Il Community Consolidated School District 15 Board of Education - Regular Meeting

15. By leveraging strengths and providing highquality support, we will honor our diverse learners in reaching their full potential. All right, welcome everybody and we'll go ahead and get started with our pledge of allegiance. Boys and girls, can we come by the screen here? You see this thing that says CCSD 15? You all look so lovely. If you could stand there. Perfect. Closer to Mr. Olsen. He looks fancy and like he took a shower today.

Maybe. Clean clothes don't mean shower, you know.

The mirrors. Good evening, President Ader and members of the board of education and superintendent Dr. Hines. Tonight, we're excited to have the Lincoln Kindness Club do the pledge of allegiance at Lincoln. Uh we started the kindness club during the 2425 school year with over 150 students participating in this club. This year we again have very high levels of interest with the same number of students participating. During the course of the year, Miss Gustoson and Miss Gillette who are here tonight will meet with students to do a variety of acts of kindness for Lincoln and our school community. With kindness being one of our school's values, this aligns perfectly with the work we are doing to strengthen our community while helping instill the importance of acts of kindness. During their sessions, there will be a variety of kind acts such as donations for the local community, other community service projects, a kindness rock garden at Lincoln, and even random acts of kindness such as personalized notes and books in the library for students to read when checking out books so all our students know that they are valued and cared for as Lincoln Lions. If you can please stand up for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And before we take pictures, I have a special thank you for students. It's called a high five highlighter. Each finger is a different color. Very cool stuff. Not every kid has one of these, but all of you will today. Just in case. All right. I have enough. Do we think sponsors should get

boys and girls if I could ask? Yeah. Can I have you come right here? Okay. Yep. You right in front. Both girls come over here. All right. And then I'm gonna scoot you. Go. Step up front. Scoot you right in here. We want to try to not have you here. How does that work? Perfect. All right. We're getting the official picture. And then parents, you're welcome to come up. And family. You look at Mrs. Anderson. And then moms, dads, grandma, grandpa, here. Come on up. Keep smiling. I know. I'm almost out.

Take care of that. This is probably the one Good job. Good job. Thank you, Lincoln. Yeah. See, it was that quick. All right. Oh, yeah. I'll go get

Up next, we have our student recognition. What? Oh, our student recognition just enough.

Otherwise, you'd be chasing the principles down saying, "Give me that back." Good evening, President Ader, members of the school board and superintendent Dr. Hines. I am Amber Daniel. I am the proud principal at Jane Adams and I'm here tonight with Johnny Bar, our assistant principal, as well as Debbie Niko Kavaris, um, one of our teachers in our structured for independence program. So, tonight we are here to recognize Mai and I'm going to let Debbie speak a little bit about Mai and his school year so far.

Awesome. Thank you. I am one of Mai's special education teachers and we are so honored to have Mai here with his family and all the teaching assistants and past teachers supporting him. Let's give them a big wave. Mai, look at all your fans. Look, Mai, look.

Good job, Mai. I love your waving. So, um, Mai is a fourth grader in the structured for independence program at Jane Adams Elementary School. Um, he's being honored for his kindness and thoughtfulness that he shows in supporting his classmates. He has demonstrated remarkable growth in building friendships and remind us how small acts of care and kindness can make a big difference. During free choice, Mai often goes out of his way to include others by selecting a puzzle, pulling up a chair, and inviting a classmate to join him in play. Recently, when the classmates had a difficulty opening um the puzzle pieces, Mai stepped in to help by opening the bag and pouring the puzzle pieces out for his friend, and they started to play together. Gestures like these highlight Mai's compassion and his ability to look out for others. His thoughtfulness is a wonderful example of how our students lift one another up and help create an inclusive, caring school community. Mai is such a joy. Is he what? Ma, you having a seat?

Okay. I'm talking about you, buddy. Come on up. We we commend Kamakai for the positive role model he is becoming and celebrate his dedication to friendships, empathy, and kindness. We are proud to honor him as a student who truly embodies what it means to aim high and achieve higher. We're so proud of you, Mai. Does the family want to come up for a picture? Good job. Good job.

Like that's a lot of hands. Congratulations. Congratulations. I have a question for you. Thank you for being such a good student. Two more. Two more. Two more. family.

Can we take a picture? Let's take a picture. Mai, come on up. Come on over here. Take a picture with my later. Yes, you're happy.

Awesome. All right, everybody. Look at this. You want to go cheese? [Laughter] All right, congratulations. We will move on to our staff recognition. Hi, my name is Julie Powell. I'm the director of instructional technology. Um, and I'm here with MJ Warden, the CTO. And we are honored to recognize Angie Vasey, uh, for going above and beyond through her exceptional contributions in innovation, leadership, and collaboration with the district 15's STEM department. She's worked in district 15 for nearly 20 years and she's taught STEM for the last 10 years. As a STEM teacher at Plum Grove Middle School, Angie teaches sixth grade computer science, sixth grade design and modeling, and our newly launched seventh grade app creators course. This year's edition of App Creators class uh required significant updates to our sixth grade computer science curriculum uh to ensure a seamless skill progression and Angie immediately stepped up leading our STEM team in revising the curriculum and ensuring a smooth transition. Uh she is dedicated to professional growth and innovation. She attended multiple trainings last

year proactively including advanced coding for real world problem solving and cracking the code from icons to world word blocks. Um she applied last spring and was accepted to attend a week-long training in Springfield put on by the learning technology center for computer science. Um, educators across the state of Illinois collaborated at this week-long training uh to talk about integrating computer science standards in our classrooms. Um, she was able to bring those insights back to our district and work with summer curriculum writing with our STEM team and work this fall in really bringing those learning experiences back to our classrooms. She has played a key role in maximizing the impact of our new educational tools. District 15 received Sparro robots at all of our middle schools through the Illinois computer science equity grant and she took the lead embedding them into our sixth grade C computer science curriculum this year. Her work has really provided students with engaging hands-on opportunities to bring coding and pro problem solving to life. and really walking into her classroom. The kids love using these FOROs. They have so much fun with them. We've had the honor of getting to see them. I know that um Emily and Ahmad have been there and they are just um having so much fun. Very engaged um working with these robots. We are proud of her. We're honored to have her on our STEM team here in CCSD15. And with the number of hoops we had to go through to get that grant approved, I'm so glad the kids love them and are using them a lot.

I'm still jumping this year's hoops, but we're almost there. It's one of those grants. So, if you could all move in front of the step and repeat, please. And then if the rest of the Plum Grove leadership team wants to come up, come on down, be in a picture, take one with just tech, and then you're all here, so let's let's do it.

And Mr. Rice is in a suit, so I mean, let's let's catch that on film. All right. Smile. Yeah. Excellent. Wonderful. Thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. All right. I don't think so. Okay. No green papers. I don't see any.

All right. Anyone any green sheets in the audience for public comment? Okay. All right. We can move past that. All right. So, we'll move to superintendence report. Okay. Great. Um, so October has been a busy month for recognition. Uh we recognize our wonderful custodians and instructional coaches who do wonderful work um in our schools, keeping them clean and organized and safe, helping our teachers um continue to improve their craft and working with our kids and using new instructional resources. So thanks to everyone within those two groups for everything they do for district 15. Um and this month um is is always principal awareness or princip not awareness appreciation month principal appreciation uh month but there's one week in which um is set aside to honor our principles and uh boy what wonderful principles we have. So we're happy to recognize them tonight. If you could go to the next slide here they are um brighteyed and bushy tailed for picture day. They don't always look like that at the end of every workday because uh the the job continues to get more and more demanding, but we have a great crew of principles who do wonderful work at their school. So, thank them for all they do as well. Hopefully, they're all home um watching the Cubs while we are not, but also listening into this board meeting. So, thank you again for everything that the principles do and their assistant principles and associate principles in our buildings. Uh next up, we've had a lot going on as we always do between uh board meetings. So, SEIU, that's our custodial maintenance and mechanical unit. We hopefully are nearing the end of contract negotiations. Uh earlier in close session, the board met and we gave them an update and we're just continuing to work through uh proposal counterproposal process. So, hopefully

at our next meeting, we'll have an agreement. Um continue to work with uh and observe principles. So, it's an exciting part of my job where I get to work and observe principles interacting with their staff or families. So, that continues. We had a large safety committee meeting um earlier in the month and we reviewed our safety protocols. We had a nice discussion with our first responders and I'll give you a little update on that um earlier or later tonight rather. We continue to work on our preschool planning and visioning um with Mindy and Renee and our consultants and Dr. Bland at over at uh CLA. Uh that presentation, an update will be coming to the board in December on all the work that we've been doing um reimagining early childhood and you know early learning in district 15. Um health life safety meetings are underway. You'll hear the first portion of the five-year uh plan as well as the capital funding plan. That's why Liz Hennessy is here and they'll be up next um in October and November. And then I had my kickoff superintendent middle school advisory today at Winston campus. It was an amazing um midday way way to spend the middle of my day. Um sixth, seventh, and eighth graders are never shy. They engaged in a lot of conversation and shared uh wonderful feedback on what they love about Winston, which was the the praise was amazing. I mean, way to go Winston. Um they're extremely happy there. They had things that they wanted us to consider for improvement, but I would say nothing earthshattering, but they're really happy. So, it was an exciting um way to spend three lunch periods. And I think I have TJ on Friday. Um, out of administrative services, number of years ago, we came to the board. Uh, we really didn't have a residency checking process in the district. You showed your paperwork when you enrolled your kindergartener and they could graduate in 8th grade spending nine years with us and nobody would check that paperwork again. We put a process in place. Um, and we continue to require people to update their residency documents, show proof of residency, but we continue to find

families that are living in this that are registering in this district that do not in fact live here. So, we've had a few families that we've that we've um worked through the process and and kind of caught them, if you will, and we've disenrolled the students because we only want to educate kids whose families are are residents and are contributing to um, you know, what it costs to educate a a child in district 15. Uh Sherry's doing principal observations. She's a collaborator on our crisis team protocols, safety conversations, and a partner in the work uh with the SIU negotiations business. You'll you've you've heard uh we continued the work on the uh fiscal year 25 audit. They're rolling out electronic time sheets at the remaining 15 schools and we're excited about that. Experiencing probably a few hiccups here and there, but we'll work through them like any new uh protocol. And the initial discussion on capital improvement projects for, believe it or not, the summer of 2026 is underway. We we barely finished 2025 and we're already planning for next summer. You'll hear a little bit more about that in tonight's presentation. Um Ahmad, who's back there, hi Ahmad. uh presented or served as a panelist for INSPRA and delivered a session on building an effective department to support district communication, sharing strategies and best practices and many of the things we're doing here in district 15 with PR colleagues uh from from across the area which is very exciting. um we he's been instrumental in updating our crisis team communication plan in partnership with a number of other departments and um is a strong partner now with the5 and PTAs to address a big initiative. We started last year feed 15. Um, it's taking getting some momentum and we're getting some traction because we're putting the5 and the PTAs together to to continue to help us feed uh more and more families that really and truly experience uh food insecurity on a regular basis here in the district. So, um that is that is well underway. Um ed services, they're involved in helping schools analyze their discipline

data now that we've been in school almost two months. Um we've implemented they've implemented behavior support updates to better align with the needs of school. So that means if kids are struggling in a certain classroom or population and again in close we talked about a few kids that are really uh struggling that's the team that's a department that will ploy deploy some additional help to the schools. um continues to coordinate restorative practices, but this is really focused around the middle school administrators and making sure that all five of them have been trained beyond the initial cohort of two middle schools and two elementaryaries. And then they continue to provide behavior coaching to support students directly and to help um build then the staff's capacity to do so because we're not always going to have people that we can deploy. That's not an extraordinarily large department. So we need to work on building teams capacity to uh respond when when kids need a little something more. Human resources analyzing 2025 2026 staffing data updating 2025 26 2627 calendars those first two bullets. Lisa's looking all fancy tonight. She is going to present both of those uh bullet points uh shortly. And then um her whole department has really been deep in the work of preparing for an HR audit. You recall a number of years ago we did a special education audit. Business always has an annual audit. We're going to have a potentially a transportation audit um with Tom retiring and Jude really taking over as the director that's underway and the HR audit will um hopefully be completed within the next like two to four months. And then we'll have information and findings that we'll share with the board and that will really help guide Dr. Lazour um as she takes over uh for the department when Lisa retires. Uh, multilingual started their parent mentors for the year at Jane Adams, Lincoln, Lake Louise, Val, and Winston. Uh, on the 6th, they particip she participated in the Illinois State Board of Education conference for multilingual administrators. And I think Carrie Keith went with you. Is that correct? Yes. Down in Springfield.

Yes. No, it was in Rosemont. In Rosemont. Oh, much better than Springfield. uh uh hosted demonstration lessons with nationally renowned expert uh in English language development for our middle school multilingual teachers and arranged ESL services for EL students placed in schools outside of district 15. And how many students do we have? Four.

Four. Okay, it's good to know. Student services, um preschool program planning is underway for 2026, completing summer claims for reimbursement and preparing for Special Olympics the season ahead. uh and updating that new athlete portal. Okay, good job. Very exciting stuff. Teaching and learning uh continued meeting with district reading and math intervention specialists around tier 2 and tier three supporting the implementation of fall assessments which are done now, right? Thank goodness. Yes. Uh coordinated that fall data review so our schools can use that data to um revisit their school improvement goals. They're developing an MTSS system committee uh with district administrators to review practices and strategically redefine the processes that are utilized. Each year we kind of try to tighten and and improve and and shape MTSS. So it meets the needs of our staff that need support for students and then ultimately helps the students receiving that support close the gaps that got them into MTSS and and tiered support in the first place. And um Emily and and MJ have been working on developing technology this developing this technology advisory committee to reorm and redefine district guidelines and practices around instructional tech. That's a little screenshot of the flyer that went out this week just the other day. And we already have last was 50. We're up to 60. Wow. 68 interested applicants and we're going to we don't know for sure 30 35 or so will probably be around where we're going to land. So there's a lot of interest around this this group. So uh don't delay in getting your application in technology planning for the same advisory committee um and the upcoming parent learn 15 workshops planning for instructional technology PD and um continuing the development of powers school cy including getting ready for progress reports other reports enhancements and data visualizations. P

school has been a big lift. It's been a little bumpy, but every day we get a little closer to having it fully operational and, you know, less of a less of a of a frustration. The team worked for over a year to get ready to launch and um we're getting close, right? Or at least they all hope to to being fully up and running. So that is it for in terms of by department little bit of a forecast. So between this meeting and our November 12th meeting, the Illinois school report card is rolled out by the state board. Usually around Halloween, it goes live. So we will send a letter uh out to the community. But um and then Emily will probably do a little more in-depth presentation in November, but just wanted to remind everybody that there is an annual report card for all schools, all 852 schools in Illinois. Um there's multiple success indicators. You've got academic, you've got school quality, and student success. You can see the subcategories and the waiting. I won't go too heavily into it now because you're going to get a full report on it in November, but that pie equals 100% of of of uh the scores that we're going to receive, the designations that our schools will receive. You go to the next slide. This is how it's broken down. Last year, we had two schools that were exemplary. The rest of our schools were commendable. So, we were really excited and proud because those are good designations, you know, out of the five. uh we will find out shortly and then share in and um in the letter that will go out just before Halloween and then at the presentation where where our schools fall. Um but that's that's the overview of the of the designations and and what each of those designations represents. So more information will be shared via a letter and in the November presentation to the board. And that's my report.

All right. Okay. Any questions? If we may move um the fiveyear facility plan, which is I believe 52.

If we can do that first since Liz is here, I don't want to take up too much extra time of Liz's, that would be great. If we could flip to Okay, that 5-year master facility and capital funding plan. There it is. Thank you. Okay. Good evening. Um, where's my little reminder? President Ader, members of the board, and Superintendent Dr. Hines. I'm here tonight with Elizabeth Hennessy, who's a a well-known uh individual here in our board meetings, and we're going to give you an update on the 5-year master facility plan and the capital funding plans. And Jim Kaplanis would be uh normally with us, but he could not make it tonight. So, we're going to uh jump right into the five-year master facility plan. And um

and you have it at your seats. Sorry. Yes, you probably have a hard copy

because the numbers get a little small. All right, so you've seen this before. Again, it's on two pages, two slides. Um, but the first column here, well, the first column are these familiar large rolledup categories. And this is of course summed up behind this is a uh plan for each school. And then we roll it up to just present the totals here. And they run everywhere from the asphalt, you know, roofs, the big ticket items, HVAC, elevators, uh, ceilings, um, and all the categories. I won't go every over everyone, but in this past summer, we did $7.9 million. Um, and you can see how that was spread out, of course, and you've heard all about the parking lots. We did a lot of parking lots, and Sunling here is one of them. So 2.5 million, that was a lot of money uh on parking lots. Um and then we go across and you'll see we have anticipated as of now $11 million next summer in another in in um more projects in particular 3 million in HVAC because as we've said before in previous meetings we're going to start what needs really now attention in the district as far as like large ticket items is in the area of HBAC and roofs. you know, we've done a lot of the playgrounds, as you can see, that's going to roll off. Um, and and we're definitely chipping away at the asphalt. So, next summer, we're looking 11 million and the summer of 27 probably around 22 million. And then we'll go to the next slide. And then got cut off. Um, that's good. Let's see. I think that was 25 million

22 and 20 summer of 28 and 22 million

the next one 22 million got this copy inside this one here shows me the numbers um so 25,6,992 in the summer of 28 and 22,184908 in 29 and again you can see HVAC is really uh really jumps out there. So, now we're going to go into I'm going to turn over to Liz. We're going to go in more into into the proposed how to pay for all of this. Okay. So, I'm going to start with just a quick market update. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but

Oh, sorry. Um, interest rates came down uh with the Fed lowering rates in September and the markets built in another two rate decreases by the end of the year, but that's not a guarantee. It is data dependent. So, um, but the unemployment numbers have kind of been justifying a rate decrease. So, we think we'll have at least one more before the end of the year. Let's go to the next page. Okay. So this is a summary of what Diana just um went over on the project side. So it, you know, goes back to 2023 and includes all the wonderful things you've been doing, including uh importantly moving 15 forward, the 22 referendum work. So that is pretty much complete now. Um the total is about

134 million.

114 million. Yeah, fantastic. And then we have the five-year plan items um starting of course in FY23 and then Diana went through the most recent which are highlighted um well some actually FY26 uh which is last summer we're in FY26. So that 7.9 was complete. Next summer is 11.1 as she mentioned and then 27 is 22.49. 49 then 2 million and 2 million for um a total on the five-year plan over this period of time of about 69 million. And then life safety items are popping in which again include many of these roofs in HVAC which are the bigger items. Um so that is looking at 20 uh in 2028 summer 25.6 6 million and 22.18 million in summer of 29. Um, so that totals 47.7 million. I'm going to say something real quick because those numbers don't quite jive with the 5-year facility plan entirely. So, in the five-year the HVAC the um mean the health life safety projects that are listed here, they're in there. We're breaking them out now because next month Wool uh Architects has have been doing our 10-year health life safety walkthroughs and surveys and they're they're finished and they're going to present it next month. Um and so we're still these are these these numbers are still uh moving targets. Um we have these these yellows here are more with the W numbers, but what I presented is our district numbers. So, we're we're talking and Liz will talk further because in the yellow you'll see that we're going to talk about $40 million of

health life safety bonds which is a new top new funding source that we're bringing to the uh to the discussion tonight. So, um just wanted to you know I know you caught that and that's why there's a little difference in these numbers. Okay. So, as Diana said, those are getting worked out and will be presented next month. But then going down to the bottom part of the page, looking at our sources of funding. Um, of course, the uh life safety bonds or sorry, the referendum bonds of 93 million that was approved by the voters back in 22. That's um starting from the bottom. Then the 40 million, that's alternate bonds that the district issued. Those are paid from your operational funds. Uh and then we have the pay as you go on and m and we made a a kind of a mid-stream switch in FY25 and 26 to stop taking that out of the operating funds and use some of the DUB bonds and the other non-referendum bonding authority to uh pay those that uh amount given budgetary pressures. And then um I'm going to talk tonight about the authorization of the DUB bonds. 40 million was authorized. 14 million was issued last January. Okay. So that's going towards the summer 26 projects um and part of the summer 25 projects. And so the next piece of this is 26 million and that is going to be scheduled uh for June of 2026. Um and I'm going to talk more about that on the next slide. So I'll hold my thoughts there. And then on the D subline, we also have a proposed 10

million to make sure that we have enough resources to match uh expenditures with the revenue sources. And then I'm going to talk tonight about a $40 million life safety bond which would pay for those highlighted items in yellow or a portion of them. So let's go to the next page and we're going to first talk about Dub. So in 23 the board authorized up to 40 million of non-referendum working cash fund bonds as part of its overall capital plan. Uh those that authorization lasts for three years. So, you have up through August of 26 to issue those. That's why we're planning for June of 26 um for that issuance, probably closing in July. In August, uh we're looking at uh well, we already did the 14 million in January of 25. We're now looking at a proposed 26 million to complete that 40 million uh in August of 26. And we have that shown in the um chart to your right. Uh right now we're looking at an estimated interest rate of 3.63% which includes a cushion. So we hope it's going to be lower especially the direction of interest rates right now. And then we have that 2029 issue for 10 million also proposed. Just to refresh your memory on debt service extension base and these bonds. Debt service extension base is part of the tax cap. So it refers back to the levy for debt in the year 1994. Then in 2009 a CPI factor was added to that. So um it's not going to increase taxes other than by the CPI which is applied every year. It's just extending them. So, what the

district has always tried to do, which I believe is a very financially prudent um move, is to pay these bonds off in 10 years or less so that future boards have the opportunity to issue more debt as needed to continue to fund your capital plan. So if you look at uh the total remaining capacity on the far end of this chart, you can see that even after the uh proposed 40 million and the 10 million uh that you've got room again to issue additional DUB bonds in 2035. So the last issue in the schedule is 29. in five to six years, you'd have the authority then to access uh additional debt in a substantial way. Um again, only increase to the taxpayers is CPI year-over-year. Okay, so let's go to the next page. Um, I think I've talked to the board about this uh public act before, but in uh different from in 22 when we're talking about referendum in 24, June of 24, the governor signed a a uh public act 103591, which allows the issuance of health life safety bonds outside of that debt service extension base. So now it can be paid from an unlimited tax but only for approved health life safety projects. I'm going to talk a little bit about the process for getting those approved. Uh also in this public act voter approved bonds are now not subject to the debt limit. Of course, your border approved bond was back in 22, so this does not apply to you. But going forward, um, any debt issued, uh, may now be extended to 30 years versus 20 years. So, our

referendum bonds were paid off over 20 years. Um, but now you can go out to 30 years. And then the last part of this act was that you could build a new building without referendum if you expanded uh or increase space for prek and kindergarten. However, there are no dollars attached to that part of the law. So, um that is what happened in June of 24. And that kind of leads us to talk more about life safety projects. What can they be? And um so here's not an exhaustive list, but a lot of items are on here. Um so things relating to security like cameras, intercom, glass, secured entry, exterior lighting, uh replacement of equipment that's passed its useful life. Um you can do uh

structural elements. Do you want to do this? Yes, sure. Um right. So we uh kind of edited this list a little bit. Yeah. Um so you can see yeah paving egress and on the next slide as best some ADA not a whole lot. Building replacements again but that gets into a little detail there. And then um and then here's the big one. Replacement of equip equipment past its useful life. That's where our boilers and some of our HVAC will qualify. and sprinklers.

Yeah, it's important. It's important to know that health life safety is about replacing equipment and things that are beyond its useful life as opposed to going to a new technology. For example, you couldn't take out your HVA and boilers if they were past their useful life and replace them with um say geothermal or something like that. It's very restrictive in the types of projects um that it authorizes. Next slide. Okay, next slide.

Thank you. Okay, so um the district architect, this is the timeline. It takes at least three months to go through the timeline. Your architect approves life safety amendments. This is different from your life safety survey. That survey is required every 10 years. And I think that's what you're talking about next month, that required 10-year life safety survey. But from that survey, certain projects may rise to the top. They have priorities A, B, and C. So once you have the priorities on that life safety survey, the architect can turn those things into life safety amendments. The board of education would approve, review, and approve those life safety amendments. the uh North Cook um uh service center would have to approve those amendments as well and then send them down to Springfield to ISBY and that's where the typically the jam is because they're very uh not a lot of staff down there to do it. But it usually takes a number of weeks, sometimes months to get those approvals back. Then a public hearing is required prior to the issuance of health life safety bonds and then a life safety bond resolution may be approved by the board after that. Okay. So here is uh uh an example of 40 million health life safety bonds. Again, kind of coordinating with those proposed health life safety bonds uh that are estimated currently at about 47 million or health life safety needs. So um again, they are not limited by the DUB. Uh the annual payments if you were to repay them in a level debt service way over 20 years is about 3.2 2 million a year. Uh that's about seven cents on the tax rate. So for a $350,000

home, the impact would be $69 a year for those 20 years. And for a $400,000 home would be $80 uh per year for those 20 years. And that's structuring it with level debt service, which we think is very conservative and and consistent with the way you structured the life safety bonds. So the advantages is that um these do not require direct voter approval just a public hearing after approvals are received from the state and the board the board can go ahead and issue the bonds. Uh this approach preserves operating funds that would other be wise be needed to spent be spent on capital. Um it also preserves your DSUB for things that don't qualify for health life safety. Um so the disadvantage is that uh again requires life safety approvals which may take three to four months. Not all capital needs can be met with these life safety bonds and it increases property taxes. So I will pause there and see if you have questions. So this is a preliminary plan again looking out to the year summer of 27. You notice those projects happen summer of 27 and summer of 28. So it's really fiscal 28 and 29.

Yeah. And so we're talking about life safety bonds at this point, Liz, but the the life safety study we will hear results of next month. Correct. Correct. I'm just giving you an example of how you might fund it. Okay, I got you. Yeah. And you said that it takes about 3 months for the process. So then would we plan to work on this later this year so that we would be able to leverage the funds in the over the summer or what's the timeline?

Yeah. So the life safety um 10-year uh survey that you're looking at is going to give you the basket of projects and that's a requirement every 10 years you do that. So that happens, but then separately from that, you look at that list and pull off which projects you want to put into life safety amendments. So then that process would happen um probably in spring uh of 27, okay,

winter of 26 or fall of 26 going into spring of 27. So that authorization would be then available to issue the debt and you could schedule the projects out from there. Okay. And and those are the estimates that were well these aren't page numbered. You had you had two about two two years of estimated I guess life safety items for summer of 2028 and summer of 2029. Yes. In the yellow. Yeah. And those are estimates from Wool, right? And these are WS. Yes. WS estimates. Mhm. Okay. And then they're going to be coming back with the with the actual numbers later on.

Right. And most of that is already in our is in our five-year facility plan, too. There are a few differences, but we already have estimates of these items rolled into the the five-year plan. Yeah. These are not in addition to the five-year plan.

All right. Thanks. Oh, hold. I had a question about the categoriz because I know we get the ABC items. So, I was curious if these were based, but I know we're going to be doing the in-depth one next month, so it's okay if we don't want to talk about it now, but I was just curious out of those 25 million and 22 million for FY29 and FY30, are those predominantly a items that we need to take it to do right away or No. No. predominant. We're glad to say though that right now A's are about half a million. 500,000. Oh wow. So it's right about 500,000 and then kudos. That's great. Right. All

125 million that we Yeah. It's the B's and the C's and and a lot most of it is in the C's which are Yeah. on this right there. They're still finalizing these numbers. So we're But as of a week or so ago was 13 million in the B's and 46 in the C's. Okay. So those there's still um work being done on these but um a lot of the C's again we you will we don't have to do okay they are mostly uh they have to report them but they're really mostly optional you know you're not

the B's you want to focus on and then definitely get some of these a half a half a million but I think all the A's we've already scheduled some of them might have been done this summer um but We have them all included in the facility plan.

So if you think just perspective and then we'll spend a lot more time next month. 2014 it was 150. Didn't really do much movement on that till starting in 2019. So we are ahead head and shoulders ahead of or we've improved significantly in the last you know 15 years. So that's or last 11 years. Sorry I can't add tired. I'm thinking 2025. The last sometimes that's how it feels.

The last 11 years since we got our first report. So, it's we're going to be excited to present it to you next month. It's good stuff. Little little sneak preview tonight. Okay. All right. Back to you ladies. Anything else? Questions? Yeah. More to come next month. Um All right. Thank you both. Liz All right. Do you want to go back up to 5.1? Let's go to Lisa's.

Okay. Yeah. All right. So, we'll go to item 5.3, our staff retention and engagement. Good evening, President Ader and Dr. Hines and the rest of the board and our district 15 community. I am Lisa Nus. I'm the assistant superintendent of human resources and I'm happy to present an update on the second item of our strategic plan, which is staff engagement and retention. And I am old and blind, so I'm gonna have to look at it on my computer while it shows up there as well. I' I've given up trying to pretend. All right. So, when we talk about recruitment, which is really what we've we've heavily focused on over the last three years, um the landscape of human resources has changed over this past decade. Um, when I first took over this position, I didn't even think of recruitment, it wasn't on our radar and it wasn't necessary. Uh, we'd have hundreds of applicants for each teaching position. Um, I didn't know how good we had it. Um, around COVID and going forward from there, this has been an issue ongoing in across all of our employment groups. Um, it's not just a district 15 issue. It's all over the nation and definitely all over Illinois. Um Isby Illinois State Board of Education says that there's only almost 90% of schools that are reporting a teacher shortage. Um 91 of percent of our leaders say that there's fewer than five applicants and I added in there and sometimes zero for open

teaching positions. That makes it very difficult to hire when you have no candidates. Um, and 71% of local leaders are reporting that their teacher teacher position needs have increased and they've increased significantly and most people expect those needs to grow over the years. So, what are we going to do about it? So, we have really focused on on I'd say blanketing the community with advertisements. We really have to get the word out. Um I think that um one of our union leaders had said to me, I don't think our issue is as much with retention because once they come here, they really like it. That was actually our DTU vice president said that to me a few years ago. And um I think he's right. We needed to get people here. We it's a numbers game. So we need volume. So the first thing we did is we started adjusting our timeline. Um we typically post in March. I think that we've talked about I mean I'm already looking at rolling over for our next year. I mean we only started the school year a few weeks ago but we have to talk about staffing predictions but the earlier you do that in the year the more it's a prediction and not actual numbers. So you really have to be careful that you don't go overboard and then you're over staffed. So you want to balance between posting early and posting accurately. So last year we knew we knew the areas especially the ones that had so many contract positions um we wanted to get out early. So we posted in January and we found that very successful. We were able to recruit um many more people early in those highly needed positions. When I say our hard to fill, it's specifically special education related services. Uh for people who don't know, related services, that would include our psychologists, our social workers, our counselors, our speech and language

pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists. Um and these most of what they do is required by law under IEPs and whether we could recruit or not, as we found in past years, we need to fill those positions. So, it puts the district in a financial situation that's very precarious. um because you'd end up having to go to contract agencies. I was very happy that the board of education supported a contract negotiations which we believed would decrease our dependence on contract agency which it completely did. Last year we were at over 55 of our certified teaching positions and when I say teaching that does include related services. Um over 55 were outsourced. Um and we're down to a handful this year. Great. Um, it it's it's it's it was a great, you know, I know the board took a big risk and I I appreciate your your faith in me that we had a plan that was going to work and um we felt pretty confident in and and it really came to fruition. Um, the other thing, not only getting out early, but we have our hiring administrators are the people who really need to interview to find the best fits for those positions. And you can imagine our principles and our department heads, this is definitely not the only thing they're doing. So HR took a more active role in trying to organize specifically for these. I called them priority positions. So every week we went through exactly what the positions were that stayed open. We gathered the applicants. We kept up to date on where they are in the interview process. We emailed the departments so they knew exactly where they were. and just keeping that on trip really kept it kind of at at the top of their to-do list. Um I'm I believe that that's one of the reasons too that we were able to grab some of those people before it's a doggy dog world right now there. Everyone's going for the same

people. So it's hard. You have to get out there early. um this year, although I will not share how we know because I don't want other people to, but we we have heard that there are some special education layoffs in the area that are coming and people know that they're coming. So, we're going to have people who have degrees and related service areas and special education. So, I've started working with Mindy and our student services department. We're going to start posting in November. We have some kind of shel postings right now just to have them up there to um to to link to some websites to get them out early. So hopefully, knock on wood, in November, we'll start hitting those related services positions early. Um and our related services departments have been very active in our recruitment process with us. Um next slide. We also have partnerships with a number of colleges and universities. Um, and that's important because when we look at our student teachers, some of them are here for a semester, some of them are here for a whole year. Um, and it's hard to tell in an interview. You know, some people can fake it pretty well through an interview and a second interview, maybe a third interview, but when you're student teaching, you're here for a long time. And those people, we have a really good understanding of and a good prediction of how they're going to perform as a classroom teacher. So last year we were able to pick up nine of our student teachers. Um we concentrated on bilingual and special ed. We were able to pick up an SLP during that time as well. We also picked up a classroom teacher. Um in the meantime we also have interns and those interns are psychologists and social workers. Our current staff of psychologists, five of those psychologists were former interns, which represents about 25% of our psychologists and social workers.

There's seven former interns, which I think is about 15%. So, we really like similar to student teaching, see our interns, they work side by side with our um related service teams. We really get a good idea of their performance levels and then we try to snatch them up when we can. Um this year we have 10 four psychologists and six are social workers and hopefully we'll have some success with them. Um we have a long list of partnerships that we're building um not only with student teaching assignments but we like to do offer observations and collaborate with them just just to be have an open dialogue with the universities. Um next slide. Oh no that's a slide. Um, last year we talked a little bit about historically black colleges and universities and you'll see later when we do look at some of the data. I shifted a little more to Hispanic serving institutions because I believe that that's more of a focus need of our district. So the eight uh higher eds that I have up there are the closest ones in those two categories. If you could see Elurno, Dominican, Nor Eastern, and St. Augustine are are closer. Illinois and Wisconsin. the historical black colleges. These are the four closest and they're uh Kentucky and uh Harristow is in

it'll come to me in a minute. Thank but not Illinois. Um so really those historical black universities and colleges we're doing an online presence there. Since their location is farther away, I think we have less likelihood that people are going to come. I wanted to focus on more Illinois schools and places where more likely to get the population that we're looking for. So, those are the first four that we're targeting and marketing with. Um, we're working with those colleges to do direct postings. We offer to go out there and talk to their student population. um the stronger those relationships are um hopefully the more students are funneled to our district.

St. Louis I love

St. Louis. Thank you. The first two were uh Lincoln's also in Missouri too. Next slide. Um I do have to say right now that um in HR we're not we're not always that great on marketing. That's not that is not our forte. But we are so fortunate to have a small but very mighty communications department. So I really want to thank Ahmad who's been a great partner. Um he's always available. His response time is great. Um him and Jen who's our former assistant director and our new person Emily. Welcome Emily. um have done a nice job of helping us just with refreshing our ads and making them all branded and look I mean they they look so much better when what they have over the past and that that's all them. So the next few slides the the graphics that you'll see are um are the the updated um advertisements that we have. Can you go back just one? This one came from some feedback we got from related services that said, you know, if we could have some of a a description of what they do. So, this is a two-sided flyer that we use when we're looking at um special ed type of recruitment um that shows not only their salary, but what their responsibilities are. Um things like that have helped. Next slide. So, then we look at our own marketing. Um, I don't think that there's anything that's going to be super surprising, but it's it's just the magnitude of it. We have certain colleges that we're able to directly post to. Um, we advertise in many different places, EEOC, diversity and ed. Um, we have a connection with the uh Illinois Department of Employment Security where we've connected with the director of business services and they send out our postings. They have a list

serve of all the people who have CDLs who are unemployed. Um, you know, we need bus drivers if you you haven't heard. Um, so we like to get it out to people who have CDLs. Um, like I said, we're we're playing a numbers game. So, the more people we get it out to, the better. We have signs that are schools. We have flyers on the doors. We have postcards and business cards that I'm actually going to show you uh in a little bit. Um, that just make it easy to pass out to people. They have our QR codes so they're able when you're on the fly to hand it to someone. Um the communications department did a really nice recruitment video that I know you've seen before. Um and we do have large signs. We have a big banner um that we're uh reprinting. We like to post it near uh highly trafficked areas. So like in front of Plum Grove like we have to use our property. So Plum Grove um Winston uh Willow Bend has a nice one on Algangquin. we could put it and we could advertise on a bus, but it has to be parked. So, I would like to drive around with big ads on our buses, but they won't let us do that. Um, so that's another way we've gotten the word out. Um, some other marketing initiatives that, uh, we've used our own. Next slide, please. Sorry. Um, website, we have links on all our school pages. We have them on our department pages. We have our community newsletter. Um we've worked with many community organizations. Next slide. Um to just promote for us. So we have over 75 locations that have um our materials either posted in their window or at their like entrance. Um and that's you know churches and community centers and veterans organizations and just anywhere people may be that they could see it. Um, and we've found that is at one point I did take out a a billboard. We spent some money on a big billboard on 290. We

really didn't get um that many hits from that. We have found that more people, it's through either word of mouth or something that's local in the community. So, that's where we try to make our focus. Um, we do next slide. um also need a social media presence which Ahmad's been great with and we've done Frontline and Jobspot and LinkedIn and Glass Door. Um Handshake was something that we used we got rid of and now the universities have said that they it seems like there's an uptick. So we don't have the same we we kind of re-engaged with them so we can connect to those universities that you have to go through Handshake. So, kind of keeping track of what the universities want to make sure we're giving them we're we're giving them what they're asking for. Um, we also do uh recruitment events. Um, there are a number of recruitment events. You know, we had um Liz Ashman and Andy Elbert were at one today um where we we sit at a table and we we recruit um these are more certified candidates um from universities. Um, a few have been very good. That North Cook job fair was great last year. Um, the Aisha, which is um, for speech and language pathologists and the Illinois School Psych Fair, which Liz attended both of those. She said were productive as well. And the nice thing about that is it's not just human resources attending that. We have our administrators who are very willing to come with us. Um, Renee Erbansky is so helpful. she we always have someone um from our bilingual our multilingual department willing to come with us um to have interviews in Spanish and talk to candidates and really get out the word. So, we are very happy that we're able to partner with them. We do our own recruitment events. These are mainly

targeted at our non-certified staff. Um and these are held at district office. Um last year we had 45 of them. We do about once a week and we really walk people through, you know, how they complete the applications and if they need certification, how we do with them. We talk one-on-one with them about some of the benefits that might not be as obvious. So, we've gotten some decent traction on our non-certified staff with our in-house recruitment efforts as well. And then really, it's our stakeholders. Last year, we put advertisements out with our PTAs. We'll do that again this year. We have a parents as partners meeting coming up. Um, and I think I said it before and sorry this is a shameless plug, but um, I do everything I can. I'm going to hand these out before I leave to the board of ed. I have found that I if I have these in my purse and I they're just in a little sleeve so they don't get all wrinkly. You can put it in your wallet. You don't need a purse, Frank. Um,

he could have carry. He could have a satchel. Okay.

But you end up talking to people at, you know, you're in line at the Jewel or you're at a pumpkin patch and watching your kid in the in the the corn box and you tell, oh, I you work for a school district. You start talking about your school district. You have this little handy card that, oh, we're hiring. You know, if you're interested, we have, you know, we our ambassadors are really the people who work for our district because they are they're the ones that sell our district the best. So I will hand those out to you and if anyone else wants some I've got plenty of those where that came from. Now when we talk about all those efforts where are we? So part of our strategic plan we listed um KPIs key performance indicators and so we looked at four areas. Those four areas are outlined here. I'm going to go back I have a kind of a side slide before I go back to the um actual results. But the first one we needed a baseline. I'm actually more hesitant on the results of that percentage of um applicants about our unrepresented groups because that's self-identification and I'll explain that when we get there. But then we're looking at our our teachers, our non-certified staff and our hard to fill positions and are we retaining them after we ask them to come back to the district. So we are shooting for 85 to 90% 90 for certified 85 for non-certified. Um we didn't just make that up. Next slide. If you look at our industry standards the national center for education statistics says that the national turnover rate is about 16% for for teachers non-certified. It's higher than that. And if you look, there's pretty much consistency between Sherm and which is the Society for Human Resource Management and uh NCES that you really want under 15% of a turnover rate. Um

it's unhealthy to have none. You're always going to have some turnover. You're going to have retirements, you're going to have people move in. A really healthy organization will have a 5 to 10% um turnover rate. Um, if you look at our non-instructional staff, the average is 20 and above and that's in the range that is unhealthy. So, we wanted to move towards that 85 to 90% range. So, the first key performance indicator we're looking at is the applicants who identified themselves as belonging to an underrepresented group. I'm very hesitant. And it said that there were 52 when we looked at our data, but over 20% of that pool did not didn't indicate what it was. We we don't force them to do that. So I don't know if I bank on the specific numbers, but I think it gives us a little bit of a of a a trend just to to get an idea. So if we look at, you know, why do we want to know who our applicants are? We we we want our staff to mimic the student population is what we want. So when I look at if you could go to the next slide um like I said I'm not as concerned on the numbers as much as I am where we have more students percentage-wise than we have staff in that group. So the biggest one that stands out is our Hispanic group. Um, that's why I kind of shifted because really our African-American group is fairly close to being represented in terms of the population. So, it did as we were looking at these statistics, it shifted our Bless you. It shifted our um focus a little bit more so we weren't just concentrating um on groups that we didn't need. Um, but we do want to market. We have our um all of our materials are out in Spanish. Um but we have so many different languages. It's

not the only language that we're trying to recruit for, but Spanish is um definitely the highest one. And we have our marketing materials all translated into Spanish. So, the next three I'm very excited to share with you. Um they they really turned out better than I than I thought they would. Um I knew we were improving, but it's nice to see the numbers that um show it. um the percentage of our non-certified staff returning from the previous year who were actually asked back. Um we had last year from 24 to the 23 24 school year going into the 24 25 school year we had about a 69% retention rate which is is not good. You know if if 20 isn't healthy you know 31 definitely isn't. Um, so through our recruitment efforts, um, I was very happy to say we not only recruited people, but we kept them at a much higher rate. So, our non-certified staff right now, um, we're at an 82% almost 83% uh, retention rate, which is a great improvement from last year. Um, and of those, and this is just my own little thing, 25 were retirees. So, they didn't go anywhere else. They just decided they didn't want to work anymore. So, um about 15% were people who who chose to leave the district. So, we're really close to that end goal that we wanted to achieve. For our certified staff, um when we looked at people who we hired and asked to come back, 134 were hired last year, new certified teachers. Um 116 of those were asked back. And out of those, 91% came back. So, there's 106 that returned, which actually exceeded our 90% goal. I'm really happy with that statistic. Um, I think it shows an effort by all of our buildings on how we treat our staff and that they do stay when they get here.

And the last indicator is our hard to fill positions, which we are most concerned about are bilingual, our special ed, our related services. I also added in elementary people with math degrees because those have been difficult and middle school science. So that's what was contained in the numbers that we pulled. And this year out of the 65 that we hired new, we offered jobs to 55 and 51 of the 55 returned. So that represents a little over 92% of a retention rate. So we've seen some really great progress. Um, it doesn't mean that we can get our foot foot take our foot off the pedal at this point. It just means that what we're doing really is working. Um, I think the biggest takeaway from what we're doing is that it is, you know, we might lead this and organize it, but we wouldn't be able to do any of this without the support from the board of ed. Our principles are constantly interviewing and looking for people to come. Our directors, our departments, they are all very helpful. So, I am tremendously grateful for being in a district that is so supportive of other people. Everyone has their own focus and their own work to do and everyone's really rallied together to um to to help us get over a hump that we were in. And I would be remiss if I did not talk about my own team. Um I I want to avoid a Dr. Edgar presentation, so I won't talk about all the things we do in HR.

Oh. Oh. Uh oh. I knew I knew he was timing me.

Um recruitment is just a portion of what we do. We do so many other things, but um I couldn't do it without my staff. Um Claire and Andy are great partners. I was able to convince Claire to come out of retirement and work with us. Um it's going to be a nice transition um when Sherry takes over to have some consistency in our department. Um, and just just to say I wanted to put their pictures up, but no one would let me put their pictures on the slideshow, but Kristen, our two Jamies, Deb, Georgian, and Elia, they are probably the hardest working team I've ever seen. Um, they're supportive of each other. We have so many people coming to HR that, you know, they're they're in a hard time. You know, they're going through a loss or maybe a sickness. And it doesn't matter how busy these people are, they're kind to our employees. They take care of them. And I consistently get um feedback from our district that, you know, the team is is is a benefit to have here and I'm I'm very lucky to have them with me. I would not be able to do anything that I do without them with me. So with that, do you have questions? And while you're thinking of your questions, I'll give you a little thing that you're gonna put in. I figure everyone likes a little little gift, little swag. Sure.

And you can see it's just our logo and on the back it has Thank you. Oh, and Lory's gonna get it. I think I'm making a t-shirt out of this walk. Probably a walking QR code. Walking QR code. I did not put my legs on the car. We had them on the car. People sometimes didn't like me putting them on their car, but I drove around with mine for a long time. I drove around with mine for a long time, too.

Um, I had a question. A lot of the employee groups that, you know, we talked about teachers, some of our other staff members. Obviously, transportation is a huge staffing need that we have. And so I'm curious if you could speak to a little bit more about some of the unique work that we've done around our transportation department for recruitment. Sure. All those and if you look at we could go back let me look at the slide that we would go back to. I mean they're advertised in all of those places. And when we target like unemployment and um

EEOC those are mainly our non-certified positions and we've really hit bus drivers hard. Um we are in some stiff competition with all the surrounding areas. Um but we have you know that's part of why we need to actually get the people here because when we could talk about it's hard to do it on a on a little card. we could get them in the door, but we really have to talk it up because you don't need any experience. You just have to be able to drive, have a clean driving record. So, we talk about the benefits of being in the district and that we'll train and we pay for training and just posting. I I personally don't think we get as many from online as we do from local. That's what the the data has told us, our local advertising. And we're um also cold cold calling off of unemployment. We're doing list serves on off of unemployment. It's just a matter of reaching as many people as possible. Um but like I said, that is an area that unfortunately it is a is a tough one. Yeah.

Great presentation. Thank you. All right. Do you want me to stay for the calendar? It's next. Yep. Oh, all righty. So, yes. Yeah. All right. I I won't go. All right. So, um

we're going to look at the 2526 calendar and the 2627 calendar. I know those are really short, but I'll just highlight a few things. Um the 2526 calendar, that's a draft that's posted on our website. We did make one change that I want to make sure that people are aware of. If you look at January, we added an institute day on January 21st. Um, parents do like that if we cluster institute days, we do those together. So, you know, if they go away for the weekend, it's it's not a random day. And what we exchange that for is if you look in May, May 21st was an institute day and we made that into a half day of school for the kids. Um the reason why is one of our presenters really needed two days back to back. Um with our with our stat our sub shortage we can't release mass amounts of people at the same time. So the best way to do it was through institute days and we did those back to back in January. We'll be training this the staff.

Okay. And then if you look at 2627, we looked at it with 211 214. We looked at third calendars and it's pretty much modeled the same. We're keeping that cycle of having the two institute days in January. Um, and then the half institute day in May. And you'll also notice that we are having the first day of school, which we have had many years in the past. We just haven't had it in the last few years. The first day of school will be a half day. Okay. All righty. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Lisa.

Okay. Rolling on to which one? Let's go back up. Let's go ahead and do the safety one. Back up. All right. Certainly. All right. We're going to go back to 5.1, which is our safety overview update.

Okay. So, as I said at our last meeting, we were going to have we had our safety committee meeting where our first responders from all of our communities come. If you can go to the next slide, please. Um, police, fire administrators, um, were present and we talked about just our safety protocols in general. We looked at content found within our website. You know, I kind of gave them an overview of all the things we have in the district. um referenced a memo that we sent out in 2022. But you know, starting first and foremost, academic growth, social emotional well-being, physical safety of our staff and students, those are top priorities. They continue to be. We have much in place. Many of the things you can you can see, you're aware of. Some of our safety measures are unseen. And that's to keep the integrity of of of those safety um those layer that layered safety uh approach that we take. Just like during CO we said there were layers of of uh of safety measures in place. Day-to-day security and safety in the district are are no different. So we have a lot of physical safety and security in place. We have you know raptor we have the vestibules. We wear our lanyards. We have um signage on our doors. We have 360 cameras that we heavily invested in during the moving 15 forward initiative. Um the website which I'm gonna if we can go to in just a moment if you can do that now Ahmad lists so many things. Bless you. Those things were all reviewed. So school safety if you if you can just scroll down or no it's on the side there. I'm sorry. Um no. Can you go back to that that page? Safe school security bu secure buildings. that I think it's towards the bottom there. There we go. So, you have our our crisis plans. We have our crisis teams at the school level, at the

district level. We have our safety committee. We have our surveillance cameras, our vestibules, the visitor management. We have a school threat uh assessment protocol. We have a visitor management system. All of our phones are have an immediate button to take you to 911. And every phone in our our district schools is um can become an intercom. So, anybody can call from their classroom um if they need to call any type of for any type of assistance. Um we have walkie-talkies. We have silent alarms and panic buttons in our schools. We have strobe lights in loud places in case a lockdown or information is being made on the intercom. The strobe lights go off to alert people whether they're hearing impaired or whether it's just a loud environment or there's it's in a panic situation that alert. We put a lot into signage on exterior doors when we had a safe a physical safety audit, you know, of our schools a couple years ago. We have signage on our playgrounds um restricting access to the community. Same thing with our new newly installed racetracks. All of our middle schools have school resource officers that are aligned with the elementary um feeder patterns. We have a lot of community partners. We have a new comm mass communication reporting system in Parent Square. We have crisis go which is an app on our phone. Anytime there's a drill or an actual emergency. Um those of us in administration that need to be notified are notified. Our police departments are with on within our crisis um go apps. They also have direct access, you know, to our cameras so they can kind of tap into the schools in in an emergency. Um so these these are all in place and they've been in place. We've added things each year, if you will, because again, we want that layered approach to safety and security. This has all been on our website. This isn't anything new within the last month or since the Plum Gro situation. This has been here for years. We just updated annually. And and one of the things I

ask every year of our first responders, um I was on a safety call today with the with ISBY and the Illinois State Police. We attend, you know, annual safety conferences. Are there other things we should be doing? Right. And we feel as though we have a very robust and varied way in which that our schools are safe beyond the things that are listed here. You could go to another page on the website and look at all the ways in which we invest in um student well-being and mental health because let's face it, you watch the statistics on kids and and adults that do that do terrible things not only in schools but in other parts of look what happened in Minnesota and at church. You you name it, it's it's happened. There's typically a strong mental health component. So we put a lot of thought and money and programming and clinician support into making sure that our kids have what they need. Um if they need more, you know, we want to provide it. So that whole student wellness, staff wellness, um that is very um well built out as well in the district. And each year we add, you know, new surveys or screeners or resources for staff to make sure that we're meeting not just the academic needs of our kids, but the this the social emotional needs of our kids. Um, another thing that we've talked about, and I, you know, I see Joyce in the audience is uh safe gun storage. I mean, that's a big piece of it. We can do a thousand things in the district, but if our families aren't doing all that they need to do, then all of our efforts are for not. So, this is on our website as well. You can get free locks at all of our police stations to lock up any weapons or anything that you need to lock up within your home. That's on our website as well, and we advertise that on an annual basis. So, there's a ton of information on our website that we update, you know, as we make changes. So, in talking to Paul Tims, who we brought out a couple years ago when he did a physical safety audit, and that was al that was after the events of UValdi a number of years ago, he did a physical safety audit of all of our

schools. Um Jeff Schley from the Palletine Police Department also helps us look at our safety protocols to see if there's anything if there's any spots of weakness um within what we call our the physical envelopes, the exteriors of our buildings, our our could be hedges, it could be our parking lots, you name it. Um and we always act on on those recommendations. So talked to Paul Tims and he said one of the things that you you know you might start hearing about is wearable duress. Right. So that so about a week before I talked to to um Paul I received this little thing from Raptor. It's our visitor management system. Um much like the red pull stations that a fire the fire alarm within our building, some schools have invested in blue pull pull stations that will that will go, you know, hardwired to the police. So I asked Paul about that and he said, you know, Lori, here's the thing. You have to find that and and run towards it. And if there's a real emergency, we don't necessarily want to be putting people into the hallways. So that's why our intercoms have the phones are intercoms, right? We've also put something in place. Um after couple years ago, Paul shared a statistic about locked classrooms. We lock our exteriors. A number of years ago, we moved to locking our classroom doors. And it was inconvenient. And I'm sure lots of people grumbled, and they may still do because it is, you know, you got to put your key in every time someone comes in and out of the the classroom or you've got to move to the door to let kids in. But a statistic was shared that said that is one of the safest things that you can do. So our classrooms have been locked for a number of years and they're going to continue to be. We're going not we're not going to you know uh take convenience over safety. It's a little inconvenient but it's the safest way in which you know it's another layer of of of locked of lockdown on a on a regular basis. But one of the things that he did say we should investigate and there's an act. It's called Alyssa's act and it's it's

been approved in probably I think it's 11 or 12 states. So far, um, Illinois had some legislation. It's, um, it's been put on hold right now because there we're waiting for the Illinois State Board of Education to see if they're going to put any parameters around Alyssa's act, which would require us to have something like this. Wearable duress is what the phrase in the industry uh, is is calling it right now. So, you have a rapid way in which to to notify. So, if you weren't by your phone or you weren't by the intercom or you weren't by um a walkie-talkie, you could simply and if I open it, it's going to start to run its video, but it looks like this. It's about the size of a badge. It's a little thicker than a Here we go. It's a video. It's a badge and a video. They spent a lot of money on this advertisement, but you hang it around your neck. It's about this size. It's a little thicker. And any member of the staff could press a button and it would immediately go to um our first responders. So MJ and Sherry and I were on a call with them a few a few weeks ago and we're getting a quote and we're going to determine if you know we want to add that as another layer and then if so we'll bring it forward to the board with you know cost information and a little bit more information but that is something that was recommended by our safety experts. Um then our first responders you know they gave us a couple suggestions. One of the police officers, our SRO's um said he would like more directionality within our cameras. So, we're looking into um and and Dave was was in the room for that call and I think maybe M MJ uh Genitech is our is is our software system. We're going to see if we can just make the cameras that we invested almost $5 million in a little more user friendly so people can move through footage faster, right? Anytime we have a discipline situation, those cameras have paid for themselves, you know, over and over and over already. So, we're we reviewed what we have in place. We're looking at new things that are out on

the market to determine if we want to add anything else. Um they did not recommend, you know, um metal detectors or drones. You know, a drone, there's FAA rules. I I heard from, you know, one one community member that said had we considered it and that's more of something that a village would own. I know that's more something that a village might own or a police force might own and utilize, but it wouldn't be something that a school would direct because we would have to have trained personnel. They're typically military or or or police. So, um if we were to go the route of, you know, a metal detection, people have to be armed. There needs to be armed guards or armed police to man those metal detectors at every door. Right? So, you know, that is also not something that we are going to entertain, but we did discuss it with our first responders and our and our safety expert Paul Tims. Um, so we are trying when we get suggestions to do a little research and and see what our safety experts are recommending. So, um, just wanted to let everybody know we had a very robust um, conversation. and the Rolling Meadows Police. Uh many of them were there, many officers and and some of their higher-ups. Um and and were very complimentary actually in terms of how the team responded, how the district responded. They they kept reiterating that there is always going to be a lag in communication because there's an active investigation is taking place and we will communicate when we can communicate and what we can communicate. So that was nice to hear that again all the the first responders from all the municipalities were very locked step in that regard and I know it's frustrating at times because parents want more information and they want to know things that we can't tell them but we just simply can't and and and won't so we'll always just have to you know experience and and take that criticism but we take it very seriously I think we have a lot of things in place we have a few things that are under consideration and I just wanted to update you on kind of what's

happened since you know our last meeting. So, what questions, if any, do you have feedback for that um wearable device? Um just curious if you accidentally if you accidentally and that's one of the downsides because everything has an upshot and a downside. They're coming in heavy that they are going to come in as if we are fully in duress and we are calling a lockdown. They don't come in. Do you just push it once or do you

It's a It's a couple. I think it's a double and the second one is a hold, but don't quote me like we're we're getting more information. Um, but they're going to come in heavy and that is why some districts have not gone that route because I reached out to a couple locals

to see anybody's doing wearable arrest yet. The states that have gone towards that have been the ones that have passed Alyssa's act. Um, and if it is passed and is comes out with any regulations around it, um, I doubt it would be a funded mandate. Um, and it was initially supposed to be in effect by January of 2026, but since it's, you know, kind of frozen at the state at the legislative level. We don't know if it'll come back and veto or if it'll be, you know, on the legislative docket again. Frank and I as active members of Ed will certainly watch and then we just have to decide if this is something we would want to do in advance of Alyssa's act because we think it would be a wise, you know, additional layer. So under under consideration and and certainly for for additional discussion. Any other thoughts or questions. Okay. All right. That was my uh update.

And then what's next? Um now we're going to wrap it around 5.5 55 uh discussion on proposed. Yep. This has to do with triple eye. We were just all saying it's hard to believe it's it's coming our way in just a little over a month. Thanks for coming, Lisa. Go ice that knee. And I am gone. Yeah. Thanks. Was great. She's so dedicated. She came. [Laughter]

All right. So, annually um at the Illinois uh at triple I the board sends a delegate that has historically been Zubir or at least since I've been in the district. Oair has been our Zubir has been our delegate. And our work in now is to take a look at the resolution booklet and let Zubar know how we would like him to vote when he represents district 15 um in November. So we got away kind of easy. Yeah, there really is. Yeah, there really isn't.

One resolution and a handful of constitutional amendments. Um in many years it's 20 or more, right? So So this one school bus safety funding. Uh you all received your packet and and the vote sheet. Does anyone have any questions or um want to talk about this one and only um resolution submittal from Sycamore District 427? Just the um the portion of it that says creates a small district waiver that extends the compliance deadline to Mike.

The small district um waiver that extends the um compliance deadline to 2034. That wouldn't include us, right? not a small district. Yep. So, um they they are recommending that we adopt. Is there anyone in opposition of that recommendation? It doesn't really pertain to us. So, my assumption is we're going for it. Yes. Bear wrote a a vote a resounding yes on behalf of district 15. As always, I reserve the right uh oh, to change courses. So, someone needs to follow him to go delegate resolution. Keep an eye on him.

Keep an eye on him. Exactly. [Music] Oh, yeah. Yeah. You still got to vote me in later in the morning. So, don't say that yet. Sure. I'll put you in. Whatever you say, bosses. All right. We'll do that at the end. Okay. The other one is just I mean, do we need to discuss the constitutional amendments? I mean, I know it's on some sort of consent calendar anyway. They seem to be um getting into the weeds of the organization that I don't want to get into. No, I would agree. Okay. I um I'm just going to plug put a plug for Northern Cook. We have a um a meeting and we will talk more about those um the other parts of the agenda that the constitution.

Yeah. I mean maybe if you know anything specific about these uh about these amendments, it might be you'll have more a lot more knowledge about it if you want to let me know.

Okay. Um as um part of North Cook, I am the resolutions chair representative. Um so I did go down in Springfield and we did discuss all of these things. Actually the um I want to say the board of directors actually went through all of them and then we um one by one um discussed every aspect of the um of these articles or um that we have to actually um review every single year and um yes we we will discuss that at length on uh October 21st and you are all invited to that meeting. Um, so just asking if you have consideration and time um to just be there and that's probably a better venue for for that discussion.

Okay. Okay. Great. All right. Moving on. Okay. 57, right? No, 56. Uh, first reading of press. Okay. And it says 57. Okay. All right. So, um, typo. Yeah,

it's okay. All right. So, the first read of press 119. Sherry's not here uh today, but do we have any questions or um feedback for us on press 119? It was a pretty minor um issuance, which is nice. Uh largely just footnotes or minor adjustments, but not a lot of significant shifts. Can I um just talk about um 8 um 030 um visitors to to and conduct on school grounds? Grounds. Yeah.

Can we go um down to the last portion of it? I need to find it. Sorry, it's Yep. Got it. [Music] And there's this section here that caught my eye under enforcement or sorry this screen is so small. Okay. Do you want to look at I have it printed out. Do you want to take my Yeah, it was it was a portion of um it starts on the page before. Um convicted child sex offender.

Okay. There's this portion where there um certainly um we do not want child sex offenders on school property or avoiding within the area. Um but there is an exception there when they talk about parent or garden attending the school because um you know.

Okay. So um and the uh the limitations are attending a conference at the school um as well as to discuss progress with the child participating in the child review conferences. But um there is nothing in there talking about whether or not that child is participating in um events um such as like the band concerts or plays. Um, so I wanted to like um uh grant a vision for me of what that's going to look like uh D15 if that student um who's parent is a um an offender and u which we do have Mhm.

in the district. So what what we typically do is on a case-byase basis, an event bye-vent basis, the parent has to reach out and and ask for permission to come to to school property, especially when a child is going to any children are going to be present. Um and then we work with the family to see if that's something that, you know, we can support. And if we were to do that, then that person would be accompanied by a school administrator for the duration of that event. Okay. So, we have a a protocol in place. We use it very judiciously for obvious reasons and we just handle it on a case- by case basis. Um, but it is something we deal with more than once every year.

And so that that would include and not just limited to this um portion of the um policy for just um specifically conferences or or things as it related. So that's case by case. Okay. Yep. But there's pros and cons to that. We we we always have to find the balance. They have to protect all kids while granting access to to those that have a pretty s significant um designation, you know, assigned to them. So, we we handle it very carefully. We typically work with the family, we work with legal. Um it's it's a we take a very measured approach and there's a a staff member with them. Okay.

Yep. Okay. Any other questions or comments? We also within this policy updated our motordriven cycles to to um to ban them on school property the way in which the villages have done over the last month or so. So that language has also been updated. Okay. Okay. Great. All right. Moving on to number six.

It's okay. Uh acceptance of minutes. May I have a motion, please? I move to approve the minutes of the regular and special board of education in close session meetings of September 10th and the 23rd as attached. Second. Second. All right. All in favor or discussion? Sorry. All in favor? I All right. I carries.

Sorry. Don't talk about that one. Uh, all right. Board committee reports. Uh, Ed Reddd Frank. Okay, not much has changed since last month because the legislature is out of session. They are coming back uh for veto session October 14th through 16th and the 28th through the 30th. So, we'll see what they discuss there. I'm guessing um that there will be maybe something having to do with the Bears Stadium. We also are Ed is asking them to uh consider

some legislation with regards to uh foyer requests that are coming from AI and that the foyer requests only can be uh submitted through real people. So that's what we're hoping to get done because otherwise we get flooded with lots of requests from just AI systems. Um ask Jamie in her office, she'll tell you. So hopefully we'll get that taken care of. Uh and then the the kickoff meeting this year is uh October 20th. So we'll uh be discussing uh items at that meeting as far as what the focus of EDR red is going to be for the rest of the year. And uh that's about it. Thanks.

And October October 20th at Ed is a lunchon. Yes. And uh Frank, you you're representing and I'm I'm there as well. So you'll be there too. Tag team. Yeah. Two of us. Oh boy. All right. All right. 15 Foundation, Eric.

All right. Yeah, we went to the the last meeting um which we uh we are we tal we opened up by talking about the feed 15 initiative and how we're going to get involved in that. So that was really exciting to be a part of that. Uh we have two mini grants uh that have been applied for. The deadline is November 7th. Uh so we're we just want to publicize that out there to keep applying for those. Uh and hopefully I don't know what the limit is on this, but hopefully more than two. Mhm. So, she's really excited about that. And our next meeting is on the 16th. All right. And I think many grants launched today. Is it today? Oh, our communication went out.

Okay. Okay. So, two is pretty good. If it just went out today, we're pretty good. All right. Uh finance committee, Wenda. Um we met as a uh separately um uh yesterday the finance committee to talk about the five-year um Astro facility and capital funding planning. Um we had a little bit of a a sneak peek to um the facilities plan that we'll talk about again in um uh November. But um you know most of the items that were discussed tonight were things that we had discussed in that meeting. Okay. Awesome. Equity Committee Zubar. Uh there there's no update.

All right. Okay. So, moving on to 8.1, approval of the personnel report. May I have a motion, please? I move to approve the personnel report. Recommendations for administrative, certified, and non-certified staff members as presented. Second discussion. Roll call. Ader I Anerino I Shupai oh sorry Khan I Pacman I Hunt I item 8.2 Two, approval of destruction of closed meeting audio recording.

Um Jim and I met the other day to go over closed. This is the the audio recording. Oh, okay. It's not the closed session will come in November. Never mind. Okay. Sar motion, please. I move to approve the destruction of the specific closed session meeting audio recording from November 15, 2023 through November 13, 2019 in compliance with 5CS120/206. Second discussion roll call K I. Bachman I. Hunt I. Aer I. Herino

I. Motion carries. Item 8.3. May I have a motion, please? Mr. Zubar. I move that board member Zubar Khan be appointed the 2025 IASB delegate to the 2025 IASB delegate assembly on behalf of district 15. Second discussion. I think we should all second that one. Roll call. Gun. I Bagman I Hunt I hat her I Herino I All right motion carries 8.4 May I have a motion please?

I move to split the bid award and award contracts to conserve FS Wakanda Illinois for 27,437.50 50 and Morton Salt Incorporated from Chicago for $37,164 for a total bid award of $64,61.50 as presented. Second discussion. Roll call. K. Iman. Hunt. I know. I

Motion carries 8.5. May I have a motion, please? I move to approve the revised 2025 to 2026 school calendar and the 2026 to 2027 school calendar as presented. Second discussion. Roll call. Bman I hunt I ader I Khan I. Motion carries. Uh item 8.6 Six. I move to approve the updated policy 8 col 030 visitors to and conduct on school property as presented. Second discussion. This is the electric just right. This is electric vehicles. Mhm.

Yep. All right. Roll call. Hunt I. Aer I. Herino I. Khan I. Bagman I. All right. Motion carries. Would anyone like to remove anything from the consent calendar? Okay. May I have a motion, please? I move to approve the consent calendar items as presented. Second. Discussion. Roll call. Ader. I. Anorino. I. Khan. I. Bachmann. I. Hunt. I. Motion carries. Correspondence. Dr. Hines. As always, we've submitted all the foyas that we've received. Any questions?

There was one foyer that came um just recently. I just wanted to know if it was real. Is the CPA society Mhm. that that is real. Okay. All right. Yep. All right. Okay. May I have a motion to adjurnn? I move to adjurnn. All in favor or second. Sorry, rushing. Second. Thank you, Zar. All in favor? All right. Who's first? Uh Frank Frank is always and then Zoo Cheers.