there's actually um 11 of our 13 schools are right well above that state average which is really good um to see and that's not by accident that's by hard work of our staff. Absolutely. We've made a lot of changes with our program models and our language allocations over the years. Um and our staff has done a a nice job with implementing some of those things and this is one of the areas we definitely are seeing that
022um the fruits of our labor right are demonstrated through um the the exit criteria percentages here. Any questions about that? >> About the homes if I can. Is there any [clears throat] indication on what changes we've had uh given all the uh events that are happening locally now and nationally uh in terms of the e population? >> I mean I think we've seen a little bit of slowdown of newcomers, right? We had a a big influx of newcomers students from a variety of countries right a couple years ago. That's kind of slowed down a little bit. We're not seeing as much of that. I don't know Arlland if you can reask your question. Sorry. Well, the question was, have we seen any more significant fall off given what of our current population given what's happening
023>> in attendance-wise? We are seeing an impact. Yes. Yeah. Not necessarily of unenrollment but in attendance. >> Okay. Thank you. >> This data is also from last year though. >> That's correct. >> Yeah. Just to you. >> This is 25. >> This is the data from last year. Right. Right. Okay, >> I was asking about current >> one thing I I would like to highlight on this particular slide is our middle school data being in the double digits for exit rates. That is not a norm at all. Been right um for administrator for a little while um and have a pretty extensive EL background. I was an EL director in what feels like a previous life. Um, and never in my career had I seen double digit numbers at the middle school level, even back
024right precoid or whatever. I've talked about that in other presentations where the key is the sweet spot, the third, fourth, fifth to get our students strong enough there. This is definitely something that, you know, I've been talking with the building leaders about like that is something definitely to be proud of to see double digit exit rates at the middle school level. And again, not by an accident like there's been a lot of work that's been put in by um our language services team, but the staff and the staff being responsive to right things that we're saying will help benefit those students. And we're definitely seeing that. Um and again, it's it's a phenomenon that I have never in my career seen. So, I'm like really excited about that. Um, homes with the five and a
025half actually is a little bit more on par. Typically, what you see is anywhere from like a 3 to 5% at the middle school level exit rate, but um definitely Cooper and London um far exceeding the norms on that. Any questions about E exits? Okay, I went down the rabbit hole. I'm sorry. I'm going to try and correct myself. So, now we'll start talking about designations, right? So, these are the uh five designations that the state um awards to schools. Exemplary is are the schools that perform in the top 10% of all schools in the state. Commendable are the schools that are not in the top 10% but don't have any targeted student groups below uh the all student group. Um and then the targeted is you have a student subgroup that is performing below
026the all group and I'll kind of get into that a little bit more. Then you have comprehensive support and intensive support. Thankfully we don't have any buildings there so I won't read that part of the slide to you but um we'll get into the two other areas a little bit more. So right all schools receive an annual sum summitive designation. It's based on their overall data, but then it also looks at each student subgroup that that particular school has. They're calculated by assigning various points for indicators such as chronic absenteeism, academic growth, and proficiency. We had 10 of our schools receive commendable designations for 2025 with Tarkington and Whitman receiving targeted support designations for the subgroup of children with disabilities. And that subgroup includes students with IEPs, but also students with 504s. Now, I'll get
027into this a little bit more um in a couple of slides here, but when we look at at the indicators and how the summitive designations are calculated, they're weighted based on these um eight indicators for elementary and middle school. So you can kind of see here there's higher waiting on the growth indicators. Um and then the chronic absenteeism. Those are the three heaviest weighted ones. Uh and then of course proficiency um for ELA math and science and then English learner progress. Um and then the climate survey. This is a visual that we um have modified. This is actually how it looks at the state for each building. So they only give us a view of like one building, right? If you go on the Illinois state report card, but we just wanted to kind of
028give you all a district view of how how do our schools fall, right? And so that red um box there is indicating from that threshold and below is the the bottom, right? the bottom 5% and then the other uh indicator is the top 10% of the schools in the state. The yellow bars indicate the percentage of schools that fell into those ranges. Um but those are basically the benchmarks. So this again is for the overall index scores. So when we look at our schools across the district at their overall index scores, all of our buildings fall within those two benchmarks. So that's a good thing, right? The challenge is when we look at, for example, Tarkington, again, Tarkington actually is really close to that other end of the higher performing buildings. But when we look
029at it's a lot of numbers I know when we look at this is the designation report that we actually get from the state and you can't see my little red circle there but I have the yellow box there to indicate for you for Tington the summitive score for the children with disabilities was 36.78 and remember from the other slide what we need to have is all of the subgroups including that one to be above the 38 8.71. So if any of the subgroups or the all group fall below that 3871, that's how you end up with either a targeted designation or some other type of designation depending on how many groups you have fall below that. So Tarkington, while again its overall index score is well within where we'd want it to be because we
030have that one subgroup falling below. that is why it received a targeted designation. >> Any questions for me about that? So, the same pattern is true for Whitman, right? Whitman's overall index score falls within the range that we would want it to. Of course, we'd like it to be a little bit more to the right. Absolutely. Um, but still they're falling within what would normally be a a commendable designation. However, again, similar with the same subgroup, children with disabilities, that summitive score is falling below that 38. It's falling at that 33.27. And so that's what again that's why it has received a targeted designation for that population. Any questions about that? So definitely right something that we're working on with those buildings looking at that population um making sure that we're making adjustments disagregating the
031data further. Um it's kind of a moving target because the number of kids and who is falling in that shifts every year, >> right? Um and it depends on do you have enough children to be in a subgroup for that to be a qualifying subgroup. are there another enough matching data points for it to be counted? So, it's this constant moving target which makes it a little bit more challenging, but we're definitely still digging into um looking at it so that we can uh try and do better for that subgroup and get them right pushed over into the commendable rating areas. >> Can I ask a quick question about that? The size of either of those groups, how does that compare to the other buildings? Do they have a larger group of those children or
032>> No, not necessarily. And the Yeah. So, it's not that it's not about the size of the group. What's what's even more challenging is remember that all of the state reporting is about the home school. So for for Tarkington or for Whitman, those could be students that are served at those buildings, but it also could be students that that's their home school, but they are served at an outplaced building or in one of our specialized programs that are housed at a different building. So that again it's another layer that makes it tricky to like drill down and see how many students and where right where are they falling short and where do we need to do better for them because it's not just kids that are physically served at those buildings. Does that make sense?
033>> Yeah. No, that's good to clarify. >> Yes. >> I wanted to ask why is attendance more of a problem in recent years? >> Yeah, I that's a that's an excellent question. Has anything changed >> the rabbit hole for you? Yes. >> Well, I think that with if I'm honest, right, once we had COVID and people saw you could learn remotely, then it kind of shifted people's mindset about the value of physically being in a school building. And so, right, we we've made adjustments. A lot of things are done online. You get some of your things right online that you turn in online. And so I think that there's a feeling of well I can still learn and I don't have to physically be at school. That's one theory, but I'd like to toss it
034back to you and ask what do you think? So Oh, wrong one. >> So are you saying that parents are in that mindset or children? >> I think it's both. >> I think that we hear we hear that from both. Yeah. What do you think? >> Um >> you think it's something else? >> I'm I'm not sure. I just wanted to know. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's I mean that's what we hear from both kids and from parents. Um but I I think you know the internet and being able to do things remotely has really changed people's feelings about physically needing to be learning and that's at the collegiate level too, right? There's tons of online courses and things like that. It might be more kids because kids are like more used to all this technology
035having all the different technological resources because you know kids even in elementary school get computers and are exposed to this. So maybe it's more children. >> Could be. >> Yeah. I think that our students, right, can learn things so fast online that they're like, you know, [laughter] sometimes they think they can get the answers faster online and well, there's some truth to that, right? Excellent question. Thank you. If we look at our middle schools, right, shifting gears a little bit, all of the middle schools fell in the commendable rating. Um and so right we don't have that that issue of any kind of other rating and so that that's all um that performance is on par of course again right we'd love to see them all shifted more to the right um and we'll talk
036a little bit more about that when we get into the um proficiency and growth scores. Any questions about that? Yes. >> Um just kind of picking back on the attendance part of it and a point that Arllin brought up earlier. You mentioned that there was there is um a difference with what's happening um and how it's affecting attendance right now. Can we expect to see that dent in this for the following school year report card? >> Yeah, I think that we will see an impact of that. Absolutely. We're still, you know, we've been looking at the attendance. It's not real widespread, but it definitely the children that it is impacting, the families that it is impacting, it's it's detrimental for them. Absolutely. >> Right. >> Yes. >> Follow question to that. Uh, is the attendance
037expected to get better or worse as time goes on and what can we do to try to help it get better? >> An excellent question. So, one of the things that we monitor is we get these reports that show us what the how many days students have missed. And we can see that from a student lens and we can see that from a grade level or a building lens. And so we've got a number of interventions that we put in place. Um, and if you think about it, it's we kind of have like a green, yellow, red kind of thing with it. So students that have not missed more than 10%. So let's let's say if it's we've been in school 10 days, you can miss one day and now you're hitting that 10%. Right?
038So we're always watching trying to keep students missing less than 10% of whatever school days it is. So we watch it all through the school year. So at the 100 day mark, right? We want kids to be less than 10 days, right? Um, and once they get past that, then we have other interventions that we put in place where we're making parent contacts, sending letters, trying to see if there's a reason and something that we can help with. Right? Sometimes there's u families have needs that maybe we can support to try and help the students get to school. And those are all pieces that we work on. Good question. Is it getting better or worse? It it's actually very individualized. There's some children that when we put the interventions in, we absolutely start to see
039them have more regular attendance and there's others that have some bigger challenges that are bigger than some of our supports can assist with. Good question. This is quite similar to what Alex said, but has it like decreased in a large amount over the years or has it been like very like slowly decreasing? So, a little bit later in the presentation, I'm going to talk about chronic absenteeism, but we've seen some decrease, but now with this new phenomenon where we've got some students missing, um, that of course is going to impact that. One of the other things I know is Dr. Shapiro. Oh, she is. Dr. Shapiro's in the audience. One of the things that Dr. Shapiro actually has been talking with me about is uh, something else that we're seeing where families are taking vacations
040during the school year. And those are also impacting our chronic absentee rate. So, one of the key things that I'm not sure everybody understands is chronic absences are both excused and unexcused absences. It just means you're absent. And so, it falls into that number. >> So, that's that's a challenge that we're currently seeing, an increase in families taking vacations during the school year. Um, do we see an higher increase in chronic absent season season for vacations during like before school ends and like before winter breaks or like randomly in the school year? >> That is an excellent question. So, I'm going to tell you what, in my career, it typically has been around Christmas break or right before school starts or right before school ends. That's what the trends used to be. Now it's all
041through the school year. So that's a challenge that we're facing that we we're seeing a growing pattern of that. That's a good question. >> And the idea with technology and learning online, has that affected this that people think that um as long as you can take your computer with you, you can that affected it? >> I think that that is impacting the mindset. Absolutely. Yeah. And we have right parents that'll reach out and say, "Well, can you just give my student work?" And we can do some of that, but we also have to be cognizant of you can't replicate the learning in the classroom on the computer, right? Because you're missing pieces, important pieces of learning with collaboration, working with, right, your peers, doing problem solving things with your peers. Yeah. >> And has it
042increased over time drastically or not? Same with the other one. >> Has what increased drastically? >> People taking vacations during the school year affecting abidences. Yeah, it that has increased. It's it's a new thing that we're seeing. Um, and I don't have all the numbers off the top of my head. If I asked Dr. Shapiro to come to the mic, I bet you she could tell you, but she has it drilled down to a total number of days that were used for vacation and how many students of those days. So, we can include that in a in a upcoming presentation. Since there's so many questions about that, we can absolutely incorporate that data into an upcoming presentation. It's a good question. Excellent question. Okay. All right. I wanted to give you a kind of a
043longitudinal view on the summitive designations. I didn't do pre right COVID because we had the two years where there weren't designations because of COVID. So, just to kind of keep it a little bit tighter, I kept it postcoid designations. Um and so this is again just a historical view uh where you can see um what those designations have been over the years and the same [clears throat] for middle school. So now we'll get dig into the AR data. Right? The IR data we look at both proficiency and growth very similar to MAP data. Right? We talk about map data very often because we give that three times a year. AR has similar pieces. I'm going to skip over these two real quick because I'll come back to them when we get into the growth pieces.
044So this is basically our achievement data, right? Looking at the performance bands. One thing that I want to highlight is the state reormed the performance bands, right? So one of the things that a lot of the communication coming out is saying you can't compare previous performance bands right to previous years because they've changed this year. So unfortunately that's why you don't see right where I'm comparing 24 to 25 because it's not a fair comparison because they reormed those performance bands and in fact previously there were five bands and now there's four bands right so that's an additional change um but what we see with the reorming is more students falling in that proficient and above proficient we see that at the state level the same at the district level we also see the expansion ion
045of the approaching proficient band. So that yellow band now is larger um than it used to be because it incorporated the the the piece that's missing is the one before between below and approaching proficient and so they basically have kind of overlapped those. So definitely right something that we're working on um [clears throat] we're always striving to do better. We absolutely want to get um more of our students in that proficient and above proficient. You know, focusing particularly on that approaching proficient group. We know that um a key to that which I've talked about in previous presentations is about rigor, right? and and making sure that our students are receiving rigorous expectations and instruction, emphasizing on academic vocabulary and some of those higher level thinking pieces. That's really what's going to get those students in
046that band into the other bands. Um and then one of the things um that we've done this year is all of our buildings have um win time, right? What I need time. Um, and so that's again a way for us to kind of drill down and look at kids, look at our students, and figure out how we can get them into the next performance bands instead of just kind of teaching to the middle. Right now, we're saying like, okay, these students have similar needs. How do we move them to the next level? And those are [clears throat] some pieces we've incorporated. Any questions about that? achievement particularly is where those demographics those those you know um with us having a higher lowincome student population a higher e population those are the demographics that absolutely impact
047these pieces because we're being compared to um the state which does not have those same levels of percentages right so students um maybe are starting at a at a higher achievement starting point than some of the students that we have. Any questions about that? Okay, I gave you a visual so that you could see again our our district is very diverse and so the proficiency levels across the district vary. [laughter] I will tell you again there's a very tight correlation when we look at those two demographic pieces to how each particular building is achie is achieving and so that's something um again there is such a tight correlation there that we want to be careful when we're comparing um buildings with very different demographics to one another. And so what we encourage with our principles
048to do is who which building has a similar demographic to your building. And that's kind of like your sister school that you're comparing yourself to, right? To make sure that we're all moving in the right direction. Um, but that's definitely something that impacts those achievement levels. When we look at the growth score, so I'm going to bounce back just really quick to this slide. Now, the student growth percentile, this is the piece that the state is saying this hasn't changed. So parents right or even us in the district this is something that we can compare to previous years. So so any one of our parents who have students um in the district if they look at this particular number they can look at this number year-over-year to see if their child is performing better the
049same or if there's a concern because maybe they're not growing at the rate they used to grow. So when we look at our growth for English language arts in the district, we're slightly above um the growth percentile of the state. So that's good. But we we definitely need to make more than above average growth, right? Because if we're trying to close gaps, um and so we definitely have some buildings that are, you know, above that 50th percentile, we definitely want to see that because that's how you're going to close those gaps. If we're below that, then that means that it's going to be much more challenging for us to close some of those gaps with our students. Any questions about that? looking at uh proficiency across the middle schools. Again, um when we look at
050this and do kind of the correlation of the demographics of the buildings, it follows the similar pattern. Um as far as you know, Cooper, for example, has a lower they don't have as many low-income students and not as many EL students in comparison to homes in London. And those achievements align exactly with those percentages. actually they correlate with um how heavy of those populations the buildings have. Again, not an excuse and we're always trying to do better, but it is part of our reality and it is additional layer of challenge that we have to address when we have some higher percentages of certain populations in the buildings. We have to be very sensitive to how are we meeting the needs of those populations and how can we do better. Absolutely. And then looking at the
051growth um again right we're our overall district growth is just above the state and then um Cooper and London also are um you know above the state and homes is lagging a little bit below the state um and again something that we are digging into more and need to be very cognizant of making sure that all of our children grow regardless of where they're starting right so whether they're are high achieving students, we want to make sure that they continue to grow. Um students that maybe are, you know, in a lower um performance band, we want to make sure that they're growing. And so those are things that our team drills into. Our teachers and our um administrators all spend time looking at those data pieces to try and ensure that all of the children
052in the district are growing. Moving on to math. So this is the performance um levels of the math data for 2025. Um you know one of the things that we have and you can see it clearly there right is this dip at sixth grade that dip exists at the state level as well and talking with uh Carolyn Joel our math director right she's sharing with me that we see those same patterns in our map data that dip in sixth grade um and even with the map norms so it's not just a district 21 thing it's like a national thing that there is a dip at the sixth grade um for a variety of reasons. Um and I told her that we may need to put that into her presentation. I think she's up to present
053next month unless we have a change and that might be something to dig in a little bit more there. this um data though we do see in our math data that we're closer to um the state performance as you see here with the last two bars there the gold bar being the state and then the darker blue bar being our district data there's not as big of a demograph or um statistical disparity between those two as as there is with reading but still right we see the variance across the buildings um and so there's again part of our diversity, but needing to be cognizant that we're looking at each individual building to make sure that we're putting pieces in place for all of the buildings and all of the children to grow and achieve. looking
054at growth. Um, again, we're um our district growth is slightly above the state and with certain buildings being, you know, even higher than that and a couple of buildings that we need to dig into a little bit more to see why um we're not seeing the growth that we would want to see there. Looking at the middle schools again, you see a similar pattern with our middle schools um in terms of performance. One of the things that is was kind of interesting as I dug into the homes data was the demographic gap at homes for our subgroups was not as great as it was for our district demographic gap which just makes me ask a lot more questions and I won't take you down that rabbit hole with me but definitely something that we need
055to look at closer. And then looking at our uh growth by middle school again right just hovering um above the state for two of the buildings and um not for um homes necessarily but something that we are digging into and looking at the science assessment also had saw some changes there. Um and so again, right, you see there the state average and our district average and each of the buildings um percentage of proficiency for the science assessment. Keep in mind that science assessment at the elementary level is only for fifth grade. And then in the next slide here, only eighth grade at the middle school level take the science assessment. Another um one of the indicators for the school report card is uh the percentage of eighth graders passing algebra 1. Um and so you
056can see here we're on par with the state for in terms of our all and then a couple you know our white subgroup actually is exceeding the state. Um and then um our Hispanic is slightly depressed as as well as the Asian, but our all group when they take it all into consideration, we're on par with the state for the percentage of students passing algebra 1. Here's the chronic absentee information. And we talked a little bit about it. So I'll just kind of highlight a few things, right? Remember with the chronic absentee rate, lower is better, right? And so the state chronic absentee rate for 2025 was 25.4% and our district was 21.5%. And there's been a lot of things, right? We've talked about some of the efforts that we've put in over the last
057uh year plus. Um you know, some of the things we started last year and definitely our buildings are working hard. They're doing all kinds of different activities and trying to make sure that um our students and our parents understand the importance of being in school. Again, we talked about it already, right? It's very hard to replicate learning online of things that could happen within a classroom, but definitely um this data looks pretty promising. We'll kind of keep an eye on it and watch to see how things that are happening in the world are going to impact our chronic absentee rate. >> Excuse me, Beatric. Mhm. >> Is it possible to aggregate out or disagregate um by attendance? And what I mean by that is it possible we could show parents students missing X days perform
058at this level compared to students missing >> Y days to make it a very visual example to them >> of the comparison [clears throat] between days missed and how they're performing on these exams. Yeah, we can absolutely look at that and there's tons of national data on that, but we can look specifically at our population um and try and give some reporting back to to and I know we we talk individually with parents, right, when we start to see kids missing a lot of days and talk with them about how that impacts them. Um, you know, the other challenge is we're we're so fortunate that we have so many interventions that we can put in place for kids that are struggling, but if a kid is absent, it doesn't matter how many interventions that we
059have, right? But we can definitely look at that. >> Thank you. >> Just make a note. Sorry. Any other questions about that? >> Yeah. Do you think part of the problem is kids not wanting to go to school? Maybe. >> Well, we definitely know that to be honest with you. We know that if students have a sense of belonging at school, they're more likely to come, right? If they're involved in activities or there's clubs that there things that they're interested in, it absolutely impacts whether they want to come to school or not. >> Is there much they can do if kids don't want to go to school? Maybe try to get them more involved or try to get them more interested or >> Absolutely. I mean, those are some of the conversations that we have
060when we start to see a pattern of absences is again talking with families to see is it a is it a challenge that the family is experiencing? Is the student themselves facing some school avoidance because that's the reality. There are some kids that they're avoiding school for any number of different reasons. And so we try to have those conversations to drill into that to figure out how we can help those children. >> Good question. Now I just want to point out that we have made gains. Um so in 2023 the absence chronic absence rate for the district was 26.2 and this year it is 21.5. So you know um and it it jogs up and down a little bit depending on what is happening in the world, right? Um there's a lot of of things
061that are outside of our control um that can impact this. But, you know, this is something that we have and as as the board knows, uh, had a a pretty intensive focus on. Um, and, you know, we're we're we're seeing some some positive results of that. This is also a nationwide problem. Uh, in every state, in every survey you take a look at, um, this chronic absence for from school is a nationwide problem. This is also one of the the um items that we have in our school improvement plans that is a goal that is written around um chronic absenteeism and how we're intervening with that. I'm just wondering how how much of the absenteeism is due to illness. Like I know at least at the beginning of last year if you had COVID you
062had to stay home for for 5 days and then I I don't I think that's changed um because I haven't heard anything come out. But how much, you know, when I look at these and see that the elementary schools have a higher average versus the middle school, it's actually the opposite of what I would think from like kids not wanting to go to school. Then I'm wondering how much has to do with just kids being sick and not being able to go to school. >> Excellent. Yes, some of it is about being sick. Um, and again, we're I don't even want to look back there at Alyssa because she's probably like there's so many data pieces and she will go down this rabbit hole. Um, I'm not going to look back there. Um illness is
063absolutely a thing but I will tell you another thing that we see and is not new. Um you know it's it's a phenomenon that I seen many years ago in my career. We see higher absent rates in preschool, kinder and first grade again because there's this feeling or belief of well they're not going to miss that much, right? and so we'll keep them home [clears throat] when it's actually the opposite because if we can close the gaps earlier on that's how we get kids on track and then we're just maintaining them right so but we definitely we we drill it down by reasons grades you know grade levels all of those pieces but yeah you would think it would be probably more at the middle school but yeah there's other reasons that are impacting it
064as well >> well and I think also to your point I We had a period of about two years where we were like >> keep them home. >> Stay home. Stay home. >> And so there has been a lot of you know there's some unlearning that needs to occur there and a lot of kind of retraining like no you can actually send them if they're you know not experiencing these things and we prefer that you do. Right. >> Yeah. [clears throat] >> Yeah. Um, do you think that the spreading of illness can lead to like a higher amount like instance like kids that don't want to miss school but then they get illness from another kid that missed school? >> Yeah. So that's also a thing, right? There's times where kids really probably should stay
065home and they are coming and then they're right breathing on each other and touching each other or touching each other's things and then spreading the illness. Yes, that's absolutely could be a thing as well. Good point. Going on to FA, do you think that might affect the little kids more just because they might have a weaker immune system or something? They might get they might be more with each other or >> Yeah, I mean I think definitely right they're not as conscientious maybe about hygiene, washing their hands, right, and doing some of those things. But I do think a lot of it is parents, right? Keep keeping those kiddos cuz usually the little guys want to come to school, right? Yeah. All good questions. Yes. >> Um, could it be like due to COVID and
066like now there being more absences, could it have like affected the like test scores of state tests? >> Absolutely. Right. Again, if we know there's a correlation, absolutely there is a correlation between students being in school and how they achieve. Of course, there's always exceptions to the rule, right? But for your average, right, as a generalization, students that are in school more have better attendance typically have higher achievement levels. Absolutely. Okay. And then here's the um middle school um chronic absentee rate from 2025. And again, right, it's not what we would expect. You would think that middle school would be higher and and it's actually the opposite. And that could be and it'd be interesting to take a closer look at it as far as >> there's more clubs, there's more sports, so there's more
067of that fear of missing out or not being a part of things, which we know that that, you know, research wise, if students have a stronger sense of belonging to their school, they're less likely to miss school, right? And even in our um in our seal data um and our goals in our school improvement plans, a lot of the principles have sense of belonging as one of the key indicators that they're looking and monitoring because they know that it impacts achievement, attendance, and any number of other things. All right, next steps. I talked I think at the last uh board meeting when I presented about the work we're doing with professional learning communities and building that. So this is going to be a key piece right of our next steps. Um again making sure that
068we're looking at individual students students with similar challenges. making sure that we're being responsive so that so our students that already have mastered things that we're continuing to challenging them instead of keeping them right with things that they've already mastered. A key piece of that is our win time that we've implemented. Um of course right monitoring our all group but as well as our subgroups um across the district. Um, last May, Amy Briler, our literacy director, talked about some of the next steps we're doing with our uh, literacy instruction. And so, right, that's um, that bullet where we're continuing to look at that and looking at the resources provided um, for um, our district meeting the unique meeting the needs of unique learners. Right? That's part of our strategic plan and making sure here I
069we've highlighted specifically um students with IEPs and 504s. And so our um special ed and student services teams working really hard on looking at doing the program audit, making sure that the types of programs that we have are meeting the needs of our students and making adjustments when they're not. Looking at supplemental resources um for those pieces. We have a lot of our students with IEPs are also identified as ELELS, so they're dually identified. Um, and so that's something that we're uh taking a really close look at. We've already talked about win time instructional leadership. This this year, we've put in place some additional pieces to try and give our um building leaders more time to collaborate and share some of the great things that they're doing so that they have more opportunities to learn
070from each other. Um because there's a lot of really great things happening and one of the keys to the professional learning communities is that you're spending time talking about how who's having success and what are they doing to have that success and and those of us that are struggling in different areas that we're tapping the people who are having success and making sure that there's time for those conversations. Lots of pieces on instructional practices, right? continuing to look at instructional learning walks, looking at student engagement, the curriculum, our language allocations, um using the information from the learning walks to make adjustments to if we need to, you know, purchase different resources or provide additional professional development for our staff. Um again looking at grade level teams and asking and supporting them with that whole professional
071learning community concept and those four questions that's a big piece I mean you'll hear us you know continue to talk about that because that's a really key piece to getting over that hump. So when we talk about that that approaching band, that yellow band, right, how we're going to get those kids to move over is by focusing more on being a professional learning community and learning better from each other, working smarter, not harder, right? Um because we know that our staff um spend a lot of time outside of their normal work hours doing things, right? And but if they collaborate more and work together more and learn from each other, they can cut down some of that time. So we we have to build in that time for them as well. We're always looking at
072our scope and sequences to try and make refinements there as needed. Um, of course, we're still part of the partnership with 214 on the math series. Um, professional development with our new uh Desmos at um our K8 level. And then um key piece that would that has been happening as well is increasing language acquisition in science and social studies. So our language services department is working close with um those teachers to try and make sure that we're upping the vocabulary and and putting in appropriate scaffolds for all of our students but particularly our EL students in terms of assessment practices spending time triangulating data. So we do that at the district level. We ask the buildings to do that at their level. We ask grade level teams to do it at their level, right? To
073look at where are we seeing similar patterns and how can we intervene um to better support our students. Uh the star assessment is something that we've implemented is particularly looking at students who are in need of tier two and tier three supports and that has really been beneficial and we'll continue to use that. of course, professional development around data literacy. While we have a ton of data at our fingertips, not everyone knows how to interpret that data or how to make it work for them. And so that's a key push that we're working on. Um, and including data protocols and then of course student attendance, which we've actually talked about quite a bit this evening. [snorts] >> Any final questions? Harlin. So on increasing increasing student attendance since we believe board believes I believe you
074believe that extracurricular activities bond a student to school a reason another reason to come to school. I know in my own case I came to school because I love the newspaper and later on I love swimming and those were my bonds into the school other than academics. Is there any thought to what else we can do to motivate parents to sign kids up for programs to in effect sell those kinds of programs more to the community >> because now it's out there. They look at it, but we don't really I don't think we do a job trying to promote it as an important part of the education. Just the thought. >> Well, I think that it's probably an area that we could work on, right? Promoting it a little bit more. I think a key
075piece is making sure that our offerings are what the children are interested in or that that our parents want their children to be exposed to, right? And so I know we've done some surveys. I think it's something that we need to do regularly, right? Both from a parent lens, but also from a student lens and engaging engaging our students as far as what types of activities they want to see. And it changes, right? I will also say though a lot a lot of times the key piece of it is who's the educator leading it [laughter] >> piece >> and we've have some really great ones as you saw this evening. Um and that's a key piece for sure. >> Any other questions? >> Thank you. >> All right. Thanks very much Dr. Childress. If [clears
076throat] that wasn't a rabbit hole I don't know what is. [laughter] I kid. I kid. No, I appreciate it. Um, next is a presentation of the Humanex fall 2025 staff culture and climate staff culture and climate results overview. >> So, um, as the board may recall, uh, this year we began, um, our work with Humanext, um, to expand, um, our, uh, surveying, uh, within our culture and climate. is something that we had been doing work as an administrative team with Humanex last year and this year we rolled it out to the entire staff. And so um I'm going to turn it over to Lewis to take us through um our full organization kind of overview of the u of the um fall uh survey. >> All right, you've got me for the next hour. [laughter]
077I'm just kidding. Just kidding. All right, so yes, as Dr. Connley said um we partnered with Humanex. I'm just going to give you a little background about Human X first. Um so HumanX provides um data-driven culture and engagement solutions to help organize um uh or help organizations create an environment where excellence thrives. Um our staff took their signature culture assessment which is referred to as the Insight X. Uh it's a comprehensive anonymous survey that measures um drivers of organizational organizational culture across multiple dimensions. We'll look at some of those dimensions in a moment. The survey doesn't measure uh happiness. It actually provides a nuance diagnostic look at team dynamics, leadership effectiveness, and the alignment of individual motivations with organ organizational purpose. The results are translated into specific, tangible um and actionable insights that guide leaders
078in creating targeted interventions. So the um survey actually had 92 statements on it that gathered feedback across four key levels of professional experience. So the questions were divided into four categories. Uh first were I questions which focused on your individual role um in the organization. These are usually the highest scoring items because who knows you better than you when you're answering those questions. Then there were team questions. Those focus on your immediate work team. Um ask they asked questions around communication and collaboration. Then they had administrator supervisor questions. They focused on your direct supervisor um things like support, feedback, trust and then there were organizational questions which focus on the entirety of um our school district uh school district communication, culture and vision. Okay. Thank you sir. So the 15 dimensions which you see here
079um in the human X survey they were chosen based on decades of research by human X um to identify specific measurable factors that most significantly drive high performance and successful cultures across various industries. So, Human X does not just work with schools. They work with all different types of industries. And it doesn't matter what industry you're working with. They're saying these are the 15 really drivers that drive your culture. The underlying framework is centered on the principle that to achieve excellence, an organization must address both innate talent and the intentional design of the environment, your culture. Uh the 15 factors are key to the model. Um because the research has found that broad satisfaction or morale metrics are often too vague to drive change. They selected dimensions that are direct actionable levers for leaders. By
080dividing the experience into 15 spec specific areas, you provide u the survey provides a diagnostic blueprint that can allow us to pinpoint exactly where to invest our efforts and our highest impact. as an organization. These were the top items that emerged from the survey. As you will notice, uh these were all questions that focused um on the individual and their role. As I said, no surprise, those taking the survey know themselves best. A little bit skip over a little bit a little bit about this. So all of the questions were answered using a liyker scale from 1 to five for the analysis. Um anything in a four to five range is considered uh an area that we're performing really well in and is seen as our strengths. We had an 80% response rate to the
081survey which is fantastic. Uh and it also provided us with just under 71,000 data points that we could use. >> Can I before you go into detail? So 80% is great. That includes all staff. >> All staff. Yep. >> So all admin, everyone that And is there I know this isn't in the presentation, but >> you obviously look at it per school. Is it pretty consistent across all schools participation? >> I did not break down the partition participation level by school. Okay. So I don't I don't have that for you, but we can look at that. >> each school has a different number of of staff members, too. So from a percentage perspective it's you know um but we can we can break that down. Um but yeah I mean the I think participation overall
082was pretty strong. >> Okay great. >> So these questions were the lowest scoring items in the survey. None of them were a one or a two, which means that even though they are low, the majority of those taking the survey did not disagree or strongly disagree to these statements. Human X told us that questions referring to the organization tend to trend lower because the more removed you are from the central office, the less you probably know or have insight into. Uh, for example, here hiring protocols or business decisions. The lowest question about recognition came up uh in many of our school buildings as well. So this is something that we are addressing. Um we did talk a little bit about the question. Uh one of the things um human mentioned in in the the uh
083one I was in was that a lot of people read this as I have received meaningful recognition in the past 10 days from my supervisor. >> Right. Um, and recognition as in an organization doesn't just have to come from your supervisor. The other thing is in the past 10 days, >> one, two, nope, haven't got anything in 10 days. So thinking about that as well, but we do know that that's something we want to address across the board. So the growth mindset this is a composite index that reflects the degree to which an organization's culture actively fosters a belief uh in the capacity for skill development and success and a systemic process for continuous improvement and innovation. It's essentially a measure of the organization's future readiness and its willingness and ability to evolve, adapt, and
084seek excellence rather than maintaining the status quo. [clears throat] A high score indicates employees feel empowered to learn. They feel safe to fail and actively seek better methods and have resources to grow. A low score suggests the culture is more focused on maintenance, fears change, or lacks the necessary tools for staff development. So, as you can see here, the questions that make up that growth mindset score, um, with the exception of one, all fell in that four to five range. So, we were happy to see that. And I think that's a testament to our staff's willingness to want to learn and grow. This is just a definition that's going to be important for the next slide. Um so I'm going to show you a graph uh and there's um you'll see engagement and satisfaction and
085this is how they define it. So essentially um engagement I enjoy what I get to do. I love teaching second grade and I love doing it in district 21. So this is what Human X calls the dream box. Um that is the the red circle at the top there. This represents the ideal state for an employee. It's um employees can be described as highly satisfied. I said they like their job, they like their colleagues, they like the environment and highly engaged. They're motivated uh productive and committed to the mission. We want to celebrate these individ individuals and provide them with opportunities for leadership and growth. And then the three darker circles right around the red circle, this is what is referred to as the neighborhood. Um it is a reservoir of high potential talent. These
086individuals have satisfaction and stability. The goal would be to move them into that dream box through meaningful challenge and inspiration. Think of going from good to great. that neighborhood makes up 34.38% of our staff. So, if we put those two together, we're almost at 95% of our staff at that higher end of um satisfied and engaged. An important thing to note here um that was shared with us from human X is that the first time organizations take this survey, their dream box sits typically in the 30 to 35% range. So we're starting the survey well above that already. So we were happy to hear that. So where do we go next? Um so what we did with this information, all schools uh were shared. They got this uh basically the same presentation. We actually had
087human X come out. They had their presenters come out to all of our locations um where they presented the information and then started working with staff to initiate an action plan based on their location's data. Um what's going to happen now is building leaders are going to sustain those conversations. They're going to continuously engage staff, discuss the results, um own the data and reinforce the plan's objectives. They are working. A lot of our our our building leaders have taken this to their building leadership teams. Um, and they're going to integrate the plans into just how they operate as a school. We then will be taking the survey again in the spring. Uh, so we can start looking at data over time. uh the district will begin uh monitoring and tracking our progress, measuring the impact
088of the interventions that we're doing and ensure improvement in key areas uh like engagement, growth mindset, that recognition piece. Um we are we you know when we take it in in the spring human said you know you may see some areas go up a little bit you may see some areas dip a little bit um as people start working on this and and start thinking about oh that's what that question means or oh now that I know this I might have answered it this way um so we'll see what that brings in the spring we're also this is also a piece we're going to use uh as we form our joint committee on climate and culture you know really digging into this a little bit and into those 92 statements. Any questions? >> Just a
089comment. Two of the important elements that you talk about engagement and recognition to me are skill sets that not everybody has just in life and that need to be taught. I mean, it just doesn't come naturally to everybody. And so while they're out there humanex, what is our role in continuing to foster those skill sets among our leadership teams? Because we know that everybody, even great managers don't necessarily have those skill sets. >> Sure. And I think that's um having those conversations with our leaders and helping them reflect on where are their areas of growth in developing that. Um I think you're right around recognition. I think that's just as a society. How many times do you go to a restaurant, it was the best meal you ever had, and you run to Yelp to
090write that review. >> No, but the minute you have a bad meal, you're all over Yelp, right? So, yes, taking the time to making to make sure that that that we're doing that. >> Yep. >> Um, actually, this was something I was going to bring up in my NSSO report. NSSO has been using Human X, I think, for four or five years. Um, the link that I sent everybody earlier about with the superintendent council has a lot of this same information. So, you can see what happens as you go on over several years. >> Um, in the fall you tend to get higher numbers also because everybody's excited to be back to work. >> Everybody's really happy and then you go along on your year and it's like, "Oh, that kid again." Um, and so
091the numbers will tend tend to go down in the spring. >> NSSO is going to be switching only to once a year, but for our first year, these are great numbers. >> Um, it's nice to see. I was very happy. That was as soon as I got it, it's like, okay, where's the squares? I I want to see what where our circles are. And it is broken down by school so that the individual schools will be able to see it. Um, just saying for NSSO, it was very interesting because it is anonymous, but we have one facility that has six employees. So, it's kind of easy to figure out who said what there. Um, but it's anonymous. It's It's been a great tool. We've used it a lot. So, I just want to say that
092this is awesome. If you want a much more indepth discussion of it, watch the video and you'll you'll get a lot more information. >> Yeah. And I just want to say when we got that 80% response uh rate back, you know, we were as as a team talked about how grateful we were um to our staff. I mean, because it's it's 92 statements, right? It takes a little bit of time. Um but clearly right off the bat there, you know, was an investment of we want to let you know how we're feeling. Um because it's important to us to make change. >> Yeah. And and the more we respond to these >> more it it's peer pressure that'll get more people to actually respond. We got as the years went on we got a higher
093response rate on it. >> What's our commitment to Human X? Like how long are we >> three years to start? >> Yeah. >> I will agree with what Debbie said as someone who took the survey for many many years. We only took it in the fall because the data in the spring is not so great. [laughter] teacher burnout is real. >> Yeah. >> But that can be adjusted over time if it's not giving us the workable data that we want. >> But I think that's valuable to know though that at different points during the year, >> different reinforcements may be more appropriate than others and determining what data points are addressed. I mean, I'm assuming this is what the joint committee will be focused on, especially once they see the the spring data, but that's
094that's very good to know. >> Yeah. Temperary expectations. >> And I also just kind of want to point out that that >> we're talking about human beings as well, right? So, the data points, they're they're a flashlight. They're an indicator at a particular moment in time um of what the priorities may need to be. Um, some of those things will change. Some of those things will stay consistent. It also will depend building to building. Um, I I also think that, and I'm just going to be real honest, um, that one of the things that I really like about this particular survey is that it does dig into those four different elements. It's about me. It's about my team. it's about, you know, my relationship with, you know, so it's there's a lot of of reflection
095um that can come into it and really begins to give the opportunity that this concept of climate, this concept of culture is not this externalized thing, >> right? that at the end of the day, your your cadre of of colleagues that are working together are not necessarily having that much contact with the organization as a whole, right? And so a lot of the satisfaction, a lot of the engagement, it's happening at that grassroots level. It's that concept of the people that are the closest to the problem are usually the most successful ones in solving it. um you know and so that also might lead to some tough conversations in areas where we might be seeing that there's a little bit more um of a of a concern, right? It's like all right so you know
096we all need to own that and how do we you know kind of work through those things. So again, it's sparking conversation and sparking, you know, really individualized by building by team ability of folks to really kind of say, how are we going to tackle this? Again, the recognition piece ubiquitous across the board, right? But it's also that concept of, you know, we can and should be recognizing each other, right? and and already that has that has you know sparked some really good conversations like in this building you know we're always we're running to and fro there's a lot of people that are kind of they pass through and go you know but kind of just taking that step to go oh you know I can't you we need to make sure that that we're
097checking in with each other you know even if it's a little like we've got the you know pass you know this pumpkin has been given to you pass it along to the next per you know those types of things so Um, it's just it's generating some good conversations >> and you're implying something with the numbers and some of the things that you said, but I just want to be curious about something. I assume you're going to be able to dig much more deeply into these numbers. And what I mean by that is you could have something we see a 3.3 on one one dimension, but that could be 90% of the respondents giving it a four or five and 10% of the respondents giving it a one as opposed to a large group of people
098giving it a three. >> Correct? So we actually have a breakdown for every statement what people rated uh the the different areas of the scale for every statement. So that's what I mean. So you will be able to go into a deeper dive. And then finally, as much as we'd like to think that we could get that is a red circle, right? Um we could get the red cir that was meant as a joke guys. Um up to 100%. What is for high I don't know high satisfactory, high achieve, whatever term you want to use. >> What is a good target? >> I'd say 80 and above. And then that's, you know, um, and I don't, you know, I don't I want I don't want to be the rain on the parade, but I would
099say that any organization that's shooting for 100% of every person that works for them to be highly engaged and highly satisfied is setting theirel up to be a little bit disappointed. >> Um, that's just not not the world that we live in. >> Um, but you know, we would like to get it up above 80%. You know, if think of it, if you're getting a hit, 80% of the time you're at bat, >> you are phenomenally doing, you know, and it >> I started out by saying I you don't expect no was >> but I think that's the thing. It's like 80% of an organization that is indicating that they are highly engaged, highly satisfied. Like that's, you know, yeah, >> that's nothing to sneeze at. >> Neither is 60%. >> We strive for progress,
100not perfection. Um, any other questions or comments from our student representatives either? All right. Thank you so much, Mr. Roberts. I appreciate it. Okay, [snorts] let's move along into our board discussion. Uh, as you know, our conference is next week, so we will be discussing the 2025 IASB resolutions committee report. Uh, board vice president Debbie Mcatee has been appointed as our representative to the delegate assembly. uh she will be voting at that assembly in accordance with the consensus of our board with regard to the uh constitutional amendments that are proposed as well as the one resolution. Um we've all had numerous chances to review this so I'm going to turn it over to Debbie to lead us in some discussion about the proposals. >> Okay. Thank you very much. Um yes, I watched the webinar
101today that was in the past has been very not worthwhile. This year it was um if anybody wants to watch it when it comes out on it will be available probably the beginning of next week if you have any more in-depth questions or just a little more more general knowledge. Um the first 10 or 15 minutes was a little introductions and things like that that might be interesting to people who haven't seen it for the past eight years. Um but I do want to go over the uh items in order here that I will be voting on. We've got got the constitutional amendments. Um, it's being done in a consent agenda, which means that unless somebody pulls it, we will just vote yay or nay on the whole thing. Um, I do anticipate at least
102a couple of these items. Um, does anybody I plan to vote yes. Is there anything I'll just read the titles of them for item number one was for membership. It's for membership status which is for a regular member or an honorary member which could be for people honorary members of IASB which could be um like the architects and things like that. They are honorary members but they are not voting. Um this was rewritten because they had a bunch of changes that they wanted to go through. All of the details are within your book that you should that everybody has gotten. Um, it's also available on our uh agenda here. So, that one I plan on voting yes. Was there anyone that wanted me to vote otherwise? Was there anyone that wanted me to vote otherwise
103on any of these? Otherwise, okay, I'm just just for the public. I'm going to just want to read them off. Um, this item number two is the delegate assembly and the annual conference. Uh, specifically the way the delegate assembly is being run. Um item number three was the elections section one on nominations how they do the nominations for the officers. Um item four is elections also but the terms of office. In the past it has been one-year terms for the office of vice president and president. They want to change then you can be reelected for a second term. They want to change it to one two-year term so that we're not spending all the time doing the interviews for everybody every year. And as far as I know, it has never not reelected the person
104who was in it the prior year. Um uh number item five is board of directors comp composition. Item six is the committees, specifically the nominating committee as to who is on it. Item four was the divisions for officers. Item number eight had to do with resolutions. Item nine was had was a miscellaneous section for declared emergencies and uh item number 10 was for amendment for proposals to amendments. So looking around, I don't see anybody that wants me to vote no on these. So I will be voting yes on these. No, Debbie, as I said last month, I had some minor issues, but one, I had a chance to talk to somebody, >> okay, >> with the uh who was help working on this. And two, these are things that they'll clean up, I think, >>
105in the next couple of years anyway, >> right? Yeah. No, most most of this is to get us back in line with the way things we've been doing things anyway. So, it's like, let's make it official. Um, so I will vote yes on on the consent agenda. I will not pull anything. Um the item number 10 on the agenda is the nominating committee report. The officers that they are suggesting for their slate. For the president is the current vice president Tracy Ser. Um and for the vice president will be uh Albert Kryer from district 214. So does anyone have any objections on either of those? Okay. I will be voting yes for both of those. And we this year, which is a major change, in the past, we've had like 12 resolutions, we only have
106one, and it's school bus safety funding, and that has to do with it for new purchases of school buses um installing the harnesses for the kids. Um that doesn't really even take effect until 2031. and it'll be something that will affect First Student and the other bus companies a lot more than it will us, but we will end up having to pay for it when it gets to that time. Um, but it's not anything that will affect us immediately. >> So, if I sounds like I have a unanimous yes [clears throat] all the way across the board on everything. >> I'm definitely glad to do it of voting in favor of the resolution. I have some real issues with the legislation that was passed. Uh, and I'm hopeful that in the next several years someone
107wraps their head around it enough to repeal it before it goes into effect. >> Um, we can discuss that in a later form at a different form at a later date, but um, for the fact that it now exists as a law in Illinois, I would like to see some commitment from the state to help defay that additional cost. >> Yes. Uh the one last thing that they did ask is that for districts that are sending a delegate to have an alternate just in case for some reason they can't fulfill their position and uh Jessica has said that she would like to she will be the alternate was there was a year um several years ago that somebody was one of my friends was hospitalized so they were supposed to be the dellet and couldn't
108and then there wasn't a backup so we have to I think that's something Leticia would need to do to put it in as an alternate for Jessica. I'm not sure. I have no intention of not going. >> And and to be perfectly fair, I only agreed because I know you have no intention of missing it. [laughter] >> On the other hand, I don't think your friend intended to be hospitalized. >> No, she did not. >> That's um that's a good point. But >> it was a pretty major illness. >> Any of our newer members to feel like they had to, you know, potentially give up their Saturday morning at conference. So, >> right. Yes. There's there's too many other things going on. It is a I love policy. I love delegate assembly. So >> on
109your assurance that I absolutely won't have to do it, I can. >> Sounds good. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Is there any other discussion or questions for Debbie before we move on? Okay. Um All right. We have now reached our public comment section of our meeting. Uh, the board will allow any individual here to share a public comment for up to three minutes. Such comments should not include discussion of personnel matters. Thank you. Which should be brought directly to the attention of the appropriate school official. During public comment, the board and administration will listen to comments but may not respond to the public. Uh, Leticia has handed me one comment card from Ben Coleman. Ben, you want to come on up? Hello, my name is Ben Kman and I'm the current president of
110the District 21 Education Association. We represent pretty much everyone who works at District 21. I'd like to talk pre briefly about two things today and one of them is my favorite holiday. Unfortunately, school board members day is not what I'm talking about, but happy school board members day this Saturday. We appreciate that you are willing to do this job. We know that it can be a long night sometimes, but we're glad that you're here to do this difficult work. I'd also like to talk about Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. In my family, my mom always made us pass a cup of grape juice around the table and take turns saying what we were thankful for. I tended towards sarcasm, but I started to appreciate the ways that everyone else would answer. I became very grateful for
111the opportunity to gather and say thanks. Here are some things I'm grateful for right now. I'm headed to a college friend's birthday party this weekend, and I'm grateful to be able to visit both of my parents and to spend some time with my extended and large family of sad Browns fans in Ohio. I was also surprised to see two of my students on the screen downstairs cutting sheep brains open. I'm thrilled to be able to bring the PLTW medical detectives curriculum to Cooper Middle School in District 21. I'll admit that I was a little terrified bringing Andy Steckling into my class of eighth graders for my first attempt at teaching dissection. The video posted on the Cooper Instagram shows a student struggling to cut a little sheep brain in half. It turns out that if
112you leave sheep brains out overnight, they dry out a lot and leaving the protective membrane on the brain doesn't help. So, we'll do better in the second trimester. But I'm grateful to be trying something a little gross, but lots of fun with my students. And um I'd also like to say uh thank you very much for all that you do and thank you very much for uh the opportunity to speak. >> Thanks very much, Ben. Thanksgiving is also my favorite holiday because it's my birthday and it's all about eating. [laughter] Um, Cass, do we have any written public comments? >> There was one that was forwarded on. >> Okay, very good. Thank you. We will ensure that we read that and will be um attached to next month's uh meeting minutes as well. Um, okay.
113Let's move on into our consent agenda. Uh, we received 10 Freedom of Information Act requests this month. There are no board conference and travel expenses for the board to approve. Uh I did have an opportunity to sit down with Mike Zerger and go through the financial documents uh and received satisfactory responses to all my queries. Thank you again Mike for your time and discussion. Um I believe Carrie and Angel Gallica need some items pulled from the consent agenda. Items D, E, and F. Does anyone else need anything pulled? Okay, seeing that, may I please have a motion to approve the consent agenda minus items D, E, and F, which are the amended minutes of the regular board of education meeting from July 24th of this year, the amended minutes of our board meeting from August
11421st of this year and the amended close session minutes from August 21st. >> So moved. >> Second. Ready? >> Yep. All right. Arlland >> I. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, >> Yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> Okay, great. May I please have a motion to approve item D, which is the amended minutes of our board meeting from July 24th. >> So moved. >> Second. >> All right. Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, abstain. Yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I abstain. >> Jessica, >> yes. >> Arlin, >> I. >> Motion carries. >> Okay. And finally, a motion to approve items E and F, which are the amended minutes from our August 21st meeting and the amended close session minutes from August 21st. >> So moved. >> Second.
115>> Go ahead. >> Grabiana on that one. All right. Angelica, abstain. Iliana, >> yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes. >> Arllin, >> I. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> All right. Very good. Let's move on into um new business. Uh our first item is the approval of the 2025 property tax levy. Um last month, Mr. Zagger provided us with a presentation. Does anyone have any questions for Mr. Zerger before we go on or was there anything you wanted to add? >> Yeah, there is a short presentation. There's a couple statutory things that have to be um presented. So um we'll keep it brief, but there are a couple of high points we need to hit. >> Wait, there's four of us then? >> He's the 26th. >> Good.
116>> There's four of us. >> Yes. >> 25 25 26 28. >> Yep. >> Everybody 50th. Oh my goodness. >> I know. >> I'm not there yet. [laughter] >> So, tonight we're here to do the final property tax levy presentation. And as as Dr. Connie mentioned, there are a few statutory things we must do tonight. So, we will do that those. This is going to be high level. We went in a lot of detail last time. So, hopefully I can keep this short and to the point. Um, first off, just some key terms and definitions when I'm when I'm saying things. The key ones are CPI and EAV, consumer price, index, equalize, assessed value. you'll hear me say those things and also just what a levy and an extension is. Those those are just things
117you can reference back to if you ever have any questions. Um tax extension. Um this is like the timeline. We've done everything we need to do so far. The last thing that needs to be done is the levy needs to be uploaded onto the county's website by Tuesday, December 30th this year. So we have plenty of time. I do not even think they'll let me upload it yet. So So um once that's available, I will be uploading it as soon as possible because I do not want to miss that. Um Just wanted to share with the board the historical CPI information over the years, how it's kind of trending. You can see we've had those spikes over the years, but as you can see now, we are actually trending back down to where where we
118typically are. Average was 2.33%. You always hear the federal government say 2%. They've done a pretty good job of that over the years because that is what they are also indicating. So, we're trending back down to that 2% level, but for the current year, we're going to be at 2.99%. So this is just a history. If you're ever wondering what we were able to get on our existing property in any year, it's right here. So if you ever want to reference it, some good information. So to the important stuff, this is the actual property tax levy for the year. Um so and the one column is the ask. Last is last year's what we actually extend it. What the increase is you see we're asking for a 4.63% increase on existing property. We're only going
119to get 2.9%. that CPI, the extra 1.73% is there for one reason, to capture new property. The levy allows us to capture $118 million and equalize assessed value or roughly $360 million in market value. We've never been over 20, so without a tip, so not worried about that. Um the other thing is 100 on 100k market value, um the cost will be $45.70 for this for this ask. So just something to point out. So that's the tax levy in total. You can see there's some increases, decreases, nothing major. Um, we do like to move things around to fund different areas based on where the funds are at the end of the year. So, this is the important stuff we're doing tonight. There's a public act that was last year was the first year we had
120to do this. There's a couple things I have to go over to the board to prove we're not over loving. So we're required to look at our fund balances, our receivables, what our expenses were, and how we kind of compare and to make sure we're not overving asking for money we do not need. So this slide gives us a a general overview about what that requirement is. Um I'm not going to go through it in detail. We will kind of see how the calc's done in a few pages. Um and then the Miller ratio. This was a lawsuit um years ago and this was how it was to decide what is too much. And so it's called the middle ratio. We're required to present that to you tonight. And the key is that we are
121not exceeding two and a half times um for lack of better words, money on hand to cover expenses. We you're not supposed to go over that amount. You can, but that opens you up to tax appeals. So that's kind of the the ratio where you don't want to go over and as you see on the next slide, we will kind of get into that that detail. So hopefully the next two slides are if there's any questions, please let me know. Um, first off, public act 1030394. So, this is where we have to look at, are we too high? Are we asking for too much 2 and 2 and a half% that level? And you see that yellow highlight over there. Um, it we're at 47.82%. So, we're nowhere near that level, but this is in
122line with our fund balance policy. We want to be between 35 and 45%. We're a little higher. It's going to flux year to year, but that's the important thing is we're not asking for what we don't need. So we need like so we have this is roughly a half year's worth of expenses. So obviously we need to levy taxes and over time that number goes up and down over the course of the year. So the important thing is we have we're at 50% we're well under where we need where you know where people would be questioning. >> Just just as a clarification for the public you're using 2 and a.5% and 47%. The 2 and a2% means 250%. >> Yes. 2.5 times public. I apologize. Yes. That's what I meant. Yeah. 2.5. So we're at
123>> half. So we're at 0.5%. So we used to have 2% of room there. So or two times room there. Um so that's and it's a three-year look back as you can see on that. The audit isn't done for this year. So I'm using an audited number. So this is important to show that we're not overleving. So so the the key here is we do not we do not need help on reduction. Um the other thing is the Miller ratio and this is the most the more important thing. So this was a lawsuit years ago that um the judge requ this is where the two and a half% came from and and the c was actually built from there. So the minute if you see on the right hand side there all those nice um
124yellow lit up numbers that kind of shows ed funds our big fund. Our three average expenses are $105 million. Our ending assets plus our taxes receivable are $14 million. So we're almost one to one. Same with operations and maintenance. Um, transportation is actually well below that. We're trying to build that up right now, but um, you know, but the cost is going up. It's hard to catch up. So, you can see in all of our operating funds, we are well below that ratio. And then you're also supposed to show the nonoperating funds, which is on the next tab. There's a lot less sear. Um, again, IMRF, we're we've been adjusting that and trying to build that back up. TOR is high, but we're actually not levying for that this year. So that's going to go
125way down in the future and we no longer levy for um fire prevention and light safety. So that's why that's at zero. So So overall the Miller ratio we are doing a a good job. No issues. You know nothing to be concerned of. We are you know we are not asking for what we do not need. So that's a good thing. We we we are you know you know we're not being greedy for lack of better words. So So those are the big things we have to go over. I know it was quick to the point but I I just a couple other things. Um this is 75% of our revenue. We are very reliant on this and um the other thing is it covers our salaries and benefits for the most part. We use
126this for salaries and benefits and our state and federal funds are what we use to cover those supplies of materials. So this is very important to the district. But overall it's I think it's a good fair levy and hopefully um you know you know that. So that's it. So sorry about that. But so I believe that's the last slide. So any questions? Right. Okay. Um, did you have any Oh, okay. Uh, may I please have a motion to approve our tax levy res? >> So moved. >> Second. >> All right. Yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes. >> Arlland, >> I. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. Our next item is the approval of a resolution instructing the county clerk on PTEL levy
127reductions. >> So there's no presentation on this just in if there's any questions. Um it's just a procedural. >> Yes. Yeah. This is just directing them on how to reduce our levy and it's so it's telling them to put it all to our educational fund and that's for budgeting purposes. So that's the big thing there is it's it it makes it easier to budget by doing it this way. Good. >> Any questions? All right. Then a motion, please. >> So moved. >> Second. >> All right. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes. >> Arlland, >> hi. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, >> Yes. Motion carries. >> Thank you. All right. Item C is the consideration and action on a resolution authorizing the issuance of not to exceed 47,623,000 47 million. Yeah,
128I said that right. Taxable tax anticipation warrants in anticipation of the collection of taxes levied for the year 2024 by the board of education for district 21 for educational operations and maintenance, bond and interest, transportation, social security and special education purposes and authorizing the sale of said warrants to the purchaser thereof. So, the purpose of this is u hopefully we won't even actually have to do this. Um but because the Cook County tax bills, second installment tax bills are very late >> um and are supposed to be hitting mailboxes as soon as Saturday um with now a due date of December 15th. Um we're very hopeful um that the receipts that we are due will come and we won't have to issue these warrants, but we want to have the ability to do if something
129else happens. Um so this is purely at this point insurance. >> That's exactly it. And we've actually delayed what we were planning on doing. >> Do we have an idea of what date we would need to issue it if or what date we need to have the money in the bank? >> It would be after the first of the year. We we're still liquid enough to >> So we're still we're still good even for the next board meeting purposes. >> I'm sorry. >> We're still good effectively for the next >> We're still good for for a little bit yet, but it's again just >> No, I understand. >> Yeah. If something goes kaput and there, you know, it it probably wouldn't be a two-day thing. It would be something where you know like okay well
130now we can't do this for you. We can't get the receipts out for a while yet. So we're just just insurance. Good. >> Yep. >> Okay. May I please have a motion? So moved. >> Second. >> All right. I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes. >> Arlin, >> I. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, >> yes. >> Iliana, >> yes. Bill, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, Mr. Zagger. Um, our final item under new business is the adoption of a resolution prohibiting the use of school district property for civil immigration enforcement staging areas, processing locations or operations bases. Uh, Dr. Connelly, would you please give us a brief overview of this resolution? >> Uh, certainly. Uh, this is a a corresponding or a similar resolution to the one that
131was recently adopted by the village of Wheeling. Um as um immigration enforcement activity continues in the area, um we um very strongly uh want to make sure that our community understands um that that is a federal uh enforcement. Um that is not something that as a local um unit of government um that um we are um involved with. uh and as such um that we don't believe it is appropriate um for any of our uh land uh our grounds to be utilized for any of those purposes. So um again this is something that um uh Wheeling has just recently done uh and as as has city of Chicago Cook County Lake County and you know there's been others. So um this uh just formalizes that that uh our area is not to be utilized for
132their operations. >> Is there any discussion or questions? >> No, I fully supported. >> Mhm. >> So moved. >> Second. >> Debbie second. All right. Jessica, >> yes. >> Arlin, >> I. >> Debbie, >> yes. >> Angelica, >> yes. Ilana, yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes and the motion carries. Right. >> Thank you very much. Um and uh my understanding is that there will be signage posted relatively. >> Yes. Um regarding this, >> the signage is um supposed to be ready tomorrow. Uh and um then our operations teams will will get it posted uh up in the uh in the parking lots and such in the next couple of days. >> Very good. Thank you. All right, let's move along into board communication. Um, board policy committee met earlier this evening just before
133our board meeting. Uh, Bill, as the chair of the committee, would you please share an update? >> Certainly. Um, earlier we did go over the 132page press plus update. While it was long, most of it focused on their 5-year review process and such was focused on doing things like updating references and so and cleaning up some existing policies. You will all be receiving that uh the update in your next month's package as we will be having our first reading of the policies at that time for the community. I made this comment in the policy uh committee meeting. I'll make it now. Press Plus is a subscription service from the Illinois Association of School Boards that monitors legislative changes at the state and federal levels as well as court decisions that impact school districts and makes
134suggested changes, updates, and additions and deletions to our policy manual. Though those are sent out to us periodically, typically two maybe three times a year. The policy committee receives them, reviews them, and puts them forward to the rest of the board for their approval. Um, additionally, we had a brief discussion on the possible adoption of a social media policy. Currently, there is only that we're aware of one school district that has such a policy. You've been given a copy of that policy already. At our next meeting a few months from now, we will begin a discussion as to whether that is appropriate for us or whether we want to modify it or perhaps wait until the IASB gets around to creating its own policy recommendations for us. Um, I told the board that I would
135talk to the people at the IASB at the conference to see where they are with that and whether they have any other sample policies that might be pertinent to our discussions. But if any of you have any thoughts on what you already have right now, please feel free to forward them to any of the policy board members or to Mike and we would include that in our discussions. >> And that's it. >> Thank you, Bill. Um, NSSO Debbie. >> Okay. Thank you. I actually went over a good part of it was about Humanex, so I've already done that. um saying that they are going to they are actually moving to a spring only survey because like I had said the beginning of the year just is everybody's excited and everything. We want to know how
136you feel after a couple of months. Uh things that they are also moving to is not just exit interviews for people that are leaving that they've gotten a lot of good information out of. um they're going to start interviewing people that are staying around. What is making you stay? What what is helping? Um I thought that one was quite interesting. Um on January 5th is their institute day. Uh it is also an institute day for us and they run um out at Harper. Last year they had 1,800 attendees at this institute day um for all kinds of breakout sessions um I don't know the details on them yet but I'm sure that uh Dr. Connelly will be getting that for any of the staff that wishes to attend. Um, in May they will be having
137their safety fair which is really important for the kids for NSSO because they see somebody in uniform and a lot of times they freak out or they see fire trucks and sirens and things and this gives them a chance to go and climb on the fire engines and things like that. um also allows the emergency staff to get used to those types of children with varying needs. You know, some are nonverbal and things like that. So, that's a really big thing. Um and we also discussed the one the resolution about the buses and it found it very interesting that districts 59 and 211 do not use transportation provided by NSSO. they they transport their own children, which I found to be very interesting. Um, just a little bit of information for people. I don't know
138if that's something we would even think about doing. Um, it's just a possibility for a cost investigation. I don't know if we would save any money on that, but it might be might it's a possibility. We have started uh transporting some of our students um particularly our students that are uh in our DHH program at Riley. Um previously NSSO was providing transportation for those students but they're in our area. So we took over transportation for that and we are looking at all u everything related to transportation because costs are rising exponentially. >> Yes. particularly special ed transportation and reimbursements rates at the dis at the the state level continue to go down. >> Yes, they do. >> Yeah. >> And it's a a very specialized transportation. It's not like you can just have any bus
139driver doing it. It's very unique. So that was it. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you, Debbie. Uh Bill, would you take Ed Red, please? >> Certainly. Uh the November ED Red member meeting was held virtually on November 6th. We had three interesting presentations. first from the superintendent of DUP page 88 who is also part of the Illinois ELE consortium which is looking for data on EL identification and exit criteria uh their benchmarks in the hope to create a more flexible EL policy. State Senator Mary Edley Allen spoke about an education mandate relief tax task force which if you've been around long enough know that that's wouldn't be the first one they had. um as well as her continued efforts for tIFF reform and we also heard a legislative update from Franzic. Highlights there included a
140discussion of the OMA foyer reform bill that we've previously discussed the safe school for all act which uh codifies to state law the piler's and I hope I'm pronouncing that right piler supreme court decision and a requirement that ISBY develop guidance for school districts on AI artificial intelligence by July 26th. Um, if any of that is of interest to you, the there is a video recording of the meeting that is available on the Ed READ website for our three new board members. If you do not have access to the member portion of their website, I would suggest you contact Leticia who will make sure that that is arranged for you. Um, there are a couple of upcoming Ed Rad events. The December member meeting will be held on December 5th at 1:30 at Maine Township
141207's administrative building. There will be an option to attend that virtually. And the annual legislative dinner will be held on January 26th. More details to come. I don't have anything more than the date right now. And that is it for Ed. >> Thank you, Bill. Would you take ISB as well? >> Absolutely. Um most of this was already covered in our earlier discussion uh the discussion area regarding the delegate assembly but the joint annual conference will be held next week. As a note to our newer board members typically we will briefly report back about some of the seminars we attended at the December board meeting. So you know whatever struck you as important or an interesting thing you may have learned. Um, and finally, you were emailed an a survey from the Association of School
142Boards last month, and you should have also received a reminder today. Um, please complete and return the survey by November 30th. >> And that would be it. >> Great. Thank you, Arland North Cook. Any update? >> I have no update on our new facility, so I'll keep you posted. >> Very good. Thank you. >> Welcome. >> Um, any other members? If you have updates for local government or liaison assignments, uh please be sure to send those in next month for inclusion in the December agenda. Um I did just want to note uh that in addition to the District 21 food drive going on this week, Indian Trails Library is also hosting a food and needs drive if you would like to donate any items. Uh, and if you have questions about what goods are needed,
143like pop top cans that you don't need a can opener for, high demand foods, and personal and menstrual hygiene products, please reach out directly to Indian Trails. Um, and let's move on to our student representatives report. So this month um we asked our student representatives um to poll uh do some surveying of their um peers um on um what how food service is going uh our breakfast and our lunch programs and kind of what some of the favorite items are. Uh and this is also going to be a topic of of discussion at my next meeting of the superintendent student advisory uh council. Um so uh our members uh will be able to share back some of that information with um with that group as well. So um with that and of course they're going
144to give you a little bit of an update on things going on in their schools. Um why don't we go ahead and breed do you want to uh kick us off? >> Good evening everyone. Um so London wasn't done gathering all the results for the um food survey. So next meeting we'll do a whole presentation about it. But from the results we have 301 people responded and their favorite be breakfast entre were French toast, pancakes, waffles, cinnamon rolls and breakfast sandwiches. And their favorite lunch entre were pizza, chicken, bosco sticks, pretzels, bread sticks, burritos, wraps, the deli bar, tacos, and nachos. And then their food request was sushi. And then update from London is basketball has started. Eighth grade boys is boys basketball is currently 4- one meaning they have four wins and one loss.
145And seventh grade boys are five and one. And they just won tonight against Holmes. And then girls basketball is also doing good as well with their seventh grade team also winning tonight against Holmes. >> Okay. Thank you sir. Sam, you want to take homes? >> In homes, um, our basketball season started off in October going against teams like River Trails, Cooper, London, Lincoln, and MacArthur. We have also had things in this month like spirit week, no graphic novel November, a fundraiser and our book fair in school and our our parent teacher conferences that are coming up. From our s our food survey, kids responded having some of their favorite breakfast entre being like pancakes, waffles, and muffins and lunch being pizza, chicken, and bosco six, and requests being ramen or noodle soup. Can I ask
146what no graphic novel November is? >> I'm not completely sure, [laughter] >> but it's basically like you're not able to read like it the graphic novels are blocked off in our library and you're not able to read them. >> Why? >> Interesting. >> I think they're trying to get us to read um more like chapter books, more educational books. >> I think that's the purpose of it. I'm not really sure either. >> I think it's it's it's to to really stretch um the the reading interest, right? I think it's um yeah, I think it is although it is very challenging to read a graphic novel. Um I have, you know, it it's a lot, right? um there's a lot going on in those things, but um I think it's also very easy from an interest
147perspective to kind of start to really just focus in on, you know, those. And so really to try and broaden the horizons, kind of be able to get some more um specific um kind of, you know, um reading in a more traditional kind of of you know, literature format um is really the aim at it. It's not that graphic novels are not good. They're, you know, it's a great thing, but you know, we want to stretch them. We want to get them into into multiple uh kind of modes. Did I get that right? Okay. [laughter] >> Go ahead, Alex. >> Uh the Cooper update for November is that our basketball boys and girls teams are off to a great season with lots of victories. The fall choir concert was on November 10th and the Scholastic
148book fair is coming from November 19th through 25th. Next, for the food service survey, 316 students completed the survey. They shared their favorite and least favorite breakfast and lunch options. Some of the favorite breakfast options were pancakes, waffles, French toast, donuts, and muffins. And some of the favorite lunch entre were pizza, chicken, sandwiches, bosco sticks, tacos, burritos, wraps, and orange chicken. Um, the main concerns about the lunchroom appear to be cleanliness, noise, and student behavior. Several students offered good ideas for improving the cleanup process and some provided additional suggestions for enhancing the overall lunchroom environment and processes. I will take a deeper dive into the results next month. Also, some of the requests were egg rolls and spring rolls. So, I have to ask which pizza is it? the square pizza or is it the
149the the pyramid pizza? >> I believe students prefer the triangle. >> The triangle. Yeah, I believe I Yeah, I know. >> I grew up on square pizza at school. >> Yeah. It's an important distinction needed. I wanted to make sure we knew that. Yes, indeed. Yeah. >> Well, I mean, this is fantastic. I love the high level of responses that were received on this and it's always good to know the kids are enjoying uh the meal service that we provide. So, I'm looking forward to your presentations next month as well. >> I do have a question. >> Oh, yeah. >> Um did we get I think it was Alex mentioned least favorites. So, you've got a list of that too that we can pass on to the food service people. Um I have a slight
150of a slight vested interest there. And also do we have information on the elementary schools what they feel about lunch service breakfast and lunch or can we get that? >> We can um that's something that um again particularly as as the the new elementary kitchens the you know the the finishing kitchens have taken root >> um we can we can do some some elementary surveying as well. Um yeah particularly with our you know fourth fifth you know um so uh now the options are more expansive at the middle school as you would you know expect but um yeah we can definitely do that and as far as uh sharing results with the um uh organic life staff they are actually going to be coming to the superintendent student advisory council meeting um and and have
151asked to be able to come to that. So, um, so yeah, so they will definitely be there to hear things firsthand. >> Fantastic. All right. Thank you all. Great work all around. Um, okay. The next regular meeting of the board of education uh is scheduled for Thursday, December 11th, 2025 at 7 p.m. Please note this is one week earlier than usual. Um, and then we will be moving into close session. Uh we will not be returning to take any action I don't believe. No we will not be returning to take any action. We will adjourn right out of close session. Um, be it resolved, the board of education approves to recess the D the CCSD21, November 13, 2025 regular board meeting and convene in close session to discuss the appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or
152dismissal of specific employees, specific individuals who serve as independent contractors in a park, recreational, or educational setting, or specific volunteers of the public body, or legal counsel for the public body, including hearing testimony on A complaint lodged against an employee, a specific individual who serves as an independent contractor in a park, recreational, or educational setting, or a volunteer of the public body, or against legal counsel for the public body to determine its validity, and to discuss the purchase or lease of real property for the use of the public body, including meetings held for the purpose of discussing whether a particular parcel should be acquired. Um, may I please have a second? >> Second. All right. Arlland, >> I. >> Debbie, yes. >> Angelica. >> Yes. Bill, >> yes. >> I vote yes. Jessica, >> yes.
153>> Motion carries. >> Thank you. Uh, we will go into close session. Thank you all very much for attending and hopefully we'll see you next month. Okay.