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so when you do that if you if they're 99.9 they're going to get on the bus correct we said under 100 right so they get on the bus and their parent thinks they're going to school they get out of the bus and you take it when they walk in and they're 100.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
this is refreshed i want to say something like four o'clock in the morning so this would have been over the weekend and usually um reporting uh goes down over the weekend because a lot of offices aren't open to do those reports next slide please the next few slides uh are daily new cases for a hundred thousand people and this comes from the johns hopkins coronavirus resource center which is a continuously updated source of coven 19 data and expert guidance the data shown here is from the first excuse me january 22nd to july 26th and federal guidelines advise that states wait until they experience a downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period before proceeding to a phased reopening the next phase of opening in the state-specific views of the graphic this two-week period the last two week period is highlighted in orange if cases are turning upward or green if they're trending down so if you look at the right hand scoop of the screen of the graph you'll see that it's colored orange so you can see illinois although not anywhere we were back in march continues to trend up this is good news because we're not as bad as we were in march but it's also something to watch with caution but let's take a look at our neighbors i have to point out that the numbers on the left vary that's due to population numbers but the important part here is the trend so here we see indiana trending up next please wisconsin trending up next please missouri trending up next please iowa actually may be starting to trend down but still not a good spot and kentucky trending up when i look at this data i see that our all of our surrounding states are trending upwards in cases faster than illinois so good for illinois but we still have people who are coming into the state from outside the other piece i wanted to draw your attention to is a list of underlying medical conditions that increase a person's risk of severe disease let's concentrate on the first light bulb the strongest and most consistent evidence and remember this is a novel virus the science is evolving all the time what this slide shows is that if a person has any of these conditions and they become infected with cova 19 it's more likely that their symptoms will be more severe the nausea the vomiting the diarrhea the loss of taste and smell the fever the shortness of breath the difficulty breathing is likely to present itself in a more severe way and if the student or staff themselves and member involved don't have any of these underlying conditions if they can track coven 19 they may be bringing it home to somebody who does next slide please rob one community member called me out correctly i might add uh for an inappropriate response to the data they submitted from the cdc which is on the top which is in the top paragraph and i apologize for that it was not my intent to imply that they were what they presented was not true rather i was thinking that although children may be at lower risk they are still at risk and that's in the second paragraph which is from the same guideline and although i am sure it is not the committee members to intend to imply this i must point out that even if the date death rate for children is small it's still clinically significant and even more so of great imports to our school and to our community and finally i would just remind everyone that our schools are not only made up of children below the age of 18 we have teachers administrators and other staff most of them above 18 who will be sharing that space in my my next slide i'm going to move from fact to opinion my opinion i have heard and read many criticisms for remote learning in uh i don't agree that face to in-person education is better i agree it is in person is better for social and emotional learning i agree it is i don't disagree that any of these statements are true i don't disagree with statements that the curriculum in spring was not ideal our staff and our teachers went from full in person to full remote days without warning and we're further constrained by the state grading guidelines i know that most if not all of our teachers and staff have had the opportunity to find their to refine their approach in their materials i don't disagree that students were demotivated because of the state mandated grading system that is no longer an effect next slide please is the hybrid plan well done and comprehensive absolutely and i'm proud of our of our uh dr thiele and all of our administrators and all of our staff for pulling it together in such a short period of time and it's true that many other districts are beginning the year with the hybrid model my concern is not that the district hasn't provided a comprehensive plan for hybrid learning my concern here is that we will have hundreds of students staff and teachers some with medical conditions making them much more susceptible to the virus in a confined area for prolonged periods of time and to protect them we are relying on the combined efforts of hundreds of people to practice good hygienic technique attending school is not the same as walking through a grocery store or going to a restaurant at 25 capacity it is easier in those settings to maintain social distancing than in a school where people are changing classes and mixing do i think many of our students will comply absolutely i drove past the south field on 63rd street thursday morning around 8 a.m and there was some team out there i don't know what team they were they were wearing gray t-shirts and they were beautifully distanced around the field but i've also seen i've also received a picture of a backyard party where young folks were wearing purple shirts and clearly not distancing i've seen pods of runners in my neighborhood and basketball player excuse me baseball players on 63rd street the other day at egg harbor there were students several again in purple t-shirts sitting almost shoulder to shoulder my concern is not that our hybrid model is not a good model i believe it is my concern is for the health and safety of our students our faculty and our staff and our community at large lots of other schools are going hybrid but i really think that there's no shame in us not being a leader here i hope i'm wrong that i'm being overly cautious and there are no negative outcomes in those other school districts i still propose we start remote with a few excuse me with a few exceptions when the need is there and those exceptions would be well defined if cases plateau in a month or three months we can move to a hybrid model yes we will have lost those initial interactions but i ask you doesn't the risk of transmission of a deadly disease out avoiding the risk of transmission of a deadly disease outweigh the risk of initiating the hybrid model in a few weeks with that i'm going to end the um i'm going to hand the speaker over to mike and we'll go from there thank you very much for listening all right thank you dr kupka um i prepared some remarks uh and uh asked nancy let me read uh read them to kind of get things going kind of from the standpoint of i i waited to last last time so i thought maybe i kind of launched things this time so i wanted to start by saying um thank you to all who submitted mostly productive empathetic and heartfelt comments uh they've been invaluable in guiding my discernment and i you know despite uh you know we all have jobs right uh we're uh this is we're not getting paid to do this uh you know hundreds of comments coming in and and uh you know i wait till the last minute i was um having my daughter actually helped me um go through some of them as we were driving home from a college visit so uh anyhow i just really want to thank people for taking the time uh to share with us uh and uh to those of you those few of you who uh decide to use your profanity and uh otherwise insensitive or unempathetic language i just want to say i i heard you too so um i spent a good deal of time preparing for our last meeting but information continues to evolve and we've now heard from hundreds more people in recent days we also just received updated guidance from cdc and isbe just this past week and some of that was unexpected uh i requested this special meeting today uh because i am now convinced that we should start the year in what i'm calling a remote for most model uh and this is for several reasons so i'll share them now i have a daughter at dgs although i believe the hybrid model is worth the risk to my healthy white family i might feel differently if my family was black hispanic or if my house was multi-generational or if one of us had underlying health conditions since the data clearly shows that these neighbors brothers sisters parents and children are at a greater risk of illness and death from kova 19.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
okay we have a motion and a second to approve the regular meeting minutes from june 22nd any discussion okay hearing not all in favor all opposed motion passes next on the agenda would be the approval of the special meeting minutes from july 15 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um as i mentioned dr brill mentioned the cohorts will be uh based on the k-12 a b cohorts for hybrid um and we again as dr breal mentioned we're trying to get the information out to everyone as soon as possible so that you can arrange for child care and um and take care of those needs i know this will this might be a hardship for some people and i i we we really want to try to help work with you um in terms of you know making making sure that this this is this is possible and as seamless as possible um parents and guardians will be encouraged to drive their children to and from school so we will be arranging and that's part of what our arrival and dismissal planning will be in terms of a midday arrival and dismissal and when students are home we will be providing some activities that they can work on at home as well so again logistically this might be difficult but for kid learning we do feel like this is the best way for us to get to know them and help them feel comfortable at school so that they're set up for success for the rest of the year in terms of uh let's see trying to go to pre-k hold on one second oh okay there we are um so the focus for our preschool program um will continue to be um exploration socialization literacy readiness skills math readiness skills um that's still going to remain our focus um our preschool team has already been discussing how um you know and sharing ideas and strategies so that we can deliver that same kind of program within the guidelines of social distancing knowing that students at that age three years old three four year old year olds um really need a lot of hands-on and for that purpose our preschool staff will be equipped with the um with the ppe gowns gloves face shield that kind of thing that will allow them to interact more closely and directly with students as needed um because again we our staff will be removing kids from car seats they'll be assisting with toileting there's a lot of hand over hand modeling instruction that has to happen so we want to make sure that our staff is safe and protected and making sure that um and then how they engage with students um at this level um students will have access to all manipulatives and toys um so we're still you know it might look a little bit different in terms of what they have access to we're not going to be looking at stuffed animals and that kind of thing anymore um but we also will be uh sanitizing the equipment um between the am and pm preschool sessions so that the opportunity will be there we'll just make sure we're cleaning things uh in between um and our custodians um and we are fortunate to have fantastic custodians at center school um they will be cleaning the preschool classrooms between am and pm sessions and i should have also mentioned that um for the kindergarten half days we'll also be doing some there'll be some cleaning in the classroom between the sessions um at this time we do anticipate that students in the preschool program will wear masks um we are waiting for additional guidance from the office of early childhood at the state level um but we will be teaching them how to put them on remove them how to care for their masks um and they'll be provided with plenty of math groups so i have a three-year-old son as well who's going to preschool i'm in the fall and we are i mean he's got some very cool masks so he's really excited about them and that helps um but we're working on building his tolerance uh we're at about 20 minutes or so so we're we're pushing for a little longer um but that's definitely going to be something that we uh we would ask parents to try to work on at home as well it's important to note that peers who've been accepted into the program um will be expected to participate in the model that whatever's happening in the school district at that time so if we're in the 100 model which is our goal we're really striving to have all students present in the classroom at that time and there was a question about students using chromebooks at preschool we do not expect students to independently use chromebooks we will be using appropriate technology with them not necessarily um you know through the the chromebook so um please don't if we can if we can take any anxiety off of you please let us do that so there's no need to hook your child up to a chromebook um prior to coming to preschool um [Music] that's that was the extent of our slides here i think i see dr brill's back on um and so i guess what i'd like to say is well i would much rather be with all of you in person tonight i'm really grateful that we're able to connect together um in this way um and you know we really thank everyone who submitted questions i think that we're going to see if there any other additional questions maybe we have a couple minutes is that our plan dr burrell yes actually thank you uh mary rose great job tonight very thorough um i appreciate all the detail that went into your uh your presentation this evening i'd actually like to turn it over to dr ruby who's acting as our moderator and able to deal with some of the questions while we have a few minutes remaining um i know we sent out the parents we're going to start on time and end on time we also have the brookfield high school presentation this evening as well so dr rube i'll turn it over to you if there's any questions that we could try to answer so so i've been watching the questions as they've been coming in and i've selected a few that i think we can answer right now but please know that if you have a question that you've put into the uh the questionnaire site we will be doing a written q a to give answers to all of those questions so we apologize in advance if we can't get to your specific question but know that answers will be forthcoming so one of the questions mary rose that i think you might be able to um to address is a question from a parent well several parents asking um well my child's never been to your school um will there be an orientation um tour of the school for new students yes so thank you for bringing that up we absolutely um are working that was one of the first things that the staff talked about is how we can we can acclimate and and show students what the school looks like um so we are planning to put together a video that will do a tour of the school um and kind of explain you know as a model and also included in the in the video would be um uh staff like all our the staff that students will come in contact with with them without masks so they can see that as well um and and make sure that they're comfortable with that and then when students do get to school um and you know we do typically do a a um a tour do you know what it means with those first couple days we'll do but we will continue to do those tours so everybody knows where everything is we can do again a virtual tour for students when they're in school we've talked about how to do something i want to make any promises but how we could try to get students and families you know again at the school in some way um you know in a socially distant manner before uh before school officially starts so we're working on all of those plans if anyone has any suggestions or requests um you know please feel free to email me we'll do whatever we can to incorporate them thank you so there's an another uh question that's been asked a few times and it's uh this one is if parents decide to home school instead of the distance learning option can they have access to the materials and whatnot in in the school districts such as you know st math and things like that and so i i want to answer that question and i want to be clear about the distinction between homeschooling and distance or remote learning homeschooling is when you formally withdraw your child from the public school system and there are state laws that regulate home schooling we have paperwork with you the parent would formally exit their child withdraw their child from school through the registrar at this uh individual schools and then we have paperwork in central office that um parents are asked to fill out telling us that you know what you're planning to teach and we look that over we don't approve it or disapprove it but we keep records of it because the state asks us for that information so once the child is withdrawn from the school they're no longer a child within a school in our school system and so then they no longer have access to um the curricular tools that we're using in the school and i don't mean to sound harsh about that but homeschooling means you have formally withdrawn your child from the school so your child is no longer on our census um and no longer included in any of the counts that the state department of education uses with regards to school funding and things like that so um so that's a really important distinction and that is spelled out um in our plan there were also some questions um since i work with with the hr department also some questions regarding will folks be told about teachers who are returning to school or not returning to school and basically personal questions and um we do not um share personal matters with the public so we would not be publishing or providing information um regarding um the the teachers in the school and whether they had decided to you know come back to school or or not that would not be something that we would be we'll be publishing um due to confidentiality issues um and i'm looking at the time and it's 30 and i don't want to keep people from getting ready for their next meeting so any questions that you sent in that were not answered we'll be collating those and grouping them to provide answers to the two similar questions and that will be we'll be getting that out to you so thank you so much dr ruby mrs diamond and the whole team uh i want to thank you for all of your preparation parents uh for joining us this evening and staff members who may have joined in viewing the meeting thank you for joining we appreciate everybody's hard work patience and flexibility as i talked about earlier um and we really want you to know that we have as mrs diamond talked about we have families we are struggling through the pandemic just like everyone else and we are with you um and we want you to be with us truly in partnership and to make the best of this very very challenging time that frankly the whole world and our nation and our state and of course locally we are all going through so we just have to stick together it's really an important message we want to talk about dr ruby i just have one note here from dr sullivan and he said that you know there's good news the good news for our our community is that in march we experienced 77 cases of covid there were 60 cases in april 21 cases in may 11 cases in june and six cases in july and only one eight-year-old and one three-year-old so as a community kudos to everybody who is taking advantage of implementing the mitigating strategies hand washing social distancing and mask wearing and i just want to echo what mary rose said i've been in about um she talked about her son thanks for sharing the personal information because i think it's important the um i've been on many state preschool meetings preschool guidance i got an email during this meeting should be coming out tomorrow they're hoping but many preschool meetings where we're being told that that young children kindergarteners and and places where little kids are wearing masks that the kids aren't having the problems with the masks so we need to be really mindful of how how we as the adults are talking about these things and we will it's just natural but how our our attitude and our perspective on on and the things that we say really is very powerful in terms of influencing our children so once again thank you very much and we will be getting the answers to those other questions put together dr burrell and that's all that's all we have thank you dr ruby again thank you mrs diamond and we wish all of you the best and hope your families continue to be well thank you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
which is well within the air of your thermometer that's fine what are you going to do with that kid in my mind because we're going to use those scanners like doug had mentioned or i mentioned to you about doug vanderlin and craig coleman they are um a scanner that gives you like a green and a red if it's green it means it's under 100 it's red it means it's over 100 correct correct but so you got on under 100 right so so then after if they register let's say a school we will recheck with another monitor if you will a touchless thermometer and then see if we have a different number we're going to try to we want to try to check and recheck if needed my question is what are we going to do with that kid congratulations so then you're going to call the parent and they're going to sit in that sick room until that parent figures out how to get them correct even if it's until 3 30 or 4 in the afternoon well that's that's how it's happened already i'm just asking what you guys have to define all this because people are going to be because it's crazy what we're considering and the process is not scientific it's all everybody's opinion so we're not doing it based on a lot of straightforward things so and for us to not have a lot of issues i think all that stuff should be very well defined if it's a hundred then that's the number and i don't have a problem with that number but we'll put that in is there anything there's different ways to take the temperature if you're doing temporal inner ear for frontal or skin temperatures there's different errors with each of those so if you do an ear thermometer on the bus and you do a forehead scanner when they get there you're going to have different temperatures there's no question so part of this i would like somehow to get the community more involved and take their kids temperature so that you have more of an average if they have that process going on so parents aren't so we don't have that scenario where we have seven kids get on the bus with the temperature of 99 because parents have to get to work and seven of them all are reading 100 just because of the difference in the thermometers it's a real it's a pain but it's going to be an issue with the process because of how everything is getting done so we need to define true ill if your kid has a temperature of 100 or for the previous so say their temperature is 100 saturday morning and 100 sunday morning does that mean monday morning they can't go to school is there an hour limit on how long their temperature can be elevated and all that stuff needs to be defined and whatever stuff we're doing we need to be very specific and defined that way when the parents they they take hold of this with the whole community so that the school isn't saying well they're 100 you got to come get them and then they're you know parents can't find a way and then they're leaving work and they're doing this and all this other stuff if we make it very specific which is harder because everybody can come up with their own scenario i know everybody's thinking well this this and this you can all come up with the scenario when we're dealing with what ifs that makes the exception to the rule we have to make things that are very specific stick to them let the community understand them get used to them and then move forward i think the biggest thing and i'm gonna go to lori in just a second the biggest thing we wanted to do with this document is to show the community what we're doing and again we didn't want it to be five or six or seven pages long but some of the things that you're mentioning through the definition we need to add that in because really we came up with a pretty a pretty decent starting point we probably can put in i should probably we can put in those definitive uh statements like they'll be taken on the bus 100 degrees is our number we can encourage parents to check temperatures at home before yeah just more i don't want more stuff i even take less stuff but the stuff we put very well defined falls into a category that says oh mom and dad go uh it's 24 hours and you know we've had that room right if you're 100 degrees and 24 hours you're not supposed to go to school the next day people haven't really followed that then the sniffles and everything gets carried through the school this is different we have to get people to get on board with those numbers and make it our parameter and if they show up at 100 parents have to know we're calling you to come again yes just to address a couple things you mentioned about like the community taking temperatures lindsay even said that they're hoping to use some of the grant money to make thermometers available to all of the families in the county so that will be helpful because we hear that often we don't have a thermometer at home with their temperature as far as the type of thermometer we're using the infrared scanners of course they all have different readings no one reads the same well right there's calibration here at all right right but that that is our method we ordered new thermometers so we're going to be doing infrared for all the school settings and on the bus um as far as but you have to define once they're on the bus does that count to school yes so then you don't have to check them again well i'll like i'll wait no go go look you can go with i i don't like commenting the problem with this and the administration director said in regards to kids getting up so for example if you're at the middle school and you're getting off at the main entrance there are also other kids coming in getting dropped off it's hard for our administrators directors to be able to make sure that every kid coming off the bus is also you don't need to check that kid because they were already checked but they sometimes mix in and they stop and talk with each other so so how does the kid that's why we just decided it would be best to check them all before they how does the kid get on the bus he never goes in the building they just drop him off at the middle school and then he gets on a bus to go to another school and do it like at my school where our bus truck is right now all those bus kids can be checked but they're walking up the same door as people that get dropped by their parents so whoever is our checker they're not going to necessarily know and bus riders don't necessarily write five days a week so like at my school we talked about we didn't want to recreate this content i would have my business dropped with a different door that we could know they're getting off the bus i don't have to put a screener at that door and then you come straight in and they wouldn't be mixing with that population that's being dropped off by their parents so you so what so what makes no sense to me being on the physician side of this is that there is no one who walks by you that's going to develop a fever in five minutes let alone five days right so if you know everybody on the bus has screened and you walk past me even if you throw the virus my way it's going to take around somewhere around 10 to 14 days to actually develop anything it's not about that it's about knowing but [Music] so that person sitting at the door when we have 60 kids trampling through the door they're not going to know if cody long got dropped off and these are you know he needs to check or put him over the bus and he's good the only way if they're all using the common door which is what happens at all the buildings in my building i can fix that because i can have my buses drop in a different door and those kids don't have to be these streets i'm not sure if the other buildings but i think safe practice would be to check everybody come to the door i don't have a problem with that then it doesn't make any sense to check them on the bus it does because we're sitting with the bumps right now for free to send them right back in my front door then get them all the way we are expecting our kids to develop a fever within five minutes of some kind of contact it'd be nice to screen them right there and say mom your son or your daughter has 101 so so when a student for example and you can help me out if you want to try them in here what we're going to do with this is the student students that try to get on the bus when they are when they meet they try when they get on the bus if we check their temperature right there if they register a temperature then there's going to be a contact made for the parent to come pick up the student and if there's again ideally it'd be great if the parents could be able to do ideas close by to start with get a feel for this and understand that when your kids get on the bus that they're going to get their temperature taken and if they're registering a temperature of 100 or greater we're going to have to have them go back home that day so the parent hopefully will wait with this student at a bus stop i know a lot of times i've ridden bus routes and a lot of times we pick up it's very very close to the house sometimes we don't doug i don't know if you have any other comments i really know the problem concern i get with that is we're going to increase our pickup time immensely good just because we'll be checking if there's something sent back there's some kids that don't they're not out there so you're going to have you know 30 40 seconds a minute waiting on them and then you're going to have a process that you go through to send them back so that's my only concern well i think it's a valid concern but i think that if you're going to check their temperature the best time is when they're at their house before you pick them up that's my point don't let them sit on a bus with a bunch of kids if they already have a fever if they get on the bus and don't have a fever there has to be a way this place can let them off a bus without having to retest them and let them go into school we can do that at the elementary but at the middle of middle and high school that is more challenging for where we drop off the safest point with our buses i don't disagree it's not challenging or it might but it's not hard there's doors by the gym there's doors as a front door there's both heights we have multiple doors we can change that process we do not have to let the kids that have already been screened that go through i'm so it's not an absolute but you should look into just dropping them off at different places so the people don't have to guess who's been tested and who hasn't been tested it's going to be enough delay like doug brought up just getting kids in the school right so if you have a whole busload that shows up the same time that seven parents are dropping off their kids why should we let them mingle right because now you got to sort out and then just do it all over again that delays the whole thing and i understand that we will look into this to see if we can come up with something at the middle of the high school the problem is we're going to have a lot of people at the beginning of the day doing a lot of different things like for example we're going to have people checking temperatures and doors this isn't just for students but for staff staff don't come into the military we've got some early riser staff that would like to be there at 6 30 6 40 6 50 in the morning we got to make sure before they got into the building their tests are checked and they're okay i agree and yet like i said we don't want to we don't want to we don't want to keep staff out of our building early but we're going to have a lot of we have to we have to come up with this plan where we're checking to make sure everybody coming into the building is fever-free right so the bus would help all the kids on the bus already tested but it's going to take additional staff to be able to monitor a separate door potentially at these buildings but we'll look into it we can take another person yes we'll look forward to it at each building i'm just saying that i think it'd be easier if we already tested them and they dropped off on the door and went right in that you don't have to test them again which delays still getting into the building tracy just did come up through the idea we could have our bus paras that are going to be on the bus walk the kids in at a different entrance we could look to do that that may be a solution to our problem okay that's all i'm asking thanks for bringing the storm that process we did that's it that's why i say that another question so are we providing maths for the staff are we providing maths for all students are we providing math for anyone are we not providing them yes we are but yeah you could everybody yes we are every day we will give mass to students and staff yes it could be reusable mass or it could be study if they want to bring their own they can bring their own okay we are we are stockpiling supplies like you would not believe everybody in the so that was going to be one of my questions also look i i think that because the school supply list already went out so i don't know if parents are aware if they get any you know supplies for masks or whatever i just had a question so well first of all the attendance awards i think that's great i think it's a really good thing to include in there nobody's penalized for following the rules and staying home so i think that's really nice um my question was on the doctor's release will be required for staff for students to return to land positive covenant 19 tests just from my experiences working at the hospital through all of this a lot of our cobit 19 positives some are just allergy-like symptoms and they rarely follow up with the physician following um so they're really going by health department directive to say you're out of quarantine you've been symptom-free for three days you're released you're good to go so the doctor piece is a little is a little bit different for me so i just wanted to bring that up and just get some clarification on that i think when we talked about it though through the health department was you know or said they can't return on that that's just as good so it may just be a worrying very important yes very well could be and that would be then the only other thing that um so on here it says that mass will be worn at schools by everyone unless developed exceptions apply so i assume that's students and staff and then it talks about how visitors are required to follow the guidelines listed unless they're five years or younger so i know you do have some tutors that are five and also some pre-k well mass supply to them as well even though they're under that age limit then yeah the the 2059 order said to stew just students okay but not to visitors okay that makes sense so as the school thought about any clear face mask for some of those students okay so like i've already purchased surface mass shields and flexible speech language in particular so those people won't have to wear a mask at all right just their clear mask we've got some that are over here so they can just see through the mask how about shields face shields instead of them it's not that science isn't isn't good at all yeah i didn't order 500 of them because i want to see what i want we got to try some things yes i have a couple questions um on this document there's nothing that several people have required if there is a positive case of 2019 diagnosed by either a student or a staff member we will are excusing will the board of education be transparent like the usb 244 recreation board was and release the statement so we know that they contact people for their father about tracing we know that but are you going to notify the school district if there has a case so that people who there's so many different symptoms to this that people could then be a little more aware to watch for themselves and in the case of the elementary school a lot of young young children that i thinks will probably be way different but a lot of times young children will be in the hallway and we stop and you say um do you need help yes i need to know where to go or i had an accident they were excused to go to the restroom they have an accident they come they're looking for a change of clothes that would not be something that all young children would remember oh why wouldn't i talk to so-and-so for this song is is there going to be some [Music] it's mandatory reporting to the state for all positives the best way to find out who's positive is by that parent or person who's ever positive reporting it to us and we can't make them tell us but we can ask everybody but so susie goes and gets tested and she's positive unless she tells us there's no way for us to get that information if you were given that information would you do a release like what the recreation center did or the recreation center put on an idol somebody right so that person must have reported to him and then they announced that was the one at the pool yes so then they announced that they had a positive patience without naming right yes so yes the school district can easily do that we can say that there was a positive or one or two or whatever i don't know that i'm against that i don't know if anybody else i'm not against that i think we discussed this with lindsay and she kind of asked that they'd be able to do their contact investigation first and then the district could you know if it was necessary um release a statement so through the health department you mean well it could be in conjunction with them ultimately but did she say she said she said even if susie came and told us she was positive she wouldn't want us to say make a statement until the health department made the statement also or is that what she's saying investigation so the health department gets notified whenever there's a positive then they investigate the context they would want to wait till after that right so we have a good example of that that just happened several weeks ago yeah so the best thing is to wait for the health department to be able to do that contract tracy because the next thing you know if somebody announces oh we got a positive piece here we got a consistency there next thing you know we have phone calls protocol after phone call people thinking they need to be tested because they heard from such and such it's like the game of telephone where you whisper in somebody's ear next thing you know ten people now it's totally different so that allows the health department to do a thorough investigation and get very accurate information and contact those that are at true risk for potentially having it before the rumors we never had a contact a lot of work trying to figure this all out and time spent answering these questions without answering and kathy if i can address like you know helping somebody get with directions in the hallway it's they're looking at the length of time that the individuals were together so that would not qualify as a contact when those for that long and that falls back into that six feet distance for more than 10 minutes so 6 10 are those key numbers and that's why it's going to be important and we've talked about this and we even discussed this with our staff last wednesday at our staff meetings through starleaf we talked about how it's important that for example assigned seating so we can be able to determine kids and that may be content and that's much easier for contract contact tracing for our staff to be able to help out for example lindsay payer and the health department people if there has to be some notifications so it's going to be a little different for a staffer staff's going to have to think about classroom organization a little differently as far as assigned seating and then you know it's trying to trying to limit interactions as much as possible and keep kids in similar groups as much as possible so here all of our teachers have microphones like something that they can use the classroom amplification systems elementary wise yes five through eight most of them do very few of the high school teachers at home so are we going to order some of that more of that i mean i'm just thinking it's hard to hear through these and then if you're instructing to a whole classroom it's going to be hard for our teachers on their voices and to you know magnify their voices so i'm thinking yeah i just didn't know if we had that availability of microphones for voice amplifiers or whatever not in the high school not in high school the only time there was one in the high school is when there's a student that has that need at the high school lobby so with that teacher said that they want them what have your teachers said anything about that that they that they would like those or they may not know yet if they like them or not i'm sure yeah i think it's something to really consider to look at possibly [Music] i have some familiarity with that from my time in first we had uh i'm trying to remember the name of the vendor i want to say red line if i'm not mistaken but again it was a voice amp there's a portable voice amplification system what doug is talking about in in systems we're talking about middle and elementary score more of a permanent type system where it's speakers we can look into those if needed we sure can i mean they're gonna have to really be projecting their voice more you know that's really gonna after seven hours talking loudly you know so let me get your question answered i so you know that's actually to prevent the mass chaos right yeah sure so if they investigate just yeah so you get what we're saying yeah yeah we have no problem we want people against public school keyword is public and we just don't want to violate any [Music] there was some concern among some staff members that we will have students who can't afford personal school supplies when we went to everyday shares nobody knew because there's a container on every table and everybody can step out we didn't know who didn't wasn't able to afford bringing their school supplies in and they didn't know if sparks money could be used to help offset that just something to think about that was a concern about it that they they wanted to make sure that every student felt that they were ready for school also not oh my gosh i'm gonna i don't i don't have all these things that i'm supposed to have for school according to that list and just to touch on your point and you go to your next item we are i'm working with uh gentleman matt harmon at wolf creek uh matt is working on putting together uh like school packages for like kids in great stage before five through eight nights we helped with the basic supplies and then also i'm working with heather carver through ecam on some school supply things some school supply supports if you will school maybe clothing or other things from a radiant life church ryan anchors i'm working with him as well because they're looking to do the shoes again the new shoes for the kids i didn't roll them so we've got some we've got some real good things and going there for students in need so and something i picked up today on again on a cdc document was all the kids need to put their name on their mask because young kids will trade stuff or we talked about doing paper sacks yeah paper sacks but afterwards walker or whatever but yeah like for their names high school age reports and things like that making sure because ideally we would like to try to reuse the masts as long as they are capable of being reused and but again the safety and storage piece did not know that there are certain ways to store them but there are better ways to store mass and we're learning that so it's it's truly the domino theory it's masks lead to plastic bags or paper bags that they know might be paper bags for storage and yeah it's just different and then we've got to have the thermometers and the owners need to try to be calibrated as best as we can and so it's it's a it's a lot but we can do this we can do it okay there were two other questions um i don't know what would be classified as an outbreak but in the event of a school upgrade would school be suspended for 14 days like quarantine style or would it be where school would you work in a school where you continue to do all depends on the guidance for example from the health department so when we and laura you can speak on this and administrators directors you guys can chime in too so if we have some sort of a situation that we need to deal with whether it's either covet type symptoms or a positive case then we go into the health department and they they help us immediately and then we make that determination based on what we need to do so is it is it some kids either need to be quarantined or isolated maybe potentially staff might be quarantined or isolated potentially it could be just a lot of different things so um or if you have any other comment we are going to rely on we want to keep the the tracing piece and the identification piece uh that the health department is using we want to be consistent and not come up with our own way of doing things at the county commissioners community today i spoke to they they really appreciated that we involved the health department and the consistency piece is going to be very important in hopefully making sure that we do everything we can to take care of all of our needs so lori i'm sorry well and i think it kind of depends on you know how active the student was the number of contacts that would be other school students school staff so according to the health department it will kind of depend on the number of contacts that would be involved with a particular case as to how many potentially would be missing school does that make sense so like a high school kiddo that's involved in theater and football and you know scholars bowl and you know numerous things may have more contacts than what a middle school fifth grade kid would have well lindsay went on to say that they don't want to close down a school for the whole system if they could isolate just even a grade level or wing or whatever that might look like depending again on what it depends lawyer has cancer but at the same time um like the state word catchword is to pivot and um part of why we're going to have those two days of training is so that we can if we need to we can pivot to an online or different platform and put it right back into the in person we have to do that obviously severity depends and severity of symptoms because i may not have many or i may not be able to function and somebody's gonna help keep over my feet so you know of course again we as we talk about the source and the receiver so whoever you know if both are wearing masks it's very low risk so so that's something to consider so to help depart when they investigate that's the first thing you're going to ask with both people in the mask the last question was on the health guidelines that says the social business they will be encouraged that you know talk about mess so there's a question since we are encouraging social distancing um not mandatory hamas are we going to limit things like assemblies like recess time uh restroom lunchroom breakfast being served and then it came up because it says the river will open at 7 35 buildings where would these students report to so the rest of the questions [Music] um you know we're kind of a difficult spot because staff aren't on duty it's hard to get their input without taking their summer away once we get a plan for those things my plan is just to roll out like an informational video to parents and staff and you kind of say here are some changes that we're going to see in our school next year for the lunchroom for breakfast 4 a.m before school definitely don't have all those answers right now there are you're somewhat familiar with this because i know darla has talked with you about we may have to because our lunchroom at the elementary school is small we may have to use half the gym put a tarp on half the gym and serve lunch in half the gym so that would keep kathy would only have half of him for pe if i'm not mistaken do we i think we have a curtain that drops we have a curtain that drops down at half court so at least there's a little bit of a barrier it's not a wall or anything like that it still be some noise from the cafeteria students on one half and then pe kids so that's an example of we're going to try to maneuver the kids and put them in places where there is some distance and some we can spread out a little bit better so that's one example adding a lunch to less than the amount of kids middle school high school i don't know if you guys want to speak on your thoughts we're in the same boat as darla i've already created an extra lunch today so we're going to have three lunches you know we're looking at whether we'll put kids certain groups in the gymnasium for the commons uh or are we gonna assume the teachers rooms but we haven't had the staff back so it's pretty difficult to make every decision that you you know i make a lot of decisions that i'm not getting as much input as i would like to get on those but those are the types of things that we're we're talking about right now and trying to limit those times where kids congregate you know so that's you know that comes with you know having a separate bus entrance um if i've got to keep fifth grade separated sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade there's two or three adults per grade level already and so it's it's how do we divide them out throughout the middle school first breakfast they come in they eat breakfast it's going to be have to be more organized at that point in time because it's not going to be oh today i'm gonna decide to eat breakfast and i'm gonna go sit wherever i'm gonna have to have assigned seats for kids as well we can put four kids at a table and they're because they can see they and they can keep their distance but they're going to have to be in the same tables every day or close to it so that if we do have to trace them we can provide that list of names guys really the question is an excellent discussion so uh and comments from administration directors thank you very much are there any more questions on the health guidelines part so is that is that a document that you're gonna then revamp before school starts and we're gonna so here here would be again ideally if we had two i'd say two to three months we would have um we would have the advisory committee before the board approves this but we don't have her we're limited with our time so this will be an approval scenario tonight for the for these adjustments and i've taken some notes um here that we're going to add in some some clarification then again thursday we're looking to have thursday july 30th the advisory committee they may come up with some things we didn't think about here today and you have a list of the advisory committee members attending their confirmation i think most all of them have confirmed i think they've only had one or two that have not been able to be on that committee and they're going to be again parents grandparents there's going to be substitutes out there teachers there's going to be administrators directors there's going to be you saw the list and i tried to put their roles out to decide what they how they would serve but i might miss them for example i might miss some i think i missed one i know that is a substitute for us but there's going to be a lot of different people there with a lot of different views and then they're going to come up with some things tonight that like for example clarification so i'll take those notes that you've mentioned and add those in for thursday's meeting and then we'll come up with some ideas maybe from their meeting that we want to make some adjustments to that'll give us a few days until our august 10 more meeting and then if they have some things that they would like to see i'll try to highlight those in a different color and then that way hey this is what they came up with this is what that advisory committee came up with it'll come back to you guys for i guess i won't say final approval but august 10 approval will just say august 10 approval and we may have to make some adjustments as we move on as we said it's a flexible document how many additional staff members versus additional healthy custodial staff will be hired to supporters okay this might be where i have for example margarito and you can kind of help me with this and make sure we're looking at having a second daytime custodian in the building during the day just simply because we believe a daytime our daytime custodians deal with a variety of things but our second daytime custodian is pretty strictly focused on additional cleaning supports for the most part and so they're looking to hire a daytime custodian for each of the buildings to help support cleaning rooms for example when darla's kids go to lunch or they go to potentially pe music library we're going to go ahead and get in there hit those high-touch areas door handles tables chairs things like that and we're going to again these positions thank you for mentioning tracy mentioned these are positions that are grant funded positions through that spark money that we're getting so when we put out those openings those positions are not guaranteed or permanent if we go back to our old normal and we don't need those positions those go away we we believe that for example some additional staff margarito am i missing anything there with staff okay the bus paris scenario those are positions that we again they will go away when we don't have to do temperature checks hopefully we don't have to do that in the in the future i'm trying to think food service additional food service additional food service staff so these are all those uh those grant fund smart cover type money positions that are we concerned about filling those yes yes so i find it ironic that she looked at me because i tend to have the fair position but i do think some of them like temperature checkers things like that could be some para's instructional you know i mean those people right could do that too before but it won't work at all i mean i know we have trouble with yeah cooks you know and and so higher on additional yeah you're right and you know what every school district in the state's going through this because again as we understand too now there are some scenarios where people are taking unemployment and making a nice wage maybe they are not too ready to get back to work because they're they're doing all right with their unemployment and they choose to go that route of course of course as long as they're capable again no judgment there at all i'm not judging one way or the other on that but yeah we're concerned about that but we do have some applicants that are popping up and we're just going to try to fill as best as we can as you said sometimes we have trouble we're keeping those filled so although that position that they come in on may be temporary it's not to say that there won't be right of course at full time i mean they won't necessarily they don't like you but the reality is and to give you another example for example our bus prayer situation we anticipate that could be like an hour and a half in the morning an hour and a half and it will just be in the morning and you don't have to do it in the afternoon some of our para professionals and some of our staff go 30 and have 35 hour weeks that could get them closer to 40 hour weeks which would again benefit them financially so maybe some of our jobs that we need to fill hopefully will be from within and we just very much we need to be together on this because like for example when i met with the county attorney or county commissioners today again just being together and getting back to school is important we all feel that but getting back to school but we have to be safe for our students and our staff and want to reiterate that i know i think every one of you are here friday and you guys talked about making sure we're safe for our students and our staff i think you guys all reference that and that is important we're going to do everything in our power because again i say we love our kids we want them back and we want them to be here for the full year we want to be in our buildings we need everything in our power to make sure that we can we can try to do that and it's going to again together together i think we can do this it's just gonna require everybody doing you know the things that we need to do how much coming back this needs to be like if we make changes how much of the i guess how deep do we get into the reason approving it at this level like i mean i i read that it looks like this starts shane brings up great questions that i kind of thought like right how much of that needs to come back to the board august 10th and stuff i mean i know there's going to be a living document well it's it's my opinion in my opinion only but the administrator we have to trust the are going to do their job and and we have to say yeah we believe you're doing your job but there is going to be things that we're going to bring up and ask that they look at but other than that we would be all day trying to micromanage that and i don't think we should that's what my question is the county commissioners again have been very good about they want for example russell cookie has been charged with working on that 1.76 million million dollars from the county for the smart money again we're so thrilled that the county commissioners have reached out to us trying to obviously take care of the county different entities in the county whether it be schools or a library system or a hospital and helping out with different different entities and so we're in fact that's something tracy and i are going to be working on tomorrow is finalizing the document to get to russell the county commissioners i think do that by april by august 13th so we're trying to get that to them ahead of time because i know they're going they're going to have a lot to consider money goes quick it really does so these things that we're talking about like mass and thermometers and extra positions and they're going to be we're focusing in on that sparta money and again what i understand is the first of possibly three distributions of 400 million so there could be two more distributions and who knows i mean we're still we're storing the supplies and materials i delivered some masks and face shields to them to the buildings today i know we've got a lot of supplies coming margarito has been working a lot on supplies and there's lorry been working on supplies as well so we're going to be stockpiling what we feel like we need and then ordering more as time goes on because again there'll probably be a second and that third distribution of money that will hopefully come from from the government but we and and tracy made a good point we put copit information on the website once this started we can we can update this on the website and as as time goes on it may be something we just do a quick review on every month at the board meeting hey we don't see any adjustments that need to be made nothing has come from our our patrons our families our administrators i don't know if you guys have anything to add or anything to look at it may just be a quick hit or review it just may be that each month stacey you mentioned not hearing or getting as much feedback from your staff as you like is that something that you expect down the line i mean obviously when it starts i think i think once school starts we'll get more feedback you know when you have a meeting in july you're not going to even get all your staff there so i mean we've had that but i think uh giving out the survey and some stuff like that maybe we'll get a little more feedback you know i hadn't thought of the uh the amplifiers and i don't know somebody i wouldn't have needed but i know some people would and so we'll have to discuss that and that'll be a question i ask the staff when i talk to other persons and that's a good point too and i would imagine our viewership tonight whether it be facebook or whether it be youtube correct we have both going down or just just youtube i would imagine our viewership tonight on youtube is probably a pretty uh pretty decent amount of people which is good glad that they're by the youtube is out there taking care of those people that are at home but we're going to get this information you know how good tracy is with minutes of meetings we're going to give this out to our staff quickly and then i'm also going to send out an email to the staff updating them about this meeting updating them about future meetings with advisory council advisory committee and that again there will be just continued more information that you know they can they can meet with their building administrators either you know phone call in person whatever if they have questions they can also contact me if there's any questions that come up and craig are you going to publish this advisory committee somewhere so the people in the public can contact any of those people to bring back involved yes because that's the great thing about the advisory committee is it's going to be wide-ranging of a lot of different people and those people have people that they associate with and then they can i would anticipate us meeting in in my mind july 30th and then i would like to hopefully maybe potentially meet one more time before school if we feel like we need it and then after that advisory council that advisory committee would be as needed hopefully our covenant numbers continue to decrease we may not have to have maybe but once every nine weeks of meetings if i have monthly meetings we just don't know but that group i want to keep that group kind of on retainer for a lack of a better term i want them i want them to give us because again you guys have come up with things tonight that we didn't get down they will as well so is there any other questions on the health guidelines and we'll move into the proposed learning options okay this proposed learning document um if you look at the navigating change document they talk about three different models they talk about the on-site piece where it's basically school school as we've seen before that's what we all prefer that's what we all desire that's what we all want it may or may not be the case you know for everyone they also talk about a hybrid or a blended model that hybrid or blended model could be something for example like say topeka school district has created they created that blended model which is an a day e day if you will so students go under eight a half the students will go in a and then the other half come on b then on wednesday they created a day where they just clean the buildings and then on thursday the a students go and friday the b students go something along those lines so you're really getting two days a week in the building the other three days are outside so it's about 40 of attendance with staff so having said that that could be a possible a blended model in some way shape or form where you're not only doing it in person with smaller groups but also you're doing online like that blended model or hybrid model the third option that the state talked about that the navigating change document was again an online learning option where you're talking about strictly online there may be some people or maybe some families that just don't feel comfortable right now sending their kids back to school and we need to meet their needs too we truly need to meet their needs so in discussions with our administrators and directors we just felt like three different options right now to start with would not make sense for us we truly felt like based on our numbers in the accounting and the information that we've had from the health department and the directions that uh i guess the i say the information we've been given and the discussions that we've had that we truly can do an on-site learning model as well as an online learning model we don't necessarily have to do a hybrid or blended model right now so that's why we chose to present to you these two options for student learning so again quick review you can see it up there that's the traditional setting really don't need to go through that too much the online learning though that's going to be different than continuous learning was back in the fourth nine weeks of this last school year continuous learning was again a a it was a project that we created we put together people in the state put together on a very short notice we did the best we could because we just didn't i think the state felt like they couldn't go from week to week to week to week to determine if we were going to actually have any type of form of school it felt like they needed to get something going and try to do the best we could to keep some sort of education happening so this online learning this is going to be from 7 755 to 310 each day and you're going to have from a tech device so basically quite honestly we're going let's say k12 101 type technology and we are so fortunate in this district that the technology staff as well as the technology uh equipment that we have and you know with doug vanderlin's leadership credit woman's leadership and then all of our tech staff as well connecting with our staff and some of the things that have been put in place not only during continuous learning but also during the summer with tech cadres and tech groups working and different things happening behind the scenes we feel like that this model can occur again you're going to have a device of some sort and the student will be expected to be online each day for class so if let's say for example a fifth grade student in amanda allen's room there she may have 15 kids and she might have one kid that's online they'll be on microsoft teams and they'll be they'll be getting the instruction all kids will be getting that instruction from that really excellent teacher that we hired to be able to take care of our kids so with that being said they will be able to to have that connectivity with their devices and so it's a consistent platform we heard also from our our parents that they really wanted to have small i guess fewer platforms to deal with so if some parent like for example some kid or something should be some teachers want to use a program like for example we have study island and reading eggs and then some use shelby and some use microsoft teams and i'm trying to think of some other places if you want to email there's a lot of different platforms that can be used and it's really confusing to parents if they've got two or three kids at different ages different levels so these two platforms we feel like they will work in an online setting plus if we have to go to a hybrid model in the middle of the school year we can utilize these platforms in a hybrid and online model so there will be a consistency in place and our teachers they won't have to change and go to different platforms if we have to go to blended as well as online so um with that being said i'll stop there questions comments so this is my understanding you just said 16 people would be in mrs allen's class so 15 are in the classroom when one is online so they would be online with mrs allen also correct they would use that device and they would see the instruction that would be coming from that teacher other questions other comments would there be anything to help facilitate that along lines of like a tech pera kind of thing because getting fifth graders on teams difficult and it's going to be their first year on teams because they're correct we're going to be working with we're going to be working with the fifth grade teachers before we send the devices home and with fifth grade students directly on those very topics so we're going to be doing teams 101 with all fifth graders so my next question you may have addressed it last year but so my grandson came from topeka and he came to our house to try to get on his assignments and he couldn't get on in the evening so when he called that number there was nobody answering the number do we have something on the call to take that or to try to get somebody on is that just only during the day that's part of why i think the discussion wasn't about the same school day in respect so that they're getting it in real time and then there's not the attempt to get it well i think with that too it's going to be important to create some of those black and better words boundaries because i had teachers that were answering questions on saturday night at nine o'clock and that's you know that's hard to be able to teach during the day and then you throw 24 7.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i know that i know what many of you are thinking just let them choose to stay home and i'll get to that in a minute many parents teachers students bus drivers custodians food service workers you get the idea regardless of their race health or age are deathly afraid of the disease even though our hybrid plan i believe will reduce the risk that's a fact you know that fear whether we agree with it or not it's unlikely we are going to convince them that we've sufficiently reduced the risk at least not in the next few weeks attending school with high anxiety and fear is not a good learning or teaching environment to say the least the truth this truth actually is not found anywhere in the cdc guidelines for those who say that people who are afraid or at higher risk should just stay home i say it's an unfair unequal choice we have a responsibility to avoid inequality if we truly believe that the benefits of an in-person experience are worth the health risk then we must admit that those who opt out will not be receiving this valuable benefit which creates an inequality that i cannot abide better that we create a more robust learning experience for all and something else about the choice some students might choose hybrid even though their parents choose remote for them the opposite is no doubt true too can you imagine being a student who is paralyzed by fear but forced to attend school by their parents or can you or consider this the isbe guidelines state that we must allow 18 year olds to decide for themselves about attending school in person can you imagine being a parent who is at high risk but has an 18 year old who chooses to attend school disregarding their parents wishes choice will create division within some families that we cannot that we can avoid with a remote mom the remote model has the inherent advantage of being entirely predictable even if we adopt a hybrid model as we've discussed we could be told by the state to scrap the model due to increased positive tests deaths etc the recent data for our area has been trending worse not better which nancy's just shared i like knowing for certain that we can do what we can do with a remote model regardless of the infection trends and in the remote for most model that i envision we have we must have strategic supports for for students who struggled this spring students who struggle with mental health issues and vulnerable populations such as english language learners and students with disabilities these supports should include limited ongoing in-person learning we should also consider some limited in-person opportunities for ninth graders and transfer students to help these new students transition into our d99 community we should also have tools to measure the success of remote learning and accountability for teachers for many families remote learning was not a success this past spring it was not a success the overall level of engagement of students as well as teachers was unsatisfactory and i we fully understand we had to move on a dime all that sort of thing but we sure did paint ourselves in a corner here i you know many people i think who are afraid of a remote model are looking at what happened here this spring and they're saying i don't want more of that we need to make sure that doesn't happen we need regular reports and data regarding remote learning and a plan to correct deficiencies in real time and we need to regularly evaluate the health risk metrics and engage community discussion to determine if we can launch the hybrid model later this fall or winter as a first step to returning to in-person learning so in closing i intend to vote for remote for most beginning to the school year with in-person strategic supports and continuous evaluation of the overall plan effectiveness so that's my statement and i look forward to hearing what everyone else has to say and then you know robust discussion thank you mike would anybody like to offer up their thoughts i can go first you can hear me can't you i i wasn't sure if i uh unmuted um yeah yeah i know this this zoom is uh is a little more interesting i i not as big fan but hey it is what it is um i think i spoke with uh nancy and with mike this week and um expressed my concern you know i know that i had um said that uh the um hybrid model would be the the best way to start and after looking at the numbers and where they're going and [Music] you know just i worry about all of our at-risk students and faculty and staff um and i don't want to make the wrong decision for them because that can maybe meet lead to life or death for them and um uh i just don't want to feel that way and so i'm also kind of leaning towards starting with remote and uh maybe having freshmen um some of those uh at i'm calling them at-risk students uh ones that um maybe we're having a hard time with the remote learning this spring and our counselors and and teachers know who those students are um and transfer students to somehow uh work out that they could come the first couple weeks of school to meet the teachers and get an idea of what their expectations are going to be because um i know that if we have remote learning it will be much more um stringent and much more um uh challenging than what we had this spring and so um i think for for the students to understand what their expectations are with that from our teachers um and then see where it lies with um how all of this is shaking out because i'm really afraid that we're going to have an increase because of the fall coming up um i worry about that and and i know that i have i kind of kept a little spreadsheet here of um comments and i know that i didn't get a chance to see the three o'clock um mailing that i think hank sent us on what was uh sent to the district so i didn't get to add those into my little spreadsheet here but according to me um and the comments that i got parents really want to see us start with the hybrid and maybe part of that is because of the experience they had this spring um i i did see a few of them would like to see us do a hundred percent and just go um full force and um our teachers uh surprisingly i i got uh more teachers wanting the hybrid model than a remote and the students i got more of them wanting the hybrid but um i think the students especially they're not as i'm not going to say at as risk but in their age group they don't feel as vulnerable maybe as some of the other groups so i i just i i this is such a hard choice because our students are what's so important but yet without our teachers and and fact and staff and all of that to help them get to where they need to go it's not going to work so i suggest remote and then see where that goes but i would also like to see our freshmen and um our transfers and some of those other folks come in and meet our teachers and talk about maybe what they need to do to to make their their experience successful i don't know thank you terry i i would like to clarify one thing just to be clear um i received a couple of emails i received several emails personally that i forwarded on to dr thiele i received three or four i don't even remember emails that either contained um personal personal medical information or i had one email that was uh the person felt was almost afraid to reach out because she felt her neighbors would not approve of her stance um and so those i did not forward because i didn't i didn't want to make them part of the record so i just want to acknowledge that there there may be a few emails missing from their cadre because i know i withheld three or four of them not many that's okay it's okay but you know my number my numbers are not um you know all the numbers involved but i just kind of took a little running tally of where each comment lied um in in my graph so but i mean it was it was uh a huge majority of hybrid oh yeah i told it yeah i would agree with that so anyway that's kind of where i am would anybody else like to discuss anything yeah um i i just wanna um thank you you all uh expressed your view so eloquently that agree and i'm not going to go on um i've been watching this statistics and i'm not as eloquent as everyone else but um i'm being totally guided by science i have been watching the way it goes um i think i was telling shirelle that i read a couple of books one on 1918 flew one on the 1957 epidemic and they followed a pattern of being very active in march falling down in the summer and then coming back with the vengeance in the fall and i i know it's not a popular decision this is um it's been weighing on my mind you know i think when i got into this i never expected that i would uh feel so torn up about about this issue but i also feel since you've all presented the statistics i won't go over that that there are other things to be gleaned during this time our country has faced it faced hardships other times you know i think the world war ii people they all came together and for the common good they did things maybe they didn't want to do um i think families have an opportunity to become closer at this time and learn how to teach their children how to learn because isn't that the objective of school it's not so much the facts but learning how to learn and i think it's a good uh for students to learn how to learn independently i i know that's going to be hard i mean i've had the experience too of trying to motivate a child who isn't motivated and i do believe that nothing can beat the in-school experience but i really feel this is a time we have to rise to the challenge and and and do this and i for that reason i'm going to be voting to go totally remote even though it's like a really hard decision that's kind of all i have to say in this thank you joanne i know somebody else started to speak before that's yeah so i've got a couple things to say um i guess i'll be the bad guy here and be the one that advocates for for the hybrid model you know this is a difficult decision i don't think there's a right answer i think we've all said that there's there's no good answer here for us you know i've read every single one of the hundreds of comments from the community i've talked to community members i've talked to teachers i've read all the comments from the teachers and in my opinion the most important job of the school board is to ensure the safest environment possible for our students to operate in and learn it's not to eliminate all risks let me refine that to provide the safest environment possible and then let the families decide what's in the best interest for their children we do this all the time let me give you an example we have hundreds of students that play football every year across america every year it is guaranteed that children will suffer brain injuries and death so what do we do as a school board we establish concussion protocols we train our coaches to how to practice and play safely we provide athletic training at the events and then we let the parents make the decision for their family every year we allow students to travel internationally and subject themselves to risks they don't face in the school environment what do we do hire the best tour companies available train our teachers provide proper levels of supervision and then let the parents make the decision and i think that's exactly what we're doing with this hybrid plan it provides the best possible safety environment mass and shield symptom checkings enhanced sanitation and more and then lets the parents make the final decision on whether or not they want to send their kids 100 remote option removes all choice from parents it's essentially the board telling parents we know better than they do and therefore they can't make that choice i'm not arrogant or vain enough to think i know better for five thousand of our families what's best for their kids i think we need to allow the community to make the choice for their kids i understand there's risk according to cdc i personally am considered high risk i have underlying medical issues and i am considered high risk but i would be sending my kid to school if we did have hybrid and you know what that's my decision to make that's not anybody's decision here on the board or in the community that's my decision so i mean in conclusion i'm in complete support of the hybrid model for starting school and more importantly to provide a choice for the thousands of families in the community to decide for themselves what's best for the family that's what i have to say eloquently said the only thing i would challenge you on dan is when you play football or you go on a trip you're assuming that risk for yourself in this instance you're bringing the risk to everyone else around you if your parents make that decision if parents are not willing to take that risk i'm perfectly fine with that parent opting out and having their kids stay home that's what this is about this is about providing choice there's risk in going to school every day there's a risk of school shootings every day in our school so what do we do we hire new head of security positions we bring on new security guards we enhance security as part of the mfp and then parents ultimately make the decision i don't think we're here to make the decision for every parent in this community about what level of risk they should assume i i just i just don't feel that we should make that decision for them i just feel that those are decisions kind of nancy said those are your individual decisions these are decisions that affect a community society i that's to me the difference between those type of decisions well but you're not giving the parents a decision you're removing decision from parents you're i think again maybe maybe i'm looking at this wrong but you're essentially telling the parents of this community that you know better than they do because at least 70 of the comments that we've gotten in the last four days at least 70 percent have been from parents that either want the hybrid model or more and what you're doing is you're telling those parents that you know better and they're wrong and therefore we're not going to allow them to send their kids so dan dan i gotta i gotta interject here um uh the you know we are charged as a board to dig into all this data right weigh all weigh all the pros and cons and we have that responsibility to make these kinds of decisions i mean no matter what what choice you make here you're making a choice for somebody right you're you know there are people damn there are people that want that want to come to school you know without face masks at all there's there's people that it's it's all over the place and unfortunately it's been put on our shoulders i would have much rather seen guidance from the state or or from the federal government that said if you're if we're here you do this if we're here you do this instead we didn't get any of that what we got was um well here's the things you can do to make things lower risk moderate risk or high risk you decide which one you want to do so i you know i i get what you're saying you want to give people a choice um i i rest on the on the notion that uh that it's an unequal choice um let me ask you guys every every government agency their first requirement was everything you can to get the kids in the classroom that's the first thing in the cdc report the pediatrician's report get the kids in the classroom the safest way possible in areas with low transmissibility and hey for a second just i'm going to let you finish what you're going to say but i'm just going to hopefully for a second because terry has the floor next after you she's been that's fine signaling go ahead sorry no that's fine well maya wait my turn no finisher finish your statement no let terry go that's fine i don't have a prepared statement i didn't know we all had to sit down and come over prepared statements tonight i thought we were gonna have a discussion this is two of us elected to prepare statements go ahead uh the other thing is is dan to your point i understand that uh you know you're talking about families but i think we also have a responsibility to our um our faculty and our staff um you know they're at a much more i'm going to put them into a more vulnerable category versus the kids of the students because you know many of them i think hank had told us last week that 25 of them are in the high risk category or even higher risk that's not accurate that's not accurate terry oh okay i'm sorry i misunderstood i missed that's all right i the it's about 10 that have said that they need some kind of accommodation to a medical issue to return which means that some of them may not be able to return some of them might have conditions that we're already addressing through the preventative measures we have in place about eight percent have child care concerns and about seven percent have a different concern that they would like to talk about with an administrator which could be anything ranging from um a family member that is that increa they themselves are not an increased risk but they have a family member that is um it could be just anxiety not just but i don't want to minimize this it could be anxiety and fear and they just want to talk through it with the school leader and work through that it could be any number of things in that that lasts seven percent but it's about 10 that it's a medical accommodation so i i just want to get the real numbers out there but when you add those together that's 25 that is 25 but not all of those are saying that they can't return oh oh no i'm not saying that they they said that they couldn't return i'm just saying that 25 of those are are concerned let's say about their either underlying conditions or other conditions so you know uh i think we have to think about them too so this is just so difficult it's so difficult but i still worry about them rick did you wanna yeah i i said what i believed last week and i'm standing by uh what i said because i really do believe classroom instruction is important um i i believe that hank's plan has done just about everything he possibly could the administrative team to try to make as a hybrid model as safe as possible um i think that is the way to start knowing that potentially down the road we may have to go to full remote we're offering people a choice and i i believe if the people that choose remote are going to get just as good as the people that decide to sign up for the hybrid yes i know there's a whole other week of sign up for the remote learning but you have 4 800 versus 200.
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okay we have a motion in a second to approve the special meeting minutes from two weeks ago july 15th all in favor all opposed motion passes next on the agenda is the finance and operations report section that first is an approval request for personnel report part one yep so on certify this month we have a correction to make from a resignation to retirement and as for pamela bacon as media specialist at greencastle high school we have a resignation from tabitha riones's math teacher at green castle high school we have several classified resignations lori lamb is attendant secretary tina pitts as instructional assistant at redpath angela lee resignation is noon aid at path and jared bruno resignation is second shift custodian at greencastle high school and then also under eca elizabeth timberman as uh resignation is eighth grade volley coach at greencastle middle school so definitely like to thank all of those folks for their time well served serving greencastle community schools um definitely wish those of those individuals leaving us permanently definitely wish them uh wish them the best and that is all that we're asking for approval for personnel part one okay we have a motion and a second to approve personnel report part one all in favor all opposed motion passes next item on the agenda is the approval request for personnel report part two mr goodbye several certified recommendations as we work to fill up our staff or the starter school don batten higher as third grade special services teacher at tz uh jessica briones hire a director of guidance at greencastle middle school tanis niklash hires eighth grade ela teacher at green castle middle school kathleen chassis hire as special services teacher at deer meadow this is a title change with no compensation adjustments but we would the recommendation is to name dr jenny french as assistant superintendent at greencastle community schools um a couple of classified uh items this month approved kim rossic as maintenance painter tony smith as maintenance painter sarah byram approved transfer as instructional assistant at gms to 8th grade math support at gms melinda short transfer is iss at gms to attendance secretary at green castle middle school several eca hires this month first at greencastle high school mark hernandez as assistant football coach aaron rowings assistant varsity cheer coach katie downing volunteer assistant varsity cheer coach michael scott volunteer assistant girls golf coach dessa frank head girls cross country coach kyle shafer varsity wrestling coach ian pingleton assistant varsity wrestling coach colin york volunteer assistant boys basketball coach rob york volunteer assistant boys basketball coach and maggie meyer volunteer assistant volleyball coach next up at greencastle middle school rob warman as head football coach ben monat assistant football coach tanya welker head boys cross country coach joy pershing head girls cross country coach jessica briones 8th grade volleyball coach jamie landry volunteer 7th and 8th grade assistant volleyball coach amanda hernandez volunteer assistant cheer coach and then one item of note a compensation adjustment for cj shields for approve to approve training and certification hours and this would be the additional hours that he spent providing awesome professional development for our teachers on preparing them to use canvas i recommend at this time the board approved personnel report part two thank you mr gibbetty can i get a motion to approve personal report part two okay we have a motion and a second all in favor all opposed motion passes next item on the agenda is the approval request for the allowance of claims mrs romer is this on oh it is off it is okay i'm the first to speak okay during the month of june we had uh two regular payrolls and two mini payrolls you will see in your packet the first regular payroll was dated june 5th with a total payroll of 423 thousand dollars 493.74 along with that payroll came accounts payable for payroll taxes and retirement for a total of one hundred seventeen thousand nine ninety five forty two next in your packet you're going to see a mini payroll dated june 8th total for that payroll was 5 000 for 36.50 along with that mini payroll on june 8th you'll see in your packet the accounts payable for payroll taxes and retirement a total accounts payable of 1 674 74. next in your packet you'll see a regular payroll dated june 19th for a total payroll of 397 thousand 596 25 along with that regular payroll on june 19th was accounts payable again for retirement and payroll taxes we were off just a little bit on some um on some curves so i had to make an adjustment on there so you'll see an extra line per per to make that adjustment for a total accounts payable on the june 19th payroll of 117 536.71 last is a mini payroll dated june 24th for a total payroll of 41 709 32 along with the mini payroll on june 24th there were accounts payable one in the amount for payroll taxes of 381.54 and the second would be for again for payroll taxes these would be for the federal taxes total of 11 325 64.
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and they did a great job don't get me wrong but it was it was trying yeah and we also don't want to create an environment this is not a virtual school yeah we are not creating a virtual school for kids we believe in the staff and teachers we have we want those teachers teaching kids so we're going to create an environment where we accommodate that the best we can to have those teachers there we don't want a kid to come back and say hey i'm pretty bright i can go through the virtual school and i can get through my full day assignments in two hours it's easier for me just to stay home and work through that environment that's that's not what we want we want those kids in front of our teachers in front of our staff and even if we all have to go home we talked about blended well what happens if we're in a situation where somebody orders that we all go home from thanksgiving to christmas right and we've got three weeks of instruction there we all can go home and we need we're going to be providing the supports for our teachers and even when they go home they've got the tools that they need at home as well so to so that again the the learning environment looks the same from day one to day 180 and i think that's what's important and significant about what we're talking about here so that that really means you know that that kid is going to be signing up as you can see for very specific things that looks like regular school sitting at their kitchen table so one of the i don't know if you've pulled a question more of a comment so students choosing a model need to remain in that model so they until the semester is over i think i think that's important because you don't want people flip flopping back and forth but just as a comfort so as a parent if i was to send my kid to school the actual in-person model that we're going to go with if all of a sudden i start to feel uncomfortable maybe somebody in my house will all of a sudden has an illness that's a compromised immune system whatever could i then pull my child out at that time and go to an online model and stay online of course until the next time to switch just just some thoughts to think about i don't think you want students flip flopping back and forth but i do think there's some circumstances where it might be okay and stacy we talked about that for that very reason and what we didn't want is all of a sudden now amanda allen because we brought amanda out now all of a sudden she's got to go oh stacy's kids now i need to drop them in such and such program and assign these objectives from october to the end of december and so the answer is yes this model supports that much better for that situation and maybe your situation is only two weeks long you know and then all of a sudden things have cleared to a point where you're like i'm ready for them to go back well they've stayed in that same learning environment they haven't disappeared for two weeks i do think it would give parents a little bit of comfort knowing that if i choose to send my kid that doesn't mean that they're stuck there the entire time and i'm going to be left with no other option once numbers go up and i no longer feel comfortable if they can pull their child and still have that saving platform of that outlet and two and i just realized i i think i put it in the item of both we'll talk more about that here in just a few minutes just above that i didn't put that in a second so i will add that wording in there um circumstances may obviously you know be you know considered special situations may be considered um i mean that can be used for an individual that's you know the contact with someone to test positive if they're home performing for two months we expected this to be online learning director's class even though they showed no symptoms they're fine correct correct um i will add that wording in there and uh and that way it'll cover that that piece and and we got guys we felt like the semester made sense you could say nine weeks it could be every nine weeks but i have our as administrators and directors we felt like that that semester piece was important and getting this information out to people because again we get this out starting tomorrow there's a survey a short survey that you've already seen we'll look at here in a minute in a few minutes but that survey filling out that survey is going to be oh so important to us because we truly need to know how many people are looking at going online because again if it's if it's one or two you know in each grade level for a total of 20 kids 30 kids whatever the case went somewhere in that neighborhood you know that's going to be different than if we have i'm going to say 20 5th graders we may have to look at you know dealing with that situation you know quite differently so anyway that those are things for us to obviously be considering as time goes on um yes kathy did you have a few i did there were a couple of questions about if a family decides to true home school not not use us in that but home school and then after a couple of months this isn't working out or whatever will they be under the semester before coming back or do they just enroll in public school they would just enroll if they choose to to go again to come back to us we need to hold them if they open our boundaries [Music] there was a question [Music] yes and we hire those people that are the best that we want with our kids we can figure out if we need to it may require that for example we would have another adult setting in that room with the kids instruction being delivered by the teacher from starley for example or mike when i'll start with microsoft teams i guess or shelby good good questions the item that's above the item that stacy referenced regarding the kids doing online learning due to health concerns not being eligible for extra intracurricular activities unless there are unusual circumstances that need to be considered there there is and dave i'm going to let you speak to this and any other administrators you can chime into keisha has waived the mandatory attendance one hour of attendance piece right that was for any kid that was home school virtual they used to have to be to participate be on site for at least one hour they have weighed that now and talking with uh mr wentworth stacy and i with a lot of our coaches just don't feel that it makes sense if they don't feel comfortable coming to school why are we going to allow them to come in practice for contact and things like that or even more it may be smaller numbers but they're still going to have greater amount of contact within a sporting or an activity event because of close contact so thoughts or discussion well my thought on that too is that we're doing a lot to ensure those kids are healthy by checking temperatures making sure they clean their hands every hour separating the small groups if necessary we can't guarantee that they might be at home but i mean they could also be outside you know for a couple hours correct who knows so we can't see and control that stuff so i have a very long same lines i mean there's also instances where crop temperature kids don't get out there but we're making this across the board right with all athletes and activities that get you guys pick and choose things with it right i i agree with we're going we're doing everything you know i think and for your acacia has recommended that all at any occasional activity before they go to practice they're checked again and with our drug testing if they're not at school i think it's unfortunate case you did that but i have a fear right now the whole semester they're branding on going online you know but if athletics is still a possibility that's what we should do yeah correct so that's what he pushed for because yeah we've been playing hoops up there and they've been talking about that for the last month and a half up there trying to push that process the problem is gonna so they've already had these conversations about so that's probably why i got pushed through is because they talked about the kid who only wants to go to school for athletics and if you don't let him do it there's going to be a lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit so i mean there was a lot of conversations up in kansas city about that i think they finally said fine we're not going to have the lawsuits you don't have to you don't have to spend an hour in school and if the school so none of the schools up there from what i've known from the kids that you talk to so i don't know if they know all the right answers but they're going there's nobody requiring them to meet that hour in any way whatsoever even before so i don't i think here if we make our kids come to school to play sports there's going to be some issues but if that's what you guys want to do then i don't know that i'm against it i just think it's going to be rough any other questions comics there's just a very short quick survey that we're going to ask students to take and this will be in a different survey before i just put in microsoft word but it'll be a more survey friendly format so you can kind of see what it's going to ask we need to know the name of the student at which building they attend we're going to ask them to fill one out for each student and then which model london do you choose for your child and it's spelled out there i don't know if we need to put any more specifics if you think that anything else and basically it's going to be four choices in abcd and then we provide a space below for some comments are you even making sure that everybody doesn't know no we're going to ask i mean we're going to queue this up as a matter of fact as soon as the meeting is over uh doug and i will cue this up to get ready to send out to parents and meet if not tonight tomorrow and and we're going to ask we're going to send out like ever bridge notification we're going to do everything again put it on the website please complete the certain week we need as many people as possible because again we truly need to know are we talking about one or two or three kids per grade level are we talking about maybe one of the grade levels it's it's 30 kids and so we need to be prepared and we want to be able to work with our staff to be prepared to meet their needs so um we've got a quote that's approaching 500 now so we're at about 60 something percent somewhere in that neighborhood a lot of people treated that like a family survey though because it was anonymous so you know you got five kids right they're just like it's the same for everyone so there was nothing that forced you to do five of them right okay and so that's that's sorry did this go this didn't go out the registration packet then this one did not though no we sent out a survey to families three maybe three weeks or so ago approximately yeah so yeah it's been three weeks so this one again this one shouldn't take people very long again if you look at it you should be able to fill this out in a couple three minutes if you have to think and consider which one it may take you a little bit more if you have some comments to put down may take you a little longer but this will help us it will help us one thing i thought about we may want to put grades down like the name and the grade grade that your student program put a check box for great bonus and then we'll give them check choices all right it is going to include on this survey that if i sign up for remote learning that i will not be allowed to take part in the extra according to curricular activities and we talked about the requirement of what they must have in order to be at home thank you for catching that okay can uh there be something in that like a direct link to what those all look like like definitions or whatever i mean they're going to be some people that are really busy and i can see these things they're just going to get the text or the survey or email and be like whoa what is this stuff when we include with that a link of this on-site that kind of stuff explains learning it's all listed there so we can do that right within the survey also within the question of the survey we've got the ability to so that tends to get that tends to get better rad just for that very reason we'll add some of the definition he's there yes so the bottom two potentials i will homeschool my child i will have my child attend to virtual school those those two even if they're in our district are uncountable as students in our system then right correct and those already exist i mean we're just adding the remote learning one those three options there's three of those options that always include yeah we'll add some for that grade level button there on that as well as the some more different definition defining on-site line remote learning we can do that we have that for the other document some questions which building do you gotcha thank you thank you my appreciation for the teachers and what they're getting ready to go through is most high for myself right now and what they're getting ready to do with the online plus in class you know and i know that the tech department and we're now i appreciate the one extra day for them to train in the areas that they've already kind of had a little training in but that's i guess if i have a fear and i want patience is because of what a lot of our teachers are going to go through that will be a little new yes they've been on microsoft themes they know some of these things but being in front of a class of 15 or whatever with one it's going to be a little different and then to try to get those some of those things out there to those kids it's going to take us some time and you know i i do appreciate them tremendously i guess i'll just reiterate what i said friday there's going to be some hiccups in this whole deal i mean it it's not going to be perfect but we know that we're on it we have a good team in place to fix it as it goes and so uh if that's anything i mean it'd be great if it was 100 percent with it it's probably not going to it's it's going to look very different than the continuous learning yeah the amount of rigor has to come to a whole new level like but it's going to be like in the boxing setting you know there may be some additional things and on top of the classrooms that he's just still a difficult day is going to look different yes move through the hallways the placing kids where they have to come in especially in my area where they haven't had cd charts in all the classes things like that they're going to end up with i think a lot of people had a chance to speak i don't know if diana has had a chance but i know she was she was instrumental and her group that uh worked with food service and continuous learning as well as tracy moore and others the our bus and transportation department getting meals i mean wow just incredible i know diana is a person a few words but i don't know if you have anything you want to add that's a good point because we brought this up friday i believe so if the kids are doing online learning at home do we have to provide them yes we do and so we have something set up for them but it's not free it's our their statuses yes one kind of concern i have is i don't want i mean this is hard all the information is going to come out slowly in different ways because we're still developing a plan but i want our parents to have as much information as they can to make this decision and know that we're doing everything to get those kids back in school safely and i don't want i don't want something to say i don't know what's going on so i'm just going to do remote learning i want us to try to get that information out there to all the parents and how we do that is you know facebook or emails or you know whatever but to get the information out what we're going to do the extra launch you know all that stuff other than just the generic maybe all of our digital signs saying so if those people are questionable or saying like a big change that we can personally contact and say add more information hey what's going on what can i help you i mean i've had a phone conversation with a parent a couple times today you know let me find out more and just help maybe facilitate another survey question is would you be willing to contact us to talk about something where i mean maybe so choosing an option is i would like to speak with somebody from the school yeah to discuss options specific for my family i can put that as one of the five on which model of learning [Music] help guidelines prior to asking for the survey you almost have to do that even though you said that to me everything that we have here it's going public tonight with the understanding that again there could be so much i think i think that's a given now in our world there can be flexible areas that be flexible and there could be some adjustments but this that was the goal of i think first of all friday's meeting to support us moving forward and then today's meeting is to support us with a plan that is going to be flexible we'll take input from i mean we've got again this advisory committee is very lengthy we've got our staff now that will have information okay this is what we're looking to do and then they will be given information back to us to be given information back to biuta and kathy freeman and her group uh there's gonna and of course when we get it out social media on social media through the republican as well as the advisory committee those people will spread it to five to ten to fifteen different poor people that they have i mean they're we're really trying to hit this hard fast and give as much information as possible what's the thing that sends me updates about weights in the morning yeah is there i mean who would you say that the board has approved these red lines we would check these out that's our that's our direction as soon as as soon as we get done with this meeting doug and i are gonna pow out for a little bit good yeah i'm here hey can you repeat i'm sorry what do you have anything to add i mainly i can eat i can hear craigslist what is it we weren't sure if you had any anything any other input or anything to add no i think uh though i had a couple questions and they got answered as they were talked about i wondered about the paris being able to get some more hours and he talked about that so i'm good to go thank you so i'd like to thank everybody for your participation in there and so what oh oh you've got a motion here so motion to approve the school safety and learning plans for the 2020 2021 school year have presented yeah we [Music] motion approved to the school safety and learning plans for the 2020 2021 school year has amended i couldn't know on my vote [Music] in favor aye yeah all those in favor try your right hand for you i'm better okay so it's a six stop one thank you thank you take care we'll see you later it's kind of interesting have you ever asked anybody in all these surveys what's sort of internet news
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
the if the people want the hybrid i believe in the hype i believe in that classroom instruction i cannot say i know better if now if the if the remote learning people came back by august 3rd of next week and you have 2500 people that want remote that's a difference but for 214 people right now of which 40 percent have have underlying issues i i i'm for the if hank's plan didn't have so much detail and so much thought out i'd say oh you're just going to be winging it i don't believe if we start with this plan it's going to be winging it i think there's still time to have meetings with the people that need to be in those meetings the teachers um and i i think the hybrid model is the way to start i want to address mike's concern um uh rick it just i'm not i don't mean to nitpick but with stats it's 20 that have said that they want to be remote because of an underlying medical condition 80 percent is just another reason not an underlying medical condition and then uh mike your question about how many uh percentage responded to the survey we only asked people to tell us if they were choosing the fully remote option not that they were comfortable with the hybrid right it was just to gather the names of the students that we had to start following up with uh for uh you know to make sure we're following up with those families uh if we end up in the hybrid family we know our hybrid format we know we need to reach out to them so otherwise you know the default was the hybrid as of last week and my my concern is just that we're we're we you know it seems that from the you know comments and information we're getting that you know the majority of people an overwhelming majority of people would prefer to have a hybrid um and i and i'm i fully respect that and uh but also uh you know take to heart my responsibility to um look out for the least amongst us too um but so but i don't think we can fairly characterize right now that you know 4 800 of our of our students or in their families are supporting the hybrid model right now what we have is comments from people who took the time to share with us um but certainly we have not re we heard we have not heard from the majority of our of our community actually on this um so only so we've heard from the we have a majority of a minority um who have responded and uh and shared with us and so i just want to make sure that we're characterizing things correctly and and that's all so thank you i just want to be clear because that that could be confusing to people right just what the purpose of the survey is people are only filling it out if they would like to go fully remote and that survey is still open for another week plus families we have told them could opt in at any time but need to stay there for nine a nine week period so just i just want to make sure everybody understands kind of the perspective that's out there on this we have heard from families that have said i might choose to do that closer to the school year i just don't want to commit to that at this time so mike what you're saying is fair it's not really a survey of the entire community where everybody's telling us their opinion right it but it does give us a metric that after one week you know it's about 215 students that have chosen to go fully remote and that's i mean that's what it says right and i'd like to add i mean you mentioned that we didn't get a majority people to send us comments but if you go back to last week's meeting through six o'clock today between emails and comments there's over 500 comments we've gotten from the community and a vast majority of the 500 comments are for hybrid so that may not be a majority of the 5 but that's still a pretty big mandate from our our constituents that are saying they want the choice to send their kids to school you know one of the things when i was reading all the emails many of them said they were concerned about their ap and honor students not you know being motivated and um not maybe being able to take the act and sat test and i thought i wouldn't i looked that up and i found out that um most of colleges and universities are kind of de-emphasizing that and realize that the whole country is in the same boat so i'm not saying that they're glowing their standards but i kind of think that's a fear that the parents don't have to be concerned about i am a little surprised that honors and ap students would not be motivated usually that's the kind of student that is highly motivated and usually can learn on their own um i have more concerns about those students who struggled with it because they probably weren't you know i shouldn't say they all weren't but i would say most of them probably were not ap and honors students um but i heard that kind of as a refrain um throughout the emails and um so and and and also addressing mental health issues um i realize these are tough times and and i hope our students aren't being severely depressed over this but if they are i think that through um remote we can the support staff can certainly address those issues and if people are more serious i think they ought to be going to seeking professional help and um you know maybe get therapy but i i just don't i i didn't think that their reasonings were all that good to be honest i'll just address sat just in case there's any confusion out there on october 14th there will be a essay a session uh we'll have to figure out if we are remote if we can bring seniors in for that sat testing experience to come in and take the exam that they missed last spring so that is the state testing date for seniors they must take that s.a.t to graduate from high school that is a state mandate that has not been waived in the spring we assume that there will be another testing date for current juniors just as there has been in the past and then sat will be running the non-mandated uh testing windows as well and that is the same test correct it's the sat yeah yeah oh here's here's some of my thoughts i'm listening to everybody and it's been some good comments i know the comment about us making a decision for the community i mean that's what we've been doing that's what we're kind of elected to do by the community and we have been where we've heard from the community in the past in droves and we have decided to choose what made the most sense to us and what we felt was the best thing for our students so that's what we are tasked with in being a part of this board and we have exhibited times before where we had a majority my minority and we decided to make the best decisions that may not have aligned with that so with that being said i i feel like um where i am on this is kind of digging into some some more um information about we're talking about 100 remote are we talking about um not doing the entire nine weeks remote is what do you guys have in mind could it potentially be and is it modifiable is it something where we start four or four weeks and we take a look in to see how things are going and we ramp on to a a uh back to into a um in person learning and then when i hear hybrid i did call hank um and ask about you know there was a comment about what i read about remote and the kids potentially not having access to some of the same things potentially that the kids that are in the classrooms and i think hank what you said to me dr thiel is what you said to me is that what they would be missing is just that in person learning in that case so i i like to at this point you know just kind of dig through what if we're talking remote what we're talking about what can that look like um can we can we um on board into this hybrid um is that something that you guys that mentioned a remote could be agreeable to i think now we kind of dig into other ways that we potentially can make this um work for our community well what i envision us doing is tracking along remember starting a remote one we can always go hybrid we'll never i doubt we'd ever go remote to full classroom again we but when the the as the number of cases start to decrease and we hope they do as we see the experience of other schools who have gone hybrid we may come into a different position in a month or two months or three months i i don't know the answer you know it is it is a conundrum because there is really no right answer the matter i i think of it as is less risky to do it this way but i would imagine that at some point we would go from fully remote or remote what is it you call it like remote with remote for most you know for most where it would be from remote for most to a hybrid to hopefully someday you know full coming back to school full-time what those metrics are going to look like i don't know i just know that the trends are going up and that concerns me for the safety of our student center so if i could say too i um you know the remote model has to be robust and it has to be successful right um i am trusting um our administration and you know they're they're they're saying to us um that we can do this far better i've heard you know we've heard it from teachers and their comments to us we can do this far far better in fact i wonder if we had done it far far better in the spring understandable that we were you know there were a lot of reasons why we couldn't right but if we had i wonder if people would be so uh concerned about it right now um i definitely see us taking this remote model as a start as a beginning but as i said monitoring the monitoring its success and getting that feedback and you know having that accountability and also look as i said previous looking at the metrics our health metrics and what's going on and i was hoping that actually you know this would be a good way to learn right we bring in some of the ninth grade you know we bring in the ninth graders we bring in transfer students for some something like that hybrid model to start right we bring in we bring in um students who you know who are more at risk um uh students who really struggle this spring in the beginning and we might learn from that experience with those smaller groups and how to expand that um and and maybe feel safer and more confident in that approach based on though that that learning experience that we're going to go through but i could also see myself at some point if remote learning isn't working so good and this is why i'm looking for real time monitoring you know if this is if this if if we end up going like we were going in the spring you know for me that could change the equation i i you know too much being lost um uh you know would it definitely change maybe some of the risk metrics for me um so that's how i i really did see this as a as an opportunity to kind of dig in initially in something that we can predict and hopefully do very well learn from the experience with those limited engagements um you know the strategic supports i mentioned and then figure out a way maybe as we continue to discuss and i know we've spent so much time on this and nobody wants to hear me say we should continue to have lots and lots and lots more discussion on about this and to continue to invite parents and teacher and community feedback student feedback but that's what we're going to need to do um that's that's what we need to do that's what's right for our students here and if there's a point in another you know after after three four weeks where we feel we could we could transition into this and our our staff feels that they we could do that then by all means let's let's do that um but uh i need i need people to be you know i really need people to be really really on board with this and especially those that feel that those 214 people that we've heard from so far and i know that number is probably more likely going to grow some those people i mean if we don't speak up for those people who's going to and and uh i just i just i really think that uh we need to kind of start in this remote model and then look for a plan to ramp up from there um and that's that's where i'm at yeah i i agree and um and there are there are a certain number of the population that we're going to have to have um you know that that probably can't do the remote learning you know the special education kids you know the uh tc er i don't know exactly 99 yeah the d99 students and i'm not sure what we're going to have to do with the um tcd students you know because they're doing a whole different kind of thing so you know those are questions to be asked but we still need to have some sort of a plan for those t99 and um special needs students that are in our buildings and um you know where you know how are they going to be doing their learning because you know it's very difficult for them to do remote learning i would think yeah so one of the reasons that we're meeting tonight yes mike did ask for a special meeting but we're actually not voting on this until our next meeting but we wanted to give if we're gonna if we're gonna change lanes and go to remote for most or totally remote which i still hope we do um you know it it it makes more sense for the people who are preparing to launch in august to know exactly what they're what they're going for instead of doing dual preparation because it also gives us more time to prepare for hybrid which frankly is you know it's very um i don't know the word i i'm the word convoluted that's not the right word it's very intricate there's a lot of detail and there's a lot of planning and it's got to be this day that day this hour that hour i mean it is very untraditional from what we've done so i would just like to throw that out that one of the reasons we're having this meeting is to re uh to talk with the board about their feelings so that so that dr thiele and all the administrators and all the teachers have a better half a more firmed foot on where they're going to be in august when school opens because this is not closing school this is simply going remote um can i have a few moments to ask a few questions of the board and and seek some direction here sure um so the idea of at some point you know he froze once before he had a brown out about 23 minutes ago so hold on let's give him another moment just at the just at the meat of this does anybody wanna wanna say anything more while we wait for hank to come back on dan did you have something yeah i had a couple things to say but maybe for hank just as a suggestion if his voice is having issues maybe he could chat his comments to gina so she can read them i don't know if he has access to the chat for that um because i know sometimes the voice in video it's too much bandwidth for for a connection so sounds like he was going to have a little bit more than a chat yeah more robust than that um [Music] let me maybe if he turns this video off for a few times i'm gonna i'm just texting him to tell him he's frozen again i'm back so i'm sorry i'm back sorry guys i'm experiencing brownouts here so that's the reason i've dropped off twice i've switched to my phone uh can you guys hear me okay yeah you can so at least then i have uh i'm powered through this so um so some of the questions that i'm seeking from the board or some direction one is i'm going to need clear direction from the board of what the conditions would look like for us to consider bringing students back in a hybrid model because as i said in my opening statement the numbers the way they are now are a way that we feel that we're comfortable coming back after the conversations we've had with the dupage county health department so i'm going to need some instruction as to who you want me to talk to in the health care profession at the dupage county health department or some direction from the board as a whole of what that data needs to look like for us to start transitioning to the hybrid model i'm not asking for an answer today but i'm going to need that so my my initial thought is uh you know at your to your point idph is charged with helping us make this decision and we are you are working closely with the dupage department of public health which is great and they're fabulous i'm sure that they have epidemiologists on staff that if you say we want to have we want to look at initiating hybrid when we start having a consistent trend of decreasing so that the the incidents right the new cases in our catchment area are decreasing consistently over a period of time and see what their recommendations are that's my would be my suggestion ah and nancy when you look when you showed your numbers those were for dupage county it would have been probably more appropriate to show them by city or village um because i probably took into aurora or where maybe some some areas that are having that are seeing higher spikes than maybe downers grove woodridge westmoreland you know i don't know if it is that i know you can look by um zip code but uh and we could do that we could try to do that um it may be different it may be different but you know rick we don't live in isolation and we don't even if our our numbers you know there are some other dem there are some other demographic to your point i think is there other there are other socioeconomic factors that factor into this and if we had some other cities they might be artificially inflating us i think that's your point you know i don't know that we would be that far off because we have large numbers large enough numbers that we should go towards the mean so we'd be statistically representative i'll try to find it but it wouldn't really to be honest it wouldn't really change my mind much because we live in dupage county we go people go into the city all the time for work or for enjoyment i mean i certainly can look i don't know off the top of my head right it's gonna be really hard to give hank a medical resource to look at when the cdc and the department of health and um the governor has us in phase four we're nowhere near sliding back to phase three the american pediatrics all those medical resources are telling us we're fine so i don't know how actually they help with the numerical resources dan all those medical resources are telling us we're fine in areas of low transmission correct and we are in phase four in dupage county correct where we can have gatherings of 50 or more 50 years but our but our numbers are escalating not enough to shift us back in in phases and we're not one of the four counties in illinois that is in danger of being shifted back i'm i'm just saying the board might make the decision the board's going to make the decision and it's obvious the decision is going to be five to two i'm just saying that it's really hard to give hank direction on this is the medical guidance to look at because the medical guidance actually says we should be back in school well again i would i would i would disagree with that statement i mean even the declaration that came out from the governor said something to the effect of um again we you know schools should go back if possible in areas of low transmission and so the question becomes what is low transmission there are also other medical um professionals who say we should shut down the whole country again but nancy phase four is low transmission the only way we get to phase five is if it's eradicated or there's a common vaccine right but we can't slide back into three we can slide back into three and i think it's eight isn't it the number is eight yeah and that's what i said in my opening statement if we were at eight i'd be recommending a positivity rate of eight i would not be recommending that we go back to school or any of those other metrics icu beds below 20 percent you know any of those things that would uh start driving us towards phase three would would result in me letting the board and the community know we're going to recommend full remote what i'm saying is right now we're not statistically at any of those numbers the only statistical trend that is concerning is six straight days of increased numbers in dupage county um so far as all of the rates that the dupage county health department and ideph have been having us look at so just you know the the spot i'm at now is the board is saying start remote and then look for an opportunity to move back to hybrid but i need to know what that opportunity would look like what would make the board feel comfortable and i'm not saying answer it now right you know but i need to know what those metrics are so that we're following those things and trying to know as an administration when it is that we should be looking that way with without that then it's what rick said we're looking at once we hit phase five then we look at coming back to school i'm not thinking that that's what i heard from the board tonight so i need to know what that point is between those numbers where the board would say okay things look okay things are trending in the right direction so uh go ahead and start working back towards the hybrid i would offer that when we look at the numbers in the county and in the state we are looking at numbers that have not where school has not been in session and my fear is that having schools in session is going to drive those numbers up because it's a congregate setting even though we'll be distancing i mean certainly in some areas like day cares i know my church has a daycare my grandson goes to daycare they have less than 10 kids they don't change classes it's a different setup so again i would think we would be able to work with the epidemiologists at the dupage department of public health to come up with some metric and present it to the board but my concern is that once we have everybody coming back into schools we're going to see that community metric rise and nancy do this was my point last week was that our opportunity to get kids back to school my fear is now now is the time this will be our only opportunity in the foreseeable future to bring students back because i don't believe it will be us that drives those numbers up i believe our plan is safe it follows what the dupage county health department has said it follows what idph has said we have extreme measures that we're taking with ppe to make sure that people are safe i don't to see that other schools are going to be following that across the state to the level we are and i think that other schools other communities uh are going to take this decision out of our hands within a few weeks or months and there will never be an opportunity to bring students back until we are in phase five hank i i just have a question for you too is this um do you think it's realistic to have those freshman transfers and at-risk um juniors and seniors or sophomores juniors and seniors that we know because we know what what they reacted to in the spring we and we know the teachers have an idea of what students were having a struggle with remote learning um how hard is it to get those kids maybe acclimated to the remote learning because i have i have i'm with you i have this gut feeling that come october into november this is gonna rage again and so if they're all in the remote learning process um it's not a here today remote tomorrow kind of thing yeah terry you're opening up to what my next question was going to be for the board which is uh first at what level of bringing students back are we comfortable right now is it 50 is it 250 is it 500 is it you know the model the hybrid model is about 1500 to 1800 students a day and about uh you know it's our full staff coming back every day at least for the mornings our whole staff would be there there's major challenges with bringing back some students the first is i i don't know based on the board's discussion right now how many is it 25 is it 10 percent is it 3 of our students that we could bring back on any one day and the board would feel like we would be able to keep students safe or is it zero right now two whatever number you pick above zero creates an incredibly difficult position with me and staff because some students coming back means that some staff will need to come back and work with students and threading the needle here of then who in our staff ranks we expose to a greater risk versus who does not get exposed to a greater risk is a great challenge administratively so i i hear you hank and i i do think it's we need to talk a little bit further about that because i do believe it's going to be a difficult decision and we have to give um the administration and the staff a chance to pivot if they're going to pivot and we're going to do something else we have to give that and even to the students to be able to make that um transition so i agree that we we the board we need to kind of figure out what that looks like and then my next question involves are we only talking about the school day or are we talking about activities and athletics as well can families select to allow their students to continue to participate in athletics whatever that looks like in the state of illinois while we're doing remote learning or does remote learning equate to we are not doing uh any athletics or activities in person as well once again i don't need an answer tonight um you know we can spend the week working on this and sharing some information with the board about what we're thinking but these are all the next set of questions that get presented as we shift this way um so we will make some recommendations administratively unless the board wants to give clear direction tonight on any of these okay i have i have a really um in regards to that what are we looking at in the way of numbers of freshmen what do you what do you think that is and um what would be the numbers of transfers and where do you think the numbers are for at-risk depends so freshman classes between six and seven hundred students traditions at each school at each school at between six and seven hundred yeah okay um and then how do we start do you think they're about a hundred i i don't know off the adve that's a number that's i on a yearly basis yeah but then when we get into the other ones you know english learners do all of the all of them qualify or some of them t99 all or some students with 504s all or some students with ieps all or some you know once we start adding together all of our students in these different groups that need additional supports you're getting up to 30 30 to 40 percent of the student body which is why the administration was recommending 50 at a time come in because then all the students in the at-risk groups as well as all of the rest of our students come in on a regular basis and get assistance from our staff and that's you know i hear a lot of talking about equity tonight but that is a level of consideration that we had in this plan is that in the hybrid plan there is a level of equity and there is a level of choice and those are the things administratively that we were trying to balance as we built that hybrid plan and when you're home remote learning those supports are not there and you can only you know you an ideal situation you would like to have everybody on the kitchen table with the computer remote learning but you know it's occurring in the bedroom it's occurring after hours it's occurring maybe not at all and so at least when they're in the school you bring all those supports to the table that maybe you didn't think about when you say oh let's just go remote learning there's more to it than just the teaching of the material in the classroom there's a social aspect there's an emotional aspect that some could argue is is more important than the academic at this level of student yeah and rick there's a competitive aspect the kids that aren't going to be able to part of those groups who are going to be at home learning with not as good of a learning environment why the rest of dupage county is in school at least in some format these are the kids are competing at competing with first college for scholarships and at college next year so as we try to figure out for the next six to eight weeks when they can go back to school their students are falling further and further behind every day yeah the achievement gap is going to get wider by remote learning well if that's really if that's really a fair statement i mean nancy based on personal experience for what happened in the spring it was it was horrible it was it was a it was a horrible situation we acknowledged that i've been doing i've been teaching remotely now now granted i teach graduate students it's it's much older people with much more motivation yes i do but i will tell you this that it's it's just improved tremendously and i think that really it's an unfair i understand it was horrible in the spring but i think there were reasons for that and i don't think it was necessarily um you know i i think that we're we're not in the spring anymore and teachers have had some time to think about this and i think that no matter what way we go if we go hybrid or if we go totally remote there's disadvantages to both you know what i mean it's not it's not ever going to be the same as coming into your classroom and learning and and being with all your friends and getting together for social emotional that is just it's just not going to be the same so then the question in my mind becomes which is the less risky and i have to still stay with remote because we've got teachers who can who are learning to teach in a new way we have parents we're going to need to learn to support a new way we've got counselors that are going to need to support in a new way i understand that i'm not saying this is ideal i'm saying it's the lesser of two evils right but they're they're learning a new way at the expense of our children i mean and i i understand we there were some teachers that did a great job my son had two teachers that did a phenomenal job he had three teachers that did they tried i give them credit for putting the effort forth they improved and i have no doubt they'll improve if we have to do this again i had two teachers and these are i'm not going to mention names these are stem classes these they're not these this isn't gym these are stem classes where the only time my son talked to the teacher was the last day of class for the teacher to say goodbye have a good summer he went from march to the end of the year without one conversation with the teacher that to me that teacher should be fired in my opinion well so guys i'm i'm gonna argue on both sides of of the argument here um as i've been known to do uh i'm going to agree with nancy that the spring should not at all be a indicator of what remote learning in the fall will look like uh the how quickly it happened the restrictions that the state put on us under the guise of do no harm caused our students a ton of harm um remote learning the plan we put together here if the board chooses for us to go fully remote will not look like the spring at all and the state has recognized that in their latest guidelines saying that at least two and a half hours a day of instruction by the state mandate must be synchronous instruction right so they've recognized that they they really didn't give us the tools we needed in the spring to make this successful so i i would encourage everybody not to use the spring as an indicator of what remote learning will look like in the fall to continue to argue against myself one second dan to continue to argue against myself in the hybrid model no matter what we do in the fall teaching and learning will be different like our teachers are going to have to re-envision teaching and learning whether when the hybrid model or we're in the remote model either way is going to result in our teachers really having to redesign teaching and learning for it to be effective hank if i can make one suggestion if we have to go if we decide the board decides to go 100 online obviously against my objection but if the board decides to go that way i know some school districts i believe rick your school district is one i think there are other school districts that are requiring their teachers to be in the classroom to do that synchronous learning from the classroom i want those i want the teachers undivided attention in the classroom teaching our kids not at home is that a consideration we can look at if we have to 100 it's something that we are definitely discussing administratively especially those that don't need a medical accommodation in any way however there are challenges in our school building and the fact that we don't have a space for every teacher to be in and teach at the same time you know and to have is their own physical space and uh that does raise some concerns for me that i i know just doing these calls in in my house with my family around or in even in the office with people in and out can be a challenge so undivided attention isn't necessarily guaranteed at school right if we don't have a unique space for everybody to be in so there might have to be some balancing here but i will i agree but i do know working from home on a zoom call from experience and i'm not a teacher but for insurance working at home from a zoom call is very different than working in your office in your place of business on a zoom call there is something different about the environment you're in and i think as much as possible they should be in the environment that they teach it i will uh i think that one of the things that mike said earlier that we need to be getting constant feedback from our students and families to understand what their experience is that if we do allow teachers to work off-site that there needs to be a mechanism for us to understand if a teacher is not being successful off-site and if that's the case then definitely they need to work from school but this is not something we've fully decided yet administratively and then this is something we also need to work through uh with the with the dga and and the teachers to figure out how this this might work um i do think that if we're talking about bringing back some students in some way i need to have staff available to serve those students needs that are in the building so um the id like i said that one that's in the middle between hybrid and full remote the remote with supports will be the most challenging to figure out with our staff so nancy i know we i'm i'm going to mention this and i know i'm going to lose so but still i'm going to mention it we haven't had it yet dan no i know but that's what i'm saying i'm saying i i know we're not supposed to it's not on the agenda to vote until next week but there's an awful lot of work for our administration to do and i know if we vote now it's going to be 5-2 against what i want but i think oh it i think we owe it to the administration to give them clear direction and to give them that vote so they can go ahead and build the best plan no matter what it is but to build that best plan for our students so i actually think we should consider voting to give a clear mandate to our administration tonight we can't do a vote at this point because it's not a board meeting with an action item but boards typically in these situations do straw polls and give boards a direction of what direction to start working in and then this would be an action item and i'll talk about what that action item might look like uh in a moment so do we have any people in the building well to make comments they would do that after this is done i would i would think we'd want to hear from them before we made a straw poll right yeah nancy that would be yours i mean having read all of the comments then some you know the i appreciate that everybody took the time and expressed their ideas their ideas fell into just several camps and if we haven't had really any other unique [Music] um uh offerings from the community right we i think we have a good sample of what people are thinking how many people are waiting to speak gina do you know we have three people let's go ahead with three people three minutes each but before we do that do any other board members have anything they'd like to say so the people coming to talk to us can at least have the benefit of her hearing hearing our thoughts or questions hearing none let's bring the three up okay would like to go first nicole let them work through some of the technical gymnastics here of getting the zoom up and running and get people to the podium hello can you hear me yes we can hear you hello again this is nicole primos i'm here today i'm sorry i can't can't hear it move a little closer and speak a little louder i turned my speakers up hello can you hear me now yes um my name is nicole primos i was here last week and i want to thank you again um for hearing me i'm here to speak for myself and i hope i'm not repeating too much when i do this but there were a few things that i wanted to touch on that i couldn't in my three minutes last week there's some more updates on health issues that i wanted to bring up first of all the chicago tribune stated that the seven day rolling average in dupage county has increased by 96 in the less than the last four weeks the patch reported that 750 students between the ages of 10 and 19 were found positive as of july 26th people are mentioning the cdc article that mentioned we should go back to school but as robert redfield the director of the cdc stated right after that document was released that it was quote substantially edited by the white house officials and the apa who did say we should go has also stepped back and said that safety is paramount for our students and i know that we can do this as other districts are currently going all online such as stevenson evanston lyden and even one of our feeders woodridge and borders for counties are not covered by glass i feel no solace in the fact that they are in a different area even pritzker said that state lines present a risk to us but as far as the hybrid goes i want to briefly touch on some of my concerns about the hybrid well it is well thought out and we are creating groups to work together for all models to develop plans if things go as expected we should be fully remote which means that we should spend our energy focusing on e-learning and including more faculty member voices to help improve from the plans that we were stuck to last year providing a structure that is more consistent and emotionally stable for our students as well the wesley educational association stated that remote start teachers edit educators and the community best practices for seasonal likelihood rather than flip flopping back and forth so while there is a choice for the parents there's still not a choice for the faculty members and that still puts us at risk but should we all work together right now rather than in small groups we can start to produce a plan that is effective to serve the students parents and teachers and finally we're not to give new direct instruction when we are face to face so the immediacy requires that we focus on e-learning where we can provide our students with a better education in the beginning and use our time more efficiently receiving direct instruction and allowing us to provide a fair equitable and consistent experience for all i don't think this is comparable to things such as brain injuries this is a pandemic and i know it may seem like if we just hunker down in the buildings this is a storm that we can weather together but last week i lost my anticovit it was a short battle it only took a week this is not complicated it's not us versus them it's not hybrid e-learning it is what this state is i have a husband with a compromised autoimmune should i take this home to him i don't think he would survive it this isn't a hoax this isn't something that we can throw up borders and stop it from coming across we need to do what's best we need to do what's safest i love my job i want to return i love my students i know they want to return but the thing is if we hunker down now and do e-learning there's a better chance that we can return into the building sooner it is not like august is the only time we meet students we have teachers i'm sorry your three minutes has expired thank you very much thank you very much my name is mark molinari i come to you as a parent of two students here in district 99 a teacher at district 99 a coach and a community member so i have a different perspective i witnessed two of my students go through the e-learning and it was not perfect i watched them as a parent i had to struggle and make sure that they were getting up and teaching them the correct etiquette and how to go through zoom and it was tough and um my students or my two kids benefited from e-learning with the grades and the guidelines their grades improved but that doesn't mean that they learned that means that they took advantage of some opportunities and i appreciate that but it was a it was it was a test it was a test for them it was a test for me as a parent and i had to consistently daily get them up and make sure that we found that routine i know that there were times that my my son and my daughter were frustrated they needed to reach out and it wasn't that this teacher wasn't available but they just needed a quick fix or a little help or some guidance and the e-learning was tough and it was tough for the teachers and it was tough for the students but i come to you as a teacher and i tell you that it was a challenge and we were challenged because of some of the the state demands that have been said but it challenged me to be a better teacher to learn how to use flipgrid and paradigm and that puzzle but it's and it forced me to communicate with parents more but it's not it's it's not the best way and we know that and we know that that personal connection that we make that dr thiele has encouraged us to have we can read our students and then and having that in-person instruction one day a week i'll take it i would want more but i we don't have that we don't have that opportunity and i would just say that is us coming back i've always thought that we were central workers as teachers and now more than ever through this pandemic we realize that we are essential workers and we need to come back and i know that our administration and our board has put a safe plan together i know that we're going to be supported when there's students that are are not going to follow through or we're going to have issues but there is no there is no substitute for in-person instruction as a coach there are no guarantees we're going to have a football season or any seasons but our district has allowed us to coach our kids we've had we've added players to our program there has not been one player that has stayed home because of covid today over 150 north and south football players freshman and sophomore came out to be a part of the program and knowing that there's a chance that we may not even play in the fall and i appreciate the opportunity to be able to do that and we're coaching those kids because they need it and they want it and those kids want to be back and they desire and we're we've been testing it it is safe they understand social distancing playing football a contact sport with masks and not being able to have any contact is a little weird but we're still doing it because we enjoy it as a community member i don't know any community members and you you've read the comments that don't want us to be back in school they trust this park i'm sorry you're out of time okay thank you um thank you for letting me speak my name is darren oral i'm a community member i'm also a teacher i've committed over 20 plus years to district 99 in special services i teach the at-risk kids that have been talked about so much tonight every student that i've taught for 22 straight years has been at risk and i can tell you while i agree with many of the things that mr davenport said tonight he made some awesome points and i can agree with most of them the equity point though i do not i believe that the equity with those at-risk kids would be enhanced if we were completely remote remote learning does not work with at-risk kids it just is not the best way for any kid but especially for the kids at risk they do not have the support at home um they they do not have the tools um regardless of what we do as teachers as much work as we can put in and i can tell you i've heard a lot about how remote learning was terrible in the spring and that's really not because of the teachers dan i've heard you make some comments about some of the teachers and the poor experience and i can tell you that unfortunately in any profession there's some teachers that don't do a good job and that had nothing to do with remote and you could take those teachers and put them in the classroom and there's probably some issues as well so i really believe we need to be in the classroom i understand the risk i have a um i'm i'm in the risk category i have an autoimmune deficiency my father is in stage four cancer and my mother has been in and out of the hospital with many health issues i check most of the boxes for a person that shouldn't want to return but i understand how important it is to be in the classroom and i can't tell you how impressed i've been with dr feely and the administration teams in both schools to put this plan together the amount of work that mr thiele has gone through to to try to check every box and be concerned about every person and every student is amazing um i i i'm truly impressed and in over 20 years i've had my issues with administrators and some superintendents but i can tell you um while i'll say when i don't agree with something i really want to make it a point to tell how impressed i have been with the work and the effort that he has gone through to try to get us in in school and in person as much as possible and i really believe that regardless um if we go remote even if we do better which i know we will we're going to work hard but there's still going to be issues with remote that no matter what you do are still going to be present they are they're still going to be issues let's get them in person as much as possible until we can't because those kids need us and i'm ready to be there for them thank you thank you i was afraid i was going to have to cut him off when he was saying wonderful things about me [Laughter] we have nobody else waiting to speak to the board no one else okay we will continue to monitor all of those as people are speaking i mean we have emails coming in all the time this is there is no perfect solution here there is no perfect answer there we're going to lose any way we go there i don't think there's any way about that it's a matter of where you how strongly you feel the risk of losing health and life is versus losing this opportunity and i don't i i fully respect every member of this board i fully respect their their um vote and i just think we all have to vote our conscience and let's go from there so we're going to straw poll it can i explain what next week will look like before you tell me that this is the way you want to go just so everybody knows the direction is i interpret it if the majority of the board here get for you the straw poll gives us direction to start working on a fully remote plan we will still come back next week with a resolution from our attorneys that indic that indicates that it is the board's intention that we work on a fully remote plan and come back in that fashion to start the school year and that we continue to work on the hybrid plan should we need to use that that the the board will then authorize in that resolution provided from our attorneys the administration to do whatever we need to to make that happen which means we may have to modify board policy we might have to make changes and procedures we might have to uh negotiate with our bargaining units but you you'll pass that resolution that will give us as an administration full authority to do everything we need to before school starts to get this up and running um because the time is of the essence well i agree time is of the essence but i don't know that we can say that it's going to be carte blanche i mean i will i will once again provide what our recommendation is from our attorneys that that uh once you approve a plan that they are that they are recommending that you allow the administration to do so i will forward you that resolution again tomorrow okay um and what is in there um so you can determine if if you're going to go with what the attorneys recommend or you would like something different fair enough nancy yep i just want to clarify you know going back to my original statement you know i was really i'm really looking for i know we're calling it fully remote i was calling it remote for most i i do think that there are as we just heard um from uh uh gentlemen uh speaking there are some students that you know we need to consider bringing in and um and so i wanna i wanna provide those strategic supports and some limited in-person contact in specific situations so i don't know how we capture that in in this um you know for hank in this but um to be to be clear i'm you know i there are some students who you know should be brought in if as long as their parents you know agree with that and i'm also kind of um in the same place with mike i'm at this juncture if we say remote i like to kind of have a plan for i know it's based on declining numbers but can we look at this in in uh four weeks you know just um identify timelines and i know it's going to be based on the numbers but what are we looking we're probably not going to see no cases you know but we'll see hopefully some decline but i'd like to not go for remote the nine weeks i like to see us go with some if we were going to do remote with some identified hey we're going to revisit this at this point or at this point at this so i'm not for just saying remote for nine weeks and i think that's the timeline right frank of hank it's a nine week um and and i'm not strictly for that either well cherelle my plan would be at every next board meeting from there on out if i you know where i uh the whole board knows where i stand on getting kids back to school if the numbers improve in any way i will be back at every next board meeting advocating to get kids back into the classroom what i don't yet understand is how many i can bring in at a time now and the board would still be comfortable with that do we have to give you that tonight or i mean no i'm going to bring you a recommendation next week and then you can tell me what you think okay okay all right okay so are you ready to straw paul hank i have a question for you since or straw polling if we do vote remote that pretty much cements the fact that sports and and club activity you can't come in after school if you can't come to for the classroom correct rick there are some school districts that have chosen to go fully remote for instruction but are allowing activities in athletics to continue uh following the guidelines of ihsa and idph and the youth sports guidelines because those are voluntary activities that students can choose to um you know can choose to participate in it's not the required coming into the school day each day but isn't it i agree with that isn't that our hybrid plan we're allowing people to voluntarily adopt the hybrid plan we're not forcing it on them we're giving people a choice we're voluntarily saying would you like remote or would you like the hybrid plan correct i don't see how you can have your cake and eat it too if you're going to go full remote because you're worried about contact and and it's it's so distressing then you can't have contact right which is why i agree you can't bring in half the students because you remember not every freshman is in a freshman class and not every teacher teaches just freshmen some teachers teach sophomores some teach junior some teach freshmen some freshmen are in sophomore junior classes it's not cut and dry and then which teachers are you going to bring in which teachers are you going to say oh you get to stay home so you either got to go one way or the other you can't be dicing this up oh this that and the other you got to realize there's consequences by going fully remote doors are going to be shut and by those doors you mean athletics and activities and and supports that those students get those at-risk kids they're not going to have those supports that they would have in the classroom all day long at home you can't and you just the teachers will not have that contact of person to person for those at-risk kids but i think what we're looking at correct me if i'm wrong at with remote for most is that there would be a very small subset of kids that we would bring in so we'd have less traffic in the school we've had we'd have a smaller teacher student ratio we would decrease those those kids in that classroom they would i would think we'd be able to maybe limit them to the same staff member every day so we don't have that constant rotation and mixing as for sports and activities i mean i i believe they are important but if more important is the actual academic work to me and that i would think if we weren't coming in for academics we wouldn't be coming in for other things because it's the same it's the same it's the same issue it's a lot of bodies and it can find space over a period of time so nancy if i'm understanding you correctly the idea of supports and lowering risk goes back to the cdc information you brought at the beginning of the meeting tonight and that it's the concerns of the mixing groups with the mixing adults so your idea of safe supports would be the same group of students coming back and interacting with the same adult rather than the idea of passing periods and changing and those kinds of things and in small numbers exactly which i think for many of us many of our students are coming in who need a lot of support are in small numbers anyway would that be the same for bringing freshmen back as well and introducing them to school i think if we brought very small groups back we have lovely new i don't know if we can sit in the stadium yet but we have lovely new seats outdoors we brought small groups back didn't rotate them you know didn't have them in confined classrooms rotating between classes we could limit it you know whatever we could do to limit that exchange of bodies and people and space is what we should aim to do so but it's kind of describing a hybrid plan then in that case if i yeah so no well the this is what some of the elementary schools have the advantage of in bringing students back is there it's the same group of kids with the same teacher all day long and in a high school we don't have like that model doesn't work you know the kids have to move and the kids have the the kids and the teachers have to move in a large comprehensive high school like what we have and um that's why we've gone through the the things we've done in the hybrid model between you know lowering the number of people in the building at one time and then adding the additional face shield with the face mask when they have to move locations to try to add that extra layer of ppe to protect in those settings but eliminating it all together is not something we could do in a normal school model so i understand that all right i think i know what i need to to go back and work with my administrative team i'd like to know overall what direction the board is leaning towards so i can bring a plan back to you next monday at least the skeleton of a plan it won't be a full robust plan like what you saw with hybrid sure so i'll ask i'll ask julie to call the role and each board member can say hybrid remote with all with all that remote means or of course you're always welcome to abstain but i hope nobody does julie will you call the vote call the roll nancy kupka ramon mike davenport remote shirelle fuller hybrid dan nicholas hybrid and allowing our families to make a choice terry pavicich remote rick probinato hybrid and joanna vazquez drexler remote if i counted correctly the straw poll this isn't an action item the straw poll is 4-3 to work on a remote plan as much as we can over the the next week here and come back to the board with whatever we have piece together for next monday i will also be forwarding you the resolution that the the board's attorneys recommend that the board pass along with that direction to the administration yes all right as has been mentioned several times this evening the administration has already started reaching out to staff members to get them involved in a variety of different committees working on a full remote schedule you know a class period schedule bell schedule if you will that team gina and ed and janice are leading that team and they began meeting today we have 38 volunteers in total for those committees so uh we do have some people that came forward we also if you remember had over 40 volunteers on our task forces that led to the hybrid and all of our chairs were involved who are also teachers in the developing of the hybrid so we we did have teacher involvement from the beginning we continue to have teacher involvement working on what we have going forward we will probably not have any of the other committees work next week outside of the remote group because things like example lesson plans and classroom management tips and all of those things will look very different hybrid versus a fully remote we don't want those teams spinning their wheels for a week so we will call them together to work in earnest once we have official direction through board action next week so that's the administrative plan thank you thank you hank anything else to discuss anybody want to raise anything call to adjourn oh moved terry joanna yeah all those in favor aye aye aye always opposed all right we are adjourned thank you very much thank you guys thank you everybody thank you so much you
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did anyone have any questions about the payrolls for june okay we'll go ahead and move on to prepays dated june 1 through june 30th 2020. there's really nothing out of the ordinary here um again you know our biggest expense on pre-pays is health insurance as it is every month the only additional um you know larger prepay was for the first payment of imagine learning and you'll see that under um like second third from the bottom did anyone have any questions about that first payment or imagine learning okay that's the first of two payments yes and that's noted there and your memo see that okay total pre-pays for june 2020 413 989 44.
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next in your packet you'll see regular claims dated today july 27 before i go through and highlight was there any questions on the claims for this month i can go ahead and answer some questions for you i did not have any now okay we'll go ahead and move on just wanted to point out a couple of things during the month of july it's customary that we have several renewals we have the online subscriptions for you know canvas ingenuity all those you'll see all those that's also renewal time of year for insurance so you'll probably see some substantial amounts in there for insurance um you know we have inspections yearly inspections for um for the fire marshal so all those things usually kind of come to a head in july so the claims are a little bit more this month than what they normally are the rest of the year total claims dated today july 27 2020 446 hundred thirty three dollars and twenty seven cents and pending any further questions i submit the payrolls and claims for approval yeah i've taken a motion to approve you have a question okay okay we have a motion and a second um any further discussion um hearing none all in all in favor all opposed motion passes next item on the agenda is the approval request for the financial report mrs romer in your board packet you should see the fund report ending june 2020 i could point out the ending balance for education fund 607 823.58 and we'll move down about two or three lines to operations fund 300 for an ending balance on june 30th of 2 million 187 964 77 and again i want to point out that that amount is going to be a little bit higher because taxes came in property taxes et cetera but also you need to remember too that it supports operations and we had quite a bit of expenses in july so next month that that amount is going to go down substantially so if you want to um go ahead and go to the last page here of the fund report that should be page 7 for you you'll see an ending balance in all funds of 8 million 163 thousand seven eighty eight ninety one next to your board packet you're going to see a depository statement and bank balances to end june 30th 2020 on that depository statement you're going to see all balances for banks less outstanding checks for an ending balance of eight million one hundred sixty three thousand seven hundred eighty eight dollars and ninety cents if you compare your depository statement balance and your fund balance you'll notice they do not match they're off by one cent it's gonna be a habit once again i'm going back and forth with 21st century um grant and they're showing we have a cent extra so i need to spend that money so we're off by one cent but i do submit the uh the fund report and the depository and bank balances for your approval okay can i get a motion to approve the financial report okay i have a motion in a second to approve the financial report all in favor all opposed motion passes thank you mrs romer next on the agenda is reports with the first report coming from i guess we would say assistant superintendent good evening cory has a presentation he's going to pull up for us as we get started but tonight i wanted to share with you our virtual learning plan we're in the current process of developing handbooks for secondary and elementary students so the information i'm sharing with you tonight comes directly from those handbooks so as part of our process we're reconvening our reopening committee of 40 teachers and administrators tomorrow morning we're going to give them this information receive their feedback and input and then hopefully publish those by tomorrow afternoon one of the things on the agenda today is for your approval to move the start back one week for school and we are asking for that because we want to get this information out to families so that they have time to process this information and make an informed decision and so we're trying to get that out to the families as soon as possible so cory if you'll go ahead and put the next slide so all students regardless of their grade level have criteria and expectations that they have to meet and so one of those criteria are having access to daily high-speed internet and i know there's a an issue of you know equity and internet access we want to provide that for all students and we're working on different grants and with different communities and able to provide that but that can mean a lot of different things and so we provided outdoor hot spots in our parking lots so that students can come to that location or to our local libraries we've created partnerships with them so families can come and even if they can get there once a day to upload and download information then they can still choose this opportunity while that's not ideal it is an option so it's not completely off limits for those students also students and parents must participate in an orientation and this is very crucial because at this time we're going to teach both students and parents how to utilize all of the online platforms so that they can be successful and that platform won't be a barrier to getting to the content um also we are asking families when they enroll and select the virtual learning option that they commit to an enrollment period so for our secondary students we're asking that they commit to a one semester enrollment and for elementary a nine weeks commitment we are also requiring any state mandated mandated texting or nwea benchmark assessment testing that that will have to be done on campus just for the validity of the test that can be scheduled through the virtual teacher or through our school counselor and that occurs maybe three to five times a year but that can be set up so that that student is there and can meet privately or separately if that is a concern and then finally the criteria is students and parents both must sign a code of conduct just committing to honesty and the report and the process and their attendance so to talk specifically about our elementary program and this is one that was giving us the most um the most challenges because as we know our elementary students are not independent learners and so to be able to provide support for the student and for the parent we try to gather as many resources as possible so one thing that i think that we can provide at greencastle that maybe some of the our local surrounding communities aren't doing is that we're providing an option that looks and mirrors the school day so the on-campus traditional school day where some of the other surrounding communities are using an edge annuity or an edmonton platform like we are for our secondary they're also giving that offering that is an option for their elementary or we're trying to provide just an exact replica of the on campus so they will access all of the same content all the same curriculum and as many of the same experiences as elementary students would if they were coming on campus and there i just listed the core curriculum that they're using also book clubs monthly different titles will be set sent out and so the students can participate in virtual book clubs together online and i'll talk more about that in a minute next slide please so as far as the delivery option we're providing both synchronous and asynchronous options and just to define that more clearly asynchronous means that it's it's not happening live you can download or watch your pre-recorded lesson and watch that on your own time where synchronous is happening real time you're connecting live with your class or with your teacher so we're providing both of those options so that in the event that there's a child care issue and a child has to do their learning in the evening then all those lessons will be recorded so they can still have access to the content we are also making sure that students have weekly connections with their peers other virtual students in their grade level and their virtual teacher so that can look a lot of different ways but we want to make sure that they're still having that virtual face-to-face facetime and they're doing progress checks as well as small group instruction or whatever that virtual teacher can do to accommodate any type of live instruction they're going to do and i know that the last bullet that i have up here is the doe the department of education of indiana requires that all elementary students stay engaged in educational activities for five hours and so some of us interpret that as oh my goodness students have to be online for five hours that's impossible you're right that is impossible um so that's not what we're asking that's not what they're requiring so corey if you'll go to the next slide i've developed just a sample schedule of what a day might look like so it's definitely a hybrid so part of their day will be online accessing the information getting the mini lesson checking in with their teacher but then that will move to an offline so they might do reading writing cursive practice math fact practice journaling science projects so different things so it's not going to be completely online screen time for that five hours so just to clarify that next slide i also want to just to share with you and this again will be in the in our handbook that we're publishing just so that parents are familiar with the type of tools that we have to offer and so here are the main tools that we're going to be offering our platforms and so this is why it's really essential that both students and parents participate in that orientation so that they can learn how to utilize all of these because it will be crucial once their content comes and they're ready to start learning so the middle school option will be utilizing as well as the high school ingenuity and the middle school is looking at just the our core classes math ela science and social studies but they're also providing elective courses and mr welts is getting out information to you and i will add it as an addition to our handbook of what those specific elective courses are but i believe there's ten electives and they they do look uh student friendly and very interesting so if a student is an honor student they will be placed in one grade level higher and they also for ela have the option of taking on a course study novel they also honor students have the elective choice of chinese or german so that's exciting and then they'll also be using imagine learning as supplemental curriculum i didn't mention this with elementary but since they'll be utilizing all of the core curriculum that on-campus students are using they will be charged the state the same standard textbook fees whereas in middle school and high school the tbr fees will still apply because that covers the device and all of the materials that go along with the device but student fees and course fees will be eliminated so just to clarify that for six through twelfth grade students high school also utilizing edgenuity and this will be their their courses will be based on their graduation plan that they've already set with their school counselor the high school takes a an approach where students do two to three courses at a time and then once they complete that they take on the next and the high school has found that they have more success when they do this this approach and it works really great for them so same with middle school and high school any mandated testing will have to be scheduled and done on campus um and one of the things that i'm really excited that our high school administrators are looking at is really trying to be accommodated accommodating to all of our families and provide different hybrid and flexible options so if there are students that are virtual but want to experience area career center as well or if they have ap courses or dual credit courses that the counselors will work with them so that they can have a hybrid approach and again tbr only applies not course or student fees so virtual students this question has come up a lot too so i wanted to make sure that we addressed it tonight but but virtual students will have access to the same supports and resources that on-campus students do and so counselors special education um even library books so all of those will still be utilized and accessible for all students our librarian is working on doing uh scheduling read-alouds to do with virtual classrooms and setting up drop off and pick up times for library books and then any of the other special services those will have to be scheduled during the physical school day because we can't expect those teachers to meet in evenings or off contract hours and then finally our technology support so we've got a system in place um if a student or parent is having trouble with login or technical issues with their device they can reach out to their teacher first if their teacher can't fix it then they sub they contact our support line and if the device needs to be brought in it can be brought to central office and they'll get it and con fix it and within one business day turn return that to you and so we're working on it making sure we have a very quick efficient process for that because we don't want kids to be without devices if they're virtually learning um one other thing i did want to mention so if you enroll as a virtual student um or an on-campus traditional student you get one change and so if you figure it out after week one or week two that this is not working for my child you get one switch and we want to do that because we we understand that their things come up and we need to change but we do want to limit to one just so that we can protect the workload of our teachers and the influx of changing students back and forth so that's why we're trying to kind of protect that capacity and then also we are going to make sure that we provide tutoring this year for any student that needs it after school tutoring and virtual students that includes them as well so they can arrange that with their a tutor within their building will have designated tutors within the building and transportation would have to be provided for virtual students but that option will be there and so we understand that students are can be behind or just still miss that face-to-face contact or need that extra teacher support so they can still have that in after school hours with a greencastle teacher so i believe that's it mr gibney did i cover everything okay okay so as i said we're going to take this back to the committee in the morning get their feedback and input and then we'll we'll publish it out to the community and put it on our website hopefully tomorrow afternoon okay thank you so it's the same as as uh 6-12 if you couldn't hear his questions 6 through 12 the same as as far as being on screen the entire time and i believe the answer is no so i believe there will also be readings and things that occur offline but that's why we have that code of conduct in place too because we need the parents to verify that they were actually offline reading and not video gaming or whatever so that we can account for those educational hours yeah i think that's gonna help a lot of people okay thanks um russell i don't mind we i'll share that internet um exactly they can come once all of their their assignments on there they can literally spend five minutes downloading all the work that they need downloading the videos um and then uploading their assignments from yesterday or the previous day for that time period i believe that we didn't discuss that right absolutely and i think we would take that on a case by case by you know basis and make sure that we're accommodating everybody i don't think that's a hard and fast rule but it is just to protect our teachers from the workload because we're trying to build capacity for our virtual teachers and then two days later get an influx of 10 more kids and then they can't handle that so we just want to be careful of that thanks next on the agenda is the report from the superintendent yeah so i just excuse me have a few items just to kind of address this this month on our website we've created the covid19 roadmap tab and there you will find our reopening plan and that is a live document with the changelog so as updates are made to that throughout the year um those those changes will be reflected in real time for families to see um also our athletics re-entry plan more information about the virtual learning option and of course after our meeting tomorrow with the reopening committee we will also post the virtual learning presentation or slideshow and uh and handbook so that way families can have that information at their fingertips to help inform decisions and an item that we're continuing to develop is just the parent parent student frequently asked question document so really taking those questions shared by our stakeholders and addressing those the best we can and again that will be kind of a rolling document that builds over time and so we will be meeting with the entire reopening committee tomorrow and we will be pushing out some building specific protocol specifically targeted based on what it looks like by our building and using the gcsc reopening plan essentially as the framework but implementation of that might look slightly different you know at the high school level than it would at our intermediate or primary schools just based on developmental age and then also obviously we have to factor in just the physical layout of our facilities so just just know that these are moving documents and and we are um keeping a rest of the situation as as we move forward one other item um just uh reopening plan specific is we have posted two additional nurse nurse assistant positions so we're looking for either i believe the qualifications are cna or lpn and what this will allow us to do is have a medical professional in each of our buildings to help us through coven 19 pandemic so if you know of anyone please help get the good word out and please have them contact polly polly shuey or myself just a couple of updates just with building and ground so i can i finally made it through all of our school district facilities our staff has worked tirele tirelessly to prepare for the return of staff and students the buildings look beautiful the grounds look amazing so i remiss if i didn't think thank those folks for helping to take care of that um also just to update on two summer projects in particular the middle school gym floor we have a projected finish date or completion date of august 5th for that the hardwood floor is down the new bleachers have been installed and they are working on painting and striping the floor and then sealing it or staining it or putting the clear coat down on that so that's going to be a nice thing or a nice addition here at green castle and then the high school auxiliary gym we've had a chiller out there and the air conditioning hasn't been functioning for quite some time but we're working with piney engineering and that will be fixed in time for the return of staff and students because we know that we're going to need some additional space and so we need to make sure that that climate is you know comfortable or more comfortable than not especially it can get pretty warm in there if you have if you have a lot of people um and then one eye other item that i would just like to bring to bring to attention and in looking at our board policies and our procedures is we have the ability to use a consent agenda at greencastle community schools and essentially what a consent agenda does um it allows um one vote for routine matters um essentially one action to approve it and uh helps to take care of those routine items just that in a more timely manner um and these items are defined specifically in our board policy as minutes bills for payment hiring of personnel resolutions that require annual adoption and resignations and leaks so essentially the board reveal approve these things with one recommendation a motion a second and a vote and what this would allow us to do or what i'm wanting to do is i'm wanting to create a recognitions section at the beginning excuse me a recognitions agenda item at the beginning of our meeting because we have a lot of really awesome and cool things here at greencastle community schools and we need to do better job of highlighting those achievements it can be of individual students through students of the month it can be through you know having having a having a specific class come in and share share what they've learned in their class um just it can be a short demonstration from like the robotics club or anything like that and so if we're able to essentially you know approve those items at a consent agenda we can create additional time to showcase those things now i do want to also clarify that at any time you know even with the consent agenda all it takes is a board member to just simply ask um to have an item removed from the consent agenda and then it can be treated as a separate action item so all the information sharing will still be the same and there's also that protection to remove an item and vote on it separately this is the consensus the consent agenda is used by a lot of other school districts we've switched to it at bloomfield school district and i just think that it would help us do a better job of showcasing um and highlighting a lot of the awesome things that we have here that's all i have for a superintendent's report for this month yeah thank you yeah so uh i'm losing track of days here but i met with mr weatherford and mayor dory i think it was last it's hard to believe but it was last friday and so yeah that's something that they have some grant dollars and we'll we definitely want to explore we had telehealth at bloomfield also and that was successful so anything we could do to help um help our parents and our students and keep our kids safe yeah and susan i have a question for you you guys represented several school systems and a lot of them uses a consent agenda right it's right okay great thank you okay next item on the agenda would be old business and we have no old business so leading us to new business first item is an approval request for an update to the 2021 academic calendar yeah and so uh to help provide some clarification for mr harvey and everyone else um you know i think it's important to understand that we we've been working diligently throughout the course of the summer and working working with our staff and our parents and we also recognize it's an ever-changing situation so a lot of a lot of time has been put into this but we just really feel like with the with the updates the additional information we're providing families with regards to the virtual learning option this some additional time might be warranted for families to make the best uh decision uh for their students we also obviously want to have some additional time to make sure that we are able to hire those two additional nurse assistants just making sure that we have everything that we need to start the school year and then obviously in being able to to look at you know once students register make any adjustments to class rosters so that we can put our virtual teachers in place and train them so i think that the one week is reasonable and i think it will allow us to uh to do just that it'll also it also keeps us pretty much in line with the other putnam county school districts because we also recognize that we don't want any students who attend area 30 to fall behind and so it keeps those things in line as well so it would be my recommendation that the board approved the the approve moving the start date back one week um just also to make sure everyone is aware at this time i am not recommending any adjustments to to our breaks or scheduled or scheduled days off we just need that additional time right now we'll certainly work through uh gcta and stakeholders just to should any other adjustments need to be made perfect okay so you're just recommending started a week everything else all other calendar days are the same yeah that's correct right okay makes sense to me okay we have a motion and a second to update the 2021 academic calendar all in favor opposed motion passes thank you mr giving i think it's a great idea next item on the agenda is an approval request for imagine learning the imagine learning three-year contract yeah so this item is a uh clarification from the june 2020 board meeting was an update that was brought to brought to my attention the board didn't have the opportunity to see the full three-year agreement that was included in your board board packet this month what was presented in june was the recommendation for the first payment of sixty thousand dollars however the total agreement is for 120 000 over excuse me 120 000 for all three years which is uh two payments of 60 60 000 so we just wanted to bring that to your attention and really make sure that that was understood and clear and with that it is my recommendation that the board approved a three-year contract with imagine learning okay i get a motion to approve the three-year contract for with the match learning okay we have a motion and a second any discussion hearing none all in favor all opposed post passes next item on the agenda is an approval request for the transitional kindergarten class proposal yep so this is essentially what we're looking at is a pilot program for this year we recognize that with kindergarten we have students of a variety of ages and this essentially would allow us to create a group that our kindergarten age but might need some additional supports and things along the way and so dr french has worked with the curriculum committee they put a lot of time into this and we just feel like it's another another thing that's going to help our students be successful at a young age and it's something that we hope to hope to replicate um over time so this doesn't remove uh the kindergarten entrance requirements as far as having to be five um just to be just to be clear with that i don't want to uh to offer up any confusion so it's my recommendation that the board approve the transitional kindergarten class proposal so this essentially creates kindergarten it's a little slower entry um benefits we found that [Music] okay okay can i get a motion to approve the transitional kindergarten proposal okay we have motion in a second any further discussion okay hearing none all in favor opposed motion passes thank you next on the agenda is an approval request for the 2020-2021 physical therapy services contract with cornerstone rehabilitation center mr gibney yep so mrs sullivan is recommending that we continue the contract for 20 20 21 school year with cornerstone rehabilitation center and this group provides physical therapy services for students who are in need for their ieps this is paid for through our federal grant fy 2021 it's my recommendation that the board approved this request okay with motion in a second to approve the physical therapy services contract in the discussion hearing none all in favor all opposed motion passes next item on the agenda is an approval request for to accept the donation from hassler's trucking to greencastle high school athletics in the amount of 500.
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mr gibney yep so it's anything over five hundred dollars requires uh board approval and uh essentially uh they're joining our corporate sponsor program and i would like to uh request the board approved these funds for our athletic department russell did okay we have a motion in a second all in favor any discussion hearing that all in favor all opposed motion passes last item on the agenda is on your new business is to approve the donation of three thousand dollar grant or i don't know if it's a donation but approve a three thousand dollar grant from the putnam county community foundation yep so i'd like to thank dr french and whoever helped support her in this in this effort essentially we put forth a proposal to help secure bottle filler drinking fountains for some of our schools and that's uh something that we're working on and will continue to work on and essentially they approved three thousand dollars uh in funds to uh to help support that so i would definitely like to thank them for being good good partners with greencastle community schools and i would like the board to accept those grant dollars so that we can put them to good use you have a motion in a second okay have a motion in a second to approve the three thousand dollar grant from putnam county community foundation all in favor all opposed motion passes last item on the agenda is other business does anyone have any other business yeah so the executive order really green castle community schools are in our plan we're already doing those those things or following the following or meeting those requirements but one thing that we are doing is we're going to participate in dr mccormick's weekly webinar tomorrow that executive order just came out and we haven't necessarily received full guidance from ido or school board association so we're going to review that information we're going to have conversations with the committee because we really want to make make sure families understand the mask requirement we also want them to understand what type of masks will be acceptable so we will be sharing out additional information for all families teachers and stakeholders you know you know what's our discipline policy with masks so we have to work with our committee but we will definitely definitely share that share that out with families thank you yeah i don't i don't believe that we're going to be able to break it out by like by class period hour within the school day any other other business okay um i guess for tonight only um we had kind of talked on the poor some people came in that we had moved comments from the audience on the recommendation or the suggestion from a couple board members having heard comments from some people thinking that they would like to see them at the beginning rather than at the end really makes no difference to to me personally i mean it's um so i guess seeing how since um not everyone was in the room maybe tonight only we'll we'll go ahead and allow not necessarily a question and answer session but another section of public comments from the audience and i would also like to really share that if people have questions or concerns i'd really like them to reach out to their school building administrators or teachers because we really want to be able to work through these items with our families and the board meeting isn't necessarily the best place for for that to take place certainly by all means we want to listen to your comments and concerns but it oftentimes can all often be difficult to answer them appropriately because if we don't have the information in front of us we're not necessarily prepared to answer that so i would like to encourage that good dialogue with building or with teachers with administrators then also with myself yes that was very very helpful so are there any comments from the audience at this point like please please go to mike i just have one question wayne lewis um is it my understanding that this board and the school corporation is coordinating schedules with the other four school corporations that participate in the area 30 program and since we moved our start date back one week is that going to affect anything else going on with the other school corporations in relation to our start date well as mr gibbon said earlier it puts us more in line with the other schools you're in line thank you thanks anyone else good evening again my name is angie weeks i've been in contact with several of you i've also been in contact with several community members in our town i want to thank you for listening to us and continuing to work together i know that tomorrow's gonna be a big meeting for many of you i also know that my email has been blowing up from family members staff members colleagues my boss i want to reach out as a community member and ask what can our district do for our staff for our leaders in terms of mental health um i know we're all tired of hearing about unchartered territory but this is a time truly where i believe a lot of my colleagues are asking themselves because i hear it how are we going to do this i'm not asking for cheerleaders or extra bonus bucks to parties or whatever but i'm just thinking how can we move forward to work together because i know that it's going to be hard it's going to be extremely hard and a lot of a lot of people are not willing to say that and i would like you to open up your mind to that and think about together on the front lines you know we're we're not doctors or nurses i'm not prepared for that i've been tutoring this summer when i felt it was safe and then a two-hour period i asked 14 times with two students please put your mask back on so i know it's going to be hard i'm wondering how can we as a as a team of educators and board members how can we come together to educate this community that in order to move forward we need their support as well as ours with this plan so i know we have a lot to do but i thank you for your time and look forward to working together some more thank you anyone else okay hearing no more comments can i get a motion to adjourn you have a motion any second to adjourn all in favor all opposed motion passes thank you for coming and be careful on your way home you
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hello again chris cooper superintendent of clearwater school district i wanted to give you a quick update here on july 29th of some things that are happening in our school district first of all there's still lots of unknowns we have teams that are working on detailed plans for the classrooms the hallways cafeterias all those things that are still in process but there are several things as i said we do know first of all a calendar team has been putting together options for different start dates and different calendars for the year and what that might look like i wouldn't let you know that we have landed on september 1st as a start date pending board approval and so want to get people's plans going around that on september 1st what will school look like well at this time we plan to provide on-site learning have all students on site with many health precautions first of all would follow the governor's order and the sedgwick county health department orders those include all all persons entering the school buildings uh wearing masks or face coverings health screenings including temperature checks prior to end of the building we're working out the logistics of that um social distancing when possible and frequent hygiene uh just as an overview there'll be lots of little details but that's that's the big part of that the other thing starting september first is uh we want you to know that you'll always have the option of remote learning and instruction from our uh staff in clearwater schools that will allow you to reintegrate quickly if if the situation changes where you feel like it's safe for your students to be at school some of the new unique things or different things we did with the calendar first of all not only moving the start date but we moved several teacher professional development days to prior to the start of school so we can have that time to train on on the things that we need to do to be safe and also about what robust remote remote learning would look like so we have high academic standards there as well we also moved parent teacher conferences prior to the start of school and that might sound a little strange but our goal is that we can have a personal conversation with each family about what school is going to look like what the expectations are whether you're on site or remote and answer any questions concerns and also to learn about your child because no one knows that person better than you do i also want to address the kansas high school activities association yesterday took no action on changing any of their plans so august 17th is a practice start date for our activities right now that's with health precautions and um we will still have some competitions most likely that we'll move around because there are other schools that we play that may not be starting until after labor day and so if we were scheduled to play them prior to labor day that competition may get canceled or postponed moved to a different date as i mentioned we're still working on our learning plans we are monitoring health data mainly through the schedule county uh covet dashboard it has data down to our zip code so that's the best data that i've been able to find to base any of our health decisions on and we're continuing to have consultation with them a meeting in the morning with a pediatric association and the wichita area to hear what their recommendations are and do the best we can to ensure the safety of all while also providing a high quality education to all so just in summary september first start date for school pending board approval that will be on site or if you choose a remote learning we will be providing more updates as more information becomes available appreciate many of the the calls and emails as always reach out to me if you would like to my email is ccooper usd264.org look forward to meeting each of you having conversations and figuring out uh what what works best for clearwater as we move forward take care you
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yes i can thank you thank you good evening and welcome to tonight's meeting of the gilbert governing board it is july 28th we welcome all of you who are here present with us in the main boardroom those who are present in the overflow room and all those of you who are on live stream we will start our meeting with a moment of silence then we'll go into a pledge led by miss eugetti and then the roll call so if you'll please join me in the moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you mr eugetti ms wilson item 1.04 would you please call the roll miss laurie wood here miss sheila yujetti here mr reed carr here ms jill humphries here dr charles santa cruz yeah mr bor mr president all four members are present you have a quorum thank you mrs wilson we would need to approve tonight's agenda item 2.01 is there a motion i move that we approve tonight's agenda thank you mr jetty is there a second second thank you mrs humphries any discussion seeing none then we will call for the vote all those in favor of tonight's agenda and the approval thereof please signify by saying i i those opposed by same motion carries five zero item three item 3.01 we are into the superintendent's report dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members uh thanks to everybody for joining us this evening today our new teachers reported for work those that are new to the profession and those that are new to gilbert public schools we held several small group virtual meetings to welcome those who are new to gps and this year we have approximately 130 new teachers and for my interactions with them today we definitely got the cream of the crop from our communications and marketing department i'd like to officially acknowledge the incredible achievement of terry bradford chris hover and everyone who contributed to the creation implementation and development of www.gilbertschools.net backslash thrive including our high school counselors and career liaison staff thank you also to our district supporters especially marcy taylor barbara newman and brandi burton for fully supporting this initiative and to our high school principals and administrators for all your support the other day we found out that thrive has won a national award for the national school pr association earning merit award in the internet category we're so excited to see how important a resource thrive will be going forward especially for our high schoolers this year this award specifically goes to terry bradford who worked tirelessly and expertly to make thrive what it is and continues to be the forefront of thrive and also to chris hober who brought the idea forward as a solution and supported the work from the start so congratulations to them i want to talk about our bond rating on tuesday july 28th of this summer today gilbert public schools sold its school improvement bonds project of 2015 and 2019 series 220.
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come on in we on uh it does say we're live but i like to give it a second to load up on my end so i'll tell you in just a second mr renda okay mr render we're live for our q a session all right good evening i'm uh dean rendon the principal here at wisconsin middle school coming live from wisconsin middle school from my office um welcome to all the wms families that are taking time out of their night um to hear our uh reopening plan and really help hopefully we'll be able to answer some of your questions and alleviate some of the concerns you may have um as you know this has been a long process so we want to make sure that you understand it and you're well informed at this time i am going to share my screen above no before i share my screen i'm sorry i want to do introductions we have dr verrill the superintendent um to my left i don't know if he's too everyone's left um we have doreen fontana who is our six through twelve uh director of expectation supervisor of special education we have anna laforgia who is our wms nurse and also a nurse supervisor for the district we have ken post who mr ken post who is the director of business and operations we have miss terry cavanaugh who is our director of human resources we have miss wygonic who is our director of pupil services and special education we have mr bednarik who is our seventh and eighth grade assistant principal at wisconsin middle school uh miss gordon was very upset she could not attend tonight um but she's she's with with us she said in thinking of us and going to hopefully be able to watch we also have dr ruby who will also our assistant superintendent who will also be our moderator of our questions uh for later on at the end and we have dr sullivan we're very lucky to have our health director dr sullivan here tonight also with us and last but not least uh we have eric conklin uh who is our director of technology and who makes all this happen if we didn't have him we'd be in trouble all right we'll see how well he taught me let's go share screen you put a lot of pressure on me there mr renda right all right i won't do that all righty we want don't want to start there we want to start up top okay all right we want to talk a little bit about the um the structure of the meeting that we have tonight as you can see we uh have our administration here in the zoom meeting for tonight we also have our school community participants that were able to um through this live youtube link to be able to watch us tonight which i think is is going to be informative for you and then we also have a link that you were able to submit some additional questions and like i said at the end of this we will be able to hopefully answer those questions and if not we will be able to have a written response to those and maybe a frequently asked questions to be able to get out to you and the district and then tonight will be a brief review of the process that we took uh we're going to discuss talk a little bit about and address some of the answers to district level questions and at the same time we want to make sure that we do the same thing for school level based for wisconia middle school we've had two already of these presentations for center school and also brookfield high school and i watched both of them and they did a fantastic job mr belanda and miss diamond along with central office staff with giving that information out so here we go the purpose the purpose of tonight is really in the structure of tonight's meeting is going to be we want to help provide you again with answers um and questions for the questions that you have regarding our reopening plan you know be more be more specific to those questions that you have there's been a lot of time and effort that's been put into this process as you know our goal is to really create um a coherent and consistent understanding of the status that we have for our reopening plan and as you can tell that depends on the plan will be dependent upon health trends not just it could be connecticut health trends but also specific to brookfield health um executive orders that are given and also procuring the uh additional furniture and things and supplies that we need to um to make all this happen it it it's a a lot to do um but we're up to the challenge and at this time i'm going to invite dr verrill our superintendent to be able to talk a little bit about a brief overview of the planning process that we have dr barrel you're on thank you mr renda and uh parents thank you for joining us this evening we really uh relish the opportunity to uh respond to your questions that you've submitted since last thursday afternoon when you received the google document uh inviting you to this meeting this evening and certainly more questions have come in over the weekend and through the beginning of the week and again uh if your question isn't answered in the presentation or if time doesn't permit for your question to be answered by the end of the meeting tonight uh that's okay we will be putting a frequently asked questions document together uh answering all the questions that have come from uh from our parents that have been submitted through that google doc um so the the first thing i'd like to do before reviewing the planning process is thank mr renda and his team um you know we have mr ben eric joining us and mrs laforgia who's been us with you know through the entire summer with this planning process uh the central office team teachers that have been part of this team uh the school reopening planning team that began their work at the beginning of june uh made up of lots of different stakeholders not only of uh for the employee groups but parents and so forth dr sullivan and dr ferreira our health director and consulting medical advisor we've really had a full team effort uh and also uh thanking the board of education for all of their support throughout this process and their flexibility to hold special meetings when necessary to review plans uh approve plans move things forward it's really been a great process for all of us in terms of getting closer and really getting an understanding of what it's going to take to reopen school so beginning right at the end of june when the governor and the state department of education produced their guidance for opening school in the fall we immediately provided a parent survey we wanted to get an initial sense of when the fall comes around parents are comfortable sending their children to school at this time our data tells us that 80 of these parents would like to send their children to school with about 20 percent keeping them home we will be providing another survey likely by the end of the week or beginning of next week to parents after we've been through these presentations because it's really important for parents to understand more so they can make a more informed decision uh the state department of education um required that the school develop a plan um have it approved by the board and submitted to the state department of education we did that uh in a three-week time period last week on the 24th of july we submitted a plan um we've solicited your questions the board of selectmen uh along with the board of finance um are helping us with the board of education as a matter of fact we have a special meeting with the board of selectmen tomorrow night where we're going to be sharing all of the reopening costs um the things we need to purchase the staff we need to properly and safely uh open the school for a 100 return and other supplies and furniture and then we will have a special board meeting likely early next week to continue through that process so we're working with all the elected officials this is a town challenge and everybody's pulling together to figure out how we can make this happen i did mention the uh secondary follow-up family survey already that should be coming out by the end of the week um we're also sending a letter to our faculty um and we're asking them if they have any concerns um that involve their contract or any legal concerns about coming back to work to funnel those questions through the human resources department it's very important um we can't open the schools without having the proper staffing so that's something that we're continuing to look at the schools and mr rendall will get into this in great detail are working on their implementation plans based on the district reopening plan and then finally the schools will be communicating all procedures and protocols to families as they always do and that will be an evolving process mr renda can you go to the next slide please all right very important to understand what was required by the state department of education and all local school districts in connecticut work under the auspices of the connecticut state department of education or csde the function of public schools falls under the state constitution so it's very important to understand that our own board of education doesn't operate nice isolation we operate under the auspices of the state so there was three scenarios that each district in the state was charged with one was coming up with a 100 in-person school experience uh getting all of our students back for five days a week the second was an option for a hybrid model where half the kids would be in school at one time while the other half would be in a remote learning model and vice versa and in the plan if you've had a chance to look at that which i encourage you to read thoroughly we explain that model not only in a narrative format but in a visual so it's very understandable for everybody and then of course a remote learning model and in dr ruby we'll get into some of the details of remote learning in just a couple of slides remote learning and it's it's the state is actually referring to it as remote learning now not distance learning anymore remote learning will look very different from what it was in the spring and i'll let dr ruby uh talk about that later our brookfield plan addresses all three scenarios our goal it continues to be to have 100 of the students in school 100 of the time that is the intention of the district to meet that goal now some parents have asked well what are the choices uh if there's a 100 percent model i understand that i might elect to not have my child come to school for the opening of school parents will choose between at this time the 100 model uh in person that we're all going for as a district and planning for or if that is not a model that suits the parent the parent could choose the 100 remote model and work with their child from home with a provision of instruction from the school there is no parent hybrid choice for the opening of school some parents had asked well can i just have that my my son or daughter come in two days a week unless the district's in a hybrid model a parent can't just choose a hybrid model so it's either for now with our model of 100 in you're choosing that or the opt to remote learning the other thing that's important for everybody to know is uh while it's been a challenge uh your brookfield team has really done some great work we are prepared to transition to hybrid or full distance uh full remote learning excuse me as conditions warrant so we're going to be ready it's not easy to do uh to turn that switch on and off but we're setting ourselves up for success to be able to do that before we go to the next slide i'd just like to address on monday afternoon the commissioner of education and the governor held a press conference many of you may have heard uh or actually viewed the press conference where the governor continued to talk about districts having flexibility flexibility to start school in a hybrid model all kinds of flexibility at the high school high school's different than the other schools maybe some flexibility at the middle school there was a lot of discussion about that it's important for the community to know the goal from the start and in writing just last week it was made crystal clear to every single superintendent from the commissioner of education that we were to continue to pursue the 100 model obviously as long as health conditions weren't and do our best to make sure we have that plan ready to go for the start of school the press conference on monday to be very frank was a surprise and while the flexibility is sometimes nice on the surface to hear about flexibility if it's not clearly defined in writing as to what that actually means um we don't want to make any rush to judgment on on what that means in terms of an interpretation at the district level so we've been on the phone with the state we've been on the phone with our with my regional colleagues and we've been talking about things and um we have a meeting with the commissioners all the superintendents do on friday afternoon and so we're hoping to get some more clarity from the commissioner as to what that means that you have flexibility for a hybrid model but again at this time we're continuing our planning for the 100 mile as you all know um it's not just week to week that things change with the cove and pandemic that we've all been dealing with and struggling with frankly for four months it's not even day by day sometimes hour by hour things change and we're doing our best to adapt and adjust as we can next slide surrender all right so now it's time for doctor to talk about that remote learning options dr ruby i'll hand it off to you oh thank you dr burrell so i'm going to talk to you about remote learning and dr brill already looted alluded to the fact that what we call distance learning in the spring and what the state is now referring to as remote learning are two very different animals so as you know we were merely going along in school on march 12th and got the word that you know essentially the party was over we couldn't come back so overnight we had to go to providing resources for folks to access at home because we thought we were coming back pretty soon and as you all know because you lived it that didn't happen rather we were told that we had to go from providing supplemental resources to developing online instruction and uh kudos to all of our building administrators um our other administrators and our teachers because if we had been told that we needed to do this ahead in advance we would have all been like holding our heads because it would have been incomprehensible but our people are amazing and in the face of the the dilemma that we that we confronted we were able to pull it together and while it wasn't something that was intentional and planful and well thought out given the situation that we were in i'm very grateful for the people that we had so that was that was distance learning and i think because most other districts were in the same position actually all other districts were in the same position as us i think this change to remote learning is multi-faceted but one of the reasons might be to distance itself from distance learning because it will be different so distance learning of old was asynchronous meaning that students were not having live instruction for the most part although as we evolved because we listened to what students were telling us we had surveys we had focus groups we were morphing as we went along and supporting our teachers our administrators work to support teachers to be able to use zoom i'm sure you uh you know like i think dean renda is like a youtube star now with his um morning openings i i think he was offered a few contracts this summer actually but the the leaders were really presenting themselves as models for teachers to help them develop a find a comfort zone a sweet spot to be able to um use live interactions with students because it's not something that that people were used to doing teachers are are interesting individuals we we pride ourselves in loving our kids and loving our content and being able to kind of morph when we're in a classroom with our students because we have such a passion for that and then all of a sudden um to go from what almost seems like a private interaction into a very public interaction broadcast is um is daunting in the beginning but we had great administrators in all of our buildings putting on the morning show um the curriculum was delivered in an asynchronous mode so we had students even at the high school who were fighting the clock doing work because we can see what time people do their work online at 11 59 to hand something in the remote learning that we're talking about here is not going to be that way so let's go back to to the slide and look at the important information here um first of all you need to understand that this is not a like a forever thing this in the state guidelines it clearly says that your right as a parent to opt into or select remote learning as a platform for your child to or a program model for your child to access their education at this point in time is temporary and obviously as your your district educators we're here to honor that that option but we can only honor it for as long as the connecticut state department of education allows and while we love all our folks up at the state of the state of connecticut department of education they change their mind about how things need to be based on everything that they're hearing and all the information that they get that we may not be privy to and it seems like things change like this so it's temporary it's not for everything parents are going to need to inform the district of what their selection is is your child as uh dr brill said currently we're 100 remote or 100 in school are you going to opt your child into the remote or the in class because that's going to involve a lot of preparation on our part in terms of being ready for your student in the in the selection that you've made so you're going to get a survey and you're going to have to inform us of what your choice is now none of us likes to be backed into a corner so don't worry that's not what's gonna happen you're gonna have the right to choose during this temporary period as to whether or not you want your child to stay in whatever you you opted into so if you decided you know i'm not comfortable or you had other reasons i'm going to keep my child home i want remote learning and then september 17th comes and you're like yeah i've had enough that this child's going back to school for whatever reason you need you can do that you just need to give us a two week notice in writing so that we can prepare we have to change the room arrangement we have to measure all the desks we have to we there's a lot of work that we have to do behind the scenes to make things safe for your child so if you give us a note a written notice then your child can return to school for in-school learning on the first day of school in the following month so if it was september 17th when you sent us the letter the first school day of october will be waiting with open arms but we will not hug your child um for to have them come back to school so um you can also go the other way if you had your child in school whatever happens whatever your personal uh feelings are you can decide you know what i'm going to have my child do remote learning that's okay too we need notice and you'll see we're required by the state to keep attendance so we need to know where kids are you can let us know that your child is going to switch to remote learning and that's not there's no time delay because we don't have to prepare anything you need to prepare for that so um you have any questions on anything that i discussed that are relative this slide please put them in the q a in the document that you have the link to and we will address that surrender you can go to the next okay so synchronous asynchronous so we had an asynchronous distance learning mod module things were recorded as i said before students could log in to either their google classroom or what whatever resources were available to them at a time that suited them that's the best we could do at that time those days are gone we found from our surveys from talking to students that they did not like the students did not like this interestingly enough colleges did surveys with their students who were in the same boat as as we were in and they thought that students would like this you know loosey-goosey freedom you know to be able to watch a video of a lesson anytime they wanted and they found across the board that students wanted to be structured they wanted to have live instruction from their teachers and just like our students they wanted to be in a virtual classroom where they could have interaction not only with their teachers but with their colleagues with their students with their peers with their friends so our remote learning will be synchronous it will be live instruction so if your child is home your child will be receiving digitally through the computer live instruction that's being delivered live by their teacher right alongside their colleagues who are in the classroom so the the one of the questions that we've been asked is so what will the day look like so in terms of the time structure the day will look like in time the same as out of school as it would in school because it's live so depending on what school you're in i'm going to make up these times if the first class starts at 8 45 at 8 the kids in the school will be at attention with the teacher you know delivering um instruction and the children at home will be on their computers receiving that same instruction as the students so will my children be glued to a computer screen all day no because there are breaks during the day for different things so there might be a lesson that's delivered by the teacher live and you're watching along and then there might be some what we used to call small group work where kids would gather at a place in the room we can't do that anymore but we can't our teachers are really resourceful and creative and we're going to be providing them with more technology instruction they can do small group work in um breakout rooms on the computer so if your child's at home let's just pick on some of our our colleagues here so let's pretend that john barrel is at home and dean renda and eric conklin and dorian fontana are in my class i can assign them to work together because they're a good group look at them they're wonderful and i can just put them into this group in a breakout room and john who's at home can be working with his colleagues or his peers in his class in a breakout room and i as the teacher can go into that breakout room and have a private conversation and actually look at their work well the the rest of the class is working and other breakout rooms are working individually so there will be that type of a break lunch of course they're not going to be glue i mean they could go into a breakout room maybe and eat lunch with their friends that's an option but they could go off and eat with their siblings if there are any at home or or the adult who's at home with them um so there's going to be options to not be glued to the computer kids do independent work they're not going to be on the computer for that in the same way as they are looking at zoom they might be working on a document or something um so the attendance for this type of learning is absolutely mandatory this is not as the state said an a la carte situation where you can choose that your child does online learning or remote learning from 9 to 11 and then you go do something else or the child does something else and then you come back in this is a commitment that you're making to having your child participate in our delivery of instruction but from a different location from your home or from a child care center and i'm just going to add in something here um folks who have um to be in work there can't be a family member at home with students have asked you know well what happens if they're if it's synchronous learning and my child is someplace else because both of us are working or who is that whoever the adults are in the home are working and not able to be there um i can't speak for every single child care situation but i can tell you that our teachers are amazingly collaborative and have the children's interest at heart and we had educators in our elementary schools that i can they can attest to who worked with daycare providers who were providing daycare service to essential worker children and um while our teachers are not going to like be working with people in child care centers like they were their student teachers or something like that they were fielding questions on the um through email and in telephone calls to support the people who were supporting children who were in daycare so i hope that some of what i've said made sense and was helpful and if it wasn't let us know because we will figure out the way to get you those answers so thank you all right thank you dr ruby really appreciate the detail on that so i wanted to go over some basic kind of across all four schools uh expectations that are going to be going on um that answer questions that have been filtering in over the last few days uh for the parents and then when i finish a couple of slides i'll be turning it over to mr render to really go through the details of whiskey here specifically cloth face coverings and masks most of you are very familiar with this but just as a quick reminder the parents will be responsible for providing the mask for their children all students will have to wear a cloth face covering or mask while in school in the building in the classroom and uh before they get on the bus they'll need to put it on as they enter the bus um and then that's there's really not much negotiable there it's very important that we all have to be wearing those it's a key mitigation strategy for us to be able to get back to school students will be provided with a mask with mass breaks excuse me throughout the day um students will be at their desks socially distance in accordance with state guidelines k through eight classroom chords will also have trifold shields at their desks um and the schools will re schools will provide further details the trifold shields are um we're looking to order ones that are clear so the students can see but it provides a natural border to remind people about social distancing and also when students mr rendell get into this when they have to take a mass break the shield is another barrier while we remain uh in social distancing um for short amounts of time so we don't have the spread of the of the virus and we really could uh and we're working with our uh with health director and medical advisor on this mitigation strategy uh to make things work in this world next slide please a big question from a lot of parents parent drop off and pick up how are you guys going to work that out of course each building is different um but as a district strategy it's important to know for parents to know exactly what we're doing and while we don't have each building strategy and plan fully articulated here's what we're doing to work on that plan number one we're working with the police department and all-star transportation to make sure we have a cohesive and systematic plan which will ensure the safety of our students of course but parents at drop off as well as our staff and of course public safety we're going to be looking at traffic patterns into and out of the schools make sure it's safe and orderly making sure the public roads surrounding the schools remain safe making sure students are socially distanced and accounted for at entry and dismissal you can imagine all especially the little ones masks on getting to know them finding routines keeping an eye on everybody maintaining social distancing it's a lot that goes into just the simple act of arrival and dismissal of course wanting our buses and cars to peacefully coexist and then really looking at if there's a way to stagger car traffic parent traffic with bus traffic and thinking about all four schools because parents have to if they're driving their children which we are encouraging that's going to increase traffic with drop-offs at multiple schools and also being flexible as a school in terms of arrival times and tardies and things like that so we're well aware of that and so we're going to be working on that plan next slide please mr rumba facilities and hygiene trying to answer the basic questions there's so much that goes into the custodial work that's going to go on and updating and enhancing the cleaning as it exists right now number one one of the analyses we've done is to see how many more custodians we need and maybe even a change in schedules of custodians to meet the new requirements we need at least six new custodians to meet the requirements so we could open school so that's something we'll be talking with the board of selectmen as i talked about earlier in terms of getting the funding to ensure that we have proper custodial staff in place bathrooms we talk about a spectrum of cleaning full cleaning to an intermediate type cleaning and then the high touch disinfectant wipe down so a lot of that will be going on not only throughout the school but specifically in the bathroom making sure they're disinfected twice a day um desk cleanings uh we talked mr ren will be talking about the students at their desk cohorted for much of the day um and he'll talk about that but specifically making sure we're wiping down deaths after lunchtime um the high school kids uh wiping down their desks there's a lot that goes into this a lot of logistics um a lot of cleaning supplies a lot of planning so we're looking at that in an option we're looking at to make sure we're really on top of cleaning desks even though with the middle school the students will be using their desk and no one else really should be using their desk because they're going to be cohorted we are looking at options for neutral cleaners that are extremely safe that would be appropriate for students to take advantage of if they'd like to wipe their desk down or even if we could share with parents what those neutral cleaners are that would like to send them in with their children to help do some extra cleaning so we're really we're trying to be a team here and really work together um one of the themes of this entire school year coming up is going to be is building on gratitude from this past year is patience and flexibility we're all going through this together we all understand the challenges and so we just need to be patient with one another and flexible with the changes that come up and new requirements to continue to evolve over time lots of hand washing breaks will be built in the principals and our facility director are working on a strategic placement of hand sanitizer stations and new wall mounts and sanitizer throughout the building so that's being worked on as well next slide please mr ella health and wellness really key mitigation strategies that you've all heard about will still be in place but something very important in working with dr sullivan just to remind us of how well brookfield's doing in general connecticut's doing well but brookfield has a a 0.6 transmission rate which is below the one percent and when you're in that range that's when it it according to the guidelines is safe to go back to school so our numbers are really good in connecticut i know they're creeping up but in brookfield we continue to do well dr sullivan happens to be on the call so if there's some questions uh toward the end of the meeting we certainly could ask dr sullivan to weigh in um and the health department also does daily monitoring of community transmission and so they know down to the to the ad that the person the street the neighborhood the health department is really monitoring uh in an incredible way what's going on in our town but what are those key actions that make it all possible for us to continue on with society and let's think about this and you've heard about these social distancing face coverings nose and mouth frequent hygiene breaks washing our hands constantly respiratory etiquette sneezing into your sleeve and so on a home assessment that's really that's written out in great detail in our school reopening plan and again it's posted on our website i encourage everybody to just carve out some time it's a 41-page document please read it um the home assessment we'd like every morning for adults to assess themselves as in and for you as parents to assess your children and take temperature and make sure we don't have symptomatic children or workers coming into the building stay home if you're ill those are the big mitigation strategies and they don't change continue cohorts again i said mr ren will be talking about this but just in general a cohort is trying to keep the same group of children together not only to ensure that we um limit contacts but if there is any concern about possible infection um we can contact trace quite easily that's done through the health department and state department of education the school system does not contact trace number one we don't have the expertise nor do we have the manpower to do that that's done by a combination of the health department working with the state department we will cohort to the greatest extent possible specifically at wisconsin families will be cohorted together what does that mean if we go into the hybrid model we talked about flexibility earlier we talked about health data if we decide we need to be in the hybrid model where the a group for example is half the students comes in for a couple of days and they learn at home and then the b group who was at home learning now comes in um and that gives us opportunity to spread the students out more in the school because there's less children in the school families will be cohorted together what does that mean the first half of the alphabet for example is one cohort so families are together no matter what grade they're in and similarly second half of the alphabet that's just one example of how we can do it we want to be as convenient to our families as possible because we know how difficult this is work schedules daycare and all that we want to make this work for everybody and so we're thinking of that as people with families ourselves and what would work for us and so we're trying to do that um uh with our own children as we would do for you and we'll get that's a priority for us getting that cohort out to everybody so we'll do that as quickly as we can next slide mr randa quick bit on special education the first thing i'll say is that we are prepared uh to serve our students in alignment with the individual disability education act idea and we will be providing a free and appropriate education for all of our special education students like we always do students eligible for special education will be treated as general education students first giving them access to everything that's appropriate for them and then of course working with their individual education plan um special education supervisors will be working with building principles to maintain cohorts to the greatest extent possible as we said earlier um but what i want you to know it's we have to be very careful about identifying children so i'm not going to specifically talk about one program or the other because those programs are so small it's very easily very easy to start almost identifying and figuring out who we're talking about so we're not going to do that tonight what i am going to encourage is parents if you have a child with special needs and you have questions or concerns please contact mrs fontana she is our grade 6 through 12 special education supervisor if you have a child going into fifth grade you probably already who has special needs you've probably already worked with mrs baldwin she handles fifth grade up through fifth grade um those are our special education supervisors and of course you could always reach out to mrs white gonek our special education director for the for the entire district next slide all right this is technology i'm going to turn this over to mr conklin and then we'll turn it back uh then we'll turn the rest of the program over to mr renda eric please thanks dr burrell um yeah just a couple quick high-level things on on technology that i want to cover there's going to be a lot more information to follow in the month of august um which is generally how we handle technology communication in regards to our one-to-one uh program and any communication we send out um to staff and families regarding technology um first of all at the the one-to-one and byod program will continue as planned for our eighth grade students um as well as our high school but for whiskey near our eighth grade students will have the option to participate in our one-to-one program we usually send communication uh for that program in early august and actually um at whiskey near mr bednarik takes uh takes a lead on that so we'll be working with him and mr renda closely on on getting that communication out um thanks to the work of the uh and the support of the boe the bos the board of selectmen and the board of finance um we were able to purchase additional chromebooks this year to make chromebooks available to as many students as possible in grades pre-k to seven in addition to what we already have in the district um and how we um utilize those devices around the district um during the school day we will have more information on that as we um set up configure and get the get the devices out to where they need to go um very exciting um we will be um offering the option um district-wide for the first time byod is bring your own device uh for those of you who don't know um we are giving families the option um we know we we heard from any of you that you purchased a chromebook during the spring or or have your own device at home already for your students um we are now going to fully support you bringing those into school um and we'll support with with fully functional wi-fi and and other services to make sure that you um get the same instruction in regards to the resources that you need uh more information on that with with an agreement that we have um will come from from wisconier and and the other schools um if your children are in those other schools in the coming weeks about how we manage the byod program um and to handle these influx of devices uh our tech team is working hard um on wi-fi upgrades among other things that they're working hard on on wi-fi upgrades um and uh and additional access points throughout all the buildings this summer um because we know that no matter what model we have uh we're going to be relying on on wi-fi and technology more than ever um i'd be happy to answer more questions as they come in later or um in in the document that we share later but i wanted to give a quick general overview um and uh thank you and i'll turn it back over to mr renda who's gonna take it over from here all right thank you very much all right excuse me um before i start as you can see our picture of wisconsin middle school here i want to thank all of our central office staff i want to thank um my principal colleagues our uh administration here at wisconsin staff here we're really trying to come up with being creative and coming up with different ways to make this work while understanding the importance of that our students and staff safety is our number one priority it's amazing how much we really miss our kids we i said this uh in the morning announcements at the end of the year and i'll say it again um it's not fun when there aren't kids around uh so we're you know we are excited to hopefully make this uh plan uh work and and with the safety obviously is our number one priority so i just wanted to make sure i said that ahead of time and also um you know i know my other two colleagues mr belanda and miss diamond spoke about having their kids and empathizing and understanding that um it takes a lot to to um go through this and understand all this and at the same time i have a son that's a junior in high school he's gonna be a junior in high school and um you know his angst and a little bit of anxious about going back but really just having conversations with him and understanding that you know we're going to do what's right and what's safe for him and for all of us now i'd like to talk about a little bit of a total day all right so a typical day this is what we anticipate at this point as a typical day at wms uh from arrival to dismissal student day will still start at 7 55 a.m um as dr brill talked about patience and flexibility we understand the drop-off between buses and parents um is going to take a little bit longer time we understand it so patience is is we were asking for a lot of patience with this process students will be in their homeroom classes that's the cohort we uh dr barrel was talking about for the whole day although some math world language and uh some small group classes will have to be split up in what i would call sub cohorts for academic reasons um so that that those small group classes also will be um will be happening during that time so it won't be the whole day for all of them but probably for most of the students uh will be in their home rooms for the for the whole day there'll be some scheduled uh mass breaks all right as we talk about math i ask that um you know we're thinking during every class period maybe halfway during the class but when we talk about mass breaks um i know uh principal diamond talked about really starting to have your son or daughter um put together and and tell if i get the tolerance uh for wearing those masks i know it's hard even as an adult and those of you who know me i have a hard time um you know standing still um and pulling out fast uh when i when i have it on um but again we you know we wanna understand we're gonna be we're gonna understand that there's gonna be times there's an itch or they want to just pull it down a little bit that's okay but we really have to develop the tolerance because our thought process is maybe every you know 15-20 minutes being able to have that mass break and how we have that mass break maybe rows one three and five um and like i will talk about with the texture on the desk and then for a certain period of time and then moving to rows two and four then having theirs on again that's something that we are going to um have a protocol for uh once we start our unified arts which is our tech ed health gym um etc will be in the home room so those unified arts teachers will be coming into the homeroom uh students will eat lunch in the classrooms that's why one of the big reasons why we'll have those dust shields is so that students will be able to eat uh you know lunch because they will have to have their mask off in that time also so we will have those best shields there for them and dismissal uh as as uh it's been before we'll start around 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
all right mr conklin it looks like we're ready to go and streaming live on youtube is that right yep we're all set mr blanda go ahead all right great thank you um so first of all welcome to our families that have joined us here uh to watch via youtube tonight for our question and answer session about the brookfield high school reopening plan uh i am pleased to be joined by many people in this room as i look at the zoom screen it's great to see some familiar faces um so i'll just go around and just introduce with us here is our superintendent dr john burrill we also have our assistant superintendent uh dr maureen ruby is here uh also from central office we have mr ken post he's the director of business and operations uh and also from central office we've got a lot of central office today we have mrs terry cavanaugh who's our director of hr human resources and also from central office who's comes the building on a regular occasion um our director of pupil personnel and that is mrs gino igonic we have some building-based people that are also here with us today i'm glad to welcome mrs susan griffin one of our assistant principals uh also uh mrs jules scheidy who is one of our other assistant principals as well uh and mrs doreen fontana who is also she's the supervisor of secondary special education uh and there's two other important people uh first is anna laforgia she is one of the nurses in district and she's also the nurse supervisor she's been with us from the beginning in this process of planning and getting ready to reopen she's been a valuable resource and we're so glad to have her on board and i purposely left him last but eric conklin is also joining us here uh the director of technology uh at brookfield public schools he's here and uh we are working this meeting together um so what i'm gonna do first is uh i'm gonna share my screen um and then which will go through a powerpoint presentation um that really addresses and we'll talk a little bit about the format tonight so i'll start by sharing my screen all right uh you know while i said we are broadcasting uh live on youtube this will also be recorded so people can go back and certainly watch it um you know we will certainly um what we've done is people have submitted uh questions and answers and a document uh which we have reviewed as a district and as a building uh i met with mrs sheidy and mrs griffin today and yesterday we talked a little bit about those questions to make sure that we get them answered to the best of our ability um and you know you certainly if we didn't get a chance to answer your particular question or if during the evening tonight you also have the opportunity to submit questions uh using um a link which i'll share and you'll see in a minute uh before i continue you know as i look at this reopening plan i i can't help but think about my wife who just told me that she found out from her district uh at this point that she's also a teacher um a middle school english teacher and she is uh going to have to go back to school it's looking like five days a week whether they're remote or hybrid and i have a third grader and a sixth grader at home and we're trying to figure out how to do and what we're gonna do with all this stuff it changes day to day um and you know i want to just empathize with everyone i feel the same thing that you're going through uh while it's a different level i have a middle schooler and an elementary school kid um but i'm feeling the same struggles that everybody else is trying to figure out what's what's the right thing to do and the best decision for me and my family and for our kids um and just know that our staff has been on board from day one uh and they can't wait to see students again that's one of the things that they're really missing the most uh but we want to make sure we do it safely and appropriately and and make sure that we're doing the right thing so what you see now is the administration obviously this is my screen but we're all in a zoom meeting this is the live youtube link and people have already submitted questions uh through the google form the review of the process tonight how this is going to go is we're going to start at the district level with questions that have been submitted you had an opportunity to select whether it was a school-based or a district-based question and we even found some of the brookfield high school questions specifically were really good to be answered across all all buildings so that we kind of up those to district level questions so we'll hear from the central office and then after that we'll discuss and respond to and address the school level questions um that people had and submitted and again if you have questions you can certainly submit them using that form that was sent out and we'll do our best to answer them if we don't get a chance to answer them tonight if we have time at the end we'll go live we'll go to a moderator who will ask some of those questions but if not we'll be sure to release a frequently asked questions document to help you make the best decision and learn more about what our plan is so the purpose really is like i said before we want to give parents answers um you know there are specific specific questions that people had uh down to very specific mind new details to the very big global how are we handling this situation uh whether it be transportation or classes down to what do i do with my student so we're trying to do the best to give a general overview of everything for parents so you have a better idea and we just want you to understand the plan that we put together um that was a labor i'm not going to say labor of love but it was a labor-intensive process that we went through um as a group and um you know we want to make sure that you understand that it is a plan that is in place and certainly can be changed and it really all depends on several things including health trends executive orders and a bunch of different other things we need to make sure that the building is up and ready to go given the guidelines and recommendations from all the varying groups in the community and the government at this point i will um turn it over to our superintendent of schools uh dr john barrell to talk about the planning process all right uh principal bolanda thank you for the introduction and uh setting the stage for the meeting this evening i really do appreciate it um and and i want to share with with mr belanda and with the community um how impressed i am with mr poland's leadership and his team's leadership uh throughout this process and working with all of the principal colleagues the school reopening team and the other staff and directors and so forth at central office to really work since june 29th when the newly updated fall recommendations to prepare for reopening or uh levied from the state department on down uh so that was the first thing i want to say the second thing i wanted to say is kind of echo mr vallando's comments as a parent uh how i can absolutely empathize uh specifically with high school parents as to what you're going through um all of us uh you know on these calls tonight have families and we're all enduring this incredible uh worldwide pandemic uh together and we're going through many of the same challenges so one of the themes i'd like to talk about tonight as we go through this is remaining flexible and patient throughout the entire process but as a parent it's important for you for you as high school folks and high school families to know what i'm going through i have two sons one is a uh ascending junior the other is now moving on into college uh both uh like many who are probably viewing right now both of my kids missed their spring sports seasons my senior missed uh you know some of the traditional senior um rights of passage and so forth so we went through this right along with the folks here in brookfield and uh while i'm proud to say we've made it through as a family quite well and just like we did as a district it has been a challenge and there's been a lot of disappointment and it wouldn't be right i didn't recognize that and acknowledge that um so again flexibility and patience and let's stick together um and really um count on each other as we make it through this together it's gonna it's not going to be easy and it's going to take time to get through this through this school year so at this point in the summer about three weeks ago when the june 29 recommendations came down from the state department of education the district put out an initial parent survey and what we wanted to know there is uh how many parents thought they'd be sending their children to school and that was about 80 percent at the time about three weeks ago now and about 20 percent thought they'd have their their child participating in remote learning and we'll get into the details of what remote learning might uh will look like um but the guidance document that came down from state department of education required us to develop a reopening plan and that plan has already been approved by the board of education last week and i submitted it to the state department of education this past friday we then uh just as late as uh this past thursday afternoon solicited your questions so we could prepare to have this meeting and really globally answer a lot of those similar questions that parents are hungry for answers on as mr belanda said we want to provide those answers um simultaneously to all of this mr belanda had a slide up there he talked about procurement of supplies furniture um their staffing we're going to need to meet the requirements of the state plan we're working right now with the board of selectmen and the board of finance to ensure that we have enough desks for example to spread the students out for social distancing in many classrooms we don't have enough desks because we have tables and so there's a lot of configuring we have to do pre-k all the way through grade 12 obviously we're specifically talking about the high school tonight we have a follow-up survey planned for very late this week or early next week where after we have these parent meetings um where we're answering as many questions as we can parents can have a better understanding of the plan and be able to make a much more informed decision as to whether they're going to send their child to school or select the option of remote learning we're also going to be sending a letter out to our faculty and staff because we we cannot move as a district without our faculty and staff and we need to make sure that we have the people in place to operate the school system so that's another um element of planning we're working on the schools are finalizing their implementation plans in in thinking through all the details of uh mr glendale talk about what's it gonna look like when we walk through the hallways i mean the the fine-tuned details uh we'll talk about things like that and then also of course the school all the schools uh you know coming out of the principal's office will communicate the plans um and the protocols and anything new that parents and students need to know next slide mr blender all right so there's a couple of things this is an important slide here um and i'm going to talk about this slide and then i'm going to talk a little bit i'm going to reference the press conference that governor lamont and commissioner cardone education commissioner cardona held yesterday because i want to make the high schools a little bit different and was mentioned quite a bit in the press conference so the first thing that's really important remember i mentioned june 29th when the plan from the state came down to every single district and that plan from governor lamont and the state department of education called for the districts to prepare three scenarios for reopening school and most of you've heard of this one is the 100 in-person school experience students in school for five days a week 100 of the time and that's what we continue to work toward we've been pursuing that all summer that's the most difficult to implement considering all the mitigation guidelines but we're still pursuing that then there's the hybrid 5050 model you've heard of where half the students are a cohort and they can come in on one day or two days in a row while the other students are in remote learning and vice versa the second half of the week that the hybrid model we'll talk a little bit more about that and then uh certainly remote learning in remote learning i'm just going to mention this now because dr ruby's going to get into some detail on this the remote learning we're planning for the fall will not be the same as the remote learning or what we call distance learning last uh last year it will not be the same so we plan uh our plan addresses all three scenarios but we continue to have a goal um especially considering the health data in brookfield and in connecticut which is very good uh that we can do our best to do everything we can to implement a 100 model for 100 of the time so some of the choices uh parents uh uh ask about what what what choice do i have so for for the opening of school parents will choose between and this is right now considering the health data considering the fact that we're planning to have enough furniture and the staffing we need to open up 100 on july 28th that we will set up a district board of education model that's the 100 model that's the plan and you either choose as a parent the 100 model to go to school or you choose to have your child 100 remote at this point when you're in the model that the school is offering there is no choice for hybrid parent can't choose to say well i want my child to go in for two days and out for three that's not an option when the district is supporting the 100 model so i want to be very clear on that we're also prepared by going forward with 100 100 model to transition immediately to a hybrid model or all the way it conditions up warning all the way to a remote learning model so we're prepared for all three scenarios while i stay on this slide mr plan if you could leave it up for me at the press conference yesterday the governor announced that local districts would have flexibility um and that they could phase in perhaps even a hybrid model for the high school and that was really a surprise to us we were not expecting that in any kind of announcement yesterday and so that came forward and while it was stated at the press conference that we would have this flexibility superintendents have not received any written information or guidance at this point as to what would um what would govern a decision to say i'm starting the school year as a hybrid model especially when you talk to dr sullivan and you hear on the news all the time that connecticut is actually uh experiencing relatively positive data especially compared to the rest of the nation so we just want you to know that we continue to push forward for the 100 model and we will adjust over the next week two weeks three weeks and if conditions change we will be in touch with you and we'll let you know what's going on that was really important for me to address but at this point we continue to plan for the 100 percent model in addition to that i just really have to thank our board of education and recently the board of finance uh along with selectmen because we have made an investment in technology i forgot to mention that in the ces presentation a little bit earlier this evening and so we're moving forward on technology so we could learning uh much more readily than we did in the spring so i'm going to turn it over i think now mr glenn if you move on i believe it's a remote um it's remote learning time and i will turn it over to dr ruby our director uh our assistant superintendent for all things teaching and learning i'll turn it over to her dr ruby thank you dr perel so as dr brill mentioned before um the remote learning that we would be implementing this year for parents who chose that over the 100 percent in school model will be different from what we refer to as distance learning in the spring and what's important to know is that as described by the connecticut state department of education the remote learning is a temporary option that they are allowing us to provide as an option for parents and so brookfield obviously is going to honor that parent option for the duration of the time that the state is going to allow that and we don't have an end date for that that will is a to be determined by the state department so you will be receiving uh late this week beginning of next week a a survey to fill out for each of your children informing the district of what your selection is for each child whether they will be there they'll be in attendance in school 100 of the time or they will be home learning from home in our remote model for 100 of the time what i want to say on this is that if you have more than one child you do not have to select the same attendance option for each child you can have differing situations in your home or with individual children so as an example if you had three children and you had a first grader a fourth grader and a tenth grader you could you could determine for whatever reasons you needed to determine that that children your two younger children would be in school 100 of the time and that your 10th grader for whatever reason you make the decision would be in remote learning so you it will be very important when that survey comes that you fill out the sheets as directed for each of your children so that we know exactly who we are preparing um to have in the classroom and who it will be remotely learning so an another question that came up many times was about transitioning from one mode of learning to the other when we're in the 100 in or remote so parents can choose to transition from remote learning to in-school learning this is your absolute um right to do that but because you can imagine that if we have children coming from at home into school that we need to be prepared for them we need to make sure that we have a desk for them in the socially distant space and that we have their um the shield that goes on their desk and that we're really ready for them because the social distancing and the mitigation factors are critical to health and safety which is our number one focus okay so if you decide for whatever personal reason you should decide that you want your child to go from remote to in school learning we will be sending you guidance on how you notify us and we'll be asking for a two-week minimum written notice of your intention to change and then your child will return to school on the first school day of the month following your notice of intention so for example if you decide to start the school year with your child at home learning remotely and it gets to be september 17th and you're feeling more comfortable you can see that the things that we said we were going to do we're doing and you'd like your child to come back you would follow the protocol that we'll be providing to inform the school of your decision to send your child back to school and then your child would start back in school on the first school day in october giving us that time to set up and make sure that we have everything that we need in place for your child when your child shows up you may send your child to in-school learning and decide that for some personal reason that you want your child to be learning remotely same procedure will follow in terms of notification so you would be provided with a protocol for giving written notification of your intention to go from in school to remote because we are responsible for keeping track of children and their attendance etc and then that could be an immediate change um because obviously there's nothing for us to prepare for it's really um on the burden of the parents to be preparing for how your child is going to learn remotely and i didn't mention this in the um the center school presentation i was remiss but if you are deciding that your child would be in a child care center or someplace like that just know because i know that's a concern of parents that many of our child care centers were in communication with us during the spring because they had children working on their chromebooks or laptops in child care centers and our teachers i know that teachers in the lower schools were communicating with folks not not teaching them how to teach but answering basic questions that might have come up so that the child care centers could support the students during remote learning so i just wanted to put that out there mr belanda could you would be okay so mr burrell dr bruhl said that remote learning was going to be different from the distance learning in the spring and this is what this slide is all about in the spring we had what was called asynchronous learning that is not what we will be providing it with the remote learning model it will be a 100 in theory synchronous model what does that means that children who are working at home in the remote model will be receiving their instruction delivered live by their t by their teachers along with their peers and the timing for it we've been asked well what will the uh the time of the remote learning day be because it will be live instruction uh right along with peers in the classroom it will be this identical to the in-school model for time um but that does not mean that your child is going to be glued to a computer screen for the duration of the school day because there will be non-screen times after a teacher delivers lessons typically in the classroom children are doing work at their desk they may even be doing work with other people in the classroom and so that would not be necessarily screen time if it was individual work but we can afford children the opportunity to work with their in-school peers through breakout rooms on our on the platforms and so they can be engaging with students and they would be in screen time but it it wouldn't i from what we've heard and what i've seen in my own work with uh teaching remotely albeit at um the college level students are engaged in working with each other who are in totally different towns and in different places and so we we can support the students to be able to do that um so that the students would get breaks they'd get their break for lunch they'd get mask breaks the bathroom breaks the time that they work on independent assignments so it would there would be some non-screen time because we this is us an instruction this is a curriculum that we're providing it the attendance is mandatory so that's really important for folks to understand it's you can't like tune in from nine to ten and then you know log off and not be present attendance is mandatory in the synchronous remote model thank you all right thank you dr ruby i really appreciate the detail you went into on that so face coverings and masks was another big area a big question area so just a couple of basic facts that you need to know about how the district will move forward in alignment with um state expectations and cdc guidelines and so forth parents and guardians are responsible provide for providing a cloth face covering um or a mask for their uh children uh this is uh the schools will have extras just in case someone forgets or there's an accident or a mistake or whatever that can happen to any of us and so we'll have extras on hand but the parents are responsible for providing the mask all students must wear the face cover and cloth face covering our mask while in school in the building um in their classrooms and actually as they enter the bus if they're taking bus transportation we'll have to wear the face mask again dr ruby just alluded to it there will be mask breaks throughout the day um students will be socially distanced when mass breaks are permitted either in classrooms or in whatever situation uh mr belland and his team um organized um it's important for high school parents i know this is specifically bhs but students in the ke classroom cohorts will also have trifold shields at their desk um in case you were curious about when uh dr ruby menstruan shields uh students k-8 will be eating it at least for the time being as we start school at their they're eating lunch in their cohort classroom at their desk and so when you have a mask off your face you need that shield uh to help with the mitigation strategies of spread and each school will provide further details on how that will work next slide mr glenda a parent drop off and pick up at arrival and dismissal time a big question from a lot of parents not necessarily such a big question from parents at the high school level because many of the students drive and there's a separate student parking lot regardless it is it is a big concern with traffic and of course we're encouraging parents to drive their children because of ensuring that we want to make sure we have enough room on the buses for social distancing as well and so we're working with the brookfield police department and all-star transportation as a matter of fact i was in communication with chief purcell this morning about setting up some times to have some uh some discussions about this and what we can do and the whole point of the bus company the police department school administration working together on this is to ensure that we have a safe uh environment in terms of the traffic flow for our students parents staff and the public we need to make sure the traffic patterns into and out of the school property at the property are safe in orderly that the public roads surrounding schools remain safe that students remain socially distanced um and accounted for as they enter and exit the school that the buses and the cars could peacefully coexist and of course knowing that high school parents may have middle school or elementary children and we want to make sure that we're taking a look at how could we set up a parent pick up and drop off in such a way that there's some flexibility and opportunity for parents to get to the different schools if they need to so we're looking into all those factors the plan will be communicated once we have it set up and ready to go next slide please facilities and hygiene so some common uh questions that continue to come up was uh in general about cleaning but specifically about bathrooms and so there's a continuum of cleaning that will be occurring there's full cleaning of a bathroom or full cleaning of a particular room there's kind of an intermediate level of cleaning uh that could happen during the day or at other intervals and then there's a lot of touch points that we've talked about you've heard that and some of you parents who are watching even in your offices might have someone who is around during uh work hours when there's more people in the office hitting doorknobs and uh frankly in bathrooms sink handles toilet seats etc and doing extra high touch disinfecting so those are things we're working on in the plan uh specifically it's very important to know that in our budget for reopening we have looked at our square footage and analyzed the cleaning needs that have to increase to meet the requirements from the state department and cdc requirements and we need an additional six um custodians or a cleaning service that can provide the the workload of six custodians across the district to make this work so that's that's a feature we're working on in our plan uh desk cleaning this was a concern of uh especially for the high school level um how are we going to clean uh desks in between classes there really isn't a physical way to have enough staff to go around and clean desks in between classes so we are exploring options for what we're calling neutral cleaners cleaners that would be very safe and appropriate for students to have the opportunity to wipe down desks um and provide that for them or share with parents what those neutral cleaners are and if parents would like to send their child in with that have that opportunity as well so you know they walk into a new room and they'd like to wipe their desk down you know we want to welcome that so we want to explore the options and see how that might work hand washing breaks are going to be central to the operation pre-k to 12 and sanitizers hand sanitizer stations throughout the school and those will be continue to be worked out with the principles in our facility department to strategically locate those in those high traffic areas and and provide them as best we can have as much as we can for everybody next slide mark all right so in health under health and wellness there was some key mitigation strategies that uh and some interesting questions that came for folks so i want to get some general information out there um in the in the reopening plan which i do need to stop for a second the reopening plan is a highly dense document it took a great deal of work to put together i encourage everyone to take the time to read the plan i think it will provide a lot of answers that you may be thinking of questions and if you just read the plan you'll actually get the answers to your questions the other piece about reading the plan is it might prompt your thinking to ask another question but that makes me wonder about whatever it might be so please read the plan a lot of effort and labor went into it as mr bolland talked about at the beginning of the presentation and i just encourage you to take a look at it's online and it's about 41 pages so it's not not a easy read it'll take you some time but if you can carve out some time in your busy schedule and take a look i'd really i think i think you'd find it um useful so in terms of monitoring you'll see that we have um for the 100 model we have the green color coding and then we had yellow color coding for hybrid and red for for remote uh quite often um dr sullivan our health director uh shared with us that currently in brookfield we are at 8.6 transmission rate which is under one percent that's the low category where really you're you're permitted to um be in a 100 model and that's what i was alluding to earlier saying that brookfield is actually in really good shape we're in position to do our best to to strive to go for the 100 model and then the moderate transmission is a one to five percent uh spread and substantial is over five percent so i just want to share that there were some questions about that um we the health department monitors daily evidence of community transmission they go right down to the streets the neighborhoods etc they know exactly where the transmission is as it's reported and they're keeping a very very close eye on things but it all goes back to the actions there's a lot of questions so what are actions we could do to mitigate the spread of the virus it's the same actions we have heard about from day one of this very difficult time the last four months which is social distancing face coverings nose and mouth hand washing sneezing into your sleeve other kinds of respiratory etiquette the home assessment of symptoms um of coba symptoms as well as the temperature taking that's very important we ask in the plan that everybody self-assess each morning adults and children uh and then stay home if you're ill this is no time to be a hero and force yourself to come in we if you're feeling ill please stay home we hope we want to not only protect ourselves but we need to protect our friends our neighbors our teachers uh everyone and uh by taking care of ourselves and maintaining a healthful uh approach to things we can uh continue to have uh this uh this positive uh outcome we're having in connecticut and in brookfield thanks a lot mark cohorts was a question so uh students will be cohorted to the greatest extent possible um we will well first of all let me tell you what a cult word is so just to remind everybody a cohort is a group in in this case a group of students that we try to keep together to not only limit contacts but it's for contact tracing if someone is to emerge positive or something of that nature um k through eight we're able to when we look at the course offerings the curriculum delivery and the developmental age of the students we are able to cohort um at the high school that becomes very difficult that goes back to the slide about the washing of the desks and things in between periods and doing our best there the schedules will be developed to limit contact as best as we can and mr bolando certainly will be able to address a little bit of that as he presents families will be cohorted together what does that mean that's if we move into that hybrid model where 50 of the kids come to school two days a week and then 50 stay home and then we switch those groups later in the week for a couple of days we really understand we have families as well and we're trying to figure all this out we want to make things as convenient for families as possible and it would make all kinds of sense and we want to do that is to uh cohort families together so if you have a child at huckleberry whiskener and at the high school they would be a cohort by family that would go to school on the same days in person if we were in a hybrid model and then would be out for remote learning on those other days and really work with our families we'll communicate the formality of that when it's finalized but it's a high priority for us next slide please special education it's important to know that special education um is very individual so we're not going to go into great detail here i will encourage now and then at the end of of this slide that parents specifically uh contact either mrs weigonick or mrs fontana about special education um with specific individual needs for their their children but it's important to know that we are preparing here in brookfield knowing full well that there is no waiver of special education requirements under idea we will make sure we are providing a free and appropriate education for all students including our students with exceptionalities in addition to that students of special populations or with ieps will be treated as general education students first we want them in the least restrictive environment and then obviously implement their program and iep uh to the fullest extent we can per csd csde which is connected state department of education guidelines um our special su special education supervisors uh will be working with our principals to maintain cohorts again to the greatest extent possible so i want to just make sure i address that we have the contact information for mrs fontana who is our grade six through twelve special education supervisor and also our director of special education mrs weigonick their emails are right there if you have specific questions about your children please contact them they work all summer long and they're happy to entertain your questions and help you next slide mark oh and here we are i'm going to turn it over to our technology director mr eric conklin uh thanks dr burrell so just a couple things to cover on technology a very high level very quick um there'll be a lot more information to follow um from the technology department and and the individual schools um but you know for the the first bullet here our one-to-one and byod programs in grades eight through twelve um will continue as planned uh you know just as we did in the previous years with the option for the 50 lease fee every year or the 100 or the um buyout of the device uh mr blanda usually sends those communications out to families in august um we do know that that families were students were able to keep the device in june uh which is not normal for the program um and we will have communication regarding the renewal of of the program for the 2021 school year um that will be coming your way in early august um for those of parents who um you know have high schoolers but also have students in the lower grades um you know thanks to the board of ed board of finance and board of selectmen um we were able to purchase additional devices that will be made available uh in schools for grades pre-k to seven and although this already applies at the high school level in conjunction with the program we will be fully supporting the byod program district-wide that is the bring your own device students and families will have the option to bring their own device in uh and utilize our wi-fi network and with so many things that we utilize being web-based now um we have a great opportunity for any device to be used for instruction at homer in school more information from the schools and the technology department will follow on that um specifically regarding um how students bringing in their own devices and um uh and how the permission for that works um and finally in the building to handle these influx this potential influx of devices um the technology department is working hard on wi-fi upgrades um throughout the district among many other um projects they're hard we're all hard at work on we know that wi-fi access is extremely important when we bring all these devices in um and so we are preparing for that as well again this was this general kind of overview of some of the things related to technology um i'd be happy to answer any future questions that might come in on the sheet or or as we communicate with parents um for the upcoming school year um and that's all i have for technology so back to you dr burrell thanks eric and i just want to say a big thank you to the district team uh for for all the work uh in preparing for this evening um and supporting our schools and uh turn it over to mr bellanda uh who has a lot of specifics about the high school so mr glenda please take over the presentation thank you dr braille um you might remember the front of this building this is brookfield high school i hope uh you know we'll be back there sooner rather than later um so it's gonna take a minute actually not a minute probably about 20 is what i have left we scheduled about an hour for this presentation i understand that a ton of information has been shared uh at this point um you know so to dr burrell's point about reviewing um the long document when you get a chance to take a look it really answers a lot of questions what we've done is we've collated um some of the responses or the the questions that came in from parents and really tried to put together um what a day would look like a day in the life of a student and we're doing this pretty much for most of the buildings um and figuring that we'll be able to address a lot of the questions that people have about how we're going to go about addressing this and this is really from the 100 model everybody back in school so we'll start with the um you know school start time at this point is still going to be 7 15 a.m uh that's when school is planned to start uh dr brill talked a lot about flexibility being a huge piece anybody who's been there in the morning understands that bus bus is coming around the loops um as well as parent drop-off and student drop-off um at best we're we're right on it in terms of time we're gonna have to be a little more flexible particularly with encouraging you know more families to bring their their children to school um you know we're going to look at everything uh traffic patterns um and making sure everything is good for bosses to get in and out and dr burrell to slide about that we're looking at all those things to make sure we can make a smooth arrival understanding that school may start classes may start a bit later than usual than they have in the past but that's the flexibility piece we may have to look at a staggered entry into the building whether that's as the buses arrive we let one bus off at a time now at this point when buses come to the school on a regular day um all students get off the bus and walk in at the same time so you might have three or four buses dismissing at the same time we could be looking at dismissing bus by bus to get kids into the building and then one of the things they're going to do is go right to first period class if you've been in high school the beginning of the day there's a lot of congregating in the cafeteria the library walking the hallways that's stuff that we're not going to have happen at all anymore students are going to go right to their first period class so that is the arrival portion of what happens um then also we're going to have random temperature checks dr braille talked about this as well in terms of health and wellness that we're asking families to do um wellness checks before the student leaves we're also going to be doing random temperature checks of students uh working with the nurses and we do have two at the high school we're very fortunate um mrs scabbard honest and mrs matier will be doing temperature checks as well to follow up on that and then as always if students did not have a first period class in some cases when students get to the upper class level juniors and seniors sometimes they don't have a first period class we're not making kids come into the building at that time unless they absolutely have to so we only want kids when they have classes so if you had a first period uh study hall you know you can opt to come in late and be there for your second period as long as you're checking into the main office so that really has not changed much at all classes um we're still going to run an a b block schedule and for those of you that are unfamiliar with that which might be some of our incoming ninth grade parents that's four classes on an a day that's the first day and then a different set of four classes the next day on a b day and we'll rotate through those so that is our plan at this point if we do have to go to a hybrid model the school be divided in half by family so what does that mean so actually the district will be divided by family pretty much to to make sure there's alignment between a student at the high school uh coming to school in the case there's a hybrid issue and we go to hybrid on a monday and tuesday their family members their younger siblings or people in the same household are also going to school at a different school let's say huckleberry or center on the same days so that's what we mean by family they'll be attending schools in the district at the same time that does pose additional challenges the the model for cohorting and hybrids is a real challenge at the high school level because of individuality of student choice of course and the comprehensive program that we offer you know students will be going back and forth between different classes so the teachers will basically remain in their classrooms as they always have and students will transition between different classrooms um we did talk about that earlier about the desks and i will get to that in a second but just i want people to be you know clear that in both of our models where students are in school in person and hybrid um you could be with somebody in one particular class in your first period english class and not be with that student in your second period maybe see them again in your third period so there is a mixing when it does come to the high school in the classroom if you've been in any of the high school classrooms they vary in size greatly from some of the very very large math rooms to some really really small social studies rooms so we've looked to rearrange desks three to four feet apart which is according to the american academy of pediatrics um you know in terms of distance between each desk um the challenge with that is it's a reduced capacity for all um which is a challenge you know the fluidity of this um of these plans to be able to go between in person hybrid and remote as health data determines um really limits us in a lot of ways i can't have 29 to 30 students in a personal finance class which is something that we have had in the past um they couldn't all attend because in that particular room with social distancing the most i could ever fit with three to four space feet between desks would be let's say 24 or 25 kids now that's a pretty normal size what i can't do is allow it to go higher than that so some people are saying oh if we go to hybrid it's great we've split the kids in half so you can put you can get back to that 30 you could put 15 one day on one section and 15 in another section the challenge with that is if we ever come back to 100 in person now i've got 30 kids trying to figure out where they fit in a room that according to social distancing and apa um guidelines i can only fit 24 or 25 and so what happens to those kids that were in the class so we're looking at all different kinds of options um and i'll talk about courses in a bit teacher does remain in the front of the classroom and that's going to be a big challenge we are lucky that our district has really looked at how we can provide some professional development for teachers because the instructional model of what has to happen in class is vastly different than our teachers are used to and our students are used to it's a very for lack of a better term old school model where the teacher is going to be in terms of old school in front of the classroom and not really interacting directly at and students aren't going to be in small groups pushing desks together you're just not going to see that sort of thing because we have to be aware of the social distancing that being said it doesn't mean as dr ruby said that we won't be able to have students grouped together whether being a zoom in a breakout room or they're very adept at google google drive and google classroom um that they can actually break up and work together on documents collaboratively so there's a lot of really great options but i just want people to be aware of what the teacher situation will be in the front of the classroom as i said before students will remain at their desks and wear masks there will not be shields at this point around it's just going to be a student desk and a mask and the next closest desk between three and four feet away we are looking at a plan for mask breaks that's something that's come up from the state department uh that we want to make sure that we incorporate and we're trying to work to figure out how that can best be accomplished at the high school level we're also looking as dr bru said to options for students to clean desks between classes at any given time we can have between 75 classrooms that are occupied at any one given time imagining having staff be able to go in and clean those desks would be very difficult so we're looking at options to see what we can do to make sure students can clean the desks if they're interested in doing so it's really important that you understand that we're going to be using a digital platform most likely google classroom would i feel pretty confident in saying and for how we develop and deliver some of our instruction or kind of our warehouse that's going to be really important that allows us that if we need to ever transition from an in-person to a hybrid or even a remote model that students are familiar with that mode of instruction the platforms that we're going to use and all the tools we would need so there isn't a drop-off like we saw clearly when we went to remote learning last spring we talked about sickness classes uh dr ruby explained that very well um whether you're at home uh or you're in in school everything's gonna be synchronous we're gonna follow a schedule which we'll develop we'll rotate classes like a and b days like we have in the past we'll put a calendar out for that as well we're also going to focus on social emotional we know it's been quite some time since students have been in school um you know by the time we get back it'll be about six months since students have been in school and that's a significant amount of time a lot of things we want to make sure that we help to support students but also our faculty and staff as well they're faced with some tough decisions and working through some whole new whole new methods of instruction uh and so we want to be sure that we do that and then attendance taken by period we're going to continue to do that we are held accountable for attendance we do have to submit that on a regular basis whether it's something at home or it's something in person and then an increased accountability for learning and what i mean by that is um we were reactionary when it came to our plans in march april and may and june last year we've got some more time we really need to get back into the meat of school and really in terms of holding students accountable what i mean that is making sure ensure their learning be able to assess their learning and provide continued instruction it's really important um that we remember this is this is school again this is not um you know a kind of get your work done at 11 59 at night spend 10 15 minutes answer an attendance question of the day and move forward we're really going to be we're going to have high expectations for students we're going to help them reach those expectations but i just want to be clear that we're going to definitely increase the accountability passing in the hallways so you can imagine you go to your first period class you've experienced your class what does it look like now for passing we're looking at different options for one-way hallways it's a real challenge there are some dead ends um in our building um so to that end we're looking at maybe using outside spaces when we can um you know there's been some questions or some concerns about security you know we still have to maintain the level of security and safety from any outside threats as we always have uh so what does that look like and i i mentioned in a board meeting that it could be a police officer you know our sro may be in a car in the front of the building as students pass outside if that's what we choose to do but of course all that's weather permitting and as long as we can make it secure but we're going to look at a bunch of different options if we can't do one way maybe directional on each side we'll figure that out and work from there students are going to be asked to proceed directly from one class the next we know that some students like to take breaks and sometimes they like to uh meander loiter if you will between classes and sometimes hang out in or near the bathrooms um which is our next step so we're gonna find that the bathroom's going to be available during class and emergency situations also the nurses is going to have bathrooms as well the reason we don't want kids actually going in the bathrooms during the passing we want to get them out of them we don't want them gathering in small groups taking mass down places where we can't really monitor them is where this the mitigation strategies become really difficult to to address and take care and enforce so absolutely bathrooms are going to be options and kids going to use those in emergency situations and during class we're going to reduce the number of unlocked bathrooms this is something we've had to do in the past not because of concerns for covid but for concerns whether it be of broken plumbing sometimes or there's a mess in a particular bathroom we've had to reduce the number of bathrooms um just to make sure that we can monitor those and then we limit capacity so we're not going to have 13 14 kids in the bathroom and we need to find a way to make sure we can monitor that well i'm working with my assistant principals um and we'll be talking about how we can best monitor that not to monitor kids in the bathroom but to be able to make sure that there's a limited number in there they're using it getting out and going back to class lunch is another big question if you've been in the cafeteria uh you've seen the lunch tables uh we did the math to keep kids six feet apart because they do have to put their mass down in order to eat that is going to be a real challenge um capacity in the cafeteria with our existing tables uh means we could only fit 66 students if we used our current tables um at any one given time that's a real challenge so we're not going to be doing that we are going to be doing multiple waves um and we're going to use individual student desks instead of tables now i know it may seem i don't know what the term is i've never actually seen maybe institutionalized uh in terms of how you know very sterile and you can see lines of rows of desks but that's what we're going to have to do in order to maintain the a proper amount of distance between students while their mass are down and at the same time fit enough kids in there so they can get to the cafeteria eat their lunch and move forward students will always be able to purchase or bring their own lunch we're talking about a system with whitson's working with mr damasi very closely on that like i said six feet between desks and then we have to be able to clean them between the lunches that's something whether we're going to really put back on kids i think some parents would be surprised or maybe they wouldn't i think they would be surprised if they saw sometimes the messes that students leave behind and say that's the custodian's job to pick up well now it's your own individual desk and we're going to be expecting you to keep that clean at least cleaning up your garbage it's not everyone it's a select few kids on occasion and sometimes they just forget because they're in such a rush having a good time it's going to be a very different scene we're going to ask them to keep it clean and move forward we'll clean them between the lunches looking at time here i've got about six minutes uh so brookfield high school athletics that's a big question um it's one that i i wish i could answer right now i can tell you that the connecticut interscholastic athletic conference um does meet with directors weekly every week they meet they talk about plans everything is always going to be based on local health data and what it looks like some of the challenges that we know are looking into if we're 100 model you got everybody there if you're at a hybrid or a remote what does that look like how do athletes participate in games they're looking at that and practices we do know that if a season is conducted in the fall uh that they're going to be grouped by geographic region we're not going to be going across the state we're not crossing state lines we're not going to be playing uh legend or montville and anything in the eastern part of the state will be staying local and that's one thing they do know and then they're producing overall guidelines obviously for how athletic directors and coaches approach practices and games excuse me and then there's also sport specific i've seen things about how to clean a football um you know to make sure leather is disinfected and different uses between different kids and what that looks like it's pretty in-depth they're looking at it and this is another one of those things where we say we don't have the answer yet um but we're going to work together and try to figure out what we're doing next we get through the day it's now dismissal time you know we have athletics we don't have athletics again same thing we're looking for dismissal dismissal is a lot more challenging at the high school than a rival because the buses line all the way up to the student parking lot all the way around we also have parents we know that are planning on coming to pick students up and we have student drivers teenage drivers driving through a parking lot so it's really challenging that's probably one of our bigger challenges we have ahead of us to try to figure out how that's going to work but we're going to come up with a plan uh it may include us dismissing by bus number classroom or alphabetically those are other options we're looking at and early dismissal is always an option if a student does not have a last period class same thing with late arrival if they have a last period class they don't have one they can do that there was one other question that i did i meant to put a slide in and i apologize that i forgot to do so i have a lot of incoming ninth grade parents asking questions we are lucky to be able to host our incoming ninth grade night way back in uh beginning of march uh so i was glad we were able to do that but you know we do have some people that are wondering what's going to happen for our new and incoming ninth graders i'm working with the peer counselors we have some options in terms of small breakout zoom meetings virtual tours and i really have some creative schedule things that i'll be working on that we can hopefully be able to roll out in the next week or two that might be able to put people at a little bit more at ease that feel comfortable coming into a new building i know it's a it's an important transition even when we didn't have uh the conditions that we're under the transition from eighth grade to ninth grade is huge and it's very important to us the kids get off to a good start and are very successful and so we're looking at a lot of different options um and i hope to be able to present something in the next couple weeks um and that at this point is all i have um so i guess looking at time it is 7 58 i'd turn it over to dr barrill and dr ruby i don't know how you want to proceed if there's anything else you would like to add first of all thank you mr belanda for providing such uh uh tremendous detail uh in in in insight into your team's thinking about how we're gonna organize the year and continue to make things safe and provide as much of the outstanding educational opportunity as possible i'd like to turn it over to dr ruby because questions uh did come in and she's serving as a moderator this evening we do have a few minutes left so dr ruby is there anything uh that's coming you'd like to share with us and perhaps yes thank you thank you well there's one one question that came in or one comment that came in that i want to clarify right now and i uh it's about the positivity rate of coping infections in connecticut and um it was with regard to something that you said earlier dr burrell uh dr will was talking about the brookfield um positivity rate being 0.6 not the connecticut positivity rate being 0.6 we are well aware that the connecticut positivity rate right now is 1.2 percent so um if uh that was misheard i just wanted to make sure that um that i shared what um you had shared uh in your presentation john so that we had that correct um we we already mentioned that we have um really good statistics in brookfield and we're very grateful to the community members for their adherence to the mitigation strategies that the public has been asked to um you know to abide by i don't know if uh dr ferreira if you wanted to say anything about that i'd give you the opportunity while we have a minute and and for everybody watching dr ferreira you're on you for dr ferreira is our medical advisor he's been with us for many years and uh he when he's available he tunes into these meetings to help us out so please dr ferreira so can you just repeat that maureen my um audio was off okay yes i i wanted to know if you want to make any comments uh so that people would have it right directly from you about the um the low positivity rate and how well brookfield as a community has been doing yep no so so absolutely so as dr verriel pointed out earlier tonight so the the infectivity rate in our communities are extremely low right and um for me we're seeing patients in the practices we're running a lot of testing through new vans health and even with that the the numbers of patients that are actually positive are so so small that i think we are in a very very good spot in addition to that i just want to let the community know that you know this team that you're seeing tonight has done truly an amazing job at putting all of this work together my son is a local high schooler as well and you know with the plan that's been put together i have the utmost confidence that he can go back safely this this um this fall i think um you know looking at what we're seeing today you know practicing good social distancing following all the recommendations that has been put together with regard to mass use hygiene and thinking about the bigger picture of where things fit in the school systems very very confident that this is a solid plan and i'm excited to send my son back to school so is my wife so um i'll leave it with that oh thank you very much that we have a number of questions that have come in and we've reached eight o'clock so i just want to assure people that we are going to be responding to these questions we had a number of questions on ventilation and the oversight of ventilations with um in alignment with the um orders that have come from the state on ventilation we will have our facilities folks give you a comprehensive answer on that um even though i'm over i just want to say that we've had questions and i discussed this in the ces presentation on homeschooling questions like can my children still get you know some of the platforms and the digital learning uh programs if they're homeschooled and i just want to be i want to clarify what homeschooling means homeschooling means that you withdraw your child from the school system and your child is no longer a student here and unfortunately not to be cruel but that means that they are no longer accessing um the tools of the district um that you are assuming responsibility for the education of your child so that's different from remote learning when the child is in the remote learning mode yes they have access to you know all of the um i'll call it bells and whistles everything that we um purchase for use in school they will have access to using at home and so we have really great questions what we're going to be doing is um taking them and grouping them by by topic and then having the people who are the experts in those particular areas that the inquiries are referencing provide written responses and i really just want to thank everybody especially this team and all you know there there are a lot of people behind all the faces that you see on this screen there are teachers who have been volunteering their time to to support us people from other unions our secretarial union people in central office uh the other administrators who aren't working with the high school tonight everybody is collaborating and i'm really um i'm really proud and humbled by the work that's been done so um i echo what dr ferreira said it's it's it's been very hard work but the uh the amount of care and um expertise that's been shared is just beyond impressive so thank you everybody dr ruby thank you for uh those important comments um i i was going to add some some to that effect but you did such a great job i will end it right here thank all the parents and staff members who are viewing the meeting on youtube tonight uh thank the team here for putting the presentation together and uh echoing the comments of all the work that's going into this and uh the family support and um it's really important to know as families too um we are here to support you we are here in partnership we all have families we are struggling through the exact same challenge as you are we are together we really are one um patience and flexibility is going to be the theme that's what we have to do for the foreseeable future um probably through the first of the year and and then some it's going to be a while and so we need to prepare ourselves for that um and i want to know there have been some parents who have sent out some thank yous uh with some inspirational notes to different administrators and so forth and staff members i've received some of them and the energy boost that they provide is immeasurable and we just want to thank you for that because you know we're working really hard uh for your children and we want to make this the the safest and most healthy experience and best educational experience we can considering this uh extreme uh crisis of this pandemic that we're all going through so thank you thank you all for attending tonight and we will get the uh the faq document with all the uh answers as uh as soon as we can put a comprehensive uh response together for all of you thank you very much mark thank you i appreciate it and you know take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you soon
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
proceeds in the amount of 40 million dollars will be deposited into our bond building fund on august 20th of 2020 the demand for the district's bond issues was significant 221 and a half million of investor orders were received for 34.3 million offered at the time of sell which was six times out subscribed the true interest cost of bonds was .609 percent which is an all-time historical low rate for bonds issued by the district gps's strong rating of aa2 by moody's and aa minus by s p were affirmed during this process the rating agencies credited the following reasons for our ratings one large and growing tax base in the phoenix metro area anchored by moderate resident income levels the district's healthy financial position has materially improved with consecutive operating surplus in the last five fiscal years and to remain healthy with conservative enrollment budgeting and prudent management and lastly the district's low outstanding debt with rapid principal amortization is a strength so congratulations to our finance department ms betts for making gilbert public schools a very financially healthy place to be how much will we save on that ms betts for our taxpayers in the coming years well it was a good shot you could have made up a number but no i'm glad you didn't but again that's that's extraordinary so thank you for that um we started our school year our school year begins on wednesday august 5th this school year like the ending of last school year will be something we've never experienced before all of our teachers and students will start online and we will make it the very best experience we can let me say this publicly we will run into some bumps when we kick this off make no mistakes but we will do all we can to make sure that we correct them and as fast as we can please know we miss our children and we miss our staff there is no doubt about that we are doing all we can to look out for the best interests of everyone involved in educating and raising our students tonight we will discuss the reopening of the 2020 2021 school year there will be differing opinions on this subject and guess what that's okay more than anything tonight i want everyone to remember that we care about each other this district this community was built on the backs of people who taught us that in order to be successful in anything we do we must first build relationships and have respect for each other in times like this that's easy to forget there have been several moments over the last five months that i've forgotten about that myself i've had to stop and remember why i do what i do and quickly i remembered i do this for our students staff and our community i do this for the people i've worked with side by side for the past five months i do this for my family and i do this for myself as we move through the evening let's not lose sight of what's important our students and each other dr santa cruz that concludes my report for tonight thank you dr mccord we are now at item four a request to speak to the governing board item 4.01 ms wood would you want to read that or would you prefer the recorded message let's just do the recorded is that ready that's fine please play the recorded message on the admonition body on an issue within the jurisdiction of the public body the board may make an open call to the public during a public meeting subject to reasonable time place and manner restrictions to allow individuals to address the public body on an issue within the jurisdiction of the public body at the conclusion of the open call to the public individual board members may respond to criticism made by those who have addressed the board may ask the staff to review a matter or may ask a matter be to be put on a future agenda however members of the board shall not discuss or take legal action on matters raised during the open call to the public unless the matters are properly noticed for discussion and legal action during the open call the board requests that speakers refrain from voicing complaints against school personnel or any person connected with the district as it may impact due process rights policy k-e-k-e-b and k-e-d are provided by the board for disposition of legitimate complaints including those involving individuals forms required for use of these policies can be obtained from the gilbert public schools website thank you i would like to acknowledge the fact that mr carr is with us he had a commitment out of state he is joining us telephonically and that would round out the five member board so mr carr is with us by telephone we will start with cara dodd who would like to speak on item 7.03 of the agenda and after cara dodd it would be megan winter ms dot good evening board members my name is cara dodd and i'm speaking as an individual i am a spice one autism teacher here in gilbert i would like to say thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i'd like to thank dr mccord the special education department our administrators and the board for what they're doing for our students and staff here at gps as a special education teacher i would like to share my concerns with online learning for our students for the majority of our students with special needs online will be extremely difficult most of our students see the computer as a reward and not as work our students with special needs need face-to-face learning they need hands-on learning they need certain therapy materials and they need structure and routine students with special needs need in person i would hope with the new guidelines with your opening schools are special education students will be able to be in person thank you for your time after miss winter we'll have bonnie hickman good evening thank you i would like to speak to you as meagan winter teacher of english language learners community member and mother of five gps graduates putting on hold in-person learning would allow the district the board staff and families to make better decisions right now all decisions are being made without knowing the data and whether the board will accept or create their own measures the personal feelings of many are to have students in the schools learning this will happen students will come back to the seats the question is when i'd like to see personal knowledge and experience drive decisions with correct data and protocols we have the buyers contractors some materials but the blueprints are being made and waiting for approval of what will be considered safe if there is a change in the trajectory we could always move the in-person learning earlier this would be easier change than to go back to online learning we could even bring in subgroups of students in for one-on-one learning such as special education students title students english learner students and other vulnerable populations i would love to see some kind of assurance assurance that the board will accept the guidelines provided by the secretary of education of the state of arizona i personally need to know that the board will accept the data that will be provided by the governor and not start in person i have medical issues that at this time force me to choose to teach online there are many unknowns such as harmony students face max requirements the opening matrixes and the protocols of the schools i need that guidance of knowing to know when it is safe and knowing what you will accept i i'm hurting wondering if i made the right decision or did i make the wrong decision because i did not have the information or assurance from the board if the board would delay the in-person opening it would give you the board the time to get the data and guidelines from the governor it would allow the board to develop their visions guidelines school protocols and procedures the district would have time to reassess family choices and staff matching i know you hear all the time that i want to be with my students i do too i just think that we need to have policies procedures and guidelines to be in place i respect each of you i'm glad that each and every single one of you are sitting in those seats this is a very difficult decision to make tonight i'm saddened that you have been put into this position but i do promise you i will work hard and do my best in whatever position or what kind of learning environment i am working in this year thank you for your time and your consideration thank you miss winter after mrs hickman martha romita hi good evening board my name is bonnie hickman and i am a teacher at paterson elementary um this is my 26th year in the gilbert district in the same classroom and i just wanted to primarily thank you this is probably not what you signed up for when you decided to run for the board and i just want to thank you for for all that you are doing and the fact that we trust you and that we know that we're in good hands and we appreciate it and i also would like to just state that the program that you've bought for our district so that we actually have something to teach from that will be an effective teaching tool is as is as good as it is um there are so many places that don't have that and i just thank you for spending the money and using what you did to um get us prepared for this kind of pandemic ahead of time and it's going to be different um but i'm excited to see where it's going to go and our kids are going to be okay and just to the community that's listening right now we're going to we're going to do well with your kids this is not going to be like it was in march when we were doing crisis education and trying to figure this out you know there's one way to log in there's one place to log in you aren't going to be having to hunt all over to find things so we have done a really good job with this for our parents and for our students and i just want to thank you for being willing to be in this hot seat right now because i would not want your jobs and thank you all to the people that are in the uh the district also that have put so much work into this because i wouldn't want their jobs either thank you thank you mrs hickman ms romero kathy steger will come after miss romero i'm a little short good evening thank you for your dedication to our district my name is martha romero i am a kindergarten teacher at houston elementary i am here tonight to speak on behalf of delaying in person school until the data says it is safe i love teaching i want to meet my new students in person and be back in school but not until it's safe governor ducey has said that we need to continue to social distance wear masks wash hands and avoid large crowds it is impossible to social distance in a classroom with 20 30 40 or even 60 students if we open schools now we are creating large crowds instead of avoiding them kindergarten students are not required to wear masks and are not great at washing hands or even staying in their own area no matter how much i teach model and review the expectations i do everything possible to keep my students safe while at school it will be very difficult to do that this year in the middle of a pandemic i also worry about myself and my colleagues being exposed and getting the virus we have seen several teachers who were following proper precautions and died can you imagine the impact that would have on your on a young kindergarten student or any student for that matter it would impact them negatively for the rest of their life when making your decision please consider the data and the cdc guidelines to keep gps students and staff safe teaching or learning online may not be ideal but it is possible and the best choice for us right now the kova numbers continue to rise along with deaths i worry if we open too soon the cova cases will skyrocket which will force us to close the schools again this would be detrimental to our students staff and community i urge you to allow time for the numbers to decrease and flatten which will allow students and teachers to be safe and give us time to learn the online expectations and be successful thank you for your time thank you miss steger good evening thank you for allowing me to speak tonight my name is kathy steger and i'm speaking as an individual i've been teaching in the gilbert school district for over 35 years i want to thank you for your time and dedication to our district you are volunteered to guide us your experience and expertise is greatly appreciated it's evident that you care deeply about students the families and staff and we need your leadership now i'm here tonight to ask that you wait to open our buildings until it is safe for the 400 4 500 employees and over 34 000 students to return i earned an undergraduate and a master's degree in education to prepare myself to be an expert in the field as a teacher i am asked to use data to inform my decisions i am also required to use research-based strategies and curriculum to address my students needs the research done by the people who have spent years studying and developing materials and methods to ensure a positive outcome now i'm asking you to use data and science to inform your decisions i'm asking you to follow cdc guidelines to ensure a safe reopening i'm asking not for a date but a data-driven decision data and guidelines were created by doctors and experts who are educated and devoted their lives to understanding viruses when arizona reopened in may the cdc guidelines were not followed and the inspect the infection skyrocketed however now that some guidelines are being followed our numbers are improving following data and guidelines work i know you are hearing from people who want you to open in-person classes now they will not feel the responsibility of covet-related illnesses and possible death among students their families and the staff they will not have to explain the decision to hold face-to-face instruction when the data didn't support it please use data and scientific guidelines created by the experts in the field of virology not a calendar date to decide when our schools are safe to reopen thank you for your time next up we'll have ms sherry goodman followed by scott encardona and amy rowe after scott sherry goodman there she comes thank you i'm very glad to be here today i'm speaking as a parent a mother of five four who have graduated from highland high school and one who's still in the program i cannot sing the praises enough of the teachers administrators there and um and i hope it can continue um i keep hearing the word data we need wait to see data if we look at other countries right now we can see that those who've gone back to school they have not seen outbreaks this has gone on for months they're not outbreaks if we look at daycare centers that have remained open here same thing we do not have outbreaks happening so if we're waiting for data we have data we have two options on the table really here we have those who want to go back to school those who do not feel safe those who do not want to go back already have that option right now you can stay home you can teach online you can be online you get to have that option those of us who would like to go back who need our kids back in school need to be able to have that option and we understand the risk that might happen because of of that decision we have teachers who want to go back also understanding that risk i am a parent of a child with special needs there is not an online program that will work for my son it has been devastating him losing this program that he loved and was his only social experience to be at the school with the most amazing teachers and there's no way my child can be online at home so my options will be to pull him out into home school and to quit my job and to be his only social experience that he has because of this option so i don't understand how being online and waiting for data will be able to serve any of these kids with special needs communities it will not work for those teachers who do not feel safe you have the options to be home and teaching online and if you choose not to do that or do not want to go back when it's time you have the option of quitting your job just like my husband is a police officer if he chose not to go back to work when this happened and did not want to be on the streets with the protest in fact we weren't even allowed to leave the state for a vacation for months he would also have to quit his job workers in the grocery stores doctors nurses also had that option to quit their job if they did not feel safe and i understand there's times when we don't feel safe but teachers are blessed with the opportunity to be able to teach from home and earn an income as well with many opportunities so once again we have those who want to stay home with every option to do so and that is your right and i understand the fear that some have you're absolutely welcome to stay home but we need to have that right to be able to go back to school and i i just hope that the board will listen because there will not be a date that it will be completely safe for us to go back there will not be a vaccine that will be a hundred percent that will never be a completely perfect setting so that is what i'd like to say to the board and i thank you for your job thank you thank you mr goodman i'm sorry can i ask people to refrain from clapping we just want to hear everyone's point of view and when we clap for people it really drives the division in the community and we all have to come together and make a very difficult decision so i would ask people to refrain from clapping mr and cardona good evening i appreciate this time for the board to give us opportunity to comment um my name is scott incardona i'm here as a parent of a elementary school age child who attends here in gilbert and i just am asking the board to please delay school in-person schooling i would like you to make the decision based on health and guidelines and i think that's extremely important um it's a very tough decision being on the board but as a parent i have concerns excuse me for teachers and for the students and i thank you for the opportunity to comment thank you thank you sir ms amy rowe followed by amy woods thank you governing board and superintendency for the opportunity to speak here my name is amy rowe and i am here speaking on behalf of myself my family my son and my community oh goodness i'm a long-time resident of gilbert my husband and i are both graduates of gilbert high school our son attends gilbert public schools and i've had the honor of being a special education teacher in the district for nearly 20 years i've never spoken publicly like this before i'm very nervous but i felt compelled to speak about the reopening schools during the current covet 19 pandemic at first i thought it would come and tell you all the reasons we shouldn't open why we're not ready like lack of building space to allow for social distancing limited training for staff on proper sanitation lack of innovation in our classrooms in the older buildings widespread community transmission of covid fear and anxiety of staff parents and students in regards to getting sick or possibly worse i'm sure everyone's already very well versed in all of that then i thought maybe i'd bring in some inspirational quotes or statistics or personal anecdote to persuade you however i'm sure your inboxes are overflowing with stories newspaper articles and science references so in the said i decided to be a more pragmatic approach and i will ask the governing board and superintendency to consider the following action items to protect the nearly forty thousand students and staff that you serve here [Music] first i'd like you to delay in-person reopening of schools beyond the august 17th date recommended by governor ducey originally so that we have time to plan properly and prepare whatever method parents are choosing for their children perhaps consider reopening our elementary campuses before secondary since emerging research shows that younger children are less susceptible to serious complications of this illness and those parents have child care concerns as well considered a staggered reopening schedule on campuses such as ninth grade comes in for one week as the only grade and then you add on additional grades each week until the campus is at full capacity allowing students and staff to practice the new guidelines in a smaller group with less repercussions of error mandatory cap on class sizes based on the size of the room the students are in not just their grade levels knowing that older buildings may have smaller rooms than some of the newer campuses perhaps we should adjust students schedules and or offer six-fifths to secondary level teachers to help reduce those class sizes to allow that social distancing requiring face coverings and mass for all students pre-k and up as well as staff to reduce transmission i implore you to take action tonight on this important issue so that teachers staff students and parents can begin planning for a safe return to campuses when the time is right thank you so much for your time next we have amy wood followed by jocelyn kozier thank you for hearing us tonight my name is amy woods and i'm speaking as a parent of two kids that are left in gilbert public schools i have a son who graduated as well i would like to speak a few minutes on the importance of the kids going back to school in person i have a daughter who will be a sophomore at highland high school and a daughter going into eighth grade at greenfield junior i never thought i would hear my daughter say please let us go back to school we miss our friends we miss our teachers my daughter who will be a sophomore said i'm really nervous i didn't learn one new thing this spring and she did every single thing and we checked that she was asked to do i understand that they say everything will change and be new i do believe that but they need to be at school in person uh one of our major reasons for wanting to for the kids to go back to school is that it is not the same learning online yes yes one of our major reasons is wanting them to go back for their education they need to learn and be prepared for the entrance exams in college and what they need to get them there but equally as important is the effects on school socialization for children at school learning to socialize face to face is one of the most important school skills that we will learn at school these kids are already looking at too many screens during the day the last thing they need is all of their schooling to be online staring at screens all day long with no ability to ask their teacher in person or ask a classmate questions asking questions and learning to talk and speak in front of others is such a vital skill to develop you simply can't do that when you're not in the classroom also i think you're getting forgetting how valuable it is to see friends in the hallway during lunch or after school for some children this is their only safe interaction they get all day long are we thinking about those kids some of you are saying it is not safe for these kids to go back on july 24th tim tim pierce with the daily wire stated the cdc as well as the american academy of pediatrics is endorsing schools reopening in person the cdc says the best evidence they can find says kova 19 poses low risk to school-age children and they are unlikely to be the major driver of the spread of the virus they stated we need to invest in our children and their well-being they are one of america's greatest assets if children are left at home in isolation it can put these children in abusive homes at major risk cnn health report states self-isolation forces victims of abuse to be trapped with their abusers stress heightens in the likelihood of abuse too many parents being their child's teacher is going to be an added major stress teachers in schools teachers and school coaches are a safety net to those children from many abusive homes many times these children open up to their teacher or a friend at school if they are isolated at home who are they talking to please remember we need to be a voice for all of our school-aged children we can't forget these kids and their need to be in school learning and socializing thank you for your time thank you for all that you do jocelyn closure and then kyle noble and after mr noble elizabeth garcia hi my name is justilyn cowser i am a mother from the school district i have four children one well one just graduated one in high school junior high and i also have a first grader i am here to ask you to get our kids back into the classroom as soon as possible we are all here every single one of us because we value education i know that we are all parents educators teachers that know the importance of education that's a given we're all on the same page there and i know that's exactly why each of you serve on the board is because you know how important education is for our children as a board though your job as stated on the gps website is the board will act as the general agent of the state of arizona in carrying out the will of the people of this district our teachers and employees of this district have a voice they have unions and they have administrations that represent them i've heard that our teachers have voiced their opinions when they were surveyed and the overwhelming majority of them would like to come back and teach in person our children however only have one voice and that is yours the teachers unions did not vote you in we did the families in this community voted you here and we have faith in you that you will do what is best for our children we have faith that you will listen to our concerns and govern this district in ways that are in our children's best interests we have heard from many organizations such that amy stated the american academy of pediatrics cdc the world health organization that are all encouraging kids to get back in school and off these screens as soon as possible i know that the parents in our community understand this and it showed when 89 of us asked for our children to attend person attend school in person one way or another either full-time or in a hybrid situation only 11 percent of our district asked for their students to go online that was just a survey taken less than two weeks ago and that is how the district feels you have an important job and that is to represent the families in the community that put you here with this overwhelming majority asking for an in-person education i don't see how you can make any other decision than to send our kids back to school i agree that we should offer online options because there are families that don't feel comfortable with this and as we have heard there are teachers that don't feel comfortable with this and that is why we have the online option we have that option for that 11 of the students and that small percentage of the teachers that do want to teach online but to me the bottom line is we as parents know our children we know what is best for them we know what they desperately need right now and as a board you know how this community feels you asked us and we spoke i am asking that you have the courage and the ingenuity to carry out the will of the people in this district do not let a union dictate what is best for our kids let the parents dictate what is best for our children if someone wants to stay online they can let the other 89 of us do what is best for our children thanks hi i'm kyle nobley i'm a parent of a child at findlay farms you're facing a very difficult decision right now but you're all on this board because we trust you to make the right decision even when it's tough to not take the easy way out and to do the right thing for our students and teachers we tell our kids what's popular isn't always right and what's right isn't always popular right now is the time to put that mantra to use there's a very vocal group of people out there trying to pressure you into making the wrong decision the truth is there's no way you can even consider opening schools to in-person learning at this point in time we have no idea exactly how bad the spread is in our community because the testing and reporting has been so woefully inadequate sonoranquest alone is reporting a testing backlog of over forty thousand tests right now on top of the backlog we have a twelve to fifteen day turnaround on getting test results the first step to containing a pandemic is to have good accurate and timely testing we failed at step one and thus have no business considering any step past that such as reopening schools from the little that we do know arizona is getting absolutely slammed by cobid as of today one arizonan dies every 14 minutes from this virus until the testing and reporting is back under control we will have absolutely no idea what's going on in our community and thus any reopening metrics given by the department of health will be completely useless further what kind of plan do you have to keep our students and teachers safe what happens if a student tests positive does the whole class have to quarantine does the teacher what about if a teacher tests positive who quarantines then what about if a student's family member tests positive does that student need to quarantine how can you even attempt to teach kids with any consistency if you have to constantly be sending students and teachers home for quarantines and if you're not going to be quarantining positive cases and those they come in contact with then how can you say that you're doing everything you can to protect the health and safety of our students and teachers will you be offering counselors when a teacher dies and students feel responsible what about when a parent dies and the student believes they brought the virus home from school do you have enough subs for when teachers are out sick or quarantining do you have enough resources in the school so students don't have to share computers and books do you have enough desks to spread everyone out in every classroom do you have enough floor space to spread everyone out adequately who will be providing hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes teachers are already supplying their own school supplies will they have to provide these items as well as a state arizona rushed to reopen and look how poorly that's turned out let's learn from our mistakes and not repeat them so considering the massive testing backlog the slow turnaround on testing the huge amount of unanswered questions regarding the health and safety of our students and teachers i say we are nowhere near ready to even consider opening the schools up at this point in time we have to push back the in-person school date well beyond the august 17th date my biggest hope for this year is that we don't have to start morning announcements with a moment of silence and every yearbook doesn't have to have several pages of remembrances at the back for all the students and teachers that we lost to kova this year you know what the right decision is please don't be afraid to make it next we have elizabeth garcia followed by colby ashton and nevin cawley good evening to the board and the superintendent thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is liz garcia the last time i addressed this board was in 1992 as the first ecology club president at mesquite junior high now my husband and i are gps graduates my children both attend greenfield junior high i teach at gilbert high and i am a taxpayer within this district i cannot imagine being more invested in this community i'm here tonight as a parent and a teacher to ask you to please make the decision to postpone the start of school until at least after fall break first as a parent i do not feel that my children are safe to go back yet even so i have serious concerns about global academy i understand that some of our teachers will teach the online curriculum for the year and that we will not be hiring additional staff that means we will have fewer in-person teachers if in-person classes are reduced to accommodate safety measures such as social distancing per the cdc much like we're practicing here in this room the only way for the overall cla average class size to stay the same is for online numbers to skyrocket how will my children's teachers give meaningful feedback or tutoring when they have far more students than in a typical year all while in person teachers have less than their normal amount of students have you thought about how to navigate this and when do you plan to tell parents how this is going to work there are families with concerns for going back prematurely and those kids still deserve the education that gps is known for if we postpone the start of school students can be in reasonable class sizes and hopefully then our community will be ready for safe in-person instruction next as a teacher i want you to know that i very much look forward to being back in the classroom when it's safe i don't think we're there yet and not knowing is so frustrating teachers are planners we spend time during breaks and weekends planning for our students teachers are problem solvers we differentiate instruction and find inventive ways to reach all of our students being in limbo has prevented us from planning and it has prevented us from finding solutions for our students the truth is we don't know when we'll be able to go back postponing until after fall break gives us the time to plan and find meaningful ways to reach our students instead of spending our time wondering what tomorrow brings we can exhale and do what we do best finally i want to share something that one of my mentors shar fujino would ask me when i felt conflicted what's best for kids it always gave me such clarity and it still does today i understand that what is best for every child right now may be different but ultimately having teachers who are focused on them and the curriculum not all of the what-ifs will be the best education that they can get thank you for your time good evening board it's good to see everybody superintendents good to see you um a little nervous as as as i'm standing in front of you i got my hair cut today though so i hope it looked alright i uh i felt compelled to come here tonight i two a little over two years ago we were in a tough situation and i felt like then a very vocal minority and well-organized minority um spoke their piece which ultimately led to the abandonment of my children leaving them without teachers in a classroom to go to my concern today is that that vocal minority is also going to drive this bus when most of us want our kids in the classroom so let's open the schools on august 17th to in-person learning as has been stated those families that are worried about the health and safety of their children can enroll them online those teachers that are worried about their own health can teach online the rest of us want our kids in the classroom butts in the chairs pardon my language i'll sign a waiver have your legal department work one up i'll sign it the teachers that want to come back they can sign the waiver but let's learn in the classroom and let's let those who don't want to be in the classroom have that option as well the district has done a great job over the last couple years of stemming the flow this or slowing the flow of students out of the district into charter schools homeschooling private schools we had a problem and the district has done a great job in selling the district to the parents of a great place to learn if gps decides to remain closed that loss of students will turn again into a waterfall to the point where the only items on the board's agenda in the future will be which schools are we going to close next which teachers do we have to let go which administrative departments are we going to have to shut down i don't want that i've had two school two students go through gilbert public schools and i have two more still here and hopefully someday i'll even have grandkids come to this great through this great school district i want it to remain great i want it to remain healthy i want my kids in the chairs on august 17th thank you after mr crowley is that collier kelly it's kelly coley yes sir angela i am nevin kelly uh i am a teacher and a parent of uh well i'm no longer a parent of students here with gilbert because all four of them have come i've gone through my last one went through this past year so thank you you did a good job with them um i want to talk about uh two things the first has been said a lot so i won't say a lot about that and that's an abundance of caution we've used that term quite a bit because this calls for it this situation calls for an abundance of caution governor ducey has also said like in everything that he puts out the safest place to be is at home right he ends with that all the time um i know you guys are looking at the numbers i know that you are going to get metrics and you're going to have the health department helping you through this so i won't say a whole lot more about that because i know that you will do your job with the data what i do want to say is i want to talk about stability parents and teachers need stability right now and there's a lot of voices and they're all saying all kinds of different things really what they want is something stable it may not look like how they want it to look teachers and parents we all understand that but here's what i would like to see and here's what i think will help everybody if we go in this uh first nine weeks and we say we're close to in person we have the executive order that takes care of things like some people need to be in person some people need child care there's an executive order that covers that but if we say for the first nine weeks we're close to in person that takes care of a lot of the data we can look at that at the end of the nine weeks and say are we ready to open or does the data say continue to keep us closed if it says continue to keep us closed then give another definite date that we'll re-look at it that definite date gives parents times to plan it gives students the knowledge that um what they're doing for the next nine weeks it gives teachers time to plan and know what environment they're planning for and then we make that new plan and go with that we can take those steps so um that's what i'm asking that's what i'm proposing thank you guys for your service and everything that you're doing i know it's tough and uh i love you guys so you can do it thank you sir next up is angela philpot followed by valerie landgren and joe goosek good evening my name is angela philpott and i am a parent of three gilbert public school students my twin daughters mckenna and morgan are seventh graders at desert ridge junior high and my son mason is a sophomore at desert ridge high school i am also an ell teacher in the district i am here tonight as a parent and an employee to plea that this governing body make the ethical choice to delay in person school until the end of first quarter or when health metrics are met as deemed by professionals in the field as i sit here and i look at all of us spaced apart with mason my classroom is not this big and i have more than 20 students at a time and so if our board is following these procedures and teachers in the field cannot follow these metrics i don't know how we can ask teachers to go in person and while other parents have said well you know there's the option for online there's the option to be in person well those children that are low transmitters supposedly have to work with adults adults have to be on campus and those adults are out and doing whatever and bringing them back to those children and those children are transmitters and so as a 22-year veteran school teacher i want to be in a classroom with my students more than anyone especially my ell students they deserve in-person learning however i cannot risk my students lives and their families lives a lot of my students live with grandparents who are elderly and even though my students may not get as sick it can be detrimental to their grandparents and i do not want to attend the funeral of a student or of their families this school year nor do i want to contract something and bring it back to my own loved ones i hope that the district will adhere not to an arbitrary timeline that's not set by medical guidelines but by an adopted calendar covet does not care what calendar is adopted by any elected body this virus will sicken and kill anyone in its path no matter how much we want our schools to reopen in person again our district acted responsibly in march and shut down in-person learning when the threat was growing we protected our students and our employees and we need to continue protecting them until the threat diminishes to manageable standards my brother is also a teacher but in florida and their schools are being required to reopen as child hospitalizations are starting to surge and have increased by 34 percent in the last eight days and while florida has embraced the title best of the worst let's not follow their lead gps should be showing their leadership to other districts that have the health of employees and their students are top priority during this global pandemic while online teaching is not ideal it is the safest path during this time of uncertainty phoenix union isaac isaac deer valley dysart in a growing number of other maricopa county districts have already calmed the fears of their employees parents and students by postponing in-person instruction until after first quarter this allowed time this allows time for numbers to flatten and gives teachers parents stability to make plans for virtual instruction instead of waiting for week by week numbers we lost an educator from my home county who taught summer school and they took every precaution with ppe with and with her and her her brother still passed away so how can we open schools knowing this i implore this body to trust the public health professionals and make a data-driven decision to postpone in-person instruction and protect our students and staff and stop community spread of this virus thank you first i wanted to say start off and say thank you to dr mccord and the board members for taking the time my name is valerie landman five years ago i proudly joined the gps family as an educator leaving my full-time position at a hospital pharmacy i've been there for 14 years and still worked there during the summer thinking back to my first year teaching yikes it was challenging the next year was equally as challenging but something was different i connected with the students the teachers the staff i found my spot i found my family the gps way is to connect create and care the final day to decide what my kids were going to do for school i was undecided i was at my wit's end and at 6 pm not friday i had a really good conversation with my principal he didn't have many answers for me but i felt that he had the best interest for the teachers at my school at heart i decided to try and teach flex until i was told i would be teaching two groups of kids so in my mind i would have double the students double the amount of parents and double the exposure to families so why not just teach global academy like myself and many other gps teachers i have talked to we don't want to lose our position at our schools and we don't want to leave our school families that we've worked so hard to gain i know many parents have talked about how they want their students to have a normal school year i want the same for my two kids what about working parents i'm one of them too we're trying to make it work i'm also in a social media group doctors and nurses talking about covid here in arizona i've assembled a few quotes teachers didn't choose to be friendly front line workers teachers shouldn't be putting their life on the line and be forced to go back to school health care staff at least have ppe teachers don't teachers are working on creating their own ppe out of their own money because there are concerned for their safety my current class roster has four fewer students on it than last year how are we supposed to keep our students distanced and safe it's up to us the parents the teachers leaders in our community to show our children not to bury our heads in the sand but to embrace this new normal just as if one of my kids was diagnosed with diabetes would we just ignore the fact that they have a medical issue because we want them to have a normal childhood experience no we would embrace it we'd give them the medicine and we would make it a new normal that's what a parent does they teach their children to face difficulty in life and not just to ignore it parents are their kids first teachers this shows we are not ready to return students to the classroom i don't want to end up like the educators in chandler and then attend one of my colleagues funerals or worse the students we do have the technology now the resources a curriculum path like florida virtual let's utilize it to our benefit so i please urge you to let teachers stay with their school families and remain online past august 17th thank you next we have joe gusik followed by kelly slater and terry playmon board president fellow board members superintendent mccord all gps parents taxpayers and last but not least students as i always tell you i'm joe goosick i'm the lovable slightly annoying america i'm the education lyrics i've had to make this comment before to this board and i will make this comment to the entire community we elect boards and have five different people for a good reason this is their test not our test the constitution united states and the first amendment gives us the right to petition our government it does not give us the right to push the button for them you will have an election at some point in the future and you can make a decision then based upon their collective actions we need to make sure that we honor that as i've said before five zero four one three two two three one four zero five we go forward that is the dna of an american citizen decisions are to be made and we execute this board these five are the guardians of this institution on behalf of all of us they don't just have a decision of one singular child but they have of over thirty three thousand some four thousand staff members this institution financially as a whole today tomorrow and far into the future i definitely heard somebody say that hey i'll sign off on an agreement fair enough don't think it'll stand up in court we need to make decisions that are based upon that the one key metric for me is that the fact that we don't have currently today in the state of arizona hour turnaround on covet testing dependable there is one board member i supported when he lost and community members did not treat him very well i supported him again to be on this board for a very good reason and i supported him to be back on this board so i call on mr reed carr board member read car to use his talents to go help this district secure the necessary assets to make that happen we need 24-hour turnaround the marlins had 13 players with it two more today plus third thing half the team is out of action i simply say to you you will open the schools when we have that 24-hour turnaround because that will give us the opportunity to have a true workflow and until then i'm sorry for me as an individual sharing my thoughts and ideas with you it's a no go you've got to go get that thank you so hello i am dr kelly slater my husband dr nick slater may or may not join us because we have our kids with us today um so we're here as individuals and we are both full-time doctors and full-time parents in the morning and the second that we get home until the kids either pass out or we just lay on the couch until we're going to pass out so to say that we want to send our kids to school full time is an understatement our oldest is going into kindergarten that leaves us with three more at home who are not school age and are currently not attending daycare they used to but you know with covid and being doctors it's hard to send them to school but we are pro full-time school and i feel like it the fact that we have been offered the flexibility to either send them to school full-time flex time or keep them at home that should be more than enough for parents and teachers my in-laws are teachers there's i have nothing against you know people wanting to stay home to be safe whether it's keeping their kids home to be safe or themselves stay home to be safe but they have that option that's the part that i'm not understanding about all of these talks is they have the option to stay home do i know every little thing about how it all works and how many teachers get to stay home of course not that's not my realm my realm is being a doctor and being a doctor i understand the cdc guidelines like you cannot believe i answer to many other higher medical authorities on top of it sterilization is obviously of significant importance to our practice in order to continue having any source of income for these kids so we do get wanting to be safe and you know preventing the disease but this data everybody keeps talking about is it's i don't know if we're just watching fox news or everybody's watching cnn but like the cases are supposed to go up everybody is supposed to have contracted this at some point we're all supposed to have some sort of antibody to this eventually am i saying i want to go out and have a coveted party of course i don't but the case the deaths the percentage of the deaths are going down the cases that's what we're focusing on are going up the countries like someone else previously said who didn't shut down the schools and didn't shut down their economy guess what they're doing just fine that's not to say that gilbert public schools has to open their school august 17th even though i pray to god that they do it's just to say that the facts are there how we perceive them all seems to be so different i mean i don't know how else to explain it it seems like those people who come up here and talk who don't want school to start are those who either have i don't know maybe i don't know i don't want to say too much like they they're just they're afraid and they should be because they watch the media is what i'm assuming but this is a disease of the elderly people with comorbidities children not so much i get that adults are obviously teaching them and they don't know who the other adults are around i get that but i don't see a reason to shut down an entire school district because of that if we were afraid of that then we shouldn't have school because the common cold we should cancel school all fall because of the flu that's insane to me to say that because kofi just came around that we're gonna cancel school for the next two years until everybody's inoculated with is insane um i'm not sure he's gone so obviously he has nothing to add to that but uh i just i feel for them the people who work obviously there's probably not there's probably a lot of mothers who work full-time stay being a stay-at-home mom i don't think i could do it i mean there's a i like working and i love my kids but that it's a lot it's a lot and those people need if they need to send their kids to school whether it be because they want their kids to have the socialization they need somebody else to teach them i'm a terrible teacher there's a reason i'm not a teacher i thought about being a kindergarten teacher it's not for me my kid going into kindergarten i'm not quite sure how to do that at all actually and watch four other kids in the evening you're also asking me to give up all the free time i have fun time with my kids every single evening until we decide to open up school we wake up just like every kid in the universe hates waking up we go to my work right now they are watched by somebody while i work all day while he works all day then we come home and right now we have the opportunity to watch tv as a family and do all that kind of stuff i'm supposed to come home and then sit on the computer with my son for however long doing all his schoolwork all day long i'm not trying to push it off on someone and i get parents or teachers i we teach him the best we can every day but i cannot give up all my fun family free time between me and my husband because we didn't want to open this up because of a virus i just can't do that so please please open the schools up i'd have you open them up tomorrow if i could but please don't push it back any further thank you we have terry playman followed by samuel ashby and then our final person will be amber franco hi good evening thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to speak tonight i am a parent of three gilbert public schools students one graduated and is on his way he's been nau for the last three years two daughters a seventh grader and a sophomore i'm a native arizona girl and i know like most of you we've grown up or the way we grew up we grew up getting to go to school in our own neighborhood there weren't boundary exceptions there weren't charter schools around we're blessed that we have many options for our students based on their learning ability and their skills and what works best for each student my daughters i i gave them the option i said what would you guys like to do and they both said mom we want to be back in class this online learning they didn't learn anything i asked my daughter just last night i said um how do you really feel about this and she said mom i don't feel like i learned anything last year at all and she said honestly i don't think the teachers really care that much about us they already have their education so why would they care about ours and that was out of her mouth and it just really kind of hit home with me that she would be that insightful that they're um taking the opportunity away from their them thriving thriving with their teachers thriving with classmates they look forward to the extracurricular activities my daughter has looked forward to being a cheerleader and getting to go to the football games and yeah sometimes life doesn't always work out the way you want to want it to but i think with the options that you've given the parents stay home be online learning if that's how you feel if you're a teacher and you want to teach online make that choice for yourself but for us who our children want to be in school the teachers that want to be in school teaching if that if there there's many more from what i hear that want to be in class teaching with the students keep giving them the options but don't take it away from us i think the only thing that's being taught to my daughters right now is to how to live in fear and i've always taught my children not to live in fear i'm a flight attendant for 26 years for an airline and i go to work and i have no fear i'm around many people passengers from all over the world and i have no fear i understand this coronavirus is a serious and i'm sorry for the loss that has inflicted on many many people but i think that there's going to be more by depleting their immune systems by not allowing them around students and also um just their mind body and spirit they need to be growing mentally physically and spiritually and i think if you keep them at home they're going to do a greater detriment to our students so thank you so much thanks for all you guys do appreciate it how's it going thanks for letting me be one of the last ones to speak um i felt compelled to be here as well and i wanted to be here because most the time the minority tend to talk louder than the majority and this is especially the case in this situation especially when our children don't have a voice and it unfortunately will have a terrible effect on our children some of the questions i wanted you to think about are what about the parents who have small children at home and won't be able to stay home with their children all day because they work have doctors and other appointments for themselves and their children along with other responsibilities what about the children that can't be monitored while they are on the computer opening them up to who knows what especially with the moms or dads that are watching other children facts are children have very little effect on the spread of the disease so what's popular has nothing to do with what is right with a first grader and two more small children at home my wife doesn't have the ability to be home all day while i work to monitor school for my first grader what about parents who have three or five children in school how do they manage online learning for all of their children we try our best to restrict screen time for our children and now they will be forced to be staring at a screen all day we're very blessed to have the means and availability to help our kids at home and monitor what they are doing online if we have to but most parents do not this is a predator's dream to have so many children online and accessible in person social interaction is so important for our children who will be the future generation whenever we go back there may be a surge there will definitely be a learning curve but if we keep pushing it off it is just postponing the inevitability the inevitable the reality is the children are much higher at risk for many other things like abuse child sex trafficking pornography and others than getting the virus at school so please refrain from listening to the fear-mongering and scare tactics that you've heard tonight and will continue to hear like the statistics we heard earlier 89 percent of us the majority not only want but need our children and back to in school in person school as of right now now those teachers and parents that are afraid of going back to school have the option to go online please don't only give the minority the option at least give the 89 percent the option to have their kids in school as well thank you and amber franco is our last speaker good evening governing board members and dr mccord my name is amber franco and i am the gilbert education association president the gilbert education association advocates for education professionals and to unite our members to fulfill the promise of public education preparing every student to succeed in a diverse and interdependent world today i am speaking on behalf of all gea members over the past couple of months the gilbert education association has focused on providing up-to-date information and thoughtfully listening to our members concerns regarding the impact of the pandemic on public education we have engaged members in weekly zoom calls and work to address questions and concerns about returning to school this has reinforced our priorities as you move forward the gilbert education association's primary focus is ensuring the safety and welfare of students staff families and the community recently the gilbert education association members were pulled to analyze how they felt about returning to work on august 17th and overwhelmingly 75 percent said in-person instruction should be delayed until at least the end of first quarter or until it's safe members were also asked using a rating scale of one to five on this statement i am afraid to go to school and work on site due to covet 19.
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um and again we'll use that same process with the bus pickup and again understanding that it's going to we're gonna have to work through it um you know it may be an extra five ten minutes we don't know it could be fifteen um we don't think it's gonna be that much but i think once we start and uh are able to go through it for the first few days i think we'll be able to get that down i'm sorry but i had to throw some pictures in wisconsin got a haircut as you can tell um in front of the tech ed uh room right there in the left part of our front of our building um you can see that uh all the trees that were there before were cut down we now that's the picture on the left the picture on the right is a picture of what's going to be our new bus if we want to call bus lane that we're going to have um and as we talk about as i go into the next slide as i talk about the arrival in the morning what's going to be new is that all parent drop off and pick up in the afternoons will be in the back of the building during the day you would still do the same process going through the front obviously because there won't be buses or traffic but in the morning on arrival parents will be popping off in the back and buses will be pulling around in the front with the picture that i just showed you uh there again we're hoping to be able to get the fleet of buses all the way around and in there we may have to have a couple on the side it's gonna be very important uh that you work with us and um we follow you know the traffic patterns that we have set up we have worked with our school resource officer officer flynn our facilities director dan caldwell and i also had all-star transportation deb jones was up here the other day with me and we were looking at the amount of buses that could you know be filled in that front area and the patterns that we're going to need to to make this all happen we will have established patterns that are marked in the driveway and especially in the back of the building where we'll have phones set up that we ask parents to please driving slowly and following those uh pathways is going to be very important you're not going to be able to let your son or daughter off you know halfway around the corner because you need to go to work we're gonna have to stay in the um in lane that we are working with it's going to be a very important that your child is ready with their materials their backpack or whatever they have that's set up there to get out of the car as they pull around the back and obviously that's important so that the traffic can run smoothly we it's similar to when it was in the front of the building and that um in that you know we asked the same thing to you then now it's going to be even more important because there is going to be a larger influx of parents dropping off which we understand but we're just asking you that you have everything set you you tell them everything they need to to have before the before for that day and they're able to get out of the car at a pretty good pace and we will have s and by the way we will have staff in the back and also in the front uh monitoring on this along with administration in the front we will have buses in the front that we will have a staggered entry into the building so we'll be using different doorways to get into the building um how we do that specifically not sure yet but we have an idea one plus four that's in the line bus eight that's in the line coming in different entryways um into the building again the whole idea is that we're not having large groups too large of a group coming in now at the same time um in the past we've had students dropped off at earlier day time at about 7 30.
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45 strongly agreed and 20 agreed with the statement that's two-thirds of these of those surveyed as of today 2107 new cases have been reported in the state of arizona the numbers are up by 277 from yesterday we are not headed in the right direction to open up schools it is essential to make the decision based on clear guidelines science and safety the gilbert education association advocates for the governing board to provide the flexibility to postpone the start of end person education until guidelines are developed and implemented to guide the safe implementation of in-person school model pushing back the start date to the end of the first quarter would allow gps to make clearer decisions using precise data and guidelines ensuring that we can all move forward safely i'd also like to provide you with the arizona education association statement regarding the reopening of schools the gilbert education in the gilbert school district has been in fairly close alignment with the aea statement some of the points made in the statement are beyond the control of the district in regards to funding and testing as we continue to discuss the in-person start date we urge you to continue to focus on the objective criteria for safely opening schools thank you thank you amber i believe that is all of those who have submitted a request to speak we have heard from all of you and will be that will be an agenda item as we move through the agenda this evening so we'll move to item five presentation 5.01 monthly budget report for fy 2020 third quarter financial report dr mccord entered any introductory remarks no just our monthly report led by miss bonnie betts welcome ms betts um thank you very much uh good evening governing board members uh dr mccord we've combined the june monthly financial report with the third quarter financial report so just to forecast what's going to happen over the next few months so as you know we've already adopted our new budget for the fiscal year 2021 but we are completing fiscal year 2020 right now so this monthly budget report represents activity through june 30.
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right now i don't think that's going to be able to happen again because we do not want to have too many students that are congregating in the school um in a certain area in the cafeteria because in the mornings we could get up to 70 80 kids in there so that's not going to be able to happen so we're asking right now um and before school starts i'll let you exactly know we're asking that you start to maybe drop off or be in line um topping off by 7 45 again understanding that's going to be a long process so um that'll be something that we will definitely talk to you about before the first day of school um when students get out of the cars in the back and then also in the front the buses they are directly what they normally do anyway go directly to their home room we're asking students um you know not to bunch up in the hallway which i'll talk a little bit about after but we're asking them to go directly to their homeroom classroom which again they're used to doing anyway and at the bottom you can see i put it's very important to understand that this new process will take time and that again our student in uh safety is our wms classes students again which i talked about will be in their homeroom classes for pretty much the most of the day their core teachers meaning science social studies literacy math world language those teachers are going to rotate into the class along with the unhc the unh teachers are going to do the same thing um coming into the class um this you know like i said before the math the world language is a small group classes uh will be will be uh sub cohorts for academic reasons the desks the desks are set up yes so that students are three to four feet apart i want to make sure that was clear the desks are set up so that the students are three to four feet apart so some people i know questions came in that the desks are three feet apart um it's it's not necessarily three feet apart for the best although they could be it's really from the middle of one that's the other but we're trying depending on the number of students that are going to be in that class i think dr ruby mentioned before that we are going to have it set up with x's on the floor so we know with the number of students that there's going to be a desk on top of that x and like i said our thought processes depending on the number of students that come it could be anywhere from three to four and hopefully it's more towards four or or more um but again i just wanted to make sure that was uh clear to two people and obviously as we talked about these cohorts i think that we're trying our best to minimize the exposure um you know that that students and uh teachers are crossing paths um staff will remain pretty much at the front of the room and wearing a mask students are going to wear their masks like dr brill talked about and remain at their desks the mass breaks i said are going to be around the halfway point of the class again hopefully students will be developing that tolerance to wear them and um which i which i've been told even in some of the summer school opportunities in different districts that they've had that's the students are are getting used to it so if you haven't had the opportunity for your child to wear masks even at home at times maybe you know i might want to put a mask on my son sometimes just so when he's home so he's not talking um like his father um but again the whole idea is to build that tolerance uh student belongings for the most part we're hoping that they're going to stay in the desk i will be putting out an email about supplies hold off on supplies right now because we do not want those big traffic keepers we're going to look to limit the amount of um supplies that we have to be able to put in their desk and also obviously when it comes to the winter with um heavier jackets and things we were going to try to not use the lockers as much but if we need to we will absolutely um take care of them um also along with the classes understanding the fifth graders that have had some questions about fifth grade transition we were very lucky in the um spring to have our peer leaders and our student council members videos and talk to uh students from their morning meeting over huckleberry um so that was i think a good you know start where we used to in the past have students able to come up to the school and and you know walk through the school we didn't have that opportunity they were you know we did have a video of that for those students we were also talking about that for new students that come to the school over the summer um we are also uh we'll be able to have a video for them put together and also for parents to kind of get a general idea of how the school runs and what certain um certain areas of the building look like whether it's the gym or the cafeteria which we won't be going in um as much um different areas of the building that they will be able to see ahead of time and um those of me again looking to make some videos for that all right synchronous classrooms dr ruby spoke about this we're going to have synchronous classes for all in person hybrid and also in the remote uh learning model so i put there'll be a more there'll be more student accountability meaning they'll have to be there they will we will be taking attendance um you know whether and if it's in the hybrid model you know the students that are home at the time they'll need to be on if their classes from 805 to um you know 8 40 or 850 whatever it may be they'll be expected beyond during that time um understanding that we're hoping that you know once the teacher goes through their lesson we talked about you know there will be some kind of students going to be working on their own obviously and doing their work um but that is what we are going to be looking to in the fall because as we've stated before in the spring we were kind of thrown into this remote learning uh now we've been able to have time and and really set things up so that there will be now more student accountability um you know um in this in this scenario for our unified arts uh we are gonna have it we used to be on an a b rotation we're not gonna do a b excuse me a b again to minimize the number of uh staff that are going into certain classrooms so they're going to be 18 days in a row so if your son or daughter has art they will have art for 18 school days in a row in certain um specials we are developing we call the personal kit for them like in art we're going to try to develop a small little uh kit for each student so that they're not sharing um obviously sharing of materials so you know for different areas like tech ed um and for you know theater arts and things like that that we're gonna try to if needed put together personal fits for them again the whole idea is so that they're not sharing materials the social emotional aspect of this uh we recognize the additional stress that's going to be on students and families um and staff going back we understand that i put ruler in here as you know for most of you that have been at wisconsin uh if you've been in huckleberry that uh we we use the rulers you know approach and um you know there's going to be a lot of emotions going on as we know we need students you know staff and students we need to be able to recognize those emotions and understand them and the big thing is how are we responding to them um because it's going to be different we're going to be walking single file pretty much in the hallways we won't have kids doubled up walking the hallways we're gonna have lines in the hallways to walk it's going to be a lot different we all understand this and you know we have to be able to uh take our time and and be patient and understand that you know and they're going to be certain students or and even staff that are you know a little bit more anxious about this so this is going to be really really where ruler comes in and understanding our emotion and recognizing uh obviously those to be able to to um work for everybody in the building and and and make for it for a better day um we're going to be looking to utilize the digital platform um in person hybrid and in the remote like we did last year um we talk about you know google classroom is was the preferred that we worked on but there's going to be other obvious some other digital platforms used by teachers at times um and the availability in class depends on availability of technology meaning if in remote obviously we would have that but in person and in the hybrid model um you know hopefully we'll be able with them which uh eric cocklin talk about the byod that will be able to have students with technology in the classroom and be able to uh utilize that uh throughout the day also uh which we talked about if hybrid if we go to the hybrid model there will be cohorts that will be across buildings by family um which dr grill hallways students will be asked to walk single file in one side of the hallway put as close as the wall as possible uh keeping three to six uh feet apart you know from front and back obviously um but i mean we don't want students and you know i could see it now or some students are literally rubbing against the wall as they're walking they don't have to do that um but we are going to ask them to be on sides of the um of the hallway and three to six feet apart um you know we're gonna have a tape down the middle we're not gonna tape off three to six feet like you may see in a store um but we are gonna show kids and we are to look to maybe even put videos together to show kids in between the hallways where we have our tiles on the floor the larger sets of tiles that are colored um whether they're i think we have green and also there's some maroon or mauve colored tiles that those are usually six feet apart now we understand that every kid is not going to be something like where we're we're saying you need to be you know you're not six feet behind the other person not looking to do that at all but at the same time we do want students to understand that we have to go slow it's going to take a little bit longer but uh again i i have no expectations that students can do this uh lunch we are going to be having that in the hallway excuse me in the hallway we are going to be having that in the classroom um students will be able to place an order for school lunch if you you you want to buy from whitman's we will be doing that the day before so the day before in class now if they have high school the day before and then i find we could we'll figure it out how to get them to lunch but the day before it'll be like at the hospital where you order your meal for breakfast for tomorrow we're doing that um so that they are able to have this ready for us um as it comes time for lunch time during the day students right now we're thinking that they're going to be able to have like burgers or cheeseburger pizza a chicken sandwich they could order a salad and or a hot lunch option or that are the things that we think right now are going to be available as always students can bring their own lunch you know that's not a problem students will eat at their desk with a desk shield like we had talked about and afterwards desk will be cleaned uh after students eat lunch um every time bathrooms what we're looking to do here is we're looking to assign specific bathrooms cohorts or if we'll call it teams or areas of the building um it'll be available during class and you know obviously emergency situations um we're going to look to have a limited capacity in bathrooms we don't know that number yet but i'm guessing it's probably two to three um but at the same time you know we want to be careful not to have a long line waiting to go in the bathroom either but these are things that we're going to be talking about with students and we're not able to monitor them every bathroom throughout the day it's just not possible um but we are going to look during you know as i call a peak time we'll be maybe at lunch or when there is a break that maybe being able to um have have someone outside of the bathroom again just to kind of move kids along um it'll be different than when the end of the period is um that we don't want all the kids to run to the bathroom during that time obviously because then again it's the whole idea of a lot of students together as one but uh that would be uh the time that we would have a bathroom and then uh we had some questions around band and chorus um recommendations are being finalized at the state level uh so i know we don't we don't know exactly how lessons will be scheduled at this point they're gonna be setting guidelines there are some guidelines that are going to be set for distance between certain uh percussion instruments or um other instruments or certain instruments that we have and also coral members so um once those are finalized we'll be able to figure out how we can run our lessons with the number of students um that we have because at this point we are not going to be having large performance or large group like we've done in the past with grade levels like all of grade 5 going during elt on monday and wednesday um we're not going to be able to have that now so again we will figure that out once um tomorrow the uh recommendations come out for that what am i doing on time at seven o'clock i'm always the one who talked um after school activities uh sports has not been set yet um final plans will be based on local health data that we have with help from our brookfield health director obviously and also along with our um athletic director who i know has been meeting um weekly or bi-weekly with other athletic directors in the in the state um after school clubs and activities right now will not start when we get back to school whether they start um after a certain period of time we don't know but at this point right now we will not have after school clubs and activities to start the school year um and um abandoned chorus did i have that advice in there um like i just talked about by last dismissal again we'll have the new new system that all parent pickup will be in the back of the building and buses will be in the front uh we're going to follow those same traffic patterns that we talked about before i'm still scheduling logistics of this so we don't have we just want to make sure that we don't have large groups of students all leaving at the same time for parent pickup so that's something that we've been talking about and trying to figure that out um we may ask to do it by grade level you know parents come in at different times by grade level obviously if you have kids in multiple grade levels they could come down at the same time but again that's not something that we have set yet uh buses are gonna again be dismissed it's staggered uh to alleviate those large group of students coming out and students will also need to take the same bus home we're asking that they come to school in the same bus and take the same bus home every day they will not be able to get bus passes to go to another student's house um uh you know during the day like we've had in the past and that's obvious because we don't want students mixing uh through the cohorts and again obviously all of this is about student and staff safety is our number one priority and again i know i'm a talker but i want to say thank you very much for joining us tonight obviously this is all uh you know something that we're still working in and these things are changing but we really appreciate your partnership and understanding that this is an endeavor that we are going to take on and make sure that we are looking out for the safety of your your son and daughter and and everyone that's involved in our staff dean thank you very very much for that we know that you can talk you have the trophy for talking and we i do we appreciate that um i always i always tease dean about being the mayor but now i realize that his parents gave him the best name he's like the dean of everything here um we had a lot of questions that came into the um question and and answer um document that we asked you to to fill out and while um we don't have a lot of time to go over those tonight i have a couple that i just want to address quickly i know we're over time but if you can bear with me and the rest of them we will be collating and looking for themes um amongst the questions that come in from parents from a variety of schools and we will be providing them in writing in a document that will be made available to you um one of the one question that i can answer very quickly um had to do with something that dr burrell said people always like to ask questions about things you say dr burrow so dr burrell said that he was going to be meeting with the commissioner and other superintendents and the question came in is it going to be remote and that would be remote whether we were in a pandemic or not because if you think about the logistics of everybody that's running the the ceo of every school district in connecticut driving to a location in hartford even if there was never such a thing as a pandemic that would be something that would be very costly to districts to have their um ceos driving leaving the district and driving up to hartford so that only happens once a year just so you know inquiring minds um there's a beginning of the year meeting where all of they have to rent a big space to fit everybody in and all the superintendents like go to the mecca to um to meet with us the commissioner but all the other meetings are that we go to that are statewide meetings are usually uh by zoom or something webex even without a pandemic we had a lot of questions on um temp on health on temperature taking and are we taking temperatures in school we um we have addressed that earlier it's in the document our plan document we are not taking uh temperatures in school every day and i don't know dr sullivan if you you know want me to address this right now or you would like to address it i'm certainly happy to have you address this question if you'd like sure um actually directly from the cdc guidelines cdc does not currently recommend universal symptom screenings or temperature screenings uh screening of all students that is from grade k through 12 be conducted by schools parents or caregivers should be strongly encouraged to monitor their children for signs of infectious disease daily and students who are sick should definitely not attend school uh in person so those are directly from the cdc guidelines um and um temperature taking temperature taking for example uh during this hot weather is basically a fluke we started out doing it in the town hall and found that as the temperatures rose outside we got very very many false positive uh elevated temperatures we had to let people sit aside for uh a time and retake their temperatures in order to allow them to um to do their business in in in town hall so it's it's it's a it's not a reliable um response uh for a reliable test thank you for that now the one of the other questions that has uh come up many many times is um what about why aren't we doing covid testing on everybody and would you like to address that briefly sure uh it's it's just not practical um in these situations with the numbers of students and and teachers in in the school system for the benefit that it might produce the numbers of of tests that would have to be performed uh would be extremely excessive and uh the long and the short of it is uh it's it's a not available valuable tool as a screening tool monitoring symptoms is the primary screening tool and one one last question that has come up probably more times than many other questions which i know you're not going to be able to address in full but if you could give us the update on the work that you're involved in has to do with what happens if a child in my child's class is positive or what happens if a teacher or another staff member is positive what will happen well that's an excellent question and um there a subcommittee has recently been formed between public health and the department of education at the state level uh to address just this uh issue um if you have read the state plan and i'm sure you all have um the infamous page 24 speaks to or addresses this particular issue um and we hope that the new subcommittee will give us some enlightenment with regard to how we proceed uh going forward if in point of fact someone does test positive and if somebody does test positive they should be self-isolated at home and isolated even from family members because most of our transmission in brookfield has been family and not inter community or intra community and likewise all contacts will be monitored and through our contact tracers who will keep in touch with potential contacts um we hope that we can get a handle on on exactly this problem but there will be more coming forward from the combined dph sde committee that has been recently formed and met for the first time monday night thank you very much and so i just want to highlight um building on dr sullivan's uh commentary that for the questions that are addressing you know the cohorting and what we're doing we're very sensitive to being able to cohort our children as as best we can within the context of a public school system because our collaboration with dr sullivan and his department which is responsible for overseeing and supporting the contact tracing for the town of brookfield is very important we need to be able to provide the best information the best data on who was where and when so that contact tracing can be provided but it's also important to understand that because of confidentiality laws and burpa and hipaa regulations uh nobody's going to be getting an email that says oh by the way um susie mcgee has coveted you know we're just we're not able to do that we wouldn't do that we're going to respect everyone's confidentiality yours and everyone else whether they're an employee or a community member but in light of all that i need to be thanking everybody in brookfield who has helped us be able to get to this point where we can even pull people together to do this kind of work because our community has had such a low incident rate i think like 0.6 we were at i correct me if i'm wrong which is you know very commendable the people in our community have been employing um at a higher level than many other places the mitigating strategies of mask wearing and hand washing and social distancing and for parents out there i think last night we heard from our principals and tonight we heard from dean um talking about um you know practicing mask wearing and building tolerance and we all he talked about emotions too we all are highly emotionally charged about how our lives have changed but what's really important is the message that we give to our children about how we are regulating this and while we need to pour our hearts out to somebody about how maybe angry we are or um upset we are whatever emotions you're feeling um we need to really be honest with our kids but not instill fear in them because we would not be inviting children back into school if we thought it wasn't safe the way we were going about it just because somebody told us to do it no no i don't think there's one person we would we would fight back so we're we're here to protect um ourselves and our families as well as your children and your families so we will get to the questions that we didn't get to and i just want to thank everybody who's here and everybody who's listening and dr burrell did you want to close yes dr ruby thank you well said dr sullivan thanks for joining us this evening for everybody on the panel to be here and listen um and we will get a an faq document to everyone uh with all of our different district experts and town experts in those particular areas to uh complete those uh responses to those questions and get that out as soon as we can grouped by theme because there's lots of questions that actually are the the same question that people have out there and we tried to address that tonight in our presentation um and to to end around the same uh ideas dr ruby just talked about is uh we are going through this uh right there with you as parents we have our own families this has changed our lives we are um enduring and remaining positive and optimistic and really working hard to set up the best plan options we can um my own kids are happening to be a rising junior in high school and one who is now rising to be a freshman in college both like many of your children i know you have older and younger children not just kids at wisconsin miss their spring sports miss senior year rights of passage um don't get to see your family maybe you don't get to see your parents kids don't get to see their grandparents at the level they would over the last four months it has been difficult uh inconveniences financial issues we understand it we need to stick together we need to be one and we need to remain patient and flexible through this process as i said i'll end with a few comments as i said at the beginning right now we continue to aim for the 100 of students coming back to school five days per week we continue to monitor health data we will be having a parent survey go out for the end of this week or the beginning of next week we need you to as quickly as possible complete that for each of your children so we understand what your plans are because it's critical for our planning um and knowing the number of students and getting a gauge on how many kids will actually be coming to school and we'll need that commitment very soon so we'll get that information that survey to you quickly um i want to thank you for your time thank you for your engagement in the process continue to send the questions in we want to hear from you and we want to provide answers this is fully open um and and we remain empathetic and open and we want to learn uh from you as to what are the burning questions of what needs to be answered so again thank you to everybody thank you for the team for all the hard work and we just have to stick together and plow through this the 2021 school year will not look like any other year we've ever had and we're going to do the best we can to get through it together thank you all and everyone have a great night really appreciate everybody's time thank you
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