Urbana School District #116 Board of Education 1_15_22 (128 kbps)

11:11PM Jan 25, 2022

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All right, it's 730 on Tuesday January 4, we will start tonight's study session of Urbana school district 116. Well, roll call please.

Number has an AKA here your member or here. Member hall here. Member Rogalski. Here, member Carter's here. Vice President ECSA here and President Pulaski.

Here. Are there any additions, corrections or modifications for tonight's agenda? Hearing none, we'll move into citizen statements. We've had four emailed to the district. The first is from usually Baryshnikov Dear members of the board Dear Dr. Aubrey Tatum and their student ambassadors, we would like to provide some context for the item seven on the agenda, dealing with the approval of the waiver to the section 17 dash one five of the school code aiming to increase the district's administrative costs above what the code allows. According to the latest stats, USD 116 had the administrator to student ratio of one to 133, higher then in champagnes district 412 141 and much higher than Bloomington normals unit five one to 211. Meanwhile, the average administrative salary in Urbana school district is 120,411 per annum above the state average easily beating champagnes 99 104 are Bloomington normals ABA, zero 36. The ratios of average salaries administrators teachers is 2.22 in Urbana 1.72 in Champaign, and 1.42 in Bloomington Normal. We will present a detailed comparative analysis elsewhere but it should be clear that our district is already suffering from significant bureaucratic bloat. spends on administration per student weigh more than the nearby metro area districts to address. The all too important challenge of overcoming educational disparities by expanding the administrative apparatus is, in our view, by far not the best way to proceed. If the board believes the new director position is the key to closing gaps in educational outcomes, we should outline what specific actions as higher would enable and what outcomes it would affect. We urge the board to give the matter careful examination that deserves respectfully yearly Baryshnikov. The second is from Ruth contour bits. Do you remember to the board is part of your study of the school improvement goals. Item 9.2. On the agenda, I urge you to take a closer look at a teaching method that is used at our elementary schools during the literacy block. Sorry.

The teaching method is based on the station rotation model. This blended learning model is highly popular as is supposed to provide a more personalized learning experience. engage students in collaborative projects and challenge them with online interactive material. The idea is to divide the class into three to four small groups according to student's academic level. The class time is partitioned into 20 minute intervals using a timer, where the groups rotate between stations with different tasks in the Standard Model. The 90 minutes literary block literacy block will be divided into four stations with 10 minutes budgeted for transition or flex time. One station is for a teacher led discussion, second station for collaborative work, third station for online tasks and a fourth station for individual work such as writing. However, the implementation of the rotation model in our elementary schools and specifically at Yankee Ridge, is far from this ideal picture. at Yankee bridge, the average student spends about 90% of the ELA time without any interactions following the zero talking rule. They pass time between stations with unengaging busy work tasks below grade level. To clarify, here's what a typical 90 minutes ELA block looks like at Yankee ridge. The class is divided into four groups. By reading level usually group one is below grade level groups two and three are at grade level and group four is above grade level. There are five stations Yes, you read five correctly. Stations one through four are reading, listening to audio books, even in fourth grade, word work and writing. The tasks do not involve practicing any newly learned material. In Word work the students write sight words forwards and backwards. While the writing in the students journal is not shared or corrected by a teacher, station five is that this teacher's desk the group's rotate the first four stations quietly no talking aloud. If the students talk to each other, they may lose recess time they are not allowed to talk to the teacher either because the teacher is busy at station five. They're the teacher leaves in the reading groups and 20 minute sessions meeting once a week with the advanced group twice a week with a middle group and three times a week with the group that is far below grade level. Now, if you have mastered addition and telling time, which according to the Common Core should happen around third grade, but if you are a typical Yankee rich student is more likely to happen after fifth grade. Estimating from the Illinois state data. You would know that the reading groups only account for two hours out of over seven hours of yellow time per week. What happens at the teacher station during the five hours left over ELA time every week. You may think that the teacher may be visiting other stations, checking on students work and giving feedback. Unfortunately not. The teacher is busy at her desk doing one to one assessments endlessly. If you were to visit the classroom and watch an individual student during an ELA block instead of watching the action of the teacher's desk, you'll see him spending between 60 and 90 minutes every day on his own rotating between stations doing mindless tasks and learning nothing new. In fourth grade he writes in his journal at the same level as he did in sixth grade no one notices. When the timer goes off. He moves on to reading comic books on Epic. 20 minutes later, he is still on epic, and no one notices what he reads. During the final 20 minutes he finishes the required one worksheet. On the weak sight words scrambling and unscrambling words such as every when because and stop. No one checks his work. He finishes early, so they can go back to reading Captain Underpants for another 10 minutes on Fridays. He has a reading group instead of the audiobook station. He gets to go to station five for 20 minutes there the students take turns reading aloud from a book. The teacher asks a couple of questions about The characters and predictions, then they need to write something down but the timer goes off and they won't get back to this until the next time his group meets there is no homework. The PI forget what he read by then and will have to reread during his group time. Meanwhile, he is back to the silent ELA stations routine. It is no wonder that in 2019 pre pandemic, only 24% of Yankee students were proficient in ELA between 2015 and 2019. We fell more than 15 percentage points we used to be above the state average. Now we are 15 percentage points below the state average. Perhaps our school improvement goals should focus more on instruction methods. Sincerely, Ruth Corbett's. The next is from Mike Madigan. Dear members of the school board. First, we first thank you for your service, especially in these trying times we truly appreciate it. We right to urge you to keep our children in school. Yes, this pandemic is surging again. But it is mostly a variant that is mild in effect and will ultimately keep will ultimately help build immunity. Our child and many others are vaccinated. We assume most teachers and administrators are as well. The CDC has reduced quarantining for those who are symptomatic indicating that this is a variant of mild effect that will run its course. Our child suffered mental and emotional illness throughout the remote learning of last year, she learned a fraction of what she would have in person. This will only worsen if you send her home again, we urge you to make accommodations for those who have underlying conditions to be able to learn remotely. But the total health of our child and her peers needs to be paramount in your decision making. And the only decision that makes total health and while being into account is to remain in person for learning sincerely, Michael and Sinead mannequin.

And the last is from cord Schroeder dear school board and administration. First thank you for thank you all for your time and efforts. I appreciate the hard work you all due to help our community. Second, please continue to keep our children attending school. The difference between last year and this year is unbelievable. The students are learning more in the classrooms and in the social atmosphere. This year is representative of what we hoped we would have when we chose Urbana High School. I was incredibly disappointed last year when numerous classes did not teach the entire syllabus. This was directly blamed on remote learning by several teachers. Please do not place our students or teachers in this position again. Keep school in school so our community can continue to work towards a brighter tomorrow. Thank you. Cords Schroeter. That's it for citizens statements that were sent in. Does anybody else wish to address the board tonight? Seeing no one. There is no call tonight for an executive session after tonight's meeting. Is there a motion to approve tonight's agenda? Roll call please. Member Hall.

Yes. Member Belsky Yes. Never has an AKA Yes. member or

Yes.

Member Carter vote yes. Vice President XM. And President Pulaski.

Yes. We have an agenda. We do have a public hearing tonight. 7.1 of the public hearing on the proposed application for waivers section 17 dash one dot 15.

So Carol's joining us via zoom. I think she was going to share a little bit of background prior to that. Can you hear us Carol are okay? Yes. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes.

Okay, good. Just wanted to share that this waiver basically is the first time we've ever had to do one of these in my 29 years here. So this isn't something that happens often. But with the combination of COVID. And this new administration, administrative position, it's requiring us to ask for this waiver. When you approved the audit back in October. There is a page of the AF annual financial report that showed administrative cost cap worksheet. It's a where we go through this computation work looks at last year's audited figures of administrative costs compared to what we've budgeted for FY 22. So when the audit was completed, we realized that was going to be over. We realized we were going to have to go through this process. The other process that you could go through is amending the budget but the budgets correct. It's because of the addition of the director of equity and inclusion for this year. That is why we went over the law allows you to be at 105% We were at 106% So we were only over 1% But unfortunately because of that 1% We have to go through This process. So what we have to do is we had to file a notice in the paper that we were having the public hearing. So if innovated wanted to come and speak to it, they could, then we put it, we had to send letters out to all of our legislators and our teachers union, letting them know we were having the public hearing this evening. Like I said, we had it in the newspaper as well. So we have to file all of this information to the legislature to let them know that we followed all the things we need to follow and ask for the waiver, and then we'll that will get approved this spring. So that's the process and tonight is just a piece of that process to be able to apply for this waiver. Any questions?

Thank you, Carol. And with that, I'd like to open tonight's public hearing with regards to the application for the waiver. Does anyone wish to address the board about the application process for waivers? Section?

17 Dash 1.5. Does anyone wait about 20 seconds here? All right, hearing none, close the public hearing. All right. All right, before we progress any further like to take a moment of silence tonight to remember the life of Jordan netballer Lewis, one of our kids who was lost far, far too soon.

Thank you, everyone. Next up, is our Student Ambassador reports. Parker Michael, is there something you'd like to present tonight? Okay,

um, I do have a concern about the way lunch has been handled recently, last semester students, we, as students, we were informed that if we had great grades, we will not have to attend studio time anymore. This has ultimately timidly resulted in an increase of students that are eating lunch in the commons room. Meaning that there's not any space, meaning. That's a problem for COVID related reasons. Although there is a staff member there that is constantly saying only four students should be at a table. There are no students that are following these rules. And it's just being broken. Constantly. So I think it's a problem, because there's not enough space. And we're not we're not It's not when it's not following the protocols for battling COVID The correct way. So that's just one of my concerns for the upcoming semester. So I got

I agree with my goal. I think it's hard to feel safe in the comments at lunchtime when there's so many kids in there. All that their masks off eating.

Thank you very much. First administrative report tonight is door detection system demo discussion.

Okay, so John and I are going to tag team this and we have our guests from open gates. Laurie, can you Okay, perfect. So Laura and Ravi. We have been making adjustments to this PowerPoint up until the last minute the other board members have a copy of their seats. So Lori is sending you a PDF copy now. I think she has everyone. Does everyone have a copy of this? Okay, I will share it with everybody. Okay, I'll just share with everybody while we're sitting here. All right, John.

Yeah, and we are also joined tonight by Tom McDermott. So a couple of weeks ago, we had discussed the Evolve system. I think at the time you guys had asked us to make sure that we were thorough and looked into make sure that that was the best system. Since then, we've also been looking into the open gate system. And we've presented this it's a different kind of system. It's a little bit more streamlined. It's a lot easier to operate with less staff, the total cost of the system implementing is about a little less than a third as much as the original original system that we were looking at. And it has a lot of other benefits. So in just to be equitable, we wanted to make sure that we had Tom here tonight, to talk a little bit about the open gate system. And what it offers. This is again, much like the other one we talked about, it is not a metal detector, where you're walking through a gate ring, and you have people kind of scrutinizing you. This is an open flow system, where the biggest takeaway is it's not really impeding students as they're coming into the building, they just kind of walk through as they normally would. It's an open post. And we'll probably see some pictures here in just a minute, similar to the other one that we looked at. And I'm going to turn it over to Tom. And he can talk a little bit about it. We did test this out with the crisis committee, and have one of these on site where we were able to kind of walk through and see how it would work with Chromebooks and different devices that students had. And the Christ crisis committee was also very appreciative of being able to see the system and how quickly and easily it's set up. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Tom, and you can go ahead.

Great. Thanks, John. Thank you, everyone. Yeah, so just real quick, Tom McDermott, from chair, I'm the National School Safety and Security sales manager, for chair, been the security industry for more than 20 years. So just some real quick background on chair before we get into the open gate was, which is a very specific detector of ours. We've been at this for more than 50 years, originally, you know, our headquarters is in Italy. We're an r&d company been around since 68. You know, global company, this is not a small company. Again, 62, started textiles, started r&d, to walk through detectors and 75, patented the first one in 82. And, you know, from there, we just more and more patents, and we've got the UN using us, all kinds of people around the world using our different technologies. I'm going to jump through quite a bit, we've got three major four major divisions, and I'm just going to focus on the Security Division, but we do industrial food and pharmaceutical, they've got to look for metal and foods as well and other things. Our ground search program is what we do with the military looking for IEDs. And then war torn countries. We've really taught the UN how to do this, and then lots of countries around the world. So this isn't just a walk through metal detector company. Most people know us through airport security. TSA has been using us since just after 911. But airports around the world have been using us both our walkthroughs well, not just walkthroughs our shoe detectors, explosives around the world just not of us yet. We get liquid bomb detection as well at our bomb detection as well, is just some of the airports around the world. So not just us, that use our technology. Building security around the world from the parliament from the Vatican. You name it, they're using our technology, House of Commons and got to move it's here Secret Service decided to use us since in 88. So the White House use us and lots of other institutions. Events security, of course, you know, a place like Disney and things like that around the world have been using us Major League Baseball, you name it, they use US Federal Bureau of Prisons use us they've got to find the smallest item, half a razor blade for inmates. People use it for loss prevention Apple use as they want to find a single year but somebody's walking out of the warehouse. We do radiation detection as well. So lots of different detection capabilities. So this isn't just a walkthrough you know, this isn't a fly by night company. We've been around a long, long time. I'm not going to get into too much there. Just wanted to give you a little background. I'll jump into a few things. Here are some of our successes. This is recent. By the way. This is a New York Post cover from back in December 3 An article. NYPD the police department has been using our detectors for many, many years including, you know, New Year's Eve celebrations and things like that. And York City schools have been using us for years but they don't have in store that every inner city school. And what happened is a school in Brooklyn and I can send you the articles of school in Brooklyn, that, that they found a gun on an individual. And they decided the next day, they better scan the whole school. So the NYPD brought the team over to check out the school. And that's when I found more than 21 weapons in a single day. In a single day. Now, that's New York City for Sir Bana, but our detectors work. Use them, it'll find the weapons.

Yeah, I just wanted to highlight at some point, as we're starting to go through the surveyed data. One of the questions that was asked of both school and staff is do they feel that there's items in the school and we'll be able to look at that later, but especially on the staff survey, there's kind of an overwhelming feeling that, yes, there's something in the schools that we're missing.

Yeah, and that's something every school has to decide every night, not just every school, every organization, just like I mentioned, Apple's trying to make sure people aren't stealing earbuds because they're pretty expensive. So really, it's, it's up to you to tell us, what do you need to be able to attack, I just jumped through a number of our different detectors, just to give you some examples, with lots of different walkthrough detectors, depending on what you need to be able to find. Again, you know, we can find half a cutter blade, which is what was used during 911. To to, you know, slash people and pilots and things like that. So half an exact though, is really what that is. So Federal Bureau of Prisons, lots of people that have it set that low as matter of fact, NYPD they use that as well. And in New York City schools, because kids are slicing each other with razor blades, getting in fights with screwdrivers and things like that. Honestly, they're, you know, although they found 21 weapons at this school, it wasn't funny with guns, by the way, was a mix of knives and guns, but they find screwdrivers and razor blades and kids every day. Because one, some are fighting in the aggressor, and some are just defending themselves. So they they're looking for the smaller items. You have to tell us you know what you wanted to attack. The open gate is our latest detector that came about from working with the NFL that want to move people a lot faster. And that's really what this about, I'll just do a quick video here is probably the best way to show it is just one example. Can you guys see that? Yes. So this is people just you could see walking through carrying all kinds of stuff. It's just two poles. They're just pretty quickly walk it through. It's very, very simple. They're portable units wireless, way less than 25 pounds, you can pick it up and move it very, very simple. But this came after 50 years of research and development, working with clients like the NFL and say what do you need. As matter of fact that gentleman right there Aaron was head of security for Disney for 10 plus years and use our technology now he works for us. So a lot of our technologies come for working with partners like Disney, and the NFL. And what snacks but you saw how quickly he set that up. I'll show you another video here

give me an idea how quickly compared to the vault system you looked at. Now you guys didn't have that come in. But this is how he's in this a former secret service agent by the way for 30 years and worked in the White House and worked for President Bush and actually on 911 But this is how easy it is to set up. As opposed to the Evolve which literally takes hours to set up and you can't move it but if you need to move it from inside to a dance to football game to a school board meeting. It's literally as simple as this he's just cheating and measuring it and getting it to about 36 inches. And that's really it. I mean that's how quickly it you know you can set it up.

Show you what you're able to do though. This is one of our tax that he's going to show you that he's going to walk through and he just alarmed.

Show you what he's carrying a handgun. It's what alarm done. And you can walk through either way, by the way, he's just kind of showing it stays green so no alarm on that show what is carrying just as an example, personal items now that's a vape pen. I purposely showed you this because for some schools of course that's a prohibited item. But for us it's not a it's not a what we call a mass casualty. threat, obviously, and either we consider a Swiss army knife a mass casualty, but we call this a weapons detector because it's not a metal detector because there's all kinds of metal there he just walked through in IT DID NOT alarm on but alarmed on the guns who's going to put that back and it alarmed on the gun I'll show you another example that we're back where he's got a backpack full of stuff. Still, yes, who's carrying the gun back through on that one? Yes, he's got a backpack full of stuff. So again, it's take the gun out which it alarmed on and walk you through no alarm. See what it carrying now. Kids with a fob to fobs on an actually which often set it off. They pin again. And these discussion will have in a second about vape pen, tobacco tin. So you got to get an umbrella in there and he's got sunscreen, metal bottle, of course. Tablet 10. Another phone, backup battery. So he was able to walk through with everything. But alarmed on the gun when he walked through another tablet by the way. And another one a bow. So he was able to carry all that through but it only alarm when he had the gun.

Now, Tom, I will jump in. We did test this with all of the Chromebooks kind of all of the various model of Chromebooks and the same as the other system we were looking at. The hinge of the Chromebooks is basically looks like the barrel of the gun. We were saying yeah, one of these on site, we're able to kind of do a few different things to see how we could mitigate those false nuisance alarms on Chromebooks. One thing that we did, I think it was in crisis committee that we were pretty successful with. If you just hold the Chromebook over your head, that does not alarm as long as that's the only thing in your hand, which it's pretty easy to see at that point. That's one way. The other thing that I think some other school districts around the country have been doing is a path around where there's a table kind of to the side, and they pass it around that this one did do a lot better. With the kind of what do you call them the thicker Nalgene bottles than the hydro flasks, the thick metal water bottles, were when we were testing before it was killing a lot of nuisance alarms on the Hydroflask type. Kind of thick, insulated water bottles.

Yeah, which charges go through I mean, I carry a Hydroflask with me. And that's what I test with all the time. And no problem. Now again, it depends what you're set for. So as a matter of fact, we can clear it discriminated against Chromebooks, but not if you're looking for a smaller handgun. So it's like everything's a trade off. So if it's a larger gun with that you get the Chromebook through. But you know, like most schools, you want to find that smaller handgun, versus like a Tec nine something small, larger, that's truly mass casualty with larger clips and things like that. So it was set for that your Chromebook to get through all day long. So we do have so we have tested about 100 Different Chromebooks, but not able to discriminate the Chromebook when you really look at for a small handgun. Not yet anyway. But again, this is something you know, years ago, it was, you know, our customers asked us hey, can you can you discriminate the cell phone so I pick it up in keys and coins and so we've been doing that for a while we just you know, the technology advances just like everything else. And the best way to think about it is almost like your your TVs, you know, back when most of us were kids and picture quality was pretty poor, just like digital cameras. But now with a TV it's 8k, it's very similar with with our technology. It's a number of signals and our older walkthrough detectors had about 60 signals looking for a threat item. This detector has more than 300. So in effect, we're painting a better picture and we can we know the difference between the metal and a water bottle and the metal and a gun itself. hardened steel barrel, because it heats up over, you know usage. So it's a very different metal content. And we're able to tell the difference. The issue again, like John said with a Chromebook is because of the spine on it, that looks really like a knife. So and because that is a hardened steel toe that the Chromebook and notebooks hold up, that it's really just as a knife going through. So we will find knives, although that's not really what the open gate was designed for was knives were looking for mass casualty, but it will find knives that are designed for killing for sure. So we're not purposely not looking for the Swiss Army knife, just like we're not looking for the vape pen. With the open gate. Again, we've got lots of different detectors. You know, lots of different ones, the airport, for example, they're looking for everything. So they're looking for the small and so lots of different detectors. The open gate was really designed for more throughput, let people walk through the purses and backpacks all kinds of things. But find the mass casualty weapon. That makes sense. Any questions on that?

Board members ambassadors? Any questions? Ask Ryan, what is the what is the signal itself? If you're able to tell us is it similar to the Evolve system that we were talking about before? Is it different altogether?

No, it's different. Great question. So it's electromagnetics. But there's two kinds there's passive and active. A passive detector, which Evolve is which really what you call magnetometer, those are only looking for type of metals that can be magnetized. So you're very limited. And how it goes about is as well, the technology is different. It's electromagnetics, but it's different. Ours is active. So we will find both ferrous and non ferrous metals is one of the big things. There's different in our technology. One of the there's lots of differences between us and the evolve. Yeah, the evolve, won't find a gun at the ankle level. There's lots of issues with the evolve. Again, we've been at this for 50 years, they're relatively new to the market. Although I think one day, they might have some good technology, it's got some, they've got a ways to go. And how they do screening, because you're watching a monitor versus watching the people going through. There's different issues with the actual tech itself.

Board members, ambassadors, any other questions?

Yeah, I was just kind of curious when you're talking about mass casualty weapons, is that based on like content of the weapon shape of the weapon? How are our organizations able to define that?

Great question. So it's a gun, so it's more than a single shot. Okay, so it's gotta be more than a single shot to a standard handgun, other department of justice standards, by the way for this, and I can send you information on it. If there's another example of how we're different from evolve. We're here to both all Department of Justice standards and international standards, which means when you say it will detect a standard handgun, that's a certain setting. Nonetheless, you to be it has to test it. Throughout the walkthrough, the tech are all up and down, turn it sideways, all kinds of thing, but we're looking for more than a single shot in the open gate. Again, different detectors will do different things. We'll find a single find actually that detector you see on the screen there, we can find what we call a disassembled gun. So even a Derringer, this disassemble, which is really close to what the TSA does. They're looking for disassemble gun we're looking for the open gate mass casualty is like a six shooter or higher up, okay, as a mass casualty. And as far as a knife goes with a mass casualty, consider it a hunting knife a K bar which the military uses something is designed for killing versus just you know, you know, buck knife a kid used for for hunting or you know, a Swiss army knife, but some and the difference there is the metal content. Again, it's hardened steel sort of holds up most blades or kids carry. If you honestly try and stop someone, chances are, it's going to break on a bone. Most of those knives won't will not hold up and that's why they're not considered mass casualty knives that are designed for killing Trulli weapons will hold up, and you can definitely slash number of people. So there's no legal definition for that on a knife, other than, you know, a knife that's truly a weapon. And there's classification for that, but not a mass casualty weapon. But as far as edge weapons go,

and as we're doing testing with both systems, as far as what it hit on knife wise, it was very similar. So we tried it with a few different sizes and types of knives for both of them. And again, to reiterate what Tom said, kind of the thinner, like paring knife or a little less than three inch pocket knife. Neither one of those really hit on that.

But again, I it sounds like the open gate is really ideal for you like it is for most schools, but not again, NYPD doesn't work for it. So it's not for every school. So if we, you know, we have some schools that nope, gotta find the vape pen. Okay, well, it's metal, we can find it churches, it's just a different detector to detect, but it'll find all kinds of things. And it's really just based on the setting, but the open gate. It has a very specific design, and it's really just looking for that mass casualty. And that was something that honestly debated with the NFL, because I had those questions. Well, because honestly, some of the security staff at certain teams, like no, we want to find, you know, any night. And you know, when it comes down to it, the argument we had is, wait a minute, at these stadiums you have, you know, restaurants and you have high end restaurants and steak restaurants go grab a steak knife. So what are we talking about here? So that's also true, you guys, you've got a cafeteria with knives, right? Unless you're using plastic these days, but kids can find other weapons to use. So you know, you really have to have that conversation. But the open gate is about really that mascot. So it's like, you know, ideally looking for a gun or a larger knife.

One question I have is how many like school installations do you have here? And then the United States? And is there any installation close to us in Urbana?

But there boy, I don't know. I mean, as far as the open gate or any detector installation,

not specifically the open gate, but any would be would be okay.

I'm the only school in your area would be University of Illinois, at Urbana is using some of ours, I forget where they're using, they're not using them at their stadium yet. They're using a for some of their other facilities. But yeah, are Ben University of Illinois using him? No other Springfield is, look, you know, they're not around the corner. But they're looking at purchasing a bunch for the Springfield district. But then not not in in Urbana right now. But across the country, again, you know, people need a larger school districts, Houston, Tampa, Miami, Dallas, you know, NYPD, Chicago, you know, all been using our detectors for years. But going to the open gate again, you know, schools like NYPD or districts, like NYPD just said, it's just not gonna work for us, because we need to be able to find those smaller items. But, and the open gate, by the way, just came out this year, to really just rolling it out. Just came out in April, and really just started hitting the road. So again, I'm before this year, che and never had anyone focused on schools. We although we sold schools, when they called us, we never had anyone focus on on it. So we were focused more on the larger institutions, and largest sports facilities, whatever a district would call us or school calls, we'd be happy to help but we didn't focus on it. But, you know, as you well know, there's been so many problems with schools in the last number of years, and especially this year. The companies like a time when did you really drive this because it's an issue for schools. But so really just start hitting the road in June and July, and getting out there different, you know, school security conferences and whatnot. So it's really brand new, just getting out there. But number schools, I can certainly give you references for honestly, three quarters of them though, at this point. I'll be honest with you, I've been using it just for school board meetings. As crazy as it seems. As you guys I'm sure know, there's been you know, lots of threats, death threats, at school board meetings and lots of not just on social media, but people at a school board meeting saying they'll kill you to the superintendent and others and I got a gun in the car. So I've got a number of districts are called me He said, Hey, can you FedEx me one, we've got a school board meeting next week, I need one. And that's the beauty of the open gate, we can do that and have it shipped. And you could set it up in minutes.

And the other benefit, not just for school board meetings, but because the system is so portable. And it takes a few minutes to boot up. But you saw how quickly you set it up in the video. Any sort of kind of social media threat or anything that's perceived if there was something at DPW or Lille, we could have them there, like in a matter of minutes to kind of check people coming in, or school board meeting, it would be pretty trivial to move it across town, they just have a handle and you pick them up. And, Tom, I did want to ask on the Springfield ones. I think we're all kind of aware of the things that have been happening in Springfield lately. So they were going with the open gate, they'll discuss Yeah, they're looking

they're having that same debate, because when I demo it is actually right after I saw you, I was down there. And because I did have that, you know, that student died you because of a knife. So we absolutely had that discussion. And, and some were there and saying, We've got to find eyes. And some are saying that's just not common. And so we're having that debate. So they're looking at both our PMB twos, which actually one in the background there. That's this sort of baseball stadium that's common for our professional sports teams, was just as column style here for outdoor use. They're looking at some of those, I've got some used ones that came back from the Denver Broncos, because the Broncos went with another major team. So I've got some used one. So they're they're still having that debate. So I've got quotes to them both a traditional detector that we'll find, you know, again, the smallest half a razor blade, or the obligate and they're just having that debate. And actually, they've got a board meeting, I think next week to have a discussion.

That's one more sorry, what's the life expectancy? How long do these things last?

You know, to it's hard to say I mean, you know, it's a three year warranty. But I mean, the TSA has had it for 20 years, and they run 24/7 the NFL, most of the stadiums have had them for you know, 1012 years, the only time they really go bad honestly is like, you know, they put them on carts and move around and they fall off the back of a cart, you or something like that. Other than that, they don't fail. They just don't, there's no maintenance on them, you can get maintenance. And the only reason we do that is really for ensuring that they're all set properly. Because what happens a lot of our institutions, his staff changes over, and especially larger facilities that have you know, hundreds of these, they have different settings at different doors, so it's inconsistent. So they ask us just to come out and recalibrate everything, make sure everything's set the same. But that's really the only maintenance we ever do. Again, less than once in a blue moon because it is electronics that will go but it's incredibly rare, incredibly, where these things are designed to be outside. Again, our NFL stadiums and you know, Cleveland and New York, Chicago that are outdoor, you know, eight do. And I don't know if you guys saw the packer game the other night, it was a degrees, freezing and they have our detectors outside, they hold up.

And as far as general reliability, we're really impressed. They're very solid construction. If you guys got to kind of play around with them while they're here. And Tom even while one was here, kind of threw one to the ground and picked it back up 60 seconds for it to recalibrate and it was working again.

Yeah, and they're designed and though the open gate is because of our work with professional leagues, they would often hose down that concrete that you see there, and ours would they would hold up but because that we said well let's make this one like 100% waterproof, which it's designed for it'll the water will flush out the bottom jewelry, take a hose to it. And we've done testing, the PGA had us out for three days straight in the rain in Texas one day, and he's literally just out in the rain just like that and they held up and still detecting as people were walking through and even police officer couldn't believe it. He said wait a minute, he walked through this gun and that alarm. I mean it just they hold up again, after years and years of doing things

I'm assuming assuming the units must be I mean they're not plugged in right there must be batteries in them then they're charged up and there's there's gonna be lifespan on the batteries.

Yeah. And so the battery is the great thing about those, which was I was really impressed when we got them. As we were unpacking them I'm like oh, these just take a standard. I think it was a was it a Milwaukee Makita battery cracker pack. So off the shelf, you could go buy replacement battery pack at Lowe's, in

the insert, that's right, and they run on each tower runs on one battery. And it automatically fails over to the other one, when one runs down, so you get about 10 and a half hours of life. But we just came out we just released though to where one of those batteries you can replace, it's basically a power adapter in place of that batteries, you can power it as well. But unfor, fully charged batteries, those are wrong about 10 and a half hours. Again, you can get back ups, and then just you know, throw the backup battery in there, you know, too. So lots of options.

And also to that point to have that flexibility. If you have a contentious football game and you want to bring it out to the football gate, you don't need to worry about power wiring or network or anything. Or if you have, you will bring it to the soccer field or the baseball team. And it doesn't really require any additional infrastructure, you can just pick it up and be there in about three minutes.

And we have some schools. Hillsborough County, one largest in the country largest one of the largest in Florida, they've been using are an older version of our bubble detector that came out honestly in the late 90s. And they do just random screenings at their high schools. Because they didn't want that look, you know with a bunch of detectors in front of the school. So they've always done random screening. And they want to clear a whole school in a day and it would take them honestly about five hours to clear a school have a habit check just like NYPD did with these unclear school in an hour, but just the portability throughout the back of their SUV. They go over to school and clear and they can be they can take kids right off the bus and have them so they know when kids get off the bus or not stashing in the bushes or in the trash or whatever. They haven't come wrath the boss walkthrough right to the attacker. It's clear it then they have a dog or also SRO go check the bus. So there's all kinds of ways you can deploy this. So don't think of it as your traditional detector walkthrough is it have to be you know, at the front of the building? You got lots of options

Alright, board members, ambassadors any any for the end? Yeah,

I did have I'm sorry to wait till the end. Um, I had a question about to the end that you said that it can be used in a different way. When you in the presentation, it says four to five machines. So could you remind me please do you need the two towers next to it like to create a band walkthrough? You can't just use one time on its own. Okay.

So, so just like the one can you still see my screen here? Yes. So this one here. Can you see my pointer? I don't see my point. Yep. So this one is our one of our traditional detectors has a crossbar here. So it's still two towers. This just uses a proprietary wireless technology. So we don't have to have that crossbar. But there's a people don't realize it but with electromagnetics. And how this works is one of the towers is sending a signal. And one of the towers is receiving a signal, and then doing the diagnostics and figuring out if there's a threat either. So that's why there's always two as far as how many you need. That's determined by of course, you know, what are you trying to attack. But a general rule of thumb is we use your throughput. So our traditional detector, because everyone has to pretty much take everything out of the pockets, but their cell phone and keys and coins. You're not walking through a backpack with a traditional detector, you put about five to 700 people an hour through a single detector, because they're slowing down. Because what will happen as you well know is you take stuff out of your pocket, you said that and you walk through it alarms, and you got to oh shoot, I forgot this and you got to set something else back down, then alarms and you we call it yo yoing you go back through until you clear. So that takes time. With the open gate. You don't have that to you change the process. You're not yo yoing people, if it alarms, you send them over the secondary screening, but you don't have those nuisance alarms we call them we don't call them false positives because if it alarms it found no, I mean so that so it just is it a threat, but we can because of the discrimination technology, we can get about 2020 500 people and our through a single open gate. So it replaces really four to five traditional attackers. So that's maybe where you got that number.

Okay, Well, thank you for answering that question. The reason why I asked just in general the number is that, I mean, yes, we have many entrances to our schools. But I was also thinking about events that happen, especially during business sporting months, when, say, in one weekend, you could have a swim meet, which is at what is in the indoor Aquatic Center, which is a building at our campus is completely separate from our high school, you may have a basketball game going on that morning, or a volleyball game or something. So you may have lots of different entrances that would supposedly need to be monitored, because then you get into questions of equity of which, if we don't have enough gates, which one deserves to be checked, and which doesn't. And that's a big kettle of fish, but

the big five, so we had and we'll go through this a little bit later in the presentation, what we let Tom off the hook here. Oh, no, but but we had kind of set up a use case where we're going to cover our main entrances. So door one, door nine, and then door three and five was kind of what led us to have average coverage or to have adequate coverage with this system at those three doors. Also, because you have five even if you had volleyball, basketball, boys basketball, all going on at the same time swim meet, you would be able to kind of allocate those, as it's as you saw fits for those different situations. Okay.

You did bring something up that you have, you know, you do have to consider should consider, you know, you know, why did you you know, why did you make kids do it at the basketball game, but not at the Swimmy. Right? So that's something you need to make sure you can address with, you know, the community, right? Well, and

also, you know, venues like say, if you went to a cross country meet or a tennis match where they're out in the open, and it's it's not like you enter in one specific spot, which is not really for you to have to worry about. These are just thoughts going in my head. My last question for you, though, that you can answer is, well, actually, no, it's not my last I'm sorry, bear with me. One of the questions was about upkeep because you I know when you did it, the comparison with evolve and open gate, they you would present it that they go by lease and you go buy a one time purchase, but being realistic, and being in the digital age where we get upgrades on phones and everything else digital so quickly, like how long do you need to go before you have to update any kind of software or wiring or technology? And how much does that on average cost? And also, with the training of staff? I mean, what type of staff training would be required for this? What type of staff would be qualified to not only monitor this, but then do you have recommendations of what would happen if a weapon is confiscated? In the worst case scenario by someone who doesn't want to give surrender it? Or someone who's belligerent or you know, I mean, is that wrapped into the training? Or do you guys just provide bare bones training on how to read the detector? And then you know, how to maintain it?

Yeah. So number thing, so let's see, where do I start? Let's start at the the end. You definitely want to, as far as if you find somebody you want to leverage your SROs, you do not want to get in the business of handling a gun. What do you do with that? Because now we've got a crew because you do have signs posted? I'm assuming about you don't allow guns on campus? Correct? Yeah. Then it's a crime, correct? Yes. Yeah. So that's when so if you did find something, you want the SRO, as far as training goes, you know, as far as and just like this person here, in this video, to train this person, all this person is doing standing there is waiting for it to alarm with alarms on somebody, that person's job, the only job they have is to push them over to somebody do secondary just like you did right there for secondary spraying to see that. So watch here, it's pushing hours. So you got to go over secondary screening. Let me check your bag. Let me check you out. That's it. And that's really honestly where the training comes in. is right here. When it alarms that's a simple job. The person manning that gate and I can man easily three gates myself, because they don't alarm very often. But it's the person that I'm sending them over to the now has to check that bag. And then also Hanawon the person to make sure they're clear as well. Because what the the open gate is simply telling you is there could be a threat. That's its job, we detected a potential threat. Now you have to go find the threat. So the person standing there, that's not their job. That person there is just say, Oh, we detected something you need to go over secondary screening. So most schools are doing for a secondary screening, is that could be security staff member. And then usually you're going to have an SRO just like you have on staff somewhere, you know, readily available in case you do find something. Okay, but that's a policy issue, but highly recommended. And yes, that would certainly be covered in training. But what training is mostly covering is detect setup detection, changing of Settings Configuration, but also screening, though. So as people walk through, how do you handle it? How do you handle secondary screening? So yes, that's, that's all involved? Um, you had another question in there that you started,

it was about the true costs of maintenance and dating.

Yeah. So software, by the way, those are all free upgrades, there's no, we don't charge you for that the only time there would be an upgrade, if there's a physical change. So for example, right now, we don't currently have modems on these we do on the other words, so you can network um, so we can get statistics on him and all kinds of things. So there's no modem on the so that would be a hardware upgrade, but it's a tiny little modem that like goes in your phone. So it's not a big deal. But that would be a small, physical hardware upgrade. But software itself, we don't charge for software upgrades. But it's only if you need that additional technology that we're adding to it. So yes, we are always adding to our technology, but not always to the detector itself. Sometimes it's we come out with a new detector like this, but usually, well, you know, detectors usually have a life of at least 10 years. So I'm always about life, 20 years. So I definitely have a shelf life. As far as technical capabilities, we always try and carry that forward. So it's like, oh, the next fresh produce is out next year. Now these again, TSA has been using them, same ones for 20 years.

And I will add on that. I don't think we really touched on it here, because it's more of a configuration thing. But there is they all connect through mobile app. So as far as configuring them for if you want to detect more things or less things or kind of setting them up, that all runs through the mobile app, and it's all pretty seamless.

Thank you. Hey, John, can you one consideration that came up with the crisis committee, when we were looking at the other system was supervision in terms of the number of people manpower that would be needed to man the other system that we were looking at, and the different I mean, he just said it, that he can watch three of these at one time. So I don't know if you address that.

And absolutely, the other ones, because they were a lot more kind of, they required a lot more intense attention, as you were walking through. So if you had to dual gate systems, you would need several people watching to see where on what person what was alarming. And then as they're directing them to the secondary screening, you would need several people at the secondary screening to identify where on each person what they were looking for one thing. These ones it's not that so instead of having I think the other ones for the two. For door number one, say we had kind of estimated it was going to take around four to five people minimum demand. As we were walking through. Looking at this, it was closer to two to three people depending on traffic volumes. Again, a lot less training a lot simpler. So I know. UHS has just hired some more SRS is thankfully, I know they need them. But these are things where you're watching them come through and the light turns red, the SRS is can direct them to a secondary screening where you could have an AP or the SRO kind of working on the secondary screening. But you're not going to need half a dozen people manning door one as they come in, since we're already short on staff that was another of the bigger selling points for me.

And also in the video that Tom showed us where the person was walking through with all the metal items that did not alarm, if you notice there was a green light that went off. So there's a visual indicator, it turns green or red. And there's also a sound. So we get to control how loud the sound is. Tom did a couple different demos when he was here he demoed at Central Office, we demoed over at UAMS with the crisis team. So you can see the green light there, but the sound is the other indicator too. So I know what door wanted. We have a lot of students who come through in the morning. So I think in the morning, we could have the sound turned up a little bit more because it's noisier, right you've got a couple 100 kids coming through that door and 30 minutes, but then for the remainder of the day, we could have the sound turned down or off and just use the green light so it is nice to have that option to have the visual as well as the sound So,

yes, that's correct. Great, great point. So yes, you could turn that. So that's one thing John mentioned, the mobile app, that's really what the mobile app is for is for changing those kinds of settings. You don't need to operate it just to configure it. But you're absolutely right, you could do that exactly what you said, Turn it up when it's noisy, and lots going on, and turn it down or actually off later in the day. And that's when you use the mobile app, though, is maybe because you can have it vibrate your your phone vibrate, or just tone on your phone, and not on the detector itself. But the lights will always alarm. So yes, you could turn off the sound at the detector. But you'll always see the lights.

And also in one of the kinds of configurations, you can actually have it kind of have staged alarms. So there's kind of a quieter alarm, if it's something smaller metal, and then if the gun that that guy just walked through with it would be a lot louder alarm and the light would kind of flash strobe.

Or any further questions for for the open gate representative? All right, hearing none, thank you very much, Tom.

You're welcome. Take care.

I'm moving on with the rest of the presentation.

So yes, thank you, everyone. Todd, can you do me a favor? Because this next part of the presentation is going to involve numbers, can you move the TV forward a little bit more for Brenda and buying her over here, just so you can see the serve the bar charts are little charts, I would like to invite Mr. Nance up to the table is is here representing UHS. And in our zoom, we have a system principal, Julie, they are both members of the crisis team. And they have had the benefit of being part of a couple demos here. And I know they have some opinions on the system, as well as the fact that we're going to be looking at survey data here. And they have been talking with students and staff. And so I wanted them to be available to answer questions as well as share their opinions, we have shared a little bit with the student ambassadors, so I'm sure if they have an opinion, they'll jump in at any point. So we're going to flip here to our surveys. So in our last discussion with the board, of course, staff, voice and student voice were very important. Again, we've talked multiple times that always a survey is not the best way to get information, but we did the best that we could to get our staff members to complete the survey. We shared this survey with students via email, I took paper copies over Miss Blixen, also and Mr. Nance. During lunch periods, we have paper copies available for students who anonymously would like to fill these out during their lunch periods. So I am actually impressed that we had 323 students even chime in on a survey and we had 84 staff members from UHS. So that's about half of the staff member ratio there. So we'll keep going here. We have kind of combine this to make it much easier to read. But the the staff and the students were asked the same questions, they were asked if they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. So what we've done is combined agree and strongly agree to show the blue wine and strongly disagree and disagree. Agree, we're combined as well. So we've just shown you the two indicators there. So again, staff and students were asked exact same questions. We wanted to compare apples and apples, as we kind of looked at this information. So the very first question we asked was, do you feel safe at school, you can see our students are feeling pretty safe. Our staff and we about 60% of those folks who completed the survey feel safe at school, we didn't go into why or whatever reason we just really wanted to just in general know what their thoughts were on that. I feel my school has enough safety and security plans in place and that can include anything we're not just asking here about looking for weapons, we're also thinking about supervision and how we're doing with our drills. So students, you can see a little about 45% of our students or 50% of our students agree that they do feel that we have enough security and safety in place. Our staff not as much, but a little over about 65 closer to 70% of our staff. Don't feel that we Have enough safety and security in place. I have concerns that students may have weapons in school, or outsiders could bring weapons into the school. So this was a question that John referenced earlier. So if you see the staff there, our staff members strongly agree with this, they is over 75% of our staff members have concerns that we may have students walking around in our buildings with weapons. That's something we've talked about here. I've shared my concerns about that. I know the high school administration has concerns about that. And it sounds like our staff echoes that our students a little over half of those 323. Students also feel that there may be students that have weapons in school. And we don't know that we don't know because we have no way to detect that. Or, on the other side, that they are concerned that people could be walking into our buildings with weapons, and we don't know. A metal detector would make me feel safer at school. So if you look at our staff number, they're almost 70% of our staff feel like this would make them feel safer if we had some kind of detection system in place. For our students, about half of our students, this is a kind of 5050 was pretty common for our students. About half of our students disagree with that. And about 40% of them do agree with that. I would be in support of a door detection system at school. So almost 80% of our staff members who completed the survey, are in agreement with that they would support a door detection system at school. For our students, again, is kind of split. You know, they are about half and half on that. Supporting the door detection at school. questions on the survey before we go into some of the

who, who are the students we're talking about? Do we know demographically? Do we know we

did not ask that question. We didn't want to we just wanted to leave it as open as possible. We didn't ask enough staff either. So you know, I can tell you personally with the students that completed paper surveys, whereas it was just a wide range of any any kid I sent the email out to every single grade level, Mr. Nance shared the email. Miss Blixen, also collected paper surveys. So yeah, we just we didn't ask that question. Kind of purposefully, we just wanted to leave it open to not gauge our viewpoint. We just wanted to ask any student what they thought. Yep.

So this first slide I'm, I'm, I'm quite pleased with the number for students. That speaks to the climate and culture that we're trying to establish at Urbana. And one of the things I was thinking about I looked at the staff versus the students on this slide was the fact that I was thinking about when do staff travel the most in the building, that's when they arrived to school, once they arrived to school, they're in their classrooms the entire day, versus the students. They're traveling every period and do our lunch. So the fact that we have over I have my glasses on couldn't follow up we have that high of number of students feeling safe in our school just speaks to the fact that, you know, we are working very hard every period during lunches to make sure that they feel safe in school, I can understand the staffs percentage, because if there's an incident involving the staff, if just one staff we do send out information, we let the staff know what's going on. And so that one time that one incident can have lingering effects, because you're in your classroom by yourself, the entire day with students going in and out. So I can understand the staffs have little less, but I'm quite pleased with the students, 323 students having that have that much faith and confidence in our in our staff in what we do.

I do have one more question about the actual numbers, I'm sure. I'm guessing you don't have a breakdown of the makeup of the staff. But when did this survey go out to substitutes? Did it go out to out

to the UHS staff list all at once on the UHS staff that would include longtime and building base subs, not random subs who just sub in the building every now and then, but any sub assigned to UHS would have also received this Yes,

because Mr. Nance made a good point about the staff traveling to and from school and then being in their classrooms. But then when you deal with custodial staff or other you know, Assistant staff or subs or people who are walking around a lot that kind of mixes it up a little bit. So they might have a slightly different response. But if obviously, we want to keep it anonymous, so we have no way of knowing exactly who was who.

To be clear, though. Oh, sorry. My question was not so much about the breakdown. of who's answering what. But when I see a number like 323, which is a pretty darn good response, we still don't know. Is it all the freshmen and none of the seniors? Is it all white kids? Is it not? Like, you know, so understanding, just descriptively, who we're talking about here, for me is super important to know who's feeling safe, if we know roughly who we've got, as opposed to, I've seen who I think is taking the survey. So I mean, I guess from a suggestion point of view, we don't have to see the data broken down that way. But just knowing whose voice is being heard, and whose voice is not being heard to me is super important when we're talking about an issue of safety in the building.

So we do, we did have a comment. If I showed you the 300 comments, we you'd be able to gauge that there was a lot of diversity. You know, we have some Latino voices, for sure. gauged in the comments, I'm happy to share the comments with board members, you know, through their responses. Some of the comments, were very telling of situations and experiences that the students have had that made them answer the questions that they did that in the way that they did. So I'm happy to share those. We have some students who are a little apprehensive in mentioned in the comments, you know, they don't want anything that makes us feel like a prison to them. But they understand that it is unfortunate in the world that we live in what right now that we're even having this conversation. So the comments were a little interesting, I think we can share those with you, Brian, because I think that will we, you know, we know we have several African American I mean, many, many African American students who make comments about gun shots in their neighborhoods and things that are happening in their communities where they don't feel safe, when they come to school, they want to feel safe, they don't want to feel like they feel when they might be at home. Versus when I'm in school. I don't want to worry about those things. And so that came through pretty clearly in some of the comments.

What period of time I guess, were you collecting surveys, I mean, from just from a month ago, or is this from six weeks ago,

we collected all the way up until winter break. So I think the last right after the our last discussion here with the board. We created the survey and we started sharing it out. So I'd say this is probably I could go back and look at the very first email. But I think we sent it out to students and staff the last time probably the week. Right before we got out of break. Maybe.

I wanted to add, Jennifer if I could. Sure. This is This is Julie talking. In the comments. It talks a lot about not wanting to be inconvenienced and having to wait in lines. A lot. That was a lot of the comments of students but with this system that I think they're thinking of the airport, we have to take everything out. And with this system, you don't have to do that. So I just wanted to add that as some of the comments that I saw a lot of so

yeah, I just had a I just wanted to clarify. Can you all hear me? Okay. Yes. Okay. This is Laura. I just wanted to clarify, too, that the expectation is that all staff would also be going through the open gate, right? So it's all staff, all students, there wouldn't be any exceptions, because they just want I feel like as a student, I would want to clarify that and just make sure that it's everyone's on the same page. Oh,

absolutely. We have a slide here and John already addressed it, we would have it basically at every single doorway. So every entrance that staff would come in with students, everyone would walk through as well as visitors to the building throughout the day, they would also have to walk through so yes.

And Jennifer, can I add to that, that all staff and students are also we bought, Id scanners that they're going to be scanning in so that they so we know who is in the building so that if an incident did occur, we would have an accurate count of who's in the building and that create accurate record of who's in our building at all times, which I think is really important, especially considering what just happened in Michigan and you know, just thinking all these things that just happened and making sure we have an accurate count of who is in our building at all times. And having students have to wear their IDs so that we know that they're students and they're supposed to be in our building, which I think is really important

questions about the story Okay, before we move on, okay. So again, as John mentioned at the beginning of our discussion this evening, you know, the board kind of charged us with looking at other companies doing our due diligence to not only bring something forward that we felt was would, you know, intentionally work for what we what we needed to do, but also be cost effective and efficient for us. So this is just a kind of lineup comparison between the Evolve program which we looked at previously, and then open gate, which is what we're talking about here tonight. So, as you heard, we are purchased, we would be able to purchase the open gate, I think that is one of the biggest concerns that we had for the price point. And the fact that we would not have even own the Evolve machines, we would be leasing them for four years. Of course, the cost would be a lot cheaper if we leased them for one year, two year three year. But the fact that we would be able to purchase the open gate systems and have them and again, as the as Tom mentioned, the life expectancy, you know, if we can keep those for 10 years, we've definitely paid back our $65,000. We're able to keep those and keep them working as long as he mentioned that they are able to do what they need to do initial training and setup or included with both systems. We talked a little bit about staffing earlier, staffing was a concern. When we were talking about this with the evolve, especially with the crisis committee, we were initially talking about it, Julie and uhs team are still hiring SRS is. And we were concerned about the number of suits the amount of supervision that would be pulled from other areas of the building just to utilize those. But with the open gate, as you've heard tonight, there is a much less supervision involved and staffing needed at those doorways, which we'll talk about here, the second. Installation and shipping much faster. I mean, the Evolve system. And again, other districts have been jumping on board with evolve. So initially, they told us six to eight weeks, I would guess now we would be beyond that, because they have been shipping them out to other districts. But the open gate, we get them a lot faster. And we would have minimal setup. And the ability to relocate them is really a big deal for us, too, that we can pick them up and move them so easily and readily throughout the day or after school or before school or for special events.

And just to touch on a couple more things on the slide, just so you guys have a good apples to apples, I don't want to seem like the thumbs on one scale. So the reason. So you see on the evolved side that had for dual gate systems. So it would have been an eight total versus the five single gate systems just kind of based on the geometry and how things were laid out. With doors one and nine. And three, the main student entrances, you ended up kind of with the dual gate systems, just because they're a little bit narrower, but they also kind of straddle like two doors. That's just kind of what we thought we needed for this use scenario to cover those doors. And then for the three to five weeks, six to eight weeks, I did talk to Tom a little bit earlier. And he said probably closer to the three weeks they've been dealing with some kind of bigger orders depending on what they're doing across the state in Springfield and some of the other places, things that they have in the pipeline, it's possible that it would get pushed back but probably a little closer on the three weeks. And one other thing on the evolved system for the installation, what we had talked about was they don't really have anything that kind of holds them to the floor. So we had talked about kind of drilling mounts into the floor, which we're kind of trying to figure out I know on the door three hallway on that upper hallway it has that kind of beautiful 100 year old tile. So we had talked about kind of some other options for that. The evolved system it has kind of industrial suction cups, and once you suction cup it there it's just kind of permanently there so it wouldn't require any any renovating to the building or drilling holes in the building. They do have some big plates if there's places for sports, where you kind of set out a base plate, which is a metal plate, and then it sets on that.

And one other point, Tom didn't mention this, but when we had our demo, we discussed it. Mr. Waller, who's part of the crisis committee was concerned with durability, like when we when that huge group of students is coming through door one with the evolved system. One because there's, they were a little high tech or more high tech, and I am being a little biased. I don't I think we were nervous that a duffel bag or a backpack or you know, the big bags that the kids bring through, that they would get jostled and bumped more. But when open gate was here and demoing, one of the arms or bars was even knocked down, and it still worked. And so that was something that we thought they will get bombed quite a bit when students are walking through there first thing in the morning, so we don't want to be replacing them because they're being damaged. But the open gate one did seem very doable. So what doors are we talking about? Donna's kind of talked about this a little bit, but our priorities are door one, which is our main entrance there on Iowa Street, door nine and Tiger Lane, we always would have a detection system set up there throughout the day. Students that are arriving late to school after Is it 810 or 815? You can't come through door one. Is that right? Mr. Nance? Okay, 810. And so then everyone is redirected to door nine. So we would be using these pretty heavily at door nine as well. Door three is the race Street entrance, that is where all of our students who utilize MTD into the building, so we would be using them at all three of our main entrances. We've already talked about sporting events, so I won't really belabor that point, but we definitely will be utilizing them there. I've had conversations with Dr. We mountain his team. They are also part of the crisis committee in there. They have asked, you know, since if we were to approve this for uhs, would there be a point where we would be considering this for you, Ms. But the nice thing also about the open gate system is because we can move it so quickly. If they were social media threads, or if there were any points where we had concerns, we could pick them up and with the number that we're purchasing, we can move them over to the middle school, we could have one at the main entrance at the middle school, door six or seven, door eight, maybe not there six 7/6 grade door, seventh grade or eighth grade door. That would have been extremely helpful. For us, when we had to lock the school down when we were looking for a weapon, we would have been able to just quickly move these over to UAMS. And have students walk through them. And students wouldn't even have known that we were doing that. We could do some random screenings when we thought you know, once a month, we could pick them up and move them over to the middle school pretty easily. After UHS is done at a 10, we would have enough time to literally pick them up and move them over if we needed to or so I think it just gives us a lot more flexibility to be able to have some targeted safety measures in place for us when we need them. But not have to spend another $100,000 or have them at the middle school every day all the time.

Yeah. And I think even we would find with kind of maybe one or two random screenings at UAMS, a semester that the incidence of students bringing items that they shouldn't to the school would drop dramatically if they even had the inkling that I could show up on a Wednesday. And I would kind of have to answer for what's in my backpack that day.

Town kind of addressed some of the other district wide screening opportunities. Hopefully we would never be bringing them to board meetings. I thought that was kind of interesting that so many districts are doing that. But we do have a lot of district wide events where we might want to utilize them for you know, for other events or performances and things like that. So that is that the last slide on no next steps. So, next steps. We're really hoping we've been talking about this for a while we've been talking about it as a crisis team. We've been talking about it as administrative teams with the middle school and high school. We're really needing the board to make a decision one way or the other because at this point If we are not going to move in this direction, then we need to come up with some other mitigation measures and plans because we know that we have students with weapons in our school. So if we're not going to move in this direction, then our team, we need to sit down and come up with some other plans sooner rather than later. So we're asking for some information from the board tonight about what your thoughts might be. And then at our business meeting, we'd like to following the board's decision tonight, put an ask and on the agenda for approval for either the valve system or the open gate system, we would be able to then finalize equipment, talk about a communication plan for our families and staff, work out a training plan, which with with with whatever company we decide to go with, and really think about when we would be able to roll these out with students.

Right board, John, could you put the board members back on the screen so I could they could visually indicate they wish to address the board. Thank you. Great, you. Go ahead and go ahead, Laura.

Yeah, I guess I think at this point, one of my concerns or just questions is is kind of that last point you were talking about? Dr. Ivory Tatum is the communication rollout. Seeing the numbers of the survey? I you know, I think that's fantastic. We got that much. But I know that's not a lot. I know, that's still there's still a bunch of folks that are potentially not aware of this decision. And I guess also just kind of concerned with I sort of have the image of the Washington Post that Tom showed about guns in schools, which is super sensationalizing some of the trauma. So thinking long term of like, we move these into our schools, how does media respond, where it doesn't become? I don't know, the next popular thing to talk about in a negative way or demoralizing groups of people? So I guess that's my question is kind of what does that rollout of communication look like?

Sure. So I don't I didn't mention this, but I'm going to because I think Laura's question kind of leads me into it. So Unifor set theirs up on Monday. And I watched the news yesterday and listen to reports and I saw nothing that really led me to sensationalizing I think I heard Rob, I didn't see Robbie's comments today, but just in what I looked at yesterday, it looked like it was pretty seamless in the rollout, I think, their students were expecting it. And we would do something similar. We would not just randomly put them there, we would make sure students were aware, staff were aware, we'd make sure that they would know what the expectations would be for the Chromebooks, which is something we'd have to kind of talk to students about and model that. And so they knew when they walk in, they'd have to take their Chromebooks out things like that. So we wouldn't message it in all the different ways that we've been messaging, texting email. Mr. Nance has been doing a great job communicating with families at the high school, so we would rely on him and his team to get as much communication out as possible.

Questions, comments, discussion?

I have a question. Robbie. All right. I'm at a cost slide. For the open gate is that $65,000 per gate, or total for five gates.

That's the total purchase price for five gates, it was we got a substantial discount. But it was I think, 12 four per gate.

So it's like the quantity brings down the price by more than one.

I think we got a there were several discounts. There were some for being an educational institution. And so just kind of like talking with them about our needs, and they kind of know where we're

at. So. All right, well, then my comment then is that for you know, for $65,000 That's really not that much in the scheme of the budget. And, you know, like, we talked about flooring costing $127,000, you know, last month, so, that's really not that much for a price. But the question I have really is, what good is it going to do? So it's going to stop somebody with a weapon of mass casualty. Now My take is a person with a weapon of mass casualties just gonna walk through and we use, they go to secondary screening, sir, it'd be like, No, I'm shooting the place up, you know, so that person is coming through regardless. So what you're potentially going to do is just train the students that want to fight to bring in exactly the blades and other small dies, which does not seem like a good idea to me. So I totally would go along with buying these gates for $65,000. Because the cost is so low. So if it gives some people peace of mind, then that's good. But I don't think it's actually going to reduce any of the fighting in the school, I think that's still going to go on. And it's just going to potentially tell people to bring in other weapons that will not be detected. And then the other part is, you know, attacker every time side, if we were to vote against this, then her crisis team would look at other mitigation efforts, I think you still need to do that. Because you probably need additional mitigation efforts for this, tell people actually be safe in school and that just feel safe.

Absolutely. And we've looked at things like clear backpacks, which you know that that is a little more challenging than it sounds in a building of our size and scope. And you know, the amount of time it takes our students to travel around. So yes, Ravi, I agree, we will continue to talk about other other measures. You do bring up a good point that I did not, we did not really address on the slide is where were we? Where would the funding come from? So you know, we've secured working cash funds, and part of working cash is security and safety. So we would, whatever system we go with, we'd utilize our work the cash funding to pay for these. Mr. Nice, are you going to make a comment?

I will say, I do agree with our board member that, you know, just having an open gate isn't going to solve the problem. So my priority was relationship building. I think that's the key to all of this. So even the kids who were impacted by the recent tragedy, when they came to school, one of the things they mentioned, which was in some of the comments is that they feel safe at school. And they even know they're traumatized, and, you know, have a lot of things going on mentally, the first thing they want to do to come to school to see Miss Hammond to see me. And so just having a relationship that we've built every day talking to kids, and you know, I'm going into classrooms every since September, mentioning safety and security, I've already laid the foundation, that, you know, this may be coming down the pipeline for our families in our community. So it shouldn't be a surprise to many, because I'm communicating constantly in our stand up staff meetings, just talking about safety and the fact that the district committee is working to put other things in place. But that relationship, that one on one conversations, those, those moments in the cafeteria in the hallway, when we're talking to kids, what I'm scheduling a whole day with students is to talk to them about different things. I think that's led to the reason why so many students do feel safe. And I think that this is just one more layer in our toolbox for safety. So when I do agree that this is just this is not going to stop, we need to continue to make sure that we're having that positive climate and culture in our school.

Anyone else? I'm

sorry, I'm gonna, I'm gonna open up a big long philosophical discussion here, but we have to have it. I mentioned this at a previous meeting, when we had our last vendor come and I mentioned that this discussion has to be coupled with the discussion of the SROs. Because as this gentleman, salesperson just told us, the SRO is going to have to be crucial in diffusing or confiscating anything that comes through. And my question, several previous meetings ago, was well, then that kind of locks us into having to have an SRO of some capacity in our school. And I think we need to take care of both at the same time. My concern with the metal detectors is not that I know that that we have threats to our school, I think Ravi made some great points about it's not going to stop fights. And Mr. Nance also brought up the great point about relationship building. I worry that we haven't done enough research and due diligence into exactly does metal detection really reduce crime or weapons or violence or threats of any sort? And it's, it's sort of it's kind of in conjunction with the study of SROs to in a way, it's like, I want to see data that proves that these things really are doing what they say they do. And over the long term, they have reduced incidence of violence. And that is why I am hesitating, because I don't want to keep putting money towards a problem without knowing 100% that it will work. I know for example, that relationship building does work. I know that when we spend money on staff, support staff and clinical professionals who can help our kids work through trauma and other problems that are causing them to create the violence of bringing weapons. That does work. We know for a fact that that works. We have data to prove it over the long term. I'd like to move in that direction with money that we're going to spend rather than I mean, whether you feel safe and whether you are safe for two different things. And that survey actually kind of confused me with two of the responses, it was a large proportion of staff said, I already feel safe here. But the very next question was, could we do more on there? Like, yeah, but we're not doing enough. And that kind of is like a little cognitive dissonance in my head is like, what if you feel safe? And why do you feel like we need to add more? And is metal detection going to be that thing, we haven't dug down enough to know if that's exactly what it's going to do. And the reason why I asked about funding to our salesperson is, even though we're going to play a flat, A flat fee, with this particular detection system, there's always costs involved. And it's not necessarily hardware costs, it's personnel cost, for example, at sporting events, if the SRO has to be at three places at once, or at the school doors, if something's detected on the Iowa Street, and then something, you know, Lord forbid, gets detected in another door, how do we coordinate people running back and forth to make sure that those weapons get done? Those are little logistical things that go through my head. And so I would really like us to be able to drill down more before we have to take a vote on this. I agree with Ravi saying that despite which way we go with metal detectors, we still need to keep researching other ways to mitigate this. And I just, I'm not, I'm not saying forget about it. I'm a No, I'm saying Please, can we do more research before we spend money on something that we're not 100% Sure is really going to work.

We can do the research, but I'm I'm going to significantly pushback right now. And I'm just gonna say that before I so 75% of our staff members feel that students have weapons in school. More than 50% of our kids feel like students have weapons in school, we can do all the research we want. But this is real life. And we have people telling you board, our students have weapons in school. And that that's all I'm gonna say. So we can research. We can pull up articles, we can do all of that. But if we're not, we're gonna continue to bury our heads in the sand, and not realize what is happening in our community. We lost a student to gun violence, who walked through our doors all fall. And several of his friends were present when he was killed. And they have been coming to school every day. How do you think those young men feel? They are concerned about retaliation? There is so much going on. I can't even begin to go into detail here in a public meeting. But our students are telling us this, our staff are saying it. Administrators are saying it. We can research this for six more months. But how many more shootings do we have to talk about? Or work through, or trauma and work with the trauma related to it before we make a decision? So I'm gonna say,

and I'm glad you bring that up, Jennifer and I, I'm not trying to sound callous about the student we lost last week. That's devastating. Meaning that and but I mean, is does that mean that more students are going to bring weapons to the school as a result of something they

already are in? They're walking around with the weapons now? I'm just, I'm just saying that

our students have access to guns.

I do not doubt that for a second. I absolutely do not. And I'm not trying to bury my head in the sand. I'm just I'm trying to listen to everybody. I know that there are people who are feeling very scared and there are people who are not or there are people feeling scared for the opposite reason that other people are feeling scared. You know what I mean? Some people feel scared because there are weapons in school. Some people feel scared because there are, you know, there are people who, I don't know, I mean, even having an SRO with a weapon counts as a weapon being in school. And we heard last year in the year before that, that there were students who were worried about that. So I am trying really hard to assimilate everything that I hear from everybody. And I want I just want to know that we make the right decision about this. And I one thing I didn't ask also was that you mentioned Unifor rolling out their machines on Monday. How many other schools in our district already used them? How long have they had them not just in our district, but nearby I mean, you know, Rantoul, Danville, Decatur you know, other places around the area, Bloomington Normal places like that, who are close by or is similar in size. If they have them, have they have they helped in any way? Can we can we hear about that? You know, sure we

can but this is not Rantoul This is not Bloomington, this is our banner, and we have students losing their lives. We have students being shot, I could bring you maybe next meeting I'll bring you the number of our students who have been immediately connected to gun violence, whether it was a sibling, a family member themselves. We are patching up kids emotionally physically, on a daily basis because of the gun violence that is happening in our community. It is a real thing. I know I compare ourselves to Bloomington and normal and Rantoul we have to deal with what's happening right here in our own backyard in our community. And I don't want to I, I don't want to address your your philosophical, SRO, PS but this is not about the SRO. The SRO cannot be at four doors at one point anyway, we are going to have to train our staff we're going to have to utilize our administrators we're going to have to utilize our SRS is, and the people who are managing these stations will have to be trained on what to look for. We're not expecting SRO Burnett to run from door to door nine to door three, every time the system pings or alarms, we will have to train multiple people to be able to do that.

I'm thinking 20 to 25. Because Mr. Waller has different events, he has different crews, so between his crew, and Miss Blix, his crew to be about 2025 add in with the admin. So we'll we'll definitely have multiple people being able and we'll walk out scenarios, we'll plan out a whole training to make sure that every scenario possible we can, we can roll and play to make sure that we know how to respond when it happens. Absolutely,

that that's just the one point I wanted to bring out again, is that regardless of whether or not this this board in the future, just decides to extend a contract with their BANA Police Department for an SRO, the need for somebody to perform the types of actions that that individual does and whether it's searches or whether it's certain kinds of security that the district would have to fulfill that obligation in another way. Well, it's going to be done somehow whether or not it's an SRO. Okay. Well, that's

an I'm glad you answered that, too. Because that was a question that I wanted to have answered, thank you.

And actually, we are under contract, was it three years or five with the SROs? I can't remember. Okay, I couldn't remember the date on Thank you.

So I just like to say, you know, just off the bat, I'm in support of the open gate, I think we need to stop saying that, you know, this will not work 100% Because quite frankly, nothing works 100% ever. You know, we're not considering this for a reduction in fights, let's just, you know, do metal detectors to reduce the amount of fights that you're going to have in a school. So you do have to have all the all the other pieces in, which I think is a piece of what we're doing in many different facets, whether it's hiring more staff to be around the building, building relationships, all of those different pieces are very important. And I call them puzzle pieces. And without all of these puzzle pieces, it's just not gonna work in general. You don't know how many people are not bringing a gun to school today because of the metal detector, and you're never going to have those numbers. That's just a reality. It's the same thing with the SRO. You don't know how many kids don't do certain things, because there's our SRO in the building. You don't know how many kids don't bring weapons in a school because there's an SRO in the building. And you're never gonna have those stats, it's just, it is what it is. We can sit here for the next two or three months and talk about, let's study this. And I'm not knocking the studies, because I think studies and surveys are important to an extent, at some point, we've got to say, we have a lot more information as administrators and as board members than our public house. So obviously, their perception is going to be different than ours, we have more information than our students have. They only get bits and pieces of what they see. They don't know the reality of everything that's happening that we know as administrators and board members. And so at some point, we have to say, we know that there are weapons in the school. And so if we're not going to do this to deter, what are we going to do? I'd love to hear what we're going to do. Because we can sit and say, though this is not going to be 100%? No, this is maybe not going to work. Yes, someone's going to come in, potentially with mass destruction. But quite frankly, that could happen anywhere. And if a person really, really wants to come and shoot up a school, yeah, they're going to do it. Again. That's not the person that we're really thinking about when we're saying we're putting a door detection and we're thinking about that kid that's bringing the school the gun to school, because they feel like someone's going to shoot me today. And I got to be ready. Or I'm going to get him or her because they got my homie last night. And I think the hard part for me and maybe even for Jennifer, Jennifer is in a different neighborhood but she is deals with our kids is that what you see on the news and happening in our community is the big stuff. You don't hear about the little stuff too much. They don't report on. Oh, there was gunshots last night, you know, on on Lincoln Avenue or you hear about it. If it's somewhere like Texas Roadhouse, you know. But you don't hear about what's happening in the neighborhoods. And I doubt that that's happening very often in your neighborhood. And so in your perception of what's your thinking, it's not that bad. Yeah, we've got stuff going on. But at some point, it's going to enter the schools, whether we want it to or not. We know the weapons are there we the kids are telling us wonder, what else do we need? What else do we need? What am I gonna say? No, you're lying? How do I? How do I take that information? When a kid is telling me their guns in the school and ignore that and not do something about it? And then deal with something when it does happen? When a kid does get shot, then how do I come back and say, Well, what did I do as a board member? After I got that information from multiple kids to say there are guns in the school? What did I do with that information? If I did nothing, thank you kid's life was on me, potentially. Because I didn't do nothing about it. So if it's not going to be this, which for me, this is something this, it may not be perfect, not going to be perfect. I can tell you, it's not. It's not going to catch every single thing. We are going to have to do other things. But we've got to show we're doing something about the guns because the guns is what is the problem in our community right now. Maybe not in yours, but definitely in mind. So

I am in favor of open gate. I don't have any, any second guessing. I don't want another darn study. I don't care what Rantoul is doing. I don't care what Bloomington is doing. I live in Urbana. I am charged with Urbana kids. And I'm saying let's go for this. Let's continue to have conversations about other things that we can do to prevent the gun violence in our community, to restore our children, to make sure our teachers and staff feel safe, even if it's just a feeling of feeling safe. A feeling of walking in the door and feeling safe for me mentally as a teacher is going to give me a different direction in my day, that if I'm worried about Johnny, who I heard had a fight last night with Jimmy, who may be might have a gun in my classroom today, my perception, my teaching is going to be different that day. If I walked in, and I felt like I was safe, even if there's potentially that hairline potential that a gun maybe did still enter the school, I'm on feel better. And for $65,000 in the conversation by it.

That's kind of where I am on to EPP. If you amortize the cost of say, as a 10 year lifespan for these devices, you're talking about $6,500 a year if we lose one less teacher a year to attrition because they feel safer in the building that pays for itself as far as I'm concerned that but there's there's a plethora of reasons I prefer the open gate system to the Evolve system and not just cost. I think it's a much more passive system. I think, you know, having the individual students show up on a screen with their you know, when they have a little box on him. I think that's that's that's triggering and targeting. I think this is a much better system and a number of reasons. It's much more passive. I also I think in the favor of going with this expenditure on our next meeting,

I'm in favor of open gate, there's a lot of stores, sometimes you don't even realize you're walking through metal detectors. But there are several stores now. Retail stores, grocery stores, you when you walk in there, you look around you and you'll be walking through a metal detector. They're everywhere they are for safety, public safety, I think open gate with the less staff we have to train would be great. And the cost is fabulous. So also the portability. I could move one of those with no problem. The weight is very minimal, very easy to move. So I am all for the open date. I think it's a necessity.

And I promised our I don't know, I didn't have a chance to meet with our ambassadors since we just came back from break about this. But I did kind of prep them to say be prepared to share your opinion. So I don't know what their opinion it might be but I want to give them an opportunity to say something that they would like to

Well, I'd like to say that if it's not this then what because you know going into school I'm ready for my education. I shouldn't have to go to school worrying about oh I just heard about I just heard about that person over there, he might have gone. So I'm worried about that. And I'm worried about my education. No, I shouldn't have to worry about that I should be able to go to school and get my education so I can worry about my future. Whereas right now, I'm going to school and I'm talking to all the other students and what their opinion is. And the favorite, favorite quote is, I thought there, were already going to add that when I asked their opinions on adding this, they say that every time and that goes to show we're ready to be safe at our school, and it's just not happening. It's just not there. It's not there.

I agree. I think it would make a lot of students feel a lot safer in the building. And I think that would really help with their academics and their social. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments or statements, questions? Anything?

Yeah, I mean, I haven't said anything yet. Because I can't add anything more than what I just heard. You know, actually, Robbie's first comment was very compelling to me, we we spent over $100,000 on floors. In our last meeting, if we didn't go any farther than that, to think $65,000. If we discourage one thing, it's worth every bit of that expenditure. In my opinion, I can't see the pro of the Evolve system personally, but we don't have to even talk about that one. And as you know, I'm a data guy, I love the idea of as much data as we can. Tory said it last week, she said it again tonight. For me, this is one of those things. It's the absence of data, that tells us an awful lot. It's super hard, if not impossible for us to collect adequate data about the efficacy of something like that, unless we I mean, certainly we could look at community levels over time. But given what's happened in the last couple of years, no historical data will ever tell us. What's what's happening. So for me, we have to move now. And so I echo the support wholeheartedly.

And I equally echo many of the sentiments, I think this is where the students voice is the most important. And I'd like to proceed with the vote and I'm in favor of the open gate.

Yeah, I'd like to just take this a step further, and say, you know, there's this lack of data that we've talked about, but I would promote, we actually make the data with us. And so, you know, that survey was kind of short, but it would be nicer if it was a little longer. So then that way, we could repeat it again, you know, zooming, we go ahead with OpenGate, repeated again in three months, or six months, or maybe making more extensive survey at the middle school level. And then because, you know, $65,000, you could just get the middle school, its own set, you know, in the following budget, potentially, for next year. And then you could then do the middle school before and after, and see what perceptions are that kind of thing. And then you can also say what all was confiscated over here. And then you could actually present this at like, you know, school conferences or whatever. So I think you actually make the data with our school going forwards and do very useful for other schools. So that way, then when they're having the discussion to Bloomington and be like, well, they had this data from Urbana. You know, so I think that's the thing we should do.

Alright, thank you very much. Anybody else? Any any further comments, discussions? All right. Well, I think you'd expect this to show up on our next meeting agenda. Our next administrative report is the sorry, the district goals update.

Okay, Mrs. Norton is going to thank you, Mr. Nance. Thank you. And I know I usually check in with our student ambassadors about this time, so it is 930. And so I'll leave it up to you if you want to remain for the next presentation. But it's up to you guys what you want to do. As I introduce Assistant Superintendent Norton, she's going to kind of give us a mid year update and check on progress on district and school improvement goals.

Thank you Okay, so yeah, this evening, we're going to be focusing on our district goals. And to piggyback off of our previous presentation, we'll start with our first district goal. And that's transforming learning spaces to be safe and supportive for all students. Now, there are several layers mentioned here. And that by no means and compasses, everything that's going on in our schools, to support our students and help them develop a sense of belonging. And as they add staff and students interact, and from students to students that some things that are in place our morning meetings, and this serves as an opportunity to help students get to know each other, developing and working on social awareness of others, building community within the classroom. And it teaches thinking listening, and speaking skills. Doing during a morning meeting, students will practice self awareness as they reflect on their own feelings, and being a good listener, and being respectful as others are talking. Another method that we've talked about previously is zones of regulation. And I'll tie this to some of the panorama data. And just a little bit, historically, we probably probably thought about that as being a tool used more so at elementary because it develops common language. But what we're seeing from our survey results, regarding students being able to identify their feelings, and emotions, we see that as an area of concern at the secondary level, as well. And zones of regulation helps our students identify their emotions, reading their own body cues, and knowing what are some tools to help me self regulate the way I'm feeling, it develops insights on triggers, and how the, the way that they are acting, perceive the way impact the way others are perceiving them. Second step is utilize at the element mentary. And that those lessons focus on empathy and respect, listening with attention, understanding complex feelings, and showing compassion, and again, managing emotions. And just as a reminder, we're focusing on the castle competencies, and those five competencies. And we focus on that through professional development, and with our SEL walkthroughs, that our principals are doing. And that looks at self awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Now utilizing the panorama survey results that will help us screen gain further insight how we can focus these strategies further. And when we look at these results, you'll see them presented a couple different ways. And so those are the survey PDFs that I sent to you that there was a k two teacher perception, because the students can't take that by themselves. And in the three to 12 students survey, and then the family survey, we will have the the teacher survey, we had some logistical glitches to get our systems to align. So we get that email out to our teachers. And our first attempt was, our HR staff was December 17. And we want to get our response rate higher. We're only at about 20%. On that right now. But when we look at those results, and I'll show you some examples, and you'll see that on those survey results that you that you read through, that results also be reported by percent favorable, or it could be performed.

As a result, by the mean, the average of the response answers. But these results were where they will really benefit us is once we do the second benchmark to because we finally have some baseline data, which we're really excited about. But we want to see from one point to another, do we have growth? You know, are we seeing that we're moving in a negative trend, so that'll help us further. And then these results can be broken down demographically. So once you get in the panorama system and navigate through that There's a lot of different layers to it, where we can look at things by race, by gender, by free and reduced lunch with students with IEPs a lot of different ways there as well.

So that I know this is a small screenshot here, but I just wanted to point out so when you look at that percent favorable, and you'll see that in your reports that shows you the percentage of respondents who selected a favorable or positive answer choice. Now on the topics, most of the answer responses have five choices. And so typically, the top two are the most positive, or the most favorable. But based on the topic, and Panorama, there are some questions that may have more than five responses, or those responses. There's, there's different types of responses based on the topic. And then there's also the mean, which is the average of the values of the respondent scores as well. So you can look at that two different ways. And then both of these scores are compared, nationally is is a Nash national assessment. So looking at our panorama family survey, we had 13.8% that responded, we definitely want a higher percentage this next time, we'll be starting the week after next with that survey deployment. And when we look at these results, again, there's a lot of different questions, what I tried to do is take out some strengths, or some areas of growth, that, that we that can be seen throughout each survey. So 81 of our families surveyed out of that 13.8% Do not feel there's any barriers that keep them from being engaged at school. An area of growth for us is that 26% of our family surveyed, are engaged and interact with their child's school. So of course, we want a greater response and meeting families where they are to have more engagement. On our K through two teacher perception, we had 67.2, participation and 74.8. On our three through 12. There was a 63% favorable for social awareness for grades three through five, and 57%. For grades six through 12 54%, of grades three through five students and 33% of six through 12 students surveyed are able to identify their feelings and emotions. So you can see that difference from K to two, verses six through 12. With our secondary students struggling more with being able to reflect on how they're feeling and identifying their emotions. 63% of K through two students had strengths with emotional regulations. And again, this was identified by their teacher. self management is an area that needs growth that we see across the district with grades three through 540 5%, and six through 12 49%, how well students manage their thoughts and behaviors in different situations. And again, we're going to keep the staff survey open a little bit longer, so that we can get get full circle results. I did want to point out the cycle of inquiry as we're looking at our data. And so we are when you look at it clockwise, we're right there. On the third one, because we have using hammer panorama we have deployed that we are reflecting on the data. Now we're looking at this next piece with prioritizing, synthesizing, determining what our focus is going to be. And then we need to also revisit our school improvement and our district improvement plans. I sent you a lot of links for all the school improvement. And then that was based off of our we used our district district improvement plan as a model for our administrators. As we embark on Program Council, which is this Thursday. Our teams will have additional time now that those narratives are completed to revise their goals. So for example, when before we had baseline data, we were kind of shooting in the dark to see exactly where, you know, we were going to focus those those points. And we stated that 90% of our students would make 10% growth in panorama from fall until spring. But when we look at that, we know that we need to hone in more specifically, on key err, key areas like the social awareness.

So then we'll come, we'll continue with that implement SEL instruction, and embedding that throughout the school day, and then continuing to evaluate and adjust as we get more and more information. And again, it's not all about just panorama, we have different strategies that we put in place within the classroom. And then we also have SEL observations. Honestly, it is really difficult for administrators, first nine weeks, when they are focusing on on students returning to school, helping students with their emotion, or emotional regulation. And then the second nine weeks, they were pushing into classrooms and getting more and more of those SEL walkthroughs. So some of the focus. And we're not even focusing on the whole SEL walkthrough, we're really trying to hone in on a couple of areas. And specifically, it's classroom routines and procedures, explicit SEL instruction, fostering academic mindset, and aligning, SEL, and academic objectives.

And so we have to balance all of these things. So when we look at our district goals Sel is is really, really important. But we also want to have that balance with the academic piece too. Next week, we will be doing our second benchmark with map for literacy and math. Again, it'll be really helpful when we have those two data points. We have baseline data, but we need to be able to see where we're making growth and an areas that we're not. In addition, we have established the math Committee last April. And that's been meeting twice each month.

We began revision of math curricula and recommending resources to pilot across the district at this time, the strong area focus will be math that will be in a high school. But the rest of the district is also establishing priorities standards, as well as curriculum, revision and alignment. As we are promoting learning renewal. We have worked closely with our teacher leaders and our instructional coaches, as we've also had to modify the sequences just based on the time that was last last school year. So that's been done as well.

So we're using math as well for literacy. I talked previously about letters, we have about 40 educators that are participating. It's a self paced professional development, but then it also requires that they are an interactive sessions each month. And then we also have 23 staff members that have completed the shifting the balance, professional development that aligns with letters and just a reminder, letters is not a package can curriculum. It supports the science of reading and within for for our early learners. As we look at our equity goal, there are specific questions. So we're going to be really excited to get these results back. For our staff, there's components that highlight cultural awareness and action. So we'll be able to get some feedback from that really soon. And then another area of focus is the work that we're doing with our standard space district committee. That's meeting twice a month. And we have PD that's been established with the world renowned Rick or Molly, that's been meeting with us virtually.

Looking at our are our fiscal the second component of equity is looking at culturally responsive teaching practices. So I wanted to highlight the the standards that have have been adopted by is the, and that teachers and students working together, developing language and literacy skills across all curriculum, connecting lessons to students lives, engaging students with challenging lessons, and emphasizing dialogue over lectures. We also are using substantial amount of our Title funds across the district for every level to purchase culturally relevant materials for our libraries. And so our librarians are making their lists. And we'll have that to me by the end of the month. So we can make sure that students are able to identify with individuals that represent them. So looking at it next steps. And again, you saw the examples with our schools that are sharing their narratives and their school newsletters with the community, we will be updating those goals. NWA map, and Panorama panorama will start next week, we have allowed more time and are increasing the window just in case we have positive cases. We don't want to cut that short. And we'll continue to focus on our improvement within each school. Surrounding SEL, equity, literacy, and any questions?

I know you're not surprised. I'm sorry, I should have paused. I emailed Kim way too many times this week about it's mostly about the panorama related stuff. And I was kind of triggered to be thinking about this a while ago, I had lots of parents, myself included, who struggled a bit with just the nature of the questions being asked. And you know, I appreciate that you sent us the responses. But if we look actually at some of the items, they're very confusing, in a way, right, so you you ask, not you but panorama asks a question like, how big a problem is it to be involved in school? And then it's the school is not welcoming to parents? And then the answers are not a problem at all. So it's a double negative question that's already sort of front loaded. And so I pull out as an example of us not really being able to know if it's an artifact of the question. Whether the school is actually welcoming or not, is not really what we've even asked, right? We could just say, is the school welcoming? Yes or No? Or how much do you agree? So the bigger question, I realize this is for you all to implement, and not for us. But as we're thinking about continuing to roll this out and use kind of a proprietary canned survey program. I don't know how much we can tinker with the wording of the questions. I don't know how much we can play with what it means to be favorable. And that's another thing I emailed you about when I look at something like a small problem, the safety of our school, that's not favorable, in my opinion, like the only favorable answer there is, it is not a problem. Right now, as soon as you take out the small, medium, large problems, all of a sudden, they favor ability ranking drops to something like 60%, at which point we would identify it as a problem area. So I guess my point in saying all these things is data are great, as long as we are looking with a real fine tooth comb, and then thinking through what do these numbers mean? And can we just accept what panorama tells us is favorable? or unfavorable? Can we play with those things? Can we adjust? And then can we make meaning out of the data? When we see from student to student and my point on that? One is when I looked at all of the school goals? There were some very specific goals, things like 10% change among 90% of students. And I think to myself, What is 10% Change me? Is that 10% And what is that in terms of actual learning? It's really hard to make sense of that. Is that a statistically meaningful change? Is it a practically meaningful change? So all those are the questions I sort of just posed, as we're moving this forward to round to getting some more, you know, getting digging in a little bit more to how can we ask these better? How can we make sure the data we're getting a really reflective of what it is that we want to know, to make the you know, to make adequate

changes? Those are really good questions. And so, Panorama has a bank on the topics, and it focuses on the castle competencies. And you can look at all five, you can look at three. So you have to narrow things down, you also want to keep the, the survey parameter and, you know, reasonable number of questions for students to so that we get, you know, as authentic of the responses we can. One of the wonderful things about it is we can customize these questions. So if we see some things, so even when you go back, and we look at five essentials as an administrator, yes, it's relevant data as a whole, these are the five essentials that are effective for schools. But the questions could be, you know, hard, we don't know that everyone really understands the way the questions are being asked, we can customize these. So we can customize the responses, and have that consistent from one topic to another, we could adjust that a little bit. In fact, with the family component, this was kind of, we wanted to go through the motions with that, to see if it was worth it this year, or if it was something that we would customize just completely on our own. Because of course, with everything, there is a cost to it. And we want to be fiscally responsible and making sure that we're getting the bang for our buck. And we're able to use this data in ways that are going to impact how our students are feeling at school. But yeah, we can definitely customize that. Also addressing I agree with the goals, and I know that we need to go back, you know, we were just with not having any baseline data. Not a lot of other districts around us, again, this is our banner. But we wanted to go ahead and look at this and say, Okay, where do we think we want to be? But we'll talk about that in Program Council on Thursday. And so for example, when we look at 33%, for example, if they can't identify their feelings and emotions, and if that's what we see, then from fall to spring, maybe a more realistic would be that's an area we are, we could say 33% is not okay for our students, you know, and then determine what is the goal there. And then, based on our results, what are some interventions that we can put in place at tier one, tier two, tier three, for our students, there are so many layers to this panorama, though, that not all that comes through, even on the PDF. And so I can send you as much or as little as you want on this. Because as I mentioned, you can break it down by demographics, we can see things by student if there are certain areas where where they're not feeling that they have a safe and trusted adult students that we can check in with, that maybe aren't on our radar, with discipline, because sometimes because students are feeling internally, they don't get up, give those warning signs, too. So there's a lot of pieces to that, that for this year. I think we're best on track saying with these original questions, and see what the data tells us from one benchmark to the next. But then we can definitely be mindful that keep providing updates. And then we can most certainly customize to make it better.

Any other questions? I guess I have one. I'm a little concerned with the family participation rate. Has there been any discussion on what we could do to help raise that up? Have we gone back to panorama and ask for suggestions that, you know that kind of thing,

we're gonna really mark that with our families. I think what happened initially, parents get an email, and sometimes that maybe went to their junk email, and we tried to, you know, keep sending that out multiple times. So and then I'm also working with one of our technology specialists so that we can see if it could be a link, as well, because I think that that's what happened with this first round is it just didn't get to the top of their email. We lost

reaching out over texts as well. I mean, my biggest concern, I'm big, lots of concerns, but with like a 13% participation rate for families, right, I'm guessing it's gonna be overly represented by families of privilege, right, exactly. And so we're not going to get anywhere near representative data from that group. So we really got to work harder on trying to change that.

And once the tech folks can create it as a link then we can send it out like we've been doing with some of our other updates through Skyler with the texting. We've seen Katherine and I've seen some really nice responses and engagements around text. So Paul's right like just putting a link in there once we can figure out how to do that and

took So what we're also going to be having, I think it's right around January 20 Is the five essentials. So for the state of Illinois, that will be deployed as well. And so just for a point of reference, in order for five essentials to be reported on individual school report cards, schools need to get to 20%. parent participation, family participation on that. And for those of you that can remember with your principals in the past, there are lots and lots of reminders, practically knocking on doors to get to that 20%, it is not easy. And so we'll just have to, again, I think our families need to know why this is important. And we just have to really reiterate that and that this, we really need to hear from them, because we're hearing from their students we're hearing from their teachers. And again, we select these questions. And so it's about us here. So we definitely will continue to work on that.

Anyone else?

Yeah, I kind of wanted to echo some of Brian's concerns. I do think the more we can engage in our question, asking, I would also think that might garner more participation. I believe this sort of came up in that first round, I did feel like I think some of the questions and of themselves are a little difficult to like, suss out what it is a school is trying to, like, get at and use it, what are they using it for? And then I can't remember, I'm assuming these also all they also go out in Spanish and French. And is that

yes, they do. Okay.

Thanks. Thank you. Anyone else? All right, thank you very much. They don't actually have tonight. So I think there's no call for future especially executive meetings at this time Superintendents report.

Alright, normally, I am going to do do have a kind of a different report, it is going to feel more like an administrative report instead of a superintendent report, because I am going to be sharing some of our COVID mitigations and some COVID updates. We shared the agenda. So early, I wasn't comfortable putting this on as a formal agenda item, you know, giving you an update. I wanted to really be able to put some real time numbers in here today. So as always, Katherine does the board update. So we'll make sure that this full presentation is in the board update when she shares it out tomorrow or the next day. And we'll send it to board members too, because it does have some good information in it. And then Lori will share it out with our email group, our UVA members and those folks as well. So they have it. So this is a little more of an administrator report than a typical superintendent report. So bear with me, and I apologize for that. But again, it is kind of on the spot info. So testing numbers. I did want to just highlight I know there's been a lot of comments on social media, I've gotten tons of emails sent to me directly. I know you guys have been receiving emails as well, about the concerns with coming back with Omicron. So we'll talk about that here in a minute. But as a district, I do want to say we are committed to testing. If you look at all of our this is a great comparison point for us. And because when we look at Rantoul, Bloomington and normal and all these districts around us, no one is doing as much COVID testing as we are I can just say that emphatically and it is the truth. We are testing through drive throughs and buildings. And we strongly believe that testing is what is going to help us be able to stay in school a little bit longer. Now there may there may be points, and we'll discuss this in a moment where we have to pivot to remote. But it was important for us to come back and get students back into a routine. My fear was if we didn't come back from winter break, we would be weeks and weeks and weeks down this path. And it isn't it was important for us to get back, get some testing going. A lot of families took advantage of testing in the community. And I know that because on Monday morning we had a lot of our schools getting those phone calls we tested it's our see we tested it marketplace. And so we do have a large number of our students that are in quarantine and isolation right now and that has nothing to do with school transmission. And that is Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and New Year's Eve and all the things that people did during the two weeks that they were out. So our goal this week is just to test as many people as we possibly can isolate those positive cases, before they're able to get in the building and take their mask down at lunch and do all these other things that we're talking about. And I think we've done a good job of that these first two days. So just in the first two days with the student drive thru that we had right here in the parking lot, and our staff drive through, this does not include Yankee Ridge after school drive the right John. But we had a large number of people come through Yankee Ridge Drive through today after school. So

this is this is just the additional testing they did. It also doesn't include the regular day,

just the additional staff and student drive throughs we put in place for Monday and Tuesday. So we tested almost 600 People in the two days. We isolated many, many positives and prevented lots of people from walking in our doors on Monday morning and on Tuesday morning. So I think it was very effective, and hopefully will help us be able to stay in person as long as we possibly can. Our goal is to we've even been talking about maybe making this a weekly student drive thru, we were able to hire some additional CNAs over the break. And that has helped tremendously. We still have a large number of people doing testing, I'm going to make you reach in the morning to test a class where we're doing some tests to stay. So we are all on all hands on deck with this. Kim was here this morning in the last two mornings. I mean, we were here at 630 in the morning, getting ready for testing. And I'm very pleased with the response from our families, and just want to say people are taking this very seriously. And they're going to test in the community they're testing here. And this is what is really going to help us be able to, you know, we'll have to pivot and we'll have to do some different things as we get farther into the winter months, but our testing protocols are what are really going to help us so I just wanted to kind of start us off with that.

Jonathan's okay, if I ask a quick question. Do you have an answer to it? Are we we got a lot of people, which is great. I mean, but do you think that the increase in numbers caught was just simply because we have more people testing or you think because it's almost cron that we're dealing with?

I think it was a lot of people that were having symptoms. So I walked up to many cars in the last two days of people who drove up and said, Hey, we are experienced some symptoms. We don't know if we have COVID. And sure enough, we tested them and some people didn't, some people didn't. And I think people knowing that we had that drive thru option, maybe didn't feel comfortable going in the community. I don't know when waited to come and go through our testing. But I think it is it. I don't know if it's a crime, we have no way to know that from our rapid tests that we do. But I do think the positivity rate that we're seeing is much higher than what we would normally be seen through our surveillance testing. Well, today was our first school surveillance day in elementaries. Middle school and high school had shield yesterday. So we're seeing a little bit of an increase in just our weekly surveillance numbers in terms of positivity. So yes. I think we're seeing it in our weekly regular survey was to

sorry to interrupt. Yeah, no, I'm really glad that we're getting such high numbers of people. I want you

guys to ask a question. Yeah. And I said, No, no, thank you, Superintendent report. So you can we can kind of have a discussion on these. So. So that was a good question. John, I don't know if you want to add anything more to what and

Yeah, and so for the first again, it wasn't included with including our regular testing, we would have been well over 900 tests in two days, which is a very high amount. Usually we're at 1200 for an entire week. 1100 1200 As you'll see a little later, but our very first day that we did the base surveillance testing at Yankee Ridge today. The numbers were about two and a half times what they would normally be, again, we don't have any way to say is that Omicron? Or is that because everybody was mingling with family over the holidays, but the numbers for those schools were a little bit higher, but not not substantially higher. So.

So as you know, we've been testing weekly, well, twice a week in middle school and high school for students and staff and once a week at Yankee rage Lille with Dr. Williams. Around Thanksgiving break, we added King in as a weekly surveillance site. And because we were able to hire additional staff To help us with testing over winter break, we are now going to be able to offer weekly surveillance at Thomas Paine and Wiley. So they are really excited about that they've been waiting for their turn. So Tuesday will be Thomas Paine's weekly surveillance testing day, Wiley's will be Wednesday, unfortunately, just use the timing of hiring all the people that we've hired. We weren't able to start that this week, we also have to collect consent forms from families. So both schools are collecting consents this week, and we will start next week, we'll have a testing team number two, going out to Thomas Paine, Wiley.

Jennifer, I have Yes. Sorry, doctor, I appreciate him. I have a quick question for you. Do we still have plenty of tests? Because I know that's a problem in the community and even at some of the sites as they're running low on tests. So

So yeah, we do this week, every week, or every time I put an order in, we're always kind of crossing our fingers and hoping that we get the delivery that we've asked for. And up until this point, we have we just received a delivery yesterday. So again, Brenda, I don't know, I think my connections and the people that I work with directly at idph have said to us, because of the level of testing that we're doing in our district, we are helping our communities significantly. So they're going to do everything that they can to continue to get us test. But again, when shortages happen, we've that we've not experienced that yet, but that doesn't mean that that would not happen.

All right, thank you. Well, that's good news that we.

Okay, so weekly COVID testing. So we have been steadily increasing the amount of testing. John, I'm gonna let you kind of talk about this chart. So this chart by reflects our binax, which is our rapid testing, and the red bars are shield testing. So as you know, we started testing at the very beginning of the year. And I'll let John kind of take over.

So this just really reflects kind of the volume and the kind of increased volume that we've been taking on over the year for testing. Both the surveillance testing program, the symptomatic testing that we're doing in the schools, all of the drive thru testing for staff and students has been slowly ramping up. It's a little noisy there, there was I think, was it a homecoming that we did some bulk testing for earlier in the year, and then a little noisier around the holidays. But the trend is increasing and continues to increase each week, which is great. And then every week, we're kind of increasing and adding schools adding students to shield. And that gives us a little bit more opportunity to get some positive cases out of the school system as quickly as we can before one case becomes three cases becomes nine cases becomes a classroom. So getting one case out is really has compounding effects going into the future.

And if you look at those, can you go back to that time, if you look at that slide, I know one thing. You know, I've received a few comments from parents who've emailed a specifically asked me about shield. We've been utilizing shield from the very beginning. But unfortunately, if you look at our numbers, not all of our students are taking advantage of the opportunity that they have to have shield testing twice a week, we've done everything we can to increase those numbers. John offers raffles he's doing some you know, we purchase raffle prizes out of our you know, not using district bonds. And we kind of donate gift cards that we can give away to students who participate in shield testing and all of our other testing opportunities, but we would really like to see that number be larger. So any families that are watching shield is, you know, it is something that is a gift to us. And I am grateful that we have it. We manage it with our own staff, we even make the delivery to the lab, our own people drop off the drop off the samples. But we would really like to see that in the hundreds. And you know, we'd like to see, you know, 500 students taking advantage of that. And we just don't have that. We've tried to incentivize it. So if you guys have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Sometimes I think people don't test because they don't want to know the results. So I think that could be a little bit this. I don't know but we are really under a lot utilizing our shield. And so right now we're trying to do some some fun things to get the students to go through the shield testing at the middle school in high school. So I just wanted to point that out too, because I know we've had a lot of families asking about shield, it is here. And we've had it since the very beginning of the year, we just don't have the large numbers that we would like to have there. So, John, I don't know if you want to add anything to that. But

yeah, and if you know high school, middle school students tell them, we've tried to make it as convenient as possible and give them as many opportunities as possible. This week, they can win some McDonald, so have them go, go by the shield testing.

So weekly COVID testing, as John put together this little graphic for us, that kind of shows our testing calendar. We also, as we've talked about here, at the district level, we have multiple crews. As I mentioned, now we have a team one team two testing team, we have our nurses who are continually testing, they conduct in school testing for symptomatic students they conduct in school testing for close contacts. We also are part of the Illinois Department of Public Health, the test to stay program, we also implement outbreak testing. So when we have a one classroom that has three or more positives, then we will go to a classroom and test that classroom twice a week. So that is more of an elementary model. You know, we can't do that at the middle school in high school. So at the middle school in high school, it is much more testing of close contacts. We've done tests to stay for our sports programs, our student athletes. So there's just a lot of weekly testing happening. I don't see that slowing down at all, more. So we're we're talking now about more testing that we could provide specifically to students with a micron. So. So going into John, did you refresh? Yep. So I added, go, yeah, if you go back. So just today, there was we have been kind of another reason why this information wasn't shared last week is we have been waiting for additional guidance from the Illinois State Board of Education and IDPH, about remote learning, and they just have not given us anything. Unfortunately, that's been a little discouraging that they knowing that the schools south of it are all back in school this week. We were really hoping that we would have some really firm guidance from IASB. And we receive some things today. So it's not on the slide. But in my notes, I added Dr. Ayala, our state superintendent sent out some guidance about adaptive pause. Today in the ISP weekly message, I think do you guys all get the ISP weekly message some of you do, I think so in that message today, if you want to go reference it, she talks about adaptive pause and really encouraging districts to utilize that kind of as a last resort, you know, if you're doing all of the other things like masking testing, vaccines, excluding close contacts, ISP is saying that adaptive pause should not be necessary. However, we are not going to I think with the number of amount of testing that we're doing with the high vaccination rates that we have of staff. We've offered multiple opportunities for people in our community to vaccinate back, get the vaccine students and staff we're doing all of those things. So as we continue to see those our cases get higher, we are going to implement adaptive positives as we need to.

And she also talks a lot in the message today about working directly with the local health department's, I know, a lot of people in the community were wanting me to kind of make that decision on my own about remote learning. But again, those are decisions that and our state superintendent said today, those are decisions that we do need to make with our local public health officials, and specifically with cpht in our case, so we'll continue to keep the lines of communication open between cu PhD when we make when we need to make collaborative decisions about things like adaptive pause, we'll do that. We have been aggressively updating the COVID dashboard. We know that a lot of our families, actively check the dashboard and want to see our positivity numbers. So we've been trying to update it, if not daily. A couple times a day, we're doing our very best to cover staff shortages. However, there may be a point where we won't be able to do that. I know, you all know that we utilize two of our most our elearning days prior to Thanksgiving. And that was primarily not COVID related, that was more staff shortage related, we just did not have enough staff. And we knew we would not have enough staff to be able to safely have in person learning on that Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So we've utilized two of those days we have three remaining. Those are days that we could of course use for all full district remote if we chose to. However, we also utilize those days for inclement weather. My goal and my hope is that before we move the whole district to elearning, that we would do more adaptive pauses, building by building class by class, where we have outbreaks where we have staff shortages, honestly, the diff the building, that has been the most difficult to staff, I would say since early November, has been our middle school, we have been struggling with a number of staff out not just because of COVID, just for all kinds of reasons. And that is continuing. So there may be a point where we have to have an adaptive pause at the middle school level. But that doesn't mean we have to shut the whole district down because we can't appropriately staff or ban the middle school. So those are conversations that we'll have as a district. Those are conversations we will have with Julie pride in the public health department when we have to make those decisions, we'll do our very best for parents to let you know at least a full day in advance. If we have to close the building, we've only closed I can think of one classroom that we took fully remote for two days. Due to and this was not recently, this was months ago. And we notified those families we sent the kids home, they stayed home for two or three days. And we were able to kind of mitigate the spread in that particular room. So that is what I would like to do as long as we can. So as long as we can pause, in a classroom at a school in specific areas, to me is the best course of action because we have kids that need to be in school. And just we know that we've seen the behaviors, we know the academic concerns, we did have quite a few families who kept their kids home. And I respect that decision. And I'm thankful for the families that have the ability and the privilege to be able to do that. A lot of our families went to work yesterday because they had to, and their kids had to be in school. And so we're going to do the best that we can to keep school open as long as we possibly can. Utilizing adaptive pause in the best way that we we need to. So we believe the best place for learning is in our classrooms with our fantastic teachers. But we want families to know that if and when we're given direction by C PhD, or ISP, to go fully remote or our governor. I know he's not mentioned that at all recently, we will pivot as we need to to do so.

Next is planning for remote learning. So we have been we have contingency plans in place. I don't want people to think we're not moving in that direction because we're not prepared for it. We recognize them person learning as the most effective means of teaching our students. And we know that there may be times in the next couple of weeks or the months to calm that we have to utilize remote learning for lots of different reasons. So, John, I'll let you talk to these bullets, because they're mostly technology related.

Sure. And I just wanted to make this very clear. This isn't a plan for what we're doing like March 2020. Or earlier where we were just sending everybody home and we're just kind of doing drive thru passing. So we have at the start of the year, all of the students as we completed our one to one Chromebook rollout across the district, not just making sure that all the Chromebooks are in the classroom but that all the students are assigned a Chromebook. So all of the schools at the beginning of the year and as being refreshed. For the start of the spring semester, have a Chromebook on them with their name shiny on the front of the Chromebook. So in the event that we do need to, if we have a weather report, oh, there's going to be 12 inches of snow tomorrow. The teachers in those classrooms can grab those Chromebooks, give them to the students to take home for that day or week or whatever they need. And then they'll be able to bring them back into the schools the following day, we will have available for all the schools extra chargers. So we're not asking teachers again, like we were a year and a half ago to go and unwire 4000 Chromebooks from classrooms, those will be kept at the school, where in the event that we need them, they'll be able to go down to the front office and grab the chargers that the students need for those Chromebooks, we have zoom in place, district wide for all the teachers, Zoom professional. And we've good or bad, built up a lot of expertise on Zoom, as I'm sure all of you have, as well. So we have those things in place for teachers, we have processes in place with standardizing on some LMS systems, that, again, across the district, there's processes in place for especially at secondary teachers to assign and collect schoolwork from students, whether they're remote or in person. And as we transitioned over the last year and a half, to a lot more digital resources, a lot of teachers have kind of adapted their learning plans, and taken this as a opportunity to modernize a lot of what they're doing. So I feel a lot better than about where we are as a district right now moving forward, and that we'll be able to better adapt and pivot to whatever circumstances that we have to face.

So the last couple of slides are more of my typical celebratory messages in the superintendent report. But before I move to those, are there any does anybody have any questions about? Yep. Paul?

Has there been any discussion with regards to limiting attendance at sporting events or

so we're already doing that? So we already have had we announced that I'm not remembering Catherine in early December, and when basketball started, so at the high school, we allow each athlete for tickets, and we have set a capacity limit in the gym, at the high school events and middle school events and middle school was allowing six people to attend per athlete and they have now lowered it to four as well. I HSA has not really, or is a have have not really put out anything about capacity limits. But Mr. Waller and I met about it early on in December. And just based on the size of our gym, at the high school, we don't have a huge gym space. So we just felt it was prudent without HSA really telling us to do it to do it. And so we have there, quite a few districts around us have not put in limits in some apps. So it just kind of depends on the school, I think, but we do have capacity limits at this time. Good question.

Sorry. Yeah. I, I had some questions about lunch. I wanted to bring back what one of our student ambassadors brought up quite a bit earlier. Yep. But can you speak to kind of lunchroom management? I obviously, it's tricky being outside. But I know that there was mentioned that might still be an option at UAMS. So can you talk about some of the mitigation measure measures for lunch.

So right now, so outside is still going to be an option at the middle school and high school, we just haven't been able to do it the last two days because the the we have specific weather rules that we follow. So we wouldn't have students outside when it's, you know, 20 degrees and depending on the windshield. So once the temperatures rise again, and it's warm enough pass, we have a threshold where we don't take students outside for a certain amount of time. Once we're over that, again, of course, middle school or high school, students will be able to go back outside to eat. We just could not do that today and yesterday. Mr. Nance said he is going to meet with both of the student ambassadors about their comments around lunch. The high school did go to a four seat for students sitting at a table as Michael mentioned, and they've put additional supervisors in the lunch room. It is just really, really hard just based on the sheer numbers. The lunch periods that are the toughest are the ones for our freshmen and sophomore students because they can't leave campus. And so we're trying to spread them out however we can and using some additional classrooms. So yes, that is still we're still, it's just day two of us being back. So I think they are really trying different things. Mr. Nance told me as he left, he sent me an email and said he's going to meet with Parker and Michael to hear a little bit more. They're underclassmen and freshmen. I think purpose is sophomore Michael's a freshman. So they're in no spaces where probably does feel like more students. So we're doing the best we can on that middle school spreading kids out everywhere. And they've been doing that pretty much all year utilizing the portable utilizing a lot of other spaces. At the elementary level, principals were working the weekend before break, like I know, one elementary school, put tables in the hallway to be able to spread more kids out. And so we have kids even eating in the lunch in the hallway at this point. So principals are trying to do whatever they can to because that is one of my biggest concerns, too, his lunches, the space where the masks are down. So we really want to make sure that we're spreading students out as much as we can. Good question. I should have put aside and for that. Any other Culver related or questions before we move on? Okay. Celebration, we have a new national board certified teacher, as you know, we are district very much committed to the national board program and our most recent person to reach that goal is second grade teacher, Mr. Rot at Thomas Paine. So congratulations to Carrie Serrat. Very proud of you. And last but not while this is well, not last but not least, but this month, January is Board Appreciation Month. So again, I know we had Board Appreciation Day, but now you guys get a whole month. So yay. So Katherine, I'll be posting some more, you know, social media posts and just opportunities for the community, hopefully to thank you for your service. We thank you for your dedication and service to our students. And hopefully, many other people are going to be reaching out and thanking you as well. January is awful Mentoring Month, and we'll talk about that at our next meeting. January 14 is Institute day. No school for EC five early dismissal for UAMS and a UHS. And then of course we are not in school on Monday, January 17, for Martin Luther King Day. So as we hear I'm not quite sure. Normally this time of year, we will be sharing more about Martin Luther King events that will be happening in the community, I'm not really sure what those events will look like. We will be sharing out the students who receive the Martin Luther King scholarships at Krannert. I'm not, I don't know if that event will happen in person or not. So I will keep you posted on that. So that is sorry for the extra detail. But I know several of those colder related slides are are things people really wanted some information about. So

any border person Oh, sorry. No, I was

just gonna follow up. It says right now on the diversity sub website of for the UBI that the celebration on Sunday, January 16 is happening in person Okay, and I know the last time I was in the Krannert you had to show proof of vaccination. So bring your card or if you've got the you know, if you're affiliated and you've got it on your in your safe for Illinois or whatever thing but yeah, that's that's what it says. Now, I

don't know when the last update is so so we will start sharing that I don't have the names of the students in this slide, but I do have them so we'll recognize our Urbana students who have received scholarships.

My board reports right, hearing none, I'd like to recognize Mr. Seamon for running our cameras yet again tonight. Thank you so much. would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Roll call.

member or? Yes.

member has an ACA? Yes. Member Hall. Yes. Member a golf ski. Yes. Member Carter votes? Yes. Vice President XM? Yes. I'm president Pulaski. Yes. So thanks, everybody. Good night. Thank you. Sorry, Jennifer. It

looks like the vineyard thing also.