001I can't hear. No. >> Testing. Here we go. All right. I'll just start from the beginning since now everyone can hear me. I hereby call to order this Committee of the Whole meeting for Monday, May 11th, 2026. The time is 8:02 a.m. Will the clerk please call the roll? >> Einhart. >> Here. >> Kristen de Castro. >> Here. >> Allison Pavlakis. >> Here. >> Amy Peling. >> Here. >> Katie Hilton. >> Here. >> Judy Berlin. >> Here. >> Aaron Stone. >> Thank you. I seek a motion to approve the minutes of the April 13th, 2026 Committee of the Whole and Executive Session meetings. >> I move to approve the minutes of the April 13th, 2026 Committee of the Whole and Executive Session meetings. >> May I have a second? >> Second. >> Motion has been
002made and seconded. Board members, are there any comments, errors, or omissions to the minutes? Okay. Um seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll? >> Einhart. >> Yes. >> Kristen de Castro. >> Yes. >> Allison Pavlakis. >> Yes. >> Katie Hilton? >> Yes. >> Judy Berlin? >> Yes. >> Amy Peeling? >> Yes. >> Thank you. The motion carries. All right. Seeing no items under facility development committee this morning, we will start with school finance, Mrs. Peeling. >> Terrific. And I will turn it over to Mr. Mr. Woltemire to discuss the draft 2027 budget. >> All right. All right. So, the framework of these slides is very similar to what we would have done last year. Um some of the slides I may only offer one brief comment or we'll go over them fairly quickly.
003And some of the other slides um I may go a little more in depth as they have either you know, bigger impacts on this year's budget or potentially lock out into the future. As I'm going through um particularly when we get to some of the more impactful slides, uh feel free to stop me if if anyone wants to talk about um what that slide means or just anything. Don't feel like you need to wait till the end. All right. So, today we're just looking at our first draft. Come back in June, approve a tentative budget. August is when the board takes their formal action. And as always, we'll make a bunch of changes between like May, June and August. We'll detail those out and summarize them for the board so the board can see what
004they're voting on. Um you know, from like my office's standpoint, the number of changes is quite large, but summarized it looks fairly manageable. Uh the top six funds here are operating funds. That's what's going to be the focus of our conversation. This shows a breakdown of all the revenue. Property taxes, not surprisingly, is our overwhelmingly top top area. Okay. So, incorporated in this budget is the impact of the estimated 25 levy, which is now including debt service up over 72 million. One of the key factors is the 2.9% CPI. That also gets plugged in a lot on our expenditure side. And we set the net collection rate at roughly 98%. You see it in there for reference. You know, we could go up or down. Typically, we might see that at quarter to half percent
005above that. Um when when the year's done. Um and so, you know, 175,000 is roughly where where that falls. All right. Interest revenue. This is an interesting one. If you think back to like the late 2000s um housing recession, there were many years where the interest rate was like .05%. Sometimes it was even worse than that. And so, I what I've shown is how rates really ramped up. We kind of hit some high high points at just over 2 million. We're starting a bit of a slide back. Um I think that's the long-term goal of the Fed is to slowly work those rates back down, probably something in the in the 2% range. Um also, what you see is fiscal year 25 Cook County was on time. Great. We got over 2 million. I'm nearly
006certain, but I'm not 100%. I believe in '23, '24, and then fiscal year '26, those years there was at least some level of delay from Cook County. When you add up all that delays, now that like I know the fiscal year 26 cost us at least 500,000 in revenue in interest revenue. I think the aggregate total of just those 3 years is up in the 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 million dollar range. Um so we'll keep an eye on that. That does play into having it at just 1.3 for fiscal year 27. We'll reassess over the summer. Um there has been some whispers, maybe more than whispers, that they'll be late again. Um hopefully not nearly as long, but that is kind of the early indication. Um and so as things happen over the summer, we start
007to approach those statutory deadlines, which is bills go out July 1st, they're due August 1st for that second installment. You'll see uh units of local government asking, put pressure to get some answers. And usually they're pretty um closely held on their information until they gets really close and they feel like, okay, now we have to release information. So it really probably will be the summer before we get an idea of what kind of delay we might be looking at. >> All right. >> Yep. >> I have a question. Um are they collecting interest as that money sits in them with the delays? >> So yeah, so I mean, yes and no. So there's like two parts to the delay. Um as we saw through like last fall, the delay that hurt us is that well,
008both delays hurt us, but the biggest delay was that they just haven't even billed. So no money was coming in, so no no entity at Cook County was potentially sitting on interest. Now, then there was a point where they had I think it was late into early December. Many residents, businesses had been paying their taxes and nothing had been remitted to us. Usually that happens you know, within a week or probably a week, then sometimes a few days after it's paid. But they were so unsure of distribution, it wasn't until we got into January that Cook County said, "Well, we've got billions of dollars. We know some of it." And so they just said, "We're going to give you I forget what the distributions were. They were 5 or 10 million. They knew what our
009overall levy was, and so they just were sending us money not knowing for lack of a better what what they were sending us. They didn't know it came from anyone in this room or someone else. Um So that delay was probably, I'd say, a month to 6 weeks additional. Um It seems like they've they may not let that happen again where they would just start distributing. Um but if you go to the Cook County website, going back to last summer, every day they were releasing a document with all the issues identified. And as we got into like November, December, January, people are paying pretty close attention to it. But then even though money started coming to us, and it has again for the first installment, which was due, I think, April 1st, the last time
010I looked at that, and I don't know if they stopped the one time when I looked after spring break, they had stopped updating that daily. That document went from like 10 or 11 pages to something substantially longer. And as you can imagine, a a massive county with I think it's potentially millions of parcels, right? You need every little instance and exception to work right. And so sometimes a line on there might apply to two or three properties. Some it might apply to nearly everybody. Um so, there's still a lot a lot of work to be done to the for the whole system to be um fully functional. >> That's helpful. Thank you. I appreciate it. >> All right. Um similar to our interest revenue, property taxes. And for those on the board, we talked about
011this a few a few years ago where you know, prior to that 22 number, something in the five to six $700,000 range was what is something I would say is historically accurate. On on it was actually quite surprising and to then have a couple of years where we basically doubled our previous high water mark. There was always this worry that it would fall back and and we did see that. Um and now we're at, you know, the low $600,000 range. We'll probably wait until July or August. We may even have the budget set before they give us the next round of um Illinois Department of estimates. But um it certainly seems that we're we've fallen back into more historical norms for this revenue line item. We've included um the board approved student fees. I just
012highlighted the the amounts for a couple of our larger larger items for everyone to see. State and federal aid. So, historically, I haven't talked much about this particular area because it's generally just been flat. There's not usually been much in change on the state and federal level as it pertains to D39's financials. One thing I do want to highlight and and kind of bring to the front burner is special ed transportation. So, every school district, whatever the need, they're they're on the hook to providing special ed transportation, whether it's the outplaced or within students coming to our own buildings. And so, when I looked back, this is this area this reimbursement percentage from the Illinois State Board has varied a lot, going back even like 15, 20 years. But, it it definitely feels like there's
013a continued trend to not put money each year in the in the transportation in a particular line item. Um so, I like I highlighted just 7 years ago, the state was reimbursing over 80%. Now, we're down below 50%, and the requirements are still the same for not only D39, but other school districts. And that difference in lost reimbursement is approaching 400,000 for us. Um so, I think amongst administrators when we're at conferences and talking about what Springfield may or may not do, this when it was when special ed reimbursement was up over 80%, it's like, "Okay, each school district has a little bit of skin in the game. We're not just going to cover everything." But, now it's starting to fall into this unfunded mandate category, um that that used to not be the case.
014This is a a new graph. Um just the software we use had an I I liked it. Shows all of our funds. It just breaks down the expenditures by all the funds. It includes debt service and capital projects. Um but, as not surprisingly, the the education and then the operations of our buildings, you know, is is nearly 90% of of the money that we spend annually. Here's one we've shown before. Salary and benefits is always going to be up around that 80% mark. In incorporated in the budget is lots of assumptions. Um many times we know these amounts. Uh I've got some placeholders for the ones that are unknown and then I've got the 4.15 for for the teachers union which we know. And then you know, we we use our guidelines uh for class
015size when we're trying to figure out the FTE um within the budget. All right. So, here's one that that really bubbled up this year. Um So, we see our renewal. We talked about it recently. So, those are the renewals starting September 1st. Included in our five-year projections and this is something that had been in place all six years that I've been here, but also prior, I don't know how long before I was here, but certainly it was communicated that was the placeholder was about a 5% average increase. And so, when I then plug stuff into the budget, I always think, "Well, how does it compare to what I had in the the five-year projections?" So, that extra roughly 10% over I'm saying the blended rate's roughly 15. That extra 10% is costing D30 the board's
016portion about 735,000 for all employees um in annual cost, right? And so, as we know with like health insurance, it's not likely we It's very unlikely that we would ever have a year where they say, "Hey, we'll have a minus 5%," right? So, it's it's going to go up. So, the 735 is in my mind now baked into our finances going forward and um that's a pretty pretty substantial amount to to be adding in. And um the dental those those amounts uh the the premiums are much smaller and they hadn't changed in quite quite some time. Um maybe a decade maybe Heather? Or >> Been that long but those are employee paid so. >> All right, I am IMRF so while we run July to June IMRF and their financials runs on a calendar year
017and so the rate they give us that the board pays on IMRF wages runs that way. We got the preliminary rate just a few weeks ago so we're at 5.89 for starting January 1st. So when rate um I think if you looked at the 23 calendar year 23 and 24 rate those were in the low 5% range. Um so the CS dropped back into the fives is really good to see. Um there really is no cap per se of like how much this could change. It's all actually driven on an annual basis. The biggest factor there are obviously some part of it is our experience with our members or our employees within this group but the biggest thing that impacts this rate is what kind of investment returns does IMRF get in the market. So
018they have an assumption I think it's like 7 and a quarter annual return. If they beat it then I think everybody's likely to see a slight decrease. If if if they were to have a really bad year then everybody's likely to jump up. Historically in what I've seen at other employers from my other jobs that I've held these are really really good rates. So hopefully they continue. All right, so then we have a lot of areas like purchase service supplies. Um our general approach is for many departments and and groups is for the their budgets to be increased by up to CPI. Some accounts particularly ones some of the areas I control, um it's less than CPI as I realize we don't we don't need that increase. Um but but then some of the ones
019I have on the bottom of this slide can be subject to bigger swings. I'll give you an example, the year that we're finishing, tech was on a a bit of a large upswing in expenditures and project. We'll see a large jump down for fiscal year 27. Um So, there going to be some swings in within those groups. Special education budget, uh we had a million nine in for this year for this current year. Uh tentatively for now I've got it at a million eight this year. Uh fiscal year 26 is looking strong. Even if we were to look at the history, one of the challenges with this line item, besides being a fairly large number, is um even if we go into a year feeling really good about a number, we usually like to have
020some extra, you know, uh student services can get hit with things, things can change, you know, pretty quickly. So, it's always good to kind of plan and give ourselves some uh wiggle room uh to work our way through the year. Capital projects. Um so, our capital projects don't fit our fiscal years nice and neat. They they always spread across two different fiscal years. So, we've got uh just in a few weeks we'll get the junior high window replacement project. Get those original windows um replaced this summer. And then um what would be in fiscal year 27 budget would either be a to be determined budget project for summer of 27 or potentially there may not be a project. Um that's something that intend to talk with everyone um at the at the June Committee of
021the whole meeting and our budget for capital projects fund is 3.5 million. Debt service and transfers, uh, we have four outstanding um, long-term bonds. Two are just considered bonds, others are debt certificates. And then we have, um, two transfers. The 800,000 is covered, it's our operating money that we're we've told the market we're going to use that to pay off our debt certificate, so that amount for uh, this fiscal year is 800,000 and then the 3.5 for transfers. Here's a summary page. Um, at present we're, you know, at 81 million in revenue and expenditures, gives us our operating fund, um, surplus of just over 700,000. Then we have some other uses out those transfers, which brings us a net deficit of 3.5 million and puts our fund balance at present at just over 40%. This
022initial draft is probably more, I I would say, more conservative. There's definitely some things to work out over the summer compared to the final, um, version that will be brought to the board in August. This graph shows over a five-year period revenues and expenditures of the operating funds. And then here's our our uh, our chart showing fund historical fund balance with the red lines representing our upper and lower targets and uh, the board has previously established. Um, that's all the slides that I have. I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone may have at this time. >> Well, I have one. Um, two slides back, you said that the you were talking about the amount that would be Could you go back two slides? >> Yeah, yeah, we can. Which one? >> Um This one,
023with the net projected deficit and surplus. >> Yeah. >> You said that those were conservative and it would change. Were you saying that it was that the 40% was conservative and it was likely to go higher, or that it was conservative and therefore it was likely to go lower? Cuz either one could be conservative. >> I um I would view that as potentially going higher. >> Just curious. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. Right. Okay. Well, thank you. We're in a very good place despite a loss of interest revenue over time, um while at the same time seeing expenses go up and reimbursements go down. So, that's really unfortunate about the interest revenue that we will never see. Um okay, if no other questions on finance. Okay, then we will move on to strategy. Ms. Stone
024is not here this morning, so Dr. Kramis-Skolnik, I'll turn it over to you. >> Excellent, thank you. We have two important updates today for strategy committee. Um we're going to start with our CSCI data, and that is our comprehensive school climate inventory survey. Uh that survey is uh given each uh spring, and students and parents and staff are invited to respond to that. We then take those results in each school team analyzes their own results and then we have a joint leadership team of representatives from across the district who come together to really look at what the district highlights are as well as the district opportunities and to begin to plan for next steps. That helps then to develop our action plans for the next year at both the school level and the district level.
025So Kelly Jackson is going to walk us through some of our district level data so that the board has the opportunity to review and give some feedback there. Board members you also have access to the school level analysis as well, but we're going to focus here on the district level analysis. Kelly. >> Um so we we had families and staff and students take the comprehensive school climate inventory or CSCI earlier this this spring winter a few months ago and so now we have all of that data that we'd like to present to you. Just a little bit of an overview about what the school climate inventory is. It really measures school climate. There are five different domains, safety, teaching and learning, interpersonal relationships, institutional environments and leadership and efficacy. And within that are different dimensions
026and so you can see I think there's 14 total dimensions that we look for scores in. Um this is a little bit of a snapshot of our joint climate and culture leadership team as Carrie mentioned we have staff from our WEA, we have supports union staff and we also have administrative staff that come together a few times over the year. First we come together to talk about the administration and how best to promote the administration of that. We had some goals this year for increasing participation especially with our families. Um and they really worked hard on um helping to get the word out with our staff, students, and families. Um and then we come together after the administration period to look at the data and um determine uh what we we're going to highlight and
027then what are some opportunities both at a district level and at a building level. So, a big thanks to all of these people for their time. Um as I mentioned um we did have some goals for our participation rate. And so, you see this year or this is last year's participation rate. So, 95.2 for students, 81.4 for staff, and 25.1 to families. Um and we were able to increase um especially our staff and our family rates. Our our students stayed pretty much the same from year to year. Um we do have them as a captive audience. So, that helps to get keep that at 95 point or 95% or higher. Um but uh we are really excited about the staff increase. It just gives us a better um more accurate account of what's going on
028in our schools when we have a higher staff participation rate and um family participation rate. And um we had um one principal in particular out there with signs at um pickup and drop-off and and really advertising this to families. And and again, it's just a better more accurate account when we have higher numbers in that area. Um I think our ultimate goal is like 30%. So, we're getting close. Um a little bit about the scores. So, I'm going to dive into the scores in a minute, but um scores greater than 3.5 represent positive uh perceptions. The highest score is a 5.0. Um and so, when we look at our scores, we're really aiming for that between four and five area. Um of course, over 3.5 is great for us, but we'd like to see it
029move toward that the higher end. Um, a score between 2.5 and 3.5 is considered neutral, and scores lower than 2.5 are considered negative. Um, overall, this is how our district scores have been over the past 3 years. So, we've been taking the CSCI uh since the 23-24 school year. We opted to go with the alternative uh survey. We used to do Five Essentials. Um, it just wasn't giving us the information that we we were looking for, and so we um chose to move to this survey, which I think has some really good questions to answer some of the questions that we had. Um, and so you can see that um most of our areas have either maintained or um moved up over the past couple of years. Um, and our overall district score is a
0304.2. That is uh maintained from last year. So, um doing really well. Again, 3.5 to 5 are positive. Uh, so let's take a look at that overall data. Um, as I mentioned, there were different domains. So, this is first the safety domain. So, you can see in orange are the student numbers, in green are the staff numbers, and um the blue are the family numbers. And so, it's broken down rules and norms, sense of physical security, sense of social emotional security, and then online safety. In the little box, um you will see uh the that's the median score. Um, and so it's 4.0, 4.2, 4.2, for example, in uh rules and norms for students, staff, and family. And then over on the right, you see the percentages for how that breaks down. And it at
031the top, it's kind of hard to see the variation in color there, but um the darkest color is a positive um, response. So, that means that a 75% for example of students' responses were in that positive category or above 3.5. Um, and then 25% were in the neutral category. Um, so that's how that breaks down. We did not have, across the board, we did not have any of responses in that negative category. So, um, and you'll see that reflected in our celebrations. And really the overwhelming majority are in that positive category for all three groups. Um, you can see certainly like sense of physical security, all three groups were at 100% positive. So, that's pretty exciting to see there. Um, and certainly we dig in at the question level or the item level when we
032have questions about, uh, for example, social emotional security, you'll see that those trend a little bit more toward the neutral side in some of those answers. And so, we want to dig in and find at the item level what that is talking about. And you'll see that reflected in a little bit. Um, so this is overall safety. Our next screen is teaching and learning. So, there's two areas in there. Um, it's support for academic learning and social emotional learning. Um, so social emotional learning is really about like the competencies. Um, there's questions like, um, in my school we we, uh, learn how to express our emotions or things like that. And the students agree or disagree, um, with those those statements. And you can see that those are all at 100% positive. Same with support
033for academic learning. So, that's, um, questions about, uh, getting kids the support where they need it. So, um, you can see that, uh, all of those are in the positive area as well. The next category is interpersonal relationships. So, uh, that breaks down into three dimensions, uh respect for diversity, teacher-student relationships, and peer relationships. And so, um you can see that respect for diversity comes out very high on there. Same with teacher-student relationships, really good positive numbers there. Um and then in peer relationships, um it's varied, but still overall really positive. The next is institutional environment. So, the first one is school connectedness. The next is our physical surroundings. Um and then the last one is social inclusion, and that's really about including students with um varied abilities. Um there's a little bit of uh
034also like cultural diversity that are included in some of those questions as well. And then finally, leadership and efficacy. And um the first one is about administration and leadership. These are only responded to by staff. Um the same is collective efficacy, um only responded to by staff, and um collective efficacy is about how staff works together. Administration and leadership is more about how administration um uh does the normal operations of the school, and how that impacts staff. Uh the next charts show the change over time. So, as I mentioned before, we've been doing this since 2023-2024 school year. Um and so, we took the student, staff, and family responses, or the median responses, for those years in um the different uh dimensions and domains, and um and put those on this sheet just to see
035kind of how we're doing over time. When you see a 4.1 to a 4.0, that's really not that significant of a change. And so, um we do dig in at the item level to see what might be affecting that, but um we what we've learned from working with the National School Climate Center who puts this on is that those are those may happen over time. We're looking for more of the the broader look from '23-'24 to to current, and then we will um next year again have 4 years of data, which will be great. Um so, when you see under rules and norms family actually going from 3.9 to 4.2, that's something to celebrate and something that um we know we've been working on, so we want to make sure that we continue to work
036in that. Um we've seen a lot of maintenance and a lot of improvements over time. Um I want to call out uh the online safety area, where you can see improvement over time in all three areas. Um there's questions about online safety, um about social media that go to elementary parents. And so, um some people mark it not applicable, which is an option for them. Some of them mark, you know, I There's one that we looked at that was uh you know, I feel comfortable with how my child if feels safe as they're on social media or something like that. And um so, and then you see elementary parents probably don't feel safe with their families um online. So, rather some families are marking that as no, I don't. So, that may um contribute to
037some of those numbers, but I think overall, um we have gone up over the 3 years, and that's been uh a constant um constant initiative from our tech department, and I know um across the board with our teachers on keeping our kids safe online. And so, um hopefully those numbers are reflecting that. Uh teaching and learning, again, a lot of maintenance in this area. Um support for academic learning, again, that 0.1 is not that significant of a drop. It did drop from last year for staff, but it's maintained over time. So, that's what really what we're looking at. The same with the social emotional learning for students. Here interpersonal relationships, again a lot of maintaining and improving. A couple of areas with respect for diversity and teacher student relationships and we'll we'll talk about that
038in a minute where we dug again a little bit more with our groups. Institutional environment. You can see the change over time for these three areas. And then finally leadership and efficacy. I just want to call out that this has been something we've been working on as a leadership team and also with the collective efficacy of our teachers and really trying to build in more opportunities for collaboration and working together, peer observations, those sorts of things and we're really excited about this change over time for these two areas. So, lots of celebrations within our data. The first was the response rates for families and staff over the past year. We continue to target those areas. Next, family responses overall have trended more positively over time. So, if you go back and look at those charts,
039you see the family responses going up in almost all of the areas. So, that's really exciting for us. Not only that our response to the survey has increased, but that those numbers have increased. Kind of those two things together is is great. Some specific areas in school connectedness that we've looked at the percentage of positive responses over time. And so, students have a Likert scale and staff and everybody has a Likert scale of five areas. So, it's strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, um agree, and then strongly agree. So, we take the two highest categories uh to get these percentages. Um so, you can see students in three areas, people at the school care about me, adults at the school make me feel welcome, and students are welcoming at my school have increased or maintained over that
0403-year period, which is fun to see, especially like that 77.3 to 80.5% that people in this school care about me as positive responses. Um that that really says that the work that we're doing is impactful. Families, I feel like a member of the school community, and I feel welcome at my child's school. Um those numbers are also increasing over time. The next area, student social emotional security has improved over time. Um and this is really that that teasing and bullying area. Um so, you see, I get teased at my school, and that's a reverse question. So, that's why I highlight the disagree there, but um it's gone from 72.4% disagree to 75.1% disagree over time. So, more kids are disagreeing with that they get teased at school, and so we want to see that continue
041to increase. And then, students at my school are kind to each other, and so that has increased over time, too. Um as I mentioned before, leadership and collective efficacy has improved. So, um administration collectively communicates with staff. Uh that is we're really excited about that jump from 64% to 80.8%. Um we're doing a lot of things in the communication area, and we hope to continue to see that increase. The same with facilitating a collective vision over time. I think we are working to be more clear um in that vision, and doing a lot of work um strategically in the next uh couple months to hopefully increase that work, as well. Um and then, the work I do is appreciated by administration, and you can see that's a 70% to 77.6%. Um, and just keep in
042mind, this is also, when we say staff, it is not only a certified staff, it's uh support staff. And so, from secretaries to custodians to um, anybody that works in our buildings, basically. Um, so, we want to continue to to hopefully show that our appreciation for all of those levels of our organization. Um, teacher-student relationship has increased or maintained over time for staff and families, so that's that's fun to see. And then, sense of physical safety and physical surroundings, lots of positive numbers there for staff and families. Um, I'm going to jump to our opportunities, and we've broken this down um with some data um from the 3 years, but then also um just by area and and what we want to see in those areas. So, you can see the first um area, for
043example, is our safety area. So, sense of social-emotional security. And when we look at um, so, the National School Climate Center sends out uh uh reports for all the schools that take this. Um, and so, sense of social social-emotional security is actually the lowest of for any school that's taking that. Um, while we're still on the positive side of that, um it is our relatively lowest area. And so, we want to continue to focus in that area. Um, and so, we need to explore what are um the there were some reports about uh student being ver- verbally insulting or harmful to staff. And um you know, when students are escalated and disregulated, sometimes there are things that are shouted out, and that can be very hurtful for the staff member that's working for them. So,
044we want to dig in a little bit more. We did break it out into educators who are certified staff and then our support staff. And we know that a lot of our support staff members are in these crisis situations, and so we want to dig in, find out a little bit more about how that's impacting them, and really develop a plan to support them and how they can manage in those situations so that it feels better when when those crisis situations happen. They're also reporting kids being verbally insulting or harmful to one another, and kids are students are reporting that they've seen other students made fun of school. Now, that's an interesting one because you'll remember in the last slide we said students are saying that they don't feel like they are teased at school,
045but they are reporting that they see other people teased at school. So, whether that's a perception issue or whether they're actually seeing that, we still need to figure out what that is what's going on there and develop a plan for how we'll target that. The other area under safety is rules and norms. And students say that they they think the rules are fair, but they don't feel like they have a a voice in the development of those rules. And so, in in that was 74.6 of students say they have little say in the rules and 38.4 say they're not enforced fairly. So, again, how do we get the kids more involved in that? Our buildings had some great ideas about how they could get kids more involved in looking at the rules and also going
046back to staff and having staff talk to their kids in in classes and home rooms and then do some focus groups as well with students with that. Interpersonal relationships is our next domain, and peer relationships is a dimension under there where students stand up for others if they are bullied. Um, 18.7 to 16% over time disagree. And so, um, that's reducing, which is great to see that number reducing. However, we want to continue to see a reduction in that. Um, the same thing with I get teased at my school. Um, I have seen other students made fun of in my school. So, there's those two that are kind of interesting, uh, back-to-back, but, um, we want to continue our focus on targeted upstander lessons. Um, we had some schools talk about how they might have
047some upstander days and really, um, envelop more of that discussion into their discussions as at a school level. Um, I think the other thing is our students understand the the skills and they know what to say in those situations, but the application isn't always there. And so, how do we bridge that gap between, here's your lesson, and actually living it out in real life. And that's really hard when you think about um, elementary students. So, takes time. It's hard for adults. Um, our next areas are leadership and efficacy. So, administrative leadership. One thing that we wanted to call out here was 52.7 percent of uh, staff report that administrators at the school over emphasize the importance of test scores. And this has been a a consistent number over the past few years. Um, I think
048that what we have been talking about as an administrative team is we have a lot of big data, but that's not necessarily impacted by the everyday goings-on in the classroom. So, how do we look more at the little data, the data that the the teachers are responsible and really looking at, you know, how do I group students or what are my common assessments say over time. And so, um, we want to to dig in a little bit more on that. Uh, versus let's say like our MAP or IAA data. That's still important to have as at a system level, but um what is the impact on the classroom is really I think where we want to focus. Um and that's part of our discussions at a strategic level, too. Uh teaching and learning is a
049support for academic learning. Um this is I know when my child is doing well at school, 26.2% of families disagree. Or um the school makes extra support available for those who need it. Um that was staff uh 24.3% disagree. So, I think that um there's some work to do when you have about a quarter of people saying, "I don't really know that my kids getting the support that they need." Um we have a responsibility for improved clarity over that. And whether that's at a system level or whether that's at a classroom level, I think we need to put some systems in place to to do a better job with that. Um and that's also supports um interventions, but also that enrichment side. And I know we've been having a lot of discussions at meetings about
050that enrichment side and how are we attending to the needs of our high readiness learners. And so, um we um are working on communication for that. Uh the last area here is teaching and learning and interpersonal relationships. So, some of these questions come from both of those areas, but really it falls under respect for diversity. At school, we learn how to appreciate students who are different from ourselves or people who are different from ourselves. We have about a quarter there that are disagree. Um staff, students see themselves represented in this in this curriculum. A little over half, which is great. It's a great number, but um want to continue to improve that. And my culture is represented re- represented in this school's curriculum. For parents, again, a little over half and that's trending in the
051right direction. Um but we want to continue to work on some of our inclusivity issues that we have been working on over time. So, our next steps today is um one of our next steps presenting this to you all having our building share their individual results at a building level. You have access to that information. We're not going to present it today, but they are working hard at a building level. We'll take these themes and our opportunities and work those into our strategic planning. A lot of them mirror some of the themes that we have found out from community members over our strategic plan work. So that's It's It's great to see that overlap so that we really know that we're putting our eggs in the right basket. We'll do some summer writing for some
052of those targeted lessons with upstanders, some of our inclusivity work. Looking at maximization of staff collaboration time when it relates to collective efficacy and continuing to target those areas, communication around academic learning like I just said, that is an area that we absolutely want to target and both at the classroom level, but then at the system level. And then not only the communication, but what are we doing and making sure that we are attending to those needs. And then utilizing focus groups to gather feedback in targeted areas and I mentioned that buildings want to do that with students, but I think we've had so much success over our strategic planning sessions with focus groups that that is something that we want to pursue further as we go through time. So with that, I will stop
053sharing and take any questions. >> This feeling. >> So I just first want to say I thought this was an excellent presentation of a really important topic. I appreciated the look over time and the very specific examples. It was really helpful and encouraging. It did that the piece about the standardized testing and the overemphasis of that just makes me reflect as a board member and what our role can be to I appreciated our transparency about data and growth and I think that's been really helpful. Um but it's incumbent on us also to convey the value of all the myriad other measurements and ways of looking at student progress. So uh we'll keep that filed away. Yeah. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay. I'll just say um touching on the safety, I thought it was excellent to
054see that families um we've either maintained or improved on a number of safety measure measures. I know we talked a little bit about work to be done on SEL, but I think the physical and the online um at least for me, I feel sometimes like the world feels less safe. So to be able to see those scores, um I thought was really meaningful and great. I know that it's just a testament to all the work that's been done, the communication with parents and um all of the parent education opportunities. So thank you very much. Um I was looking over the data and I was um all of the celebrations made complete sense and there was just so much um to celebrate and recognize and I thought there's really not going to be much on the
055opportunities, but I also appreciate that you guys really looked for every opportunity going forward um and were you know, very transparent about that and I thought some of the opportunities actually could have been celebrations, but I appreciate it and um we will look forward to seeing those um integrated into the new strategic plan. But I just think excellent work and really speaks to our the prior strategic plan um and thank you. Great presentation. >> And I just want to again thank the joint leadership team for their contributions. That's a really hard working group of people not only at the district level but at the school level. And also celebrate the tremendous growth that we've seen in our leadership and efficacy. I think that that is representative again of the collective work across our schools. Our
056principals and assistant principals in their buildings are really leading a lot at the building level and I want to acknowledge and celebrate them. But that collective efficacy is really our teachers and staff coming together to work collaboratively. And so those are some great gains that we've seen really significant changes over time and just want to acknowledge and and celebrate that and thank our building leaders as well as our our staff within our our schools for their their contributions there. >> I'm curious which school had signs? >> Sorry. >> Was there a school High Crest had signs. Okay. Yeah, I was just looking at the range in participation numbers across the schools and was curious about that. And of course the you know, the value of the survey and all the results is really contingent upon
057getting people to participate. So I I'm grateful for all the work that's taking place to get those numbers up. All right. If we're finished now with strategy, we'll move to public comment. This is >> We have another update to the strategic planning update and and I'll I'll try to be brief but did want to share just a little bit about our strategic plan planning. Let me see if I can share my screen effectively. There we go. Okay. So we as the board knows have been making progress on our strategic plan. We did all those focus groups that really helped to refine and identify what some of the priority areas are. And then we did an online survey, and that survey um helped us to prioritize those priorities um and get some additional feedback from all
058stakeholders, including those who maybe weren't able to be here in person for those focus groups. So, I wanted to just give a quick update. Um we're continuing to work toward development of our strategic plan. Again, um our old strategic plan or our strategic plan that's about ready to sunset, um you'll see here, and and we in vision that our mission, our vision, and our core values will remain the same as well um the overall goal areas. What will um be adjusted is not only some of those strategies, but also the ways in which we measure and monitor the growth that we're making. Um that's really what we're focused on um right now as a team. This is our road map, and and right now we're in this May-June uh time, and we're on track to
059present in June the to the board um the strategic plan for the next 5 years. That will include at Committee of the Whole, I'll give a kind of high-level overview of what the plan is looking like, and then we'll present it um in its final form at the June board meeting for approval. So, these are the themes that advanced from our focus groups. There were 11 of them, and so these are the themes that we took out in our online survey to get additional feedback. Remembering that the focus groups really tapped into people from across um the district. We had more than 450 participants in all of our focus groups, and I'm really proud to say that our survey when we went out had over 550 responses. So, uh putting that all together, we have
060more than 1,000 people contributing to this plan, and that's been um really, really helpful in refining what we know about our next steps. Um so, I wanted to share just a little bit about the survey. We're really pleased to share that, again, more than 550 responses, but representative from across our district, every school, and the district office had some had had members represented within our survey, as well as a few who just identified themselves only as a community member and didn't even identify themselves with a with a school. And so, we're really pleased with that. And this is the various categories in which respondents identified themselves. So, we had about 61% identifying themselves as parents or guardians within our district, and about 40% representing themselves as staff members, either teachers or another category within our
061district. There's just a little bit of overlap, that's why you'll see there's probably about 2% who are both parents and teachers or staff within our district. But again, really really happy to see so many people contributing to our our planning. This is shown as an example. I I really wanted to share that as we're looking at the survey results, we are looking not only at the qualitative, but also the quantitative data that we're seeing here. And so, our our consultant Pack reco led us through the analysis of these results. And really here we're looking at the spread. So, if you look here under advanced learning and differentiation, you see that many of our respondents identified that as a as a higher need. So, the the lower bar shows that it's a higher need. It's it's
062kind of in reverse order of what I would have otherwise imagined. Technology and integration, for example, that the heat map there shows that people are kind of ranking this in a variety of ways. Some are saying it's very important, others are saying it's not very important to them at all. So, that tells us a little bit about about what might need to happen there. Um, another example would be streamline communication. Many people rated that as a relatively low priority. So, again, we know from our focus groups that this is an area that we want to continue to um, focus on, but in terms of the the the the importance of it as like a next step that we really need to focus on, um, people were rating that a little bit lower. So, we looked
063at all 11. These are just some of the examples um, of where people were ranking them. Oops. Oh, goodness. I went one too far. Um, so, when we looked at the rankings, and this is taking every respondent together, this is uh, how they ranked the priorities. So, you see the higher rankings, meaning a higher priority for the respondents. Um, we do see some difference between what our parents are responding, what our teachers are responding, and what our staff are responding, but generally speaking, um, advanced learning and differentiation, um, student social emotional behavioral and mental health, executive functioning skills for our students, and then teacher and staff care and excellence. Those are some of the higher rankings. So, we know that as we build out our plan, we want to address some of those things first
064within the earlier part of our plan. The mixed rankings are some of those where for some people it was really important, for other people maybe not as important. So, that becomes a mid-range area of focus. Again, technology integration and use. We know we've spent a lot of time on that over these last couple of years, and so some might be saying, "We're in a good spot there." And others are still wanting either for us to refine our practices there, or to be um, a little more clear about what our expectations are. Facility needs, targeted professional development, and then dedicated collaboration time and structures. And again, we see some differences here between what our staff are saying because they know a little bit more about what that dedicated collaboration time means, and how important it is
065to them, and then maybe what parents are rating as as priorities. Um and then uh the lower rankings um really represent some of those areas that are are starting to become um part of the regular work that we're doing. And so, um maybe not the highest priority to address right away, but still important work because again, we heard from our focus groups that those are important things. Um but it may be that they're kind of institutionalized into the way we're doing business right now. So, as we think about MTSS and data teaming, we're we're feeling a little more confident and comfortable there. Streamline communication and our our green initiatives, our sustainability um is just part of the work that we're doing um on a regular basis. And then we looked at the open responses, and
066you'll remember that there were two questions asked in open response. Um one is what was working well, and the other is what have we missed or what else do you want to highlight for us? Um and so these are just some of the things that um were identified as what's working well. Um we're really so proud of our teaching staff. Um that continues to be highlighted as a as a celebration among our our parents, um also among our staff. Um really recognizing um the high quality of of all of our teachers and support staff. Positive school culture and climate um in community. Kelly was just celebrating that as well. Special education and intervention support is has really come out as a strength of ours as a district. Um and we're really proud to celebrate that.
067There's been a ton of work in that area over the last 5 years, and so to see that um not only not identified as a priority area of improvement, but also then celebrated as a strength is is something noteworthy. Strong family and school uh communications, excuse me. Our active PTA. Um we've done a lot with curriculum updates over the last several years, and so you'll remember 5 years ago that was identified as potentially an area of need that received a lot of attention over 5 years and and we're really celebrating that as something that's working well. Supportive administration and leadership and again here as we just saw on the CSCI survey as well, we've seen a lot of growth in that area over the last 5 years. So, we're pleased to see that come out
068as qualitatively something people were highlighting as something working well. Robust specials and extracurriculars, that includes our language offerings and then so many of the extracurricular offerings at each of our schools. Focusing on social emotional learning, we know that that was an area that was identified as a as a priority among the rankings, but also an area that's celebrated because we have made so much growth over the last several years. And then staff collaboration and team structures again, it's working well and we want to continue to expand and support that work moving forward. And then some areas that either we missed or that people just wanted to highlight, they felt a need to talk more about this in their online survey in that open response. So, these are some of the areas that were identified. So,
069again, we remember that in technology integration, we saw that as kind of a mixed bag. Some thought it was a really high and important need for us to continue to address and others not as much. Um here it came out in those places where people wanted to talk some more about an area, they talked about reducing technology or screen time, they talked about expanding advanced advanced learning and enrichment. They talked about consistent behavior management. So, all the way down you see some of those areas that need continued work or that people when given the opportunity to say what else should we highlight, what else should we work on, they gave us some really rich data here for us to to use to inform our planning. So, again, this is our road map of the process
070and we plan to have available to the board at in about a month. The committee of the whole will present um a rough draft and seek some feedback from the board. Um the DSAT will also be responding to um some of the the rough draft elements of our strategic plan, and then we will present it for approval in June. I'm happy to answer any questions the board has. I just really wanted to give an update and share a little bit more, um give a little bit of a window into our planning process because there's so much valuable insight and data being shared by the thousands of participants who are contributing to this process. So, we're really grateful for everyone's um support and contributions there. Any questions from anyone? Thank you. >> All right. Now, this
071is an opportunity for the public to address the board on any topic. Are there any audience members that would like to speak at this time? Seeing none, we will continue with our agenda. Old business. Is there any old business? New business. Any new business this morning? All right. Then, um if there is no other business, we will adjourn to executive session. May I have a motion to adjourn to executive session to discuss special education and individual student matters, collective negotiations, and specific personnel. >> I move to uh move to executive session to discuss individual students and special education and individual student matters, collective negotiations, and specific personnel. >> Thank you. May I have a second? >> Second. >> Motion having been made and seconded, will the clerk please call the roll? >> Alison Pathalis >>
072Yes. >> Amy Pailing >> Yes. >> Katie Hilton >> Yes. >> Judy Berlin >> Yes. >> Ann Hart >> Yes. >> Kristen De Castro Motion carried.