001Dr. Bidwell? Yes. Dr. Ferris? Present. Mr. Gilmore? Here. Mr. Hedley? Here. Mr. Homer? Here. Mr. Miceli? Here. Mr. Brucie? Here. Okay, first item on our agenda tonight is our consent agenda. You have them all to review the entire entire review review the agenda. If you need a few more minutes, you can feel free. There is an addendum [clears throat] on the desk. If any member wishes to pull any item off the whole from the agenda to discuss the addendum, please let me know. Okay, if nobody wishes to pull anything, I entertain suggestions a motion to Does this suggest motion on our materials or otherwise um and please remember to include the addendum. Move to waive the reading and approve the consent agenda as printed in the board agenda including the April 28th, 2026 personnel addendum.
002Second. Motion by Mr. Brucie, seconded by Dr. Bidwell. Roll call, please. Mr. Brucie? Yes. Dr. Bidwell? Yes. Mr. Homer? Yes. Mr. Hedley? Yes. Mr. Miceli? Yes. Dr. Ferris? Yes. Mr. Gilmore? Yes. Okay, next item on our agenda tonight is our recognition. All right, we're going to have staff come up and recognize tonight for the outstanding contributions to our staff from the staff tonight. You have the opportunity to make a motion. But we don't need to keep sitting on the motion, okay? All right. Go ahead. All right, good evening, Board of Education. Tonight we're going to honor two amazing staff members. The first person I would like to honor is uh Ms. Mary Pease. I would like to recognize Ms. Pease for the incredible impact that she has on our school community. She brings kindness, energy,
003positivity into her classroom every day creating an environment for students to feel welcomed, supported, and excited to learn. Over the last four years, I received many emails from parents and student and students who share how much they appreciate her and enjoy having her be their teacher. This speaks volumes about the relationships that she builds. Beyond the classroom, she helps create positive through her humor and light-hearted personality. She's known for being a bit of a prankster. In fact, one day Mr. Wesley and I were walking down the hallway and she jumped out of out of the corner and scared us both. I may have used similar language in the hallway that day. Anyway, I want to make this short for at least my part and just say, Ms. Pease, I am so glad that you're part
004of the Thunder family. We are very lucky to have you. I have a couple of students right now who would like to speak a little bit about Ms. Pease. Mr. York, can we hold off on that and introduce the other person, please, so we can do our motion through? Yes, I apologize. No, we've got our normal routine that we got to follow. So, I think it is this thanks to all of you. Well, once I didn't make a mistake, awesome. >> [clears throat] >> All right, the other person is Ms. Shannon Nelson. Hello. And she is the uh assistant principals uh and the attendance uh secretary. All right. Whereas the Board of Education of Woodstock Community Unit School District 200 wishes to recognize the contributions of these individuals and whereas District 200 has benefited as
005a result of these accomplishments, uh therefore be it resolved Board of Education of Woodstock Community Unit 200 hereby bestow special recognition and a certificate of achievement on behalf of this institution and the district. Uh second? Second. All right, motion by Mr. Gilmore, seconded by Mr. Miceli. Roll call, please. Mr. Gilmore? Yes. Mr. Miceli? Yes. Mr. Brucie? Yes. Mr. Homer? Yes. Mr. Hedley? Yes. Dr. Ferris? Yes. Dr. Bidwell? Yes. Okay. Um starting off with Ms. Pease, she's honestly one of my favorite teachers. She's the type of teacher who constantly goes above and beyond to help her students. Her sarcastic behavior is as Dr. Gilmore said, amazing. It also creates a classroom environment that students want to be in. Um she inspires students to not only do good in school, but to um sorry, to notice the
006little things in life, to pick up on small little things that she notices. Um I was a junior in high school and I was a nervous student. Um I didn't have very many friends and I was struggling in this class. Um Ms. Pease became one of those teachers that all students have, the one that they can lean on. Um she is funny, she's caring, outgoing, and most importantly, a teacher who students want to be around. Um she goes above and she goes above every other teacher. She tries her best to make sure her classes are fun and enjoyable and students and students enjoy all while learning the key strategies to things. Um she is one of the teachers that I think was born to teach and does a great job at her job. Thank you.
007>> [applause] [clears throat] >> I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN WITH MS. PEASE AS A TEACHER. I would say she has the inspiration and confidence that one needs to teach a classroom. Um the three classes that I have with Ms. Pease have always been blessed to be in and I'm pretty close to Ms. Pease as well as only kids who really make it home by themselves. Uh her jokes and fast comebacks always bring personality back to the classroom setting. She's authentic and dedicated with the way she structures our classes, plans for each of the year. Ms. Pease shows confidence in her job as a teacher allowing as as a teacher allowing all students to be successful in her class. Every time I come to class, she has a smile on her face and a new meme
008to share. She takes pride in creating content for her classes just as much as she enjoys teaching it. Um whenever I go to Ms. Pease, she always works with other staff and students to make sure everyone in the class has a good understanding of what we're doing. >> [applause] >> Ms. Pease, thank you for everything you do for our students. >> [clears throat] >> Uh now I'd like to recognize Ms. Shannon Nelson for the incredible impact that she has on our school community. She's the definition of kindness, consistency, and teamwork. Every day she helps organize the chaos of the attendance office and the assistant principal's office, supports students who are struggling and needing the guidance, helps coordinate uh substitute teachers, and assists with purchasing to keep our building running smoothly. She also plays an important
009role in creating a positive school culture through her work with the Sunshine Committee. No matter how busy things get, she's always ready uh and stand always always steady and ready to support uh our students and our staff. Her kindness, reliability, and communication make a lasting difference and we are so fortunate to have her as part of our Thunder family. I have a student right along with me who's going to talk a little bit about Ms. Nelson. I have uh one year of assisting Ms. Nelson in the office for all four of my years at South North. She was very kind to me and the rest of the students that I was with. She was also someone that I could talk to about anything, always willing to listen to what I had to say. She also
010makes sure to show her appreciation by giving all the office runners snacks and a pizza party at the end of the year. So, um when she asked me at the end of each semester if I wanted to be an office runner next year, uh I never turned her down. >> [applause] >> Ms. Nelson, uh thank you for everything you do for our school and for our students. All right, big round of applause FOR SHANNON NELSON. >> [applause] [applause] >> YES. >> [laughter] [applause] >> WE'RE GOING TO START IN 30 seconds with the rest of our board meeting for the business. For those of you came for recognition, this is usually where we would take a break at this point. Let those of you who are really disappointed about the recognition chance and you know, we'll
011just leave it at that and not ruin too much. Uh you're welcome to stay if you'd like to meet and simply we're not kicking you out or anything, but you're welcome to stay if you'd like to. All right, we'll start again real quick with the rest of our meeting. Thank you for coming. Okay, continuing on. Next item on our agenda is our communications. Communications are a time for community members of the district board to express a point of view that's debatable issue. There's a sign-up sheet for public to identify the name, address, phone number, name of organization representing them, and a brief description of the topic to be addressed. Comments are generally limited to 3 minutes and according to board policy 2 colon 230 and otherwise covered by board policy 2 colon 230. Has anybody
012signed up? No. Okay, we have no one on the sign-up sheet. That doesn't mean that there's we don't need to remain up at this time. There are no other public wishes to address the board at this time. Any other public comments? Any public comments? Okay, then we'll move on to our staff comments. Are there any staff comments? Board comments. Uh I was digging around the website the other day and it appears that our meeting schedule runs out as of the end of this meeting. So, uh just so that you know, our next board meeting will be May 12th and the board meeting after that will be May 26th. Uh we'll pass the schedule um at our next board meeting, but just so you are aware of the dates. So, we're not going to mix up
013there, okay? Um and I hope everyone's enjoying dinner so far. You want to go first? Are you serious? What What then? I said, "Are you serious?" Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm starting to enjoy. All right, uh that's it for Any other board comments? Then we'll move on to the superintendent's report. All right, we're in spring now, which is crazy season for us. All of our high school musicals have ended, but high school musicals um for the last three weekends have been going on, too. But, there's still another opportunity to see our students perform as the school year goes on. The middle school musicals are this weekend. We have performances by choir and orchestra and band from both high schools. And then uh we're going to spring our high school prom the next two weekends as
014well. So, there's a lot of opportunities. Next week is Teacher Appreciation Week. It's a great time for our families and students to reach out to teachers and let them know how much they appreciate them. And for our staff, we appreciate them and all the work they do. We look forward to celebrating our staff next week. Thank you very much. Next item on our business is our monthly report. It's a letter report that deals with the Challenger Learning Center updates. All right, thank you. You can bring anyone uh tell me which weekend that week. The whole weekend earlier cuz I had school performances at high school. So, we're going to do some shout-outs. >> [applause] [laughter] >> And one of the first things I was going to say is that It's all fair game now. >>
015[clears throat] >> Um one of the first things I was going to say, we you know, acquired the Challenger Learning Center about 7 years ago, 2019. And so, I'm happy to report one of the first things I was going to share is that we have now um we've paid off those costs. We've paid off our renovation costs. It's a really exciting month for me AND FOR EVERYONE. >> [applause] >> SO, THAT'S ONE OF THE NEW THINGS. UM WE have as we've kind of grown over the years, we have added some staff members. We're up to seven uh full-time not full-time, but on a per diem basis, but seven staff members that call on a consistent basis. And then we still have tons of our volunteers, so that's awesome. Um that really allows us to kind
016of have subs when there's um different staff members that are sick. So, we are offering four different missions. When we first started Challenger um in 2019, we had two missions um which were Expedition Mars and the Operation Comet. But now we've added our Lunar Quest and Earth Odyssey. The numbers to those left of each um mission are how many um missions we're running with those. So, it's the schools, they have a choice of which missions they want to run. So, still by far the favorite one is Expedition Mars. We ran 249 of those missions uh this year and that is for the grade level of fifth and sixth grade. So, the majority of those coming are at fifth and sixth grade. Lunar Quest is one of the new ones that we started um this year.
017We're hoping to kind of expand this to the little bit older kids, so that's seventh and eighth grade. Um You can see here again we started in 2019. Uh we had that dip obviously because of COVID and we had to shut down the center um for quite a long while. But now we've kind of stabilized and this year we had 262 missions, which was one more mission than last year. We can run essentially two missions in a school day. A lot of schools, you know, they're not coming. We don't have a lot of you know, huge attendance in September, none in August really. September and October are really light because you know, classrooms are getting routines in place. They're not necessarily wanting to take kids on field trips. Um but once really actually December is
018quite quite popular, but really once after the new year um it's pretty much packed and day every day we have uh more missions going. We even have missions on weekends. Um especially um gifted of Crystal Lake come, some Girl Scout, Boy Scout troops, they tend to reach out more than um and and that's it. Um this is a nice map that actually we work with the Challenger Learning Center, the National Challenger Learning Center, and so they have a new platform. And this is a nice map that just kind of shows you geographically where we're drawing from different um school districts or groups that are coming. So, as you can see, the majority are around here or around us, which is nice after the blue. But we do go as far as we can up in
019Janesville. We still have some school districts in Wisconsin that have come down. And then as far west as over um Freeport. So, that's kind of central. The closest Challenger Learning Center to us is in Hammond, Indiana. So, as we kind of look ahead then, um now that we've kind of are at that point, we want to really look at our equipment and develop some short-term goals. Our equipment, things that might need to be updated. How can we do some programming enhancements? That's something we're going to be developing over the course of next year. Um there's lots of celebrations with the 40 years of the Challenger. Um and with this So, the Challenger Learning Center is doing lots of different events, so we're kind of partnering with them on different things like that. We have summer
020camps, so every year for the past five years we offer summer camps. We offer 10 different summer camps for all ages. We already have 170 students that are registered. Those really start that first week after we're done with school, June 1st, and they run throughout June and July. And they're really for all ages, but mostly we get kids from elementary that want to come. And then we do a lot of these one-day missions, too, where we get those last minute sign-ups for kids just to come on a day as a mission. And then as we look ahead to next year, we already have 108 missions scheduled for the '26-'27 school year. So, as you know, last year we said we were 262, so we're already over halfway there for next year. Any questions or comments
021regarding the Challenger Center? Can you elaborate? What You had one mission for high school last year, right? Was that an Earth Science class that came in? What [clears throat] Do you know if that's Um I have to look into that. It's okay. That's in what district [clears throat] it was, but it was just one. >> Yeah, that's So, it was just one group and one mission that we did for that. And it wasn't any from our district. Oh, it wasn't. Okay. Yeah. But I can look into that if you'd like. It is convenient. Yes, thank you. That ain't what I was stressed Any questions? Thank you for sticking it out. Yeah. And that 7 years ago the first summer was just all over town what's happening to it. And yet you stuck it out and
022and here we are. It's really perfect that we we we don't even see it and you get better every year. Denise Propes runs the day-to-day operations the operations at the center so I don't know if she's really the one that's teaching at the schools and scheduling everything and doing all of that. So we have a great team that's working and very passionate about science education. Keeps them coming back. Thanks Katie you were really quick too. You've done such a great job for us on this. It's one of the many hats you wear for us but this is what you've been passionate about. You were totally question free when you got up here but thank you so much for doing this for us today and thanks again. You're doing a great job. Thank you Katie so
023much. Thank you. Thank you. No other comments? Thank you for the presentation. Okay we have no other finished business. Next item on our agenda is new business which is the first item is the third quarter review of the 2025-2026 budget. Okay. It's my pleasure to present to you our third quarter update. We're 75% of the way through the year. I really kind of like this layout because it gives you guys an idea as far as trend wise where we are and it it also provides some you know some I guess comfort in the fact that when you look across the years for the same time period we're fairly close and consistent which we should be. But just looking down the list and you can see that for property taxes we've got about 47.8%. That is
024our entire collection for that 2025 2024 levy. We will start collecting on the 2025 levy probably in May and June and typically in that time period we collect about 53% of that levy before the end of the fiscal year. So right now we're kind of at our lowest point from a financial standpoint because we have stopped collecting the property taxes but we'll see that pick up again in the next couple of weeks. Looking at fund 10 though just looking down the list I mean revenue wise we're actually pretty good shape. When you look at that second line down CPPRT that corporate personal property replacement tax it looks really high but we're going to move some of that around to some of the other funds to be in agreement with what our budget was. So we'll
025see some move around to the O&M fund to the IMRF fund social security. But it's good that it's as high as it is because nonetheless we'll still come in ahead of budget on that one which I was kind of surprised about. Again just other things to point out looking down the list the salaries and wages and benefits we're pretty much where we should be. We're actually 75% of the way through the year so you know I'm I'm pretty happy being at 70 71% and that's kind of consistent across the prior years. Looking down a little bit further you can see the transfers number pretty big number but that was the transfer to our bond fund to pay off the second large payment. So that was a good thing. So that worked out well. And then
026the tuition number is a little bit high but nonetheless when you look at the revenue side our tuition revenues are actually in the 80% range so we're doing pretty well with that as well. So fund 10 I feel pretty comfortable with that. Are there any questions about that as you're looking at it? Okay let's move on to the second one O&M. This is our operations and maintenance fund. Again similar story with the revenues and I think I mentioned to you about CPPRT we'll move some of that into this fund towards the end of this year. I usually wait till the end so I see where we're looking budget wise. But again just looking across the board from a revenue perspective we're pretty much where we should be at this point in time. Looking down a
027little bit further salaries and wages benefits again we should be around that 75% and we are. Salaries were 74.7 so we're in pretty good shape. The only things that stand out to me when I look at it is purchased services and supplies and materials and again those typically tend to be run a little high anyways because we do a lot of projects in the beginning of the year so again not really of concern at this point in time. So any questions on O&M? Okay. And then the last one the transportation fund. Similar story with the tax revenues. The second one down the categoricals though not unlike prior years our third quarter payment from the state is running a little bit late. Actually we actually received it on April 13th and you don't see it in
028here because this is dated 331. So if you took that into account we'd be up in the 75-76% range. So again not an issue. And looking down the expenses similar story. We do you'll notice in the capital outlay line we did put some funds in there for potential you know potential used buses but we really haven't gone that route yet which is fine. But it gives us a little bit of cushion in the O&M fund or in the transportation fund. Any questions on those? Okay. If there's no questions then uh Yeah there's no other questions on the third quarter budget review for July. Questions comments concerns? Okay then thank you for your presentation. Things look pretty good. Okay next item on on our agenda is the approval of copier lease agreements. This is a renewal
029of a lease that we've had actually this is our I should back up. Our copier lease was a five year lease and it expires on June 30th. We've had a lease with Stands going back actually decades. Stands was purchased by Gordon Flesch about four years ago. So as this lease was coming due we went out and talked to a couple of the vendors just because we wanted to make sure that we were getting good pricing. All in all though working with Gordon Flesch or the old Stands they actually gave us better pricing and they also are leasing us three more copiers. And the reason we're getting three additional ones is we actually went out and surveyed the school secretaries to see if there was any copiers that really weren't working the way they should. So
030we'll end up adding three additional copiers to it and they will also extend their service agreements to not only cover the copiers that we're leasing from them but they'll also copy cover the ones that are existing or owned by us. So we'll have that extra coverage. So all in all we're extending it for another five years with Gordon Flesch. They know us. They provide excellent service to us. They know our buildings they know our staff and their pricing was better than what we could get from another vendor. So this is not this is considered technology so we didn't have to go out to bid for it but nonetheless we wanted to make sure that our pricing was good. Does anybody have any questions regarding the um copier lease agreements? I have a question but just
031that I'm glad to see us stay local when we can. That's that's a really nice thing to do so I appreciate that. And they take good care of us. Yeah. Gordon Flesch has the best overall service because they also the most competitive pricing wise too great. So it's kind of like you said but they really beat that pricing here for us pricing which is great. And I think they were we were important to them as a customer. They wanted to make sure that they were competitive so they really tried. They really tried to make it happen for us. That's good. Any other questions or comments? If not do you have a suggestion motion on page 90 of your materials? Move to approve a 60 month lease service agreement with Gordon Flesch Company for copiers and
032service for a total monthly amount of $12,603.64. Second. Motion by Mr. Holmes seconded by Mr. Hedley. Roll call please. Mr. Holmes? Yes. Mr. Hedley? Yes. Dr. Ferris? Yes. Mr. Miselli? Yes. Dr. Bidwell? Yes. Mr. Pearcy? Yes. Mr. Gilmore? Yes. Okay that's it for our new business. Next item on our committee reports. Does anybody have any committee reports or anything any other reports since our last meeting Mr. Chambers? Yeah the co-curriculars met and we are adding two new stipends for next year. The one is the Model UN club at the high school and our high school principal knows me a long time. I think that's going to go well and they're glad to see see this get off the ground. And then Mariachi club is coming to start in the next year at the middle school
033which is again wonderful. I love them both because we're servicing the kids that we don't always necessarily serve more effectively with these additional things. So I think it's a win-win for us and for the kids. The stipends are the most supportive of the kids. Great great. Thank you. Okay any other committee reports? Okay then our last item is our closed session. We have a motion stated in the materials that we need someone to make the motion exactly as written in the materials please. Move to go into closed session for the purpose of discussing the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees of the district or legal counsel for the district including hearing testimony of a complainant against an employee or against legal counsel for the district to ensure compliance with Mr. Pearcy
034do we have a second? Second. Oh boy. Second I'll say Mr. Miselli. >> [laughter] >> Roll call please. Mr. Pearcy? Yes. Mr. Miselli? Yes. Dr. Bidwell? Yes. Mr. Holmes? Yes. Mr. Hedley? Yes. Dr. Ferris? Yes. Mr. Gilmore? Yes. Okay we'll move on to return to open session when we're finished but it'll be a little while so >> [laughter] >> Come on turn off. >> [laughter] >> Thank you very Uh we're going