Community Unit School District 7 Supt. Joe Tieman told members of the Board of Education Monday night that local schools could see as much as $600,000 in additional funding as a result of “evidence based” school funding approved by the state legislature and signed into law last summer. He cautioned, however, that such projections are tentative and could be impacted by the state budgeting process and other factors.

“We don’t know how much money it will be,” Tieman said. “Models that were run last summer showed we could receive as much as $600,000. Now, it may be $200,000 or it could be $400,000, but those initial models showed we could be receiving a significant amount of money.” The school district’s current budget totals about $6.5 million, he said, meaning an influx of $600,000 could push the district’s budget to more than $7 million next fiscal year.

In other action, board accepted letters of retirement from veteran teachers Kelly Vesper and Kimberly Link, approved the purchase of three used school buses to replace aging buses in the district’s fleet, and approved changes to the high school’s eighth period program that allows some students to end their school day early.

Tieman used a PowerPoint presentation to explain some of the intricacies of Evidence Based Funding (EBF), noting that the law is an attempt to correct the inequities inherent to the old state aid formula that treated schools equally regardless of their financial circumstances. The new formula will base funding on more than 30 factors, including variables such as the district’s poverty rate, current property taxes and the percentage of the budget covered by local contributions.

“It’s not just one or two factors,” Tieman said. “It’s a number of factors so schools with high poverty don’t continue to get funded at the same rate as other schools. The way we used to fund schools was the same for all schools. It wasn’t working and it wasn’t fair.”

The rate of local contribution, Tieman said, will be particularly significant. School districts that rely on local funding contributions for 25 percent of the budgets, like CUSD 7, Tieman explained, are “going to be funded differently than a school district where the local contribution is 75 percent.”

Under the new law, schools are guaranteed to receive at least as much in state aid for the 2017-18 school year as they received for the current school year. The law essentially mandates the state to appropriate at least as much money to fund schools at the same level as the previous year, plus additional funds to which they will be entitled under Evidence Based funding. Those additional funds will come to the district with a caveat: the funds must be used for school improvement measures and cannot be used simply to pay existing bills.

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“The intent is to supplement, not supplant existing funding,” Tieman said. “The state is going to ask us, ‘What did you do with the money and how did it improve school performance?’”

Tieman said principals at all three CUSD 7 attendance centers are working on “wish lists” to identify areas where the additional money can be most effectively spent. Among the areas under discussion are reducing chronic truancy, paying for social workers to join the staff and hiring Response to Intervention coaches to work more closely with students in need of additional attention.

Though not tied to one another, Tieman said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the No Child Left Behind, will be a useful tool for administrators to identify under performing areas where EBF money can be applied.

As part of the EBF program, individual schools will be categorized by tiers, ranging from Tier I for exemplary schools in the top 10 percent of Illinois schools in terms of performance to Tier 4 for schools in the lowest five percent in terms of performance. The law mandates tier assignments for individual schools, not school districts, meaning that an elementary school and high school within the same district could conceivably be assigned to different tiers. Tier assignment does not directly affect the amount of funds schools receive, but it does provide an index for monitoring school performance and improvement.

The relatively complex tier system includes details that could throw a school into a lower tier level even though it is otherwise performing at an exemplary level. For example, Tier I schools must be in the top 10 percent of schools statewide and have a graduation rate of 67 percent or better, but the school would be moved to a lower tier if if one or more subgroups in the school are “underperforming.” The subgroups are identified in the law.

“In my 17 years, our IEP (Individualized Education Plan) students have never performed at the level the state is going to require,” Tieman said. “You could be exemplary in every other area, but if one of you subgroups is underperforming, you can’t be a Tier 1 school.”

Tieman and other administrators are anticipating that the three CUSD 7 attendance centers will be Tier 3 schools, identified as “underperforming schools.” That expected designation is attributed in part because to the stringent nature of the Tier 3 definition, which includes schools in which one or more of its subgroups are performing at or below the level of the “all students” group in the lowest five percent of Title 1 schools. That definition is complicated for CUSD 7 since only BenGil Elementary receives Title I grant funds, and because the state has not yet defined which students are included in the “all students” group to which local student performance will be compared.

“They’re thinking most schools will be Tier 3 schools,” said BenGil Principal Angela Sandretto, who has attended workshops along with other principals on the new funding system. “That’s what we’re hearing.”

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“From what you’re saying about our IEP kids, we’re starting at Tier 3 no matter how we look at it,” board member Jenni Alepra commented. “We’re always going to have one or more subgroups that are underperforming.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Tieman answered.

“They’re not being compared to all students,” Sandretto clarified. “They’re being compared with students in the lowest five percent of Title 1 schools.”

“We really need to educate the public about this,” Alepra said, adding that there is likely to being a negative reaction from the community “as soon as we’re identified as underperforming.”

While the tier designation is a part of the EBF systems, it is not directly tied to the amount of money the school district will receive. Seventy-five percent of the formula for determining tier designations is based on academic indicators, each of which is weighted. For example, for 2018-19, 20 percent of the assessment for all schools is contingent upon performance in English, language arts and math proficiency. For the 2019-20 school year, that level drops to 7.5 percent and five percent is assigned to proficiency in science. For both years, however, growth in English/language arts and math represents 50 percent of the score for elementary and middle schools, and graduation rates represent 50 percent for high schools.

Proficiency levels will be determined by performance on standardized testing such as PARCC. Tieman said the new system corrects a long-standing issue with how standardized test scores are compared from one year to the next.

“For years administrators have said, ‘You keep comparing sixth graders from one year to sixth graders from the next year’,’ Tieman said. “It doesn’t make sense. They’re different kids. This will tract individual students from one year to the next.”

Like many other aspects of the new system, Middle School Principal Jill Rosentreter said the state has not yet disclosed its formula for assessing “growth.”

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“You could have a very talented student that started off very well in the fourth grade that scores 98 percent on PARCC,” Tieman explained. “But he scores 92 percent in fifth grade. We would think that’s great, but they will say it shows no growth.”

Tieman said high school students currently are tested only once during their four-year high school year. Under the new law, they will be tested during their freshman, sophomore and junior years to establish a base point for determining growth from one year to the next..

Another 25 percent of the tier assignment will be based on Student Success/School Quality indicators that will measure factors such as chronic absenteeism and college/career readiness among graduating seniors.

While the tier designation required under the law has no direct impact on the level of funding, it does, however, have other ramifications. Tier 4 schools, identified as the lowest performing schools, will be required to accept school improvement support from the Illinois State Board of Education. Tier 3, which CUSD 7 schools are expected to be, are eligible to receive support if they want it.

“We’re not going to turn down any help we can get,” Tieman noted.

Even though many of the program’s details are still being refined, Tieman said school districts have been told to expect the first of three monthly payments next month. The other two payments currently are scheduled for May and June, which should allow the distrrict to consider the additional money as part of its annual budget for the 2018-19 school year. However, disbursement of funds already has been pushed back several times.

“First, it was going to be November, then January and then March,” Tieman said. “Now we’re being told it’s going to be April.”

Tieman also cautioned that even though the law requires the state to consider the additional EBF funding, plus current state aid, to be the funding floor for 2019-20 school year, whether or not that money materializes is contingent upon the state budgeting and releasing sufficient funds to meet the obligation. In recent years, he noted, the state appropriated only enough money to release a portion of its state aid obligations to local school districts. Additionally, he said, the amount of money made available for state aid and EBF funding for 2019-20 could be impacted by the upcoming gubernatorial election.

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“We want to be cautious about how we spend the funds,” he said, “until we see what we actually receive.”

SCHOOL BUS REPLACEMENTS

On a motion by Dobrino, seconded by Hayes, the board approved borrowing $171,000 from United Community Bank for five years at an interest rate of 2.75 percent to purchase two 2016 77-passenger Bluebird buses and one 2014 34-passenger Bluebird bus equipped with a wheelchair lift. Alepra, who is employed as a branch manager for UCB, abstained from the vote.

The price tag for each of the 77-passenger buses is $65,000, and the 34-passenger vehicle is priced at $44,000. Tieman said the district is trading in two older buses, bringing the total price down to $171,000. He said UCB agreed to postpone the first of five $34,500 payments to June 2019 to give the district time to make the final payment on an existing bus purchase loan.

Tieman said he solicited bids from both local banks and obtained the more favorable interest rate from UCB.

“We are in dire need of updating our fleet,” Tieman said. He further recommended purchasing one or two buses every five years to keep the district’s fleet of buses updated in the future.

EIGHTH PERIOD PROGRAM REVISION

On a motion by Bernot, seconded by Schmidt, the board accepted High School Principal Shane Owsley’s recommendation for altering the school’s Eighth Period program that allows some students to leave school 30 minutes early as a reward for academic performance. The change will be implemented for the 2018-19 school year.

Currently, high school students are allowed to leave school early if they have all As and Bs on their report cards. The new policy will require students to have no grades below a C.

Owsley described the change as an incentive to poor performing students who may have one of more Ds or Fs on their report cards.

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“Students with Ds or Fs may see an A or a B as out of reach,” he said, “but they may see a C as something they can get to.” Parents, he said, are required to sign a form allowing their children to participate in the program and parents of students with average grades can opt to keep their children in school for the entire school day by not signing the form.

He said about a third of sophomores and juniors are allowed to leave the campus early now on the basis of their grades. Freshmen are allowed to participate after their first set of grades are posted at the end of the first quarter of the school year.

Since part of students’ quarterly grades are based on testing, Owsley said the less stringent Eighth Period program could be an incentive for students to perform well on tests.

OTHER ACTION

In other action, the board:

• Heard a report from Supt. Tieman indicating that bids for resurfacing the all-weather track will be opened April 17 and that he would make a recommendation to the board at its regular April meeting.
• Voted unanimously to renew membership in the Illinois High School Association.
• Approved a schedule for regular school board meetings for the coming fiscal year starting in May. The board will continue to meet on the fourth Monday of each month except for December when the meeting will be set for the third Monday due to the annual holiday break.

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