A District 99 board meeting was held on May 6 as one of the last for the school year to give credit to students excelling in areas like architecture, NISPA awards, research club, short film and journalism state qualifiers, as well as touch on some of the improvements for the 2024-25 school year.

The whole first half of the meeting was dedicated to giving recognition to the students at DGS. In attendance were many students accompanied by their families. Students, staff and the awards were presented to the board with multiple students and coach speakers.

Senior Will Elliot spoke for short film director Christopher Blum, elaborating on the skills it takes to produce a short film and ultimately place 6th in the state.

“I am a director of editorial for the IHSA short film and I also did sound design… This was a huge achievement for us because not a lot of schools have outlets of creativity for students like me who are interested in film and can really express themselves,” Elliot said.

In addition to the short film team being recognized, the board brought in research club members to elaborate on their most recent project of planting a prairie at DGS. The club president Taylor Mitchell, vice president Mara Haiduc and secretary Nahla Mokkath presented their project story to the board and explained their vision.

“Our inspiration for this was when the grounds people came to the research club sponsors Mr. Howard and Mrs. Socklaven said they had a problem mowing this area because it’s a detention basin so there is some runoff collected there… it was more of a problem with machinery getting stuck in the mud down there,” Mitchell said.

The project took place on April 6 at 9 a.m. on a Saturday for the research club members and families to come help plant and save this area.

After the recognitions, the board got onto their usual agenda of the student representatives reporting on both DGN and DGS over the past few weeks and looking into the end of the year for seniors.

Toward the end of the meeting, the board went over and discussed the feedback for the 2024-25 school year. There was feedback on the D99 websites saying that it was not the resource most people checked first for information. There was discussion about the lack of consistency between different web pages for grades, sports and academics.

With constructive website feedback and communication, it was proposed to change the confusing aspects of the website to improve student and parent satisfaction. District board member Jill Browning talked through the online feedback of the schools.

“We do know that our website is the portal to everything so we want to make sure it’s simple and clear. On our to-do list is to refresh the current site that we have… paying particular attention to calendars because that is the number one reason people come to our websites,” Browning said.

The District 99 board has goals in place to improve student and parent satisfaction with websites and overall attendance to school events.