We gathered via Zoom to do a few things:

1. Share info about the latest news from the state regarding reopening;
2. Visualize how school will look different as we reopen;
3. Explore financial implications for each of these changes.

A few key conversation threads:

• It is expected that the governor will allow all of Illinois to advance to phase 3 by end of month. Not yet clear what this will mean for EC. Expecting to reopen as individual pods of children, with multiple pods per school. Perhaps we will be looking at groups of ten (unclear if including teachers or in addition to teachers.)
• Amy Gudgeon is available to work with schools to assist in financial scenario planning (agudgeon@studiowatershed.com
).
• What will schools have to eventually pay for the unemployment pay received by employees furloughed or laid off--especially if your org has never paid into unemployment?
• On the lobbying/advocacy front: What do we wish to communicate regarding group size? How will the government compensate schools for the costs incurred during this period?
• Unknowns about what actually demand will be.
• For Jewish ECE to continue to exist in Chicagoland, we will need $$ to survive reopening. Looking at increased costs of, for example, $20-25k per month in a 200-person school. How would/should/might the community prioritize investment at this time?
• We think we can succeed in holding on to some of our current families. Bringing in new families and attracting new families will have challenges. How to rethink marketing to and onboarding of families in this arena.
• Visualizing how room set up will look.
• Who will wear masks? What kind do we need and how will we get them?
• Great webinar on legal issues; let’s set one up that is specific to Illinois law.
• On Thursday, May 21, you are all invited to meet with JUF's voice in Springfield, Amy Zimmerman, who will join us to listen and understand what are the realities facing EC leaders on the ground.

Meeting participants included Anna Hartman, Jenna Turner, Amy Gudgeon, Michael Halpern, Shelli Patt, Alan Brown, Bonnie Neubauer, Cherene Radis, Elizabeth Foster, Janet Sear, Jean Losek, Lisa Spewak, Lorrie Appleby, Michael McCarthy, Ray Sherman, Roger Wolf, Saralyn Peritz, Sasha Kopp, Scott Aaron, Shelli Patt, Susie Wexler, Turhan Karabey, and Zahava Berman.

We are getting closer! This is our last meeting before we go behind the scenes, code the survey, and then do some beta testing. We came up with some very cool ideas, like estimating the hourly tuition. This will let us do some comparisons across sites (though we know there are some assumptions baked into our calculations). Next step is to test the tool and then we hope to start data collection in late August!

Due to a necessary reschedule in February, we held two Financial Metrics Taskforce meetings in March. It was a quick turn around! At the first meeting we re-introduced the idea of this taskforce and the goals for the initiative. We shared a high level view of the indicators we were looking to collect. By the second meeting we were able to share a more in-depth view of the indicators (including the metric data sources). The group had a chance to look through the indicators and decide: what would be really challenging to collect, what doesn't need to be collected, and what was missing. The group brought up some really great points, and we are well on our way to finalizing the indicators.

We have done a lot of work since this group last convened in October 2018! We have contracted with Studio Watershed and CoMetrics to help us with this work-stream. Our goal is to increase financial sustainability and efficiency by understanding each program's individual data and by building knowledge of industry best practices.
We had to reschedule our February meeting for early March. At this meeting we presented the indicators that we think we want to capture, and received feedback from the taskforce. Our next meeting is in a couple of weeks and we'll continue to refined our indicators and then discuss the data collection plan. 

During our August meeting, the Task Force helped refine the Request For Proposal (RFP) that we intend to send out in the fall. We both strengthened and clarified the RFP while also prioritizing the data points that we hope to see addressed in the final report. In the coming weeks we will send out the RFP. If you are interested in reviewing the proposals, please let Kate know.

On July 16th, 2018 we kicked off the Business Model Task Force. This group, comprised of directors and lay leaders is charged with helping to identify a number of sustainable business models that our system can try to emulate.
During the meeting we examined data that helped illuminate some of the operational pain points that the schools experience. We then went through protocols to help

1. Identify the underlying reason why we are experiencing those pain points and
2. Identify what information we would want to know if we were going to open up a school from scratch. 

We'll take the results from these activities and work to find a researcher who can conduct the necessary research to help us develop the business models. See below for meeting deck and in depth notes.