so i don't have a number as to what that would be at tracy nolan hussey i was director of pupil personnel is looking at that but those are the categories that you know have the biggest potential for variances to our budget and you know i i was reluctant you know jeff and i spoke earlier to put any numbers to that that are definitive yet because i don't know what they are until we know what period that they'll extend to yet we are in the first budget month of the year which hasn't closed out yet but obviously i will be providing finance updates as as we progress here so i hope that at least answers the question kind of at a high level and we'll keep narrowing down the numbers as we go forward thanks vincent uh jeff i'm sorry let me turn it back to you i'm not sure if there's some more emails that came in or if you want to go on with your update on those more let's talk about yeah i mean i definitely wanted vin to be able to give that financial update you know as the next item on the agenda and then to address the myriad of kovid related emails and i will tell you you know uh there's a solid stack of them and some of the questions that are asked are you know brief enough that i can kind of give a a quick shout out on some of them that have come in in the last half hour or so long that i i couldn't even read them to respond yet in this um in this forum this sort of forum without people just sitting there staring at the screen uh for a long time so um the i'll just try and crank through these questions um and and summarize them uh we're concerned about teachers ability to serve both in-person and remote students equally what happens also if the student or if the teacher becomes ill excuse me um and we have to go to a substitute so uh marlene you want to talk about how much we've been focusing on consistency between classes this year this summer yes we've been doing a lot of work with that especially knowing that in the remote environment we want to make sure we always want to make sure that kids get the same experience um obviously that's going to going to vary based on things like teacher personality and how they choose to teach a certain standard however the the material that they learn and the content that they are are asked to master will be the same we actually have a number of teachers going to conference workshop next week three three days two hours a piece that a number of us will be attending so that we can provide some professional development also to all of our teachers around this idea of again you've heard me say this before meeting students where they are regardless of the fact that we've just experienced covid and this is a practice that we we want to employ all of the time not just during this pandemic so there's been a lot happening behind the scenes as far as teaching and learning and instructional practices that we'll be utilizing during that time thank you i also want to just indicate to people that are watching um at home that on our website right on the front page it says frequently asked questions so you know if you were to go to our home page um the cheshire public schools website and show you quickly here how easy that is this is our website right here it says has our school reopening plan and then frequently asked questions below that because many of the questions i get are available here in the faq section and we do update this as things change so this uh is a great resource for people to access if you have a question and um just kind of want a quick answer on that um next question is about uh will if we have to go to a cohort or excuse me a hybrid model where half the students are attending one day and half the other will you be conscious of siblings and the answer is yes we'll do the best we can easily within a building but also try and look at that across different buildings different grade levels um if with the current hybrid model monday tuesday thursday friday what will happen with many school holidays that fall on monday that was an example in our hybrid model so when we identify what cohort students are in we would identify the school schedule around that because we wouldn't want the cohort who always has school on monday to always be dripped if uh numbers still stay low we'll be there will there be a time place to move to a full five day a week school and the answer is probably the state like i said earlier new york and massachusetts have both both released guidance around that connecticut about two weeks ago indicated they would but we haven't seen that yet what percentage of students or parents are take three it's been a long day what percentage of teachers do not want to return to school what will happen if our teachers refuse to return to school first of all all of our teachers want to return to school they want to do so safely though and so that's really what we're focusing our energy on is to try and make sure that that's safe we've asked teachers that have medical conditions to um notify our hr department and vin and his team are working through those things and i'm working through those with the union we're meeting actually next week to review some of those um you know if you if you just don't want to return because you just don't want to um that's not really an option obviously you know if there's not a health issue or anything you just don't feel like it you know or you're concerned but there's no medical you know we try and address it if there's a concern how can we help mitigate that concern but otherwise you know you really have to report to work [Music] with a hybrid model teachers and staff will be instructing two days for two days and remotely for three days that's not necessarily accurate i just want to make sure people understand in a remote in the hybrid model the teachers are teaching in person four days monday tuesday thursday friday for example during the week wednesday would be a day to everybody's home doing remote but in that model the the teachers there all four days doing live instruction and the students at home again this would be an area where we would really want more of those camera setups it would really help on a broader scale to be able to do that at that point but i still think it's prudent to have a wait and see approach at the moment have we thought about uh possibly extending days to ensure adequate drop off time uh not necessarily extending days but we're working with the cheshire police department to set up more efficient drop-off situations for students on buses and on um and who get driven to school as you know that's already a huge issue in our buildings and we're looking at alternatives so for example as an alternative that we're exploring this is not definitive but you know white students who are getting dropped off at cheshire high school have the option of getting dropped off it's escaping me the next street over where the funeral home is might they get dropped yeah thank you a walking path to cheshire high school um as opposed to having all those car cars pull around front i mean we're looking at different options with the cheshire police to make sure it's safe and to make things more efficient in our buildings what about leveraging volunteerism to fill gaps absolutely when we send out our survey we'll be asking for parents who may be interested in uh supervising buses you will have to pass a background check to do that um or to uh come and help supervise at recess or something like that where we need more eyes on people and supporting social distancing that would be really helpful and we are going to ask for that [Music] have we thought about moving to outdoor classrooms yes i talked about the tents um we don't have there aren't enough tents in connecticut for us to move a lot outdoors but we do want to provide more options for that [Music] if there's a an issue in a school or class and plans shift to learning models in a more localized way so if there's an example at the hot high school for instance would a decision move to hybrid or virtually made only for that school actually in a cohorting model we try to only do it for that group uh is the most in the most limited degree that the people that the individual's been in close contact with so elementary and middle that's why it's it's easier to have that cohorting at the high school now if it's an alternating group that gives us some cohorting capacity but not great we would still work with only those that the child came in contact with but all the kids that are going on the other day if there's no positive in that group we have no problem um would we consider a modified hybrid model for younger students that has them engaging in class more regularly so after we issued the hybrid model the monday you know tuesday with the wednesday off thursday friday is we explore the youngest grades we think that there may be room to continue to discuss and explore with medical advice is it possible to get the younger kids in still on a daily basis um and that's gonna you know it's going to depend on data and medical advice but we're certainly open to that idea um there were a few emails we had uh four emails from different people two of whom were married that were concerned about pushing the start of the calendar back um and we'll talk about that a little bit later on um will teachers be provided details of building specifics before making final decisions about returning based on their medical conditions we're trying to provide everybody more detailed uh information about their return things like the state changing what's permitted obviously um derail that to for a short period and we're trying to get as much detail out as we can but please know even when we send out videos about what a day in school will look like we're still trying to finalize those we'll probably still be finalizing those until the bitter end which is why you know we anticipate providing the first two weeks real flexibility about changing your mind uh going from remote to school or vice versa uh after that we'd like you to really lock it in uh for a period of a month and then have a kind of an open enrollment period at the end of that month um so that's kind of where we're at at the moment um does have you seen recent data on children under age 10 being transmitters and contracting covid all the data we have to date is very positive around the younger age groups but again this is so fluid it changes uh seemingly daily and we continue to monitor that as well as take guidance from the health professionals and chespercott uh including chesapeake i should say around what's appropriate not i want to just take a second to shout out our pediatrician jim o'connor who is always available to talk to us about concerns and questions we have always very responsive and getting us feedback and he regularly uh as part of his professional development is working with yale and is often the conduit for many of our questions that we have uh to go past a body of experts in in the field of epidemiology and transmission and illness and and he gives us back great feedback so thank you jim for that um will teachers be provided an option to teach remotely that's already something i addressed if there's a an illness that is something we would certainly consider most but if it's just i i don't feel comfortable we would work with that individual to try and make them feel more comfortable but unfortunately may not be able to accommodate every one of those requests [Music] will there be a new survey sent out to parents i've kind of covered that into teachers you know we're going to send out an email that a survey that says which one are you committing to um that's really where we're at at this point in the game we have to be able to make plans for the return to school so um parents can expect that uh again next wednesday one quick question on that commitment i just saw a couple come through my hand so is when when we ask parents for a final commitment or uh say and where they land when sending our kids to school or not does that bind them into that option can they make it just it does in some respects but again for the first two weeks we'll be flexible and letting people in and out of that okay after those first two weeks we really need to kind of lock that down um for continuity for the children's sake and for our staff and so you know uh we would look at that point for at least a month commitment uh in either way okay now obviously if the state changes and says you know three weeks in everybody goes remote then everybody goes remote but you know in terms of the choice that's what we're we're doing this is a really lengthy email that i can't read the whole thing but basically it's a advocacy for district choice for hybrid model and it looks like this person's uh pushing for uh that being a consideration at all grade levels again we'll consider you know with the data and our medical advice if we do that uh this next one is that um dr solon indicated a previous meeting that one classroom in each grade will be wired for synchronous teaching um is that one classroom enough and again i think you know when we get data back about how many people want to go out at that point we'll be further along in the installation process and maybe even able to to pursue more if that's prudent um if of parents are driving their kid to school how will we manage the start of school the individual principles will talk a little bit about arrival dismissal but i've already talked about us working with cpd to support that process and i'm really appreciative of lieutenant jeff sutherland to offer us his support on that [Music] what about an individual student testing positive and the students that they may have been in contact with before during after school so if there's a positive it doesn't matter if it's a child in our community our schools or an adult in our community more esposito and her team at chesapeake actively pursue uh contact tracing for those individuals so the the challenge here is that a positive test can take 10 days to get back and you know everybody tell me everybody you've come in contact with over the last 10 days for some people that's easier than others um and you know so it's created a bit of a challenge for more on our team that one that's that's that's when it comes up right so i think the context of one of those really questions is if uh my my son or daughter is in the classroom uh you know their course of school and it turns out that one of the students of classroom contracted covet what's the procedure for the rest of the the classroom right uh did the parents get notification that there was an exposure do they go off it gets tested and related to this is will the schools force testing on kids i know we can't and wouldn't right but i think it's more about what happens when uh your child was it's gonna happen i think we plan for the worst hope for the best right but if it happens in the classroom the concern is what's the protocol then for the classroom the kids impact the teachers right because the answer will follow justification guidelines or house so we're working with chess for cotton surrounding towns to develop common guidance around that chest ricotta initially said well we need to assess the situation is this a student who never wore a mask and has been playing basketball and with all the buddies in the neighborhood well now those buddies may need to be quarantined and individuals that those kids sit next to did they wear the mask all the time would they have to be quarantined we would work with chespercott to notify everybody who needed to be notified if there's a positive in the building will notify the building community that there was a positive test not by name in that but that there's an individual in that building now if it's a child in a specific class we're more than likely going to cohort or you know in that cohort uh at the middle in elementary schools that class might very well likely be quarantined but we're still working through the details of that and i i think maura justifiably so is sensitive to you know hard and fast in the sense that well you said that only the kids from the class would be quarantined well that's not true the kids in the class might be quarantined so are the five kids that this guy has been playing basketball with outside every day for the last three weeks with no masks on and so those kids would also and maybe some of the other kids in their classes would have to that's the absolute worst case scenario that we hope doesn't happen and why we need to reinforce how critical mass masks are with kids um and adults in our community um if we go with a hybrid model are we consulting with other towns this comes from a teacher who a parent who's a teacher in another district the answer there is yes we've been working closely with other surrounding towns on that um and i i feel bad that i i keep just hitting these through but i want to be i want to honor the time that these people put into asking questions and it also gives perspective to everybody who's in the audience about the diversity of things that we're we're trying to work through um uh person saying i think the proposed challenges changes to the school calendar are great especially starting later in september um about why the last possible date for kids would be june 17th what happens if there's a blizzard or weather related event and we'll talk a little bit about that and that's really we're going to go to remote learning after the second snow day so after that um second snow day has occurred every snow day thereafter would be a remote learning day and that's somewhat contingent upon what happens with the uh school calendar discussion later but that's that's the the plan at this point um okay i just want to get back to the start of these questions here um sorry all right um backpacks instead of lockers uh we do we are um requiring backpacks instead of lockers uh that we don't want kids congregating together uh closely that may change as we get to winter and have to worry about coats and things like that but at this point no locker use what will lunch be at the high school that'll be addressed by the high school plan we will not be cutting any elective courses in the music program we really want to you know for those large ensemble classes get them outside as much as possible where they can play musical instruments where they can sing as i said before for some kids that's the reason that they come to school every day and i really want to make sure that we continue that our team is committed to that questions about safety drills fire and lockdown still waiting for guidance from the state on that issue it seems to fly in the face of the health guidance to have everybody congregated together so we're waiting on that um a question about being a substitute and how will that process work we've just signed a contract with kelly services where they will provide us significantly more access to a larger pool of staff should we need it now i think not only might we need it for teacher subs if worst case scenarios but also for additional ia support and to provide supervision if we don't have adequate numbers of volunteers will need to do that will subs be able to participate in cobid training before school starts i think that's a good idea we'll work with marlene to try and get that off the ground question about will there still be freshman orientation we're going to address that in the calendar conversation in a little bit um well this is uh somebody who's just given me a shout out for the the leadership stuff and how things have been going um one concern relative to reopening with the increase in covid cases among 10 to 19 year olds how can we responsibly open schools knowing a significant portion of students made the leading demographic for recent infections um we are working still very closely with our medical personnel and you know we are so far away in some respects from the opening of schools that we will continue to monitor that very closely and follow the guidance of our health professionals like i said more esposito namely and then also with um with jim o'connor and others that we consult on these issues uh the this is from a teacher who happens to live in town with a concern about the potential for the new hybrid model uh and the concern for extra prep time being needed i think that's something that we'll work through with the high school administration and teachers there to to continue to work on that that's something that we're we're very sensitive to as i said earlier uh the worst thing that we can do is burn out our staff that results in bad um you know diminished uh instruction for our students and so that doesn't work for any of us we need to work collaboratively to make sure we have positive experiences for everybody with the can we use ac uh air conditioning and will the heating systems be able to run uh while the students are in school i i know heating may sound crazy after the last week and a half that we've had um because it feels like the earth is on fire at this moment but it will be here before we know it quickly though with the ac we can't use window units uh we can use central air systems we've purchased upgraded uh filters for those are in the process of of trying to secure those for the start of school it's called a merv rating uh we currently use a merv eight we're looking to go to move merv 13 which is recommended and we will uh do that we had another question about um working with optimizing airflow and things like that we have been consulting with a mechanical engineer to optimize all of the airflow that we have as well as with a physician from yale who's helped us with some of this as well and we are implementing that for our schools um i am conscious of the fact by the way that without air conditioning it could be super hot in some of it's hot you know in our buildings now and so what we're looking to do is um consider half days if the temperature is going to be that hot or even a remote learning day uh asking our students to spend the day and staffing the day for the full day in the school with the mask on when it's 90 degrees in the room is overwhelming and you would know that if you've been outside for more than 10 minutes with your mask on in the last week and a half how will students be able to wear masks in schools opening april august 27th when there's no air conditioning will portable units be deployed unfortunately we can't use the portable units they simply recirculate the air so those are forbidden and so we are looking at pushing the start back a bit uh what's the plan to screen all adults etc uh temperature tracks required tests uh we don't have required testing as a matter of fact you know we did explore if you saw last meeting batch testing or pool testing it's called where it's a simple nose swab and not the the deep nasal swab but it's a nose swab where say 25 people put their swabs into a container the lab tests those and can pretty quickly turn them around the problem is there are so many false negatives with that process that's not been perfected yet and so um we kind of abandoned that strategy the other thing is doing the the real deep nasal swab the the tests that uh you must see on tv those take so long to turn around that they're not really an effective manner to screen so we ask people certainly our staff and students to take uh covid screeners at home we're providing um the kinsa thermometers their smart thermometers for families in cheshire to be able to take their own temperature before they come to school that data is then provided to uh anonymously to the state where our chess for cot can track this and see well geez we have more fevers at home and it's going to take this entire thing to wipe out uh kovid takes an incredible amount of personal responsibility uh from all members of our communities i've been harping on masks temperatures as well if you're feeling the symptoms stay home we want to try and provide you uh with instruction at home to the greatest extent we can not if you're at home for one day you know we don't do that now we don't automatically hook you up but if you're home for multiple days and you're quarantining or something we want to try our best to get you the best education you can during that period especially if you're not ill is anybody exempt from wearing a mask if a student staff or visitor is exempt from wearing a mask how will those individuals be screened for covid19 everybody really has to wear a mask that's the bottom line it's a it's a public safety issue if we do have some individuals with significant needs who may not be wearing a mask and we are providing additional ppe for for those unique situations but really masks are necessary for everybody are you talking about high school only remote yes um then there was they referenced a survey a statewide survey about teachers not wanting to return you know i think there's some validity to that i think there's real concerns that our teachers have and we're working with them to address those concerns elementary school question if only one elementary school classroom per grade is equipped with synchronous learning at this point uh will parent-teacher ratio be maintained um and yes so uh we know that if we were to uh put every student who's remote plus um 20 other students in a class with a teacher that would be a terrible situation for the teacher and the students in the room so we are maintaining the class size ratios i think tony made a good point about um you know will teacher will parents know how many students are in rooms it's kind of a chicken in the egg situation where i don't know exactly how many kids will be in a room until i know exactly how many kids will be going remote um so i won't know in advance but i can project out for people and that might be helpful um this is a question a statement about the governor indicating six feet distancing with a mask 12 feet without that's not the guidance that was presented in the uh state document so you know we're we're following the state document to maximize social distancing to the greatest extent possible i'm sorry this this email is just it's really long give you a short break yeah take a drink first of all thank you for going through all this so i just want to make a couple of comments i know for folks watching or who may um be brave and actually watch us after the fact for its entirety because there's a it can be a long meeting uh thank you i know there's a a lot of information everyone's looking for i would encourage uh central office or as a jeff in this case that all these questions that we're getting and all the answers if we can put them out there in the faq and just keep it going and get folks to see that you know so i'm hopeful out of it's possible i know there's a tremendous amount of work going on in central office but maybe for the next meeting if there's a way to get the faq updated all these questions and answers and points made yeah it's a running list yeah before the next meeting it it may help folks um you know kind of turn tune in the middle of the meetings they're not really answering the question we kind of answered it an hour and a half ago and had to watch the whole video i mean i don't want to watch myself a little video i'm sorry i'm sure people might watching you through a whole video jeff but it's a lot to absorb and having that document uh to work with is is key so um the point is let's update that site as soon as we can i'm happy to help if i can but i know it's not that simple it's both yeah yeah thank you and and we are trying to maintain that and continue to to update that it does need to be updated particularly after the number of questions we received today so we'll work on that uh do you want to break hearing questions maybe go on a section and come back to the questions i'm okay cranking them out if you are you know they're i'm fine if the board feels otherwise speak up i i also worry about the folks watching yeah yeah i mean it is tough i mean it is tough to go through all of them i know people want to hear an answer to their question um which you know we're trying our best to get through them but obviously there are a lot of questions and um it gives a sense of you know these these 100 questions or whatever um it's reflective of the amount of planning and challenges that we have to overcome to open schools effectively and and safely so you know getting back real quick uh athletics there's a question about that um as i said that you know ciac is going to work on that a question about has the board seen the cea survey that was released yesterday i'll be honest i haven't had a chance to read it um it basically says statewide i think it was like the 48 percent of teachers don't want to come back uh they're concerned i almost say don't want to come back i think they're concerned about coming back is a better choice for words but um i don't know if any board member wants to address that um go ahead yeah i just this is really a reminder because i've heard from parents and i know i've mentioned it before i think marlene has spoken to it um a reminder to there are i've heard from parents who want the classroom to be set at a specific time this is probably more uh it might be remote learning for the high school um the thing that uh i just want people to keep in mind is you know of the 400 teachers plus staff that are involved everybody has their own story and one of the things that goes through my mind is caregivers not just necessarily child care but also you know senior care care for anyone really um but life can be complicated and if we are if we end up in a situation where we were before where teachers are teaching remotely from home being able to get to the camera at a given moment in time is can be difficult and maybe it's not appropriate um you know for this is a new year and maybe that person should not be teaching because of that situation but i want to add my own personal experience that some people probably saw before i've got a preschooler this is just one small example preschool uh i think it was 20 kids basically per class and jeff you might be able to speak to it i know you have relationships with the preschools but it's dropped down per the state rules right now i think it's dropped down to 14 kids per class so simply even finding preschool even if a teacher wants to could be complicated um so i just want to remind people that the teaching remotely is complicated because everyone is bringing their home with them and i know we all sort of know that now we've been doing it for a few months those of us fortunate enough fortunate enough to have a job but uh i think it's it's just important to keep the complexities in mind of life for everyone jeff on the cea survey i i did see in fact uh some of the board chairs were talking about earlier today i mean just just rough numbers uh so you know basically the ce survey of united's teachers it finds that about 81 percent of teachers expected they'd be back in the classroom so there's expectations that you know they will be back but given the choice of being bathroom online or a mix of both uh being in the classroom the survey indicated sixteen percent of teachers would prefer that forty six percent wanted to go online so and as you noted earlier it's not that they don't want to be back it's more about safety concerns and you mentioned earlier on the call that you are meeting uh with the local teachers union and i think you've been talking to them anyway something's gonna go into that but i don't have any talking to further detail about some of the concerns i have locally but you've also been meeting with teachers you said about 75 so far uh into this week it'll be more so be curious um the sentiments of that survey across the state are different than what you're hearing especially based on the things you're trying to ensure our teachers do feel safe they did go back to the classroom but those were the high level numbers from the survey thank you yeah um the next one was if us if a student is quarantined would they be able to do remote learning you know it's easiest if a class is quarantined that teacher and students would do remote learning like we did last spring if it's an individual from a different class it would take us a little bit more time to set that up but we would definitely want that individual who's home to have access to their education particularly if they're not sick i mean that's that's the worst case for a parent that your child is not sick but they're home and you know we want to make sure that they continue to be educated particularly if it's such a long stretch these 14 day quarantines [Music] the question about are they are we going to send out another survey it felt like the last survey was misleading that survey was a survey from the state that we were required to to send out that asked where people were now the next survey that goes out is going to be here's more information about what school will look like and which one would you like to commit to um in the cps plan states uh students who choose to participate in remote will be placed in classes that support synchronous learning um the at the elementary level does this mean that students will be placed in a cohort that has the synchronous technology in the room and if the child later decided to return in person they'd be added to that same cohort to a degree so we would make every effort to place um students that are designated as remote learners in that synchronous environment however there are other variables that may trump that um and so you know we would rely on the the principal's discretion there to make those decisions that are in the best interest of of the student um and yes i mean that that if you do come back in that situation you would stay in that cohort with that same teacher um another question about how many teachers are not coming back uh how are we dealing with the union i think we kind of touched upon these issues and i don't have detailed information yet uh just like for students i don't know exactly how many are not coming back yet um question or concern about yes chs is larger but keeping kids socially distant elementary schools near impossible um the their this person is basically concerned about um not allowing hybrid at the elementary level again this is something that we consult with physicians on and our health health team and we make you know decisions that are are uh in the best interest of all students and we are providing an option for those that um don't feel that's appropriate for them uh concerns about teachers you've heard how you're addressing them i've kind of addressed that already that i'm meeting with large groups of teachers i very much value the opinions and perspectives of our teachers and they've been very helpful the meetings that we've had for them to express concerns to us because we try and rectify them the best we can including things like you know i don't know what i'm going to do with six days of professional development for child care so we're looking at ad options for that not that we're going to pay for child care for our staff but how do we make it available and how do we make it easier and so that's what we're looking at masks this person saying still unclear when kids need to wear them you need to wear them all the time unless you're outside of the six foot social distancing um you know unless you're eating playing an instrument where you have adequate social distancing you should be wearing the mask all the time unless it's a mask break plan for transportation it's a it's a good question right vin you want to talk about transportation just to break up my voice okay well i mean we're going to run the transportation the way we normally do except that we're trying to have a maximum capacity per bus of 50 students the normal capacity depending on the bus we have some 70 passenger or 80 passenger buses so you know 50 is the high that we're setting our routes to and then to the extent that you know parents are not sending their children there would be less than 50 students on the bus so i mean that's the plan um across the district i'm sorry jeff there's not much more of a longer answer than that so no i don't need a long answer we're looking for short answers these days this would be a good thing uh thank you next question is about a hotline to report concerns about safety and non-compliance i think it's a great idea you know we could definitely set that up for the start of school just forwarding on that email so we can address that um sorry weekly testing um i've already covered that outdoor schooling as much as possible we've covered um reduced density where kids go a couple days a week that we've addressed through the high school level where it's uh currently most supported by our medical team uh if students decide to go remark so this talks about that same question before if you're remote or not remote you stay in the same cohort answer is yes if you are in starting in school and you go remote however you will probably receive some live instruction from the person who's doing synchronous your teacher will be responsible your teacher of record will be that homeroom teacher if you come back you're going back to that teacher you are assigned to and you will be getting all your work your grades everything from that teacher you are assigned to uh i i want people to understand like we're used to the normal and um i i could give you a lot of data and give you a lot of examples that you know we do normal school better than pretty much everybody in connecticut you know over the last four years or we've skyrocketed in our ability you know and our performance and everything this is not normal school even when kids come back to school seating in in rows all facing the same direction it's not normal school i still think that we will do and the best that can be done under these circumstances but things aren't going to be normal so the idea of being in one class and possibly getting some live instruction from another teacher is not normal and it's it's just weird to think about it's hard for our teachers to consider it's hard for our parents to swallow but these are certainly not normal circumstances and we're doing the best we can and we'll learn more and we'll continue to evolve but that's really the the challenges that we're dealing with at this time will there be an option will there be option for non-synchronous learning uh like we had in the spring i think that's something that we're still trying to work toward um recognizing that not all parents are available and uh maybe perhaps students aren't capable of logging on um you know at that time so uh particularly with younger grades so that is something where we're working toward um just a shout out you know for trying to answer a thousand questions uh can you describe any changes in the plan for dodd since the last meeting including how you reduce the cohorts from 100 to 25 um and it's a good question sid and honestly right now i i don't have enough detail on that plan mike woods the principal there will be sending out information on what those cohorts will look like on by wednesday and at that point i think you'll have a lot more clarity and i know mike will be able to answer that question uh better than i can so i apologize i'm not i don't have that one off the top my head will you be having dry runs for the new technology uh yeah we are installing that right now we actually want to um to have another meeting in one of those locations so people can see that it's really quite impressive so why not hybrid for for dodd again we're working with our um guidance of our our health team and consultants to make that determination and this is an absolutely fluent situation so i could be sitting here telling you a hybrid's appropriate for cheshire high school today and come back three weeks from now and go hybrid's appropriate for the whole district or we could be saying we have to close the whole district or everybody goes back full-time we all want to go back full-time we all want to be safe we all want our kids to be safe and we're working with the health guidance and i know with 4 200 different students there are going to be a lot of different parent perspectives about this so we're trying with the guidance of health professionals with our talented teacher team and administrators to provide a a really strong option that captures everybody as many people as we can in the center knowing that some people on either end may not be happy and we want to try and provide options for those folks regarding the notion of a positive case it will be shared within that school building um but what about siblings uh to consideration something that we'll talk to maura uh in the health department about um kids driving themselves to school uh and with others i mean that's been a real concern from a variety of folks including our teaching staff about when the school day ends it's disheartening even now to drive through the community and see a whole bunch of kids together not wearing masks and stuff and so it's it's obviously impossible for us to police that um and it's really got to be a community commitment to be vigilant about wearing masks um you know when you're around those that you don't live with um the as it says as of now is the state accepting hybrid proposals we have to submit a hybrid uh proposal but um that is not yet you know something that they've allowed to happen with the will we continue with the um the ymca program yes we are working with them they have a great team chrissy uh cassisi her team they've been great with us and we're gonna continue to work with them for after school at this point again if numbers change that may change but uh that's where they are right now we are asking students to put their basque masks in ziploc bags if they're capable if not we understand that again if a mask gets dirty we have additional masks for students in in all schools hybrid model chs where classes don't have a camera speaker option [Music] that right now is the if we go to the different hybrid plan um we would have to worry about that than just our opening hybrid plan at this point right now we're focused on that um twins uh should likely be uh cohorted in the same uh class i know that's something that we really give parents the option of uh for twins and so at this point we really unfortunately can't give much of an option there to maintain cohorting so yes they should be in the same same class um so what uh this is a great question about uh what sort of um manipulatives are provided for students in say an engineering class or um more like a science biology lab we're working through professional development to try and find identify like home options for uh like labs so what materials could we use at home to replicate this alternatively do we need to put kits together that families can pick up like we did during the spring uh so that they the children at home can get the best possible experience without being in the room so this also impacts us with uh labs that we typically do in pairs and things like that so we are trying to be considerate uh how are kids going to play win instruments without spreading germs uh marching band gonna be an option uh during band performances we don't have distancing so traditional band performances will likely not take place as we've known them in the past that being said we're still working with mr kuner to provide marching band uh pep band with with the social distancing that's required in order to facilitate that so um those large ensembles we want to get those kids outside because i know how critical it is to them to actually be outside and be engaging in that so um our our uh board will be very happy to know that i have reached the end of our covid questions and this ordeal for you is now ended i hope that there is um you know some education in there for not only our board but certainly all the members of our community well if your deal isn't quite over adam has a question but in all and just of course um jeff the majority's questions come in during the meeting yes yeah i was gonna say i know an ideal situation if they came in ahead of time it was a way to write them up and post them somewhere so we can refer to the meeting but i know it's not always that easy and i suspect during the next meeting uh and i'll i'll uh i'll yield to adam in a second at the next meeting i think he alluded knew this earlier that sometime next week you're looking to the board to put our approval on a plan is that correct well um we've already submitted the plan that we were required to submit um today what we're looking for is approval on the calendar the plan is going to be something that even if you approved it today would probably be different three days from now would be different five days from then so there's not a formal approval process for the plan but meetings like this help us you know keep communication open about what's going on and that's how i was going so um it might be worthwhile to have another meeting next week even though that things are a little bit in flux just so we can keep answering the questions and if there's any change in information or options that come up it it might be easier to try to do it in small chunks to answer these questions versus waiting two or three weeks out another meeting but we can talk about that i'm sure uh after today if folks what if someone watches this video you'll probably get more emails um yeah but i do thank you for going through all that yeah i just want i want to make sure mr massiana is available next wednesday because our viewership goes through the roof when he's on and i just went well we were 221 earlier i don't think it's gone up down since you started talking offense but well well sorry i'm sorry guys long days you know uh and i'm sorry you've been waiting for a question for about a half hour so please go ahead thank you uh actually it was developed through the uh listening to the the questions that were submitted by parents um and with in regards to the synchronous learning it sounded like we have a self-imposed cap on who can participate and if if i did interpret that correctly does that mean that parents who choose early to have their kids be schooled remotely would they then get a preferential treatment and a preference to be in the synchronous learning as opposed to a pure remote learning situation or is that is the intention to be purely synchronous uh at the beginning of the year for those who decide to opt out so um it's a fair question i think what we do is regardless of when the request comes in we evaluate the requests and the needs of the student and uh we trust the principals to make really good decisions about what is the best learning environment for this student um and that you know is often made with you know feedback from the the parent or the the teacher that they had last year um any sort of needs that the child may have um not that those are used to rule people out if you have special education there's just a good chance that you would be in a synchronous learning is not but um what are the individuals needs how can we best meet those needs we want to try and honor that you know synchronous learning request um but in some cases as you heard the questions we may get asynchronous requests for kids that are out so you know in that case we we're going to be judicious about who we place in those classrooms making sure it's in the best interest of the student so then we are sort of self-limiting the access to the synchronous learning you know based on the original data adam uh there just aren't enough kids in any grade or school based on the original survey that would exceed the number of kids we would have in a classroom anyway that may change i'm very conscious of that it may change in that case we'd probably be looking to add more synchronous learning capacity but um right now it wouldn't exceed so we're not like limiting it yet um we may have to make that determination in a couple of weeks okay um and then as far as ymca goes as for before and after care and i don't know i don't know if they they sh they share data via via to you directly or if they have to go through chesapeake but um if by before school begins would they be sharing with you their their data from their summer camps as far as if anything occurred there yeah my knowledge right now they have 550 kids not wearing masks cohorted predominantly outside without issue now i mean that's different than you know being inside but these are kids that are going home to families every day coming back and it's it's you know for me that's positive information and i really hope that that will continue with kids once school starts but yeah they would we would definitely be in communication about any sort of positive test or any sort of issues that they may be carrying over from the summer as of right now i'm not aware of any and we communicate regularly but um yeah that's a good question right well because i know that once uh before and after care begin in the at the elementary level any kind of um restriction that they may have during the day i don't know if it'll necessarily carry over uh before or after care and would they are they required to to tell if uh if there were any incidences i don't know if they take temperature or anything like that but if they say someone came in in the afternoon with the fever are they required to report to your office uh that day if something occurred like that for the next day yeah we would make a condition of their use of the facility to report any concerns i mean in some respects it may be an early screener for somebody who comes into before care i mean i'd hate i certainly am not advocating jesus if you're not sure if your child is sick why don't you just send them to the y and they'll figure it out you know obviously if you're not sure if your child is sick if it's a question in your mind they have to stay home period end of story and let the school know and we'll work with you um to try and support your child and your family the best we can but uh we we will maintain close communication with the y we have that already and that'll that will only be closer uh this year that's good to know and uh lastly for for teachers who don't feel comfortable in returning um does their union give them any sort of like a sabbatical option where they're where they basically risk a full year off um but not endangering their career if they're you know they bet that kovid will be solved for next year and so they're going to take the year off is that is that something that they can do or is that is that something at the university level you know that that would be possible here as well that if a teacher asked for a leave of absence we'd be likely to grant that um again as every situation is so unique and specific to the individual um that if they have questions and you know including that they should reach out to our hr department who can help them i know the unions ask them to reach out to them too and that's good you know because we work closely with the union as well so you know we want to try and support each other because we need them desperately for our kids to be successful and they need us um as much for for their su for our support and um you know it's a symbiotic relationship no doubt thank you okay before we move on to the next update tim had a question earlier thanks tony uh yeah so maybe i don't follow the news closely enough jeff so everyone may already know the answer to this but you wouldn't have said before uh there's a 10-day delay for test results yeah it's running about that long yes look coincidentally i had i had surgery about a month ago and i i drove down to st rafes and i got the the jump in the pool deep dive covid test and they had the results in a few hours so i'm wondering is the state i mean i'm not talking about you but is the state looking to put something like that on their bid where we could actually get the results get the test done you'd have to hire nurses the equipment but what i've heard is and you know i'm not a public health specialist so maura could give us the best answer on this but my understanding is that the supplies are in such incredible demand from the states that are overwhelming that it's been hard for us to get local supplies there are limited locations in connecticut where one can get a turnaround test uh where you just like unfortunately i had to do that um about a month ago and the gateway location was open in new haven and my wife and i found out in the matter of an hour that we were negative in the whole process which is what we would want in a best case scenario across the country really unfortunately that availability just doesn't exist in connecticut so when you go to your doctor and you do the typical process you know maura has shared publicly she had to be tested for covid it was 10 days before she got her results she's the public health director you know i mean it doesn't give us a lot of confidence for people who aren't the public health director thank you um and one other thing and i don't know if you're going to speak to this separately but it was on the um graduation is in a couple days graduation is uh on august 2nd how exciting um okay yeah if you're gonna bring it up later that's fine i just wanted to ask about that briefly yeah i mean i i could tell you that we uh we were very hopeful that the way things were trending we would have the opportunity to have a more traditional in-person uh ceremony unfortunately it won't be that way but each graduate will can bring a car with their their family to the farmington polo grounds on sunday afternoon and the information is available through the cheshire high school site and uh we will be live streaming it and uh it should be uh an unorthodox but memorable event for all of our graduates thank you thanks tim jeff uh did you want to get or vincent we got a financial update do you think you covered that it's part of your yeah i think ben covered that anything you need to add vin about medical claims any changes no update to medical claims yet i'll have a i should have a report probably in the next week though thank you vincent we have no old business but we do have new business so we have um approval of a revised 20 20 21 school calendar but uh jeff and marlene you want us give us the overview of what the options are and how you let how we came to this sure sure so i'm going to share my screen really quick and you know um this is information that we floated to the community uh last week and asked for some some feedback on it like i said we did get the handful of folks pushing for a later start and we had a handful of folks pushing for the um the uh earliest start possible so in sharing my screen with you here this is proposed version a it looks a lot like our startup school now this is our current start of school the 24th 25th and 26th of august 27th 28th and 31st would be the mandated days for the state professional development so our school year would start on september 1st i just want to hit each one really quick and and point out some of the differences and then we'll get to you know what my recommendation would be this is a similar calendar where we start the rpd state pd the next three days would be what we're calling an orientation like a hybrid orientation model where we would have approximately a third of the students in each school attend those days there's no additional cost for this from a busing perspective or anything we would run regular bus routes we would pick up a third of the kids based on their alphabetical last name we would bring those kids into school and run an orientation program with them given the idea that the mask thing will be different for them we have to run them through mask breaks uh transitions to a new school with transportation uh will be different for obviously our kindergartners our first graders at doolittle our sixth grader or excuse me seventh graders at dodd and our ninth graders at cheshire high um who'd never received the benefit of transition programs last year all students would also have the benefit of a more intimate day with their teacher just a small group of students in the class getting to know their teachers which we found to be really the most critical part of remote learning when we got there was the relationship between the student and teacher and we figured that would be a very good way to uh kick it off this by the way that that three day rollover was unanimously endorsed by everybody on the uh the stakeholder committee that looked at how do we we returned to school the last option uh version c we start our teacher professional development days a little bit later the 27th 28th and 31st um we then have our state professional development days the three days leading up to the labor day weekend the uh orientation days are the 8th 9th and 10th and full start on the 11th um now this uh option here is the one that i would most endorse because as i said earlier the governor still hasn't told us if a hybrid plan would be allowed or not at any level including the high school although they have said that the high school would be the area they'd be focused on [Music] if i don't find that out until the middle of august which is the current plan our ability to adapt and provide you know a quality experience for our kids is going to be really compromised the earlier that we start and i you know i can we do any we turned around from brick and mortar to uh remote learning in two days but you know if we're looking at what's in our students best interest i think that the you know having that additional few days would be beneficial from the planning perspective the other uh reality that a lot of folks have expressed i've said in this meeting several times that we're not permitted to have air conditioning now could it be 90 degrees on september 9th um and not on the 27th of august or something yeah of course i mean but we're looking at probabilities in a situation where the eighth ninth and tenth um we have a third of the kids in the building it provides greater options for mask breaks kids to be able to just go outside if it is a hotter day and the 11th would be then all students in or engaging in remote learning that day and even for students that are doing remote learning students the teachers in the classroom and other kids in the class will be connecting with each other at this part of the alphabet these days as well because we're not forgetting about the kids that are home and just tending to those who attend school but those students would also be a critical part of these transition days for our our students so the goal would be to start all students on the 11th if i had a secondary option it would be the the b plan where the transition days occur before the labor day weekend and we start full on on the 8th so i i want to just throw it out for a discussion um just a quick observation i think tim uh met brought up before the meeting started that on options b and a uh the calendar shows in june june 19 the last day for students but in the listing it says june 14th okay yeah this is accurate the the this here is accurate so the last day for students in option a and b would be the ninth and i'm glad you brought that up because in option c uh the last day shifts to the 14th now in that option what we've said is that for the first two snow days so the 15th and the 16th it would push the calendar back they would be traditional snow days if we were to have a blizzard or something like that if we once we got to the third snow day um not in one weather event but throughout the course of the winter the third snow day and each snow day thereafter would be a remote learning day so on those remote remote learning days they would count as our school days and um so we could guarantee that the last day of school for our students would be the 17th um cat uh ann has a question then katherine i just want to share that my daughter doesn't like the idea of snow day being remote learning today but well the first two are the first two she can have a great time it's it's i'm sure she likes the idea of summer vacation though so i heard a squeal from the kitchen so uh ann and then catherine yeah i actually uh just to go off of what you were just saying um maybe in the future that's a way we can handle snow days even if we um if we have this um online learning remote learning uh capabilities if we get it done really get it down to uh to the science that it is um we might be able to use that in the future yeah some people live for the snow day i remember as a principal even as a superintendent like the snow day is a blessing from god because i could come into work and catch up on all the things i hadn't been able to catch up on and you know for kids they may not feel that way uh they like you know my son would like be excited about fortnite or roblox for my other guy you know it's like but they get two of those days and then after that we get back on track so we don't burn up more summer my only comment was that i had when i looked over those three scenarios was i really really like the three days of student orientation and i accept jeff your explanation of of why you might want to start later but uh to me the the main issue was having those three student orientation days i thought that was that's a great idea yeah so that's available in b and c right that's all i have thank you um i think i'm next right tony um so jeff i just had a quick question on c so the last day of school would be the 14th if the three snow days that your plan that the intent would be to do remote learning if something happened that prevented remote learning from occurring that that i guess would push the last day of school out another day past the 17th right so it's some sort of action you had three like a tornado big power outage power lines down yeah something like that so you know but only if we couldn't do the remote i'm sorry you know like but happening are a 110 in 2020.
we're also wanting to send out something to our staff as well to get a sense where they're at we were thinking of a very quick turnaround time because we need time to interpret that look at that start talking about that one of the things i'm proposing not that i want to add more meetings to anybody's calendar but i'm proposing we consider looking at adding and this is a thursday so that we have enough time to get the data together and review a policy would be to add a governing board meeting for us to to look at the face the face coverings policy that asba is putting out there because we would need to have that in place to be able to communicate that as one of the mitigation strategies and per executive order and also review our survey data uh what what are what are our numbers looking like right now what are we hearing both from our teachers and from from our from our community and then the august 7th which is a friday is the date that they have indicated we should have hopefully sooner than i will tell you that i have reached out to every single person who i worked with at the ate who was part of those committees saying does anybody know have any idea what are we looking at how does this look um and and we are not i don't have any more information and then obviously the 12th was our next scheduled board meeting for us to come back with we have had metrics we will have had um our numbers for us to interpret what do we now do what is our recommendation for for this moving forward so we can respond those are let's uh questions ideas thoughts dr foley real quick on the timeline i don't know how my other board members feel but for me i would much prefer adding a board meeting and i know it's not a lot of time but either friday night after those benchmarks are released or on saturday where we can adopt that mask policy and have the discussion of whatever those benchmarks are i agree so i mean i i was just saying yeah for me because instead of doing it the day before we're all going to be sitting there going what is it what is it what is it and then let's do it together we can't talk until the 12th anyway and we know we're on a timeline so i know for me i would rather either do friday night um and i know that doesn't give you guys a lot of time to pull it together um and i know we're going to kind of be prepared like oh we just need this this and you know watching we're going to have all kinds of data waiting to be pulled or like i said or on saturday where we can sit down and kind of talk about those metrics where are we as a district and adopt a face mask policy at that point so i agree i can be very flexible on those states too i do help me that you decide and we will make that happen saturday morning at eight nine friday night friday night what would be we are what what time are these benchmarks being released on august 7th we said by august 7th we have no idea we live here we live here seven days a week anyhow so any anyhow any time we're here i i think the seventh i mean if they are running late my fear is is that we i say we'll be scrambled i think we're going to be on the saturday morning so that they've been out and we have a chance to have all read it and bring ourselves up is that okay mr glover okay the saturday morning the eighth because we have no and let's hope they're done sooner but i i i have no idea nine am nine am for nine a.m nine a.m mr watovic is retired i'm thinking more of them if they're going to be working late into friday because they just got it and they're yes give them a little bit of time i just want to thank you again i know that i think mr glover would like to uh take the microphone for a minute and thank you for coming tonight even though i know you're not feeling so hot but it it's been a really difficult time in the past week of going through all of this data that you um have put together and shame on them shame on them for throwing this in the laps of boards and we are not doctors we are not immunologists we are not cdc people we are not any of those things we are moms and dads and um community members that want the very best for our students and all i can say is shame on them for what they put us through and i am not happy and my vote mr glover will show that i know you love to push that every year and um yeah that's that's my amy rand 2020.
on the third day of school is going to take out all the communications in gesture and that so as much as i hate you for bringing that up you're probably right uh and so we have to explore that i will put an asterisk on the calendar um yeah okay category may extend the school year that's it that's all i had thank you but i do i i do support the sea as well it just seems to make more sense to me to push out the start so that we avoid a lot of heat days you know so um i think that's a really good idea i would say our administrative team at the meeting today begged me to advocate for c um because like i said the nuances of what we're planning for for the start of school to even buy them those few extra days at the start and then the um the heat uh two real considerations from our staff as well they're very concerned about students in their own you know well-being in the heat now again i mean we could if we didn't start on that c schedule we could still play the you know remote learning day due to heat so that's still out there but um doesn't preclude us from not being in that day right but it does give you more time to handle the last minute change that the governor's going to throw at us basically and that's a real issue that's really a huge thing yep thank you uh tim and then hey thank you tony yeah my um my real comment was what catherine had just touched on about power outages or whatever scenario might happen in avoiding guarantees on a last day of school and the only other thing i'll point out is uh snowy day one of the best children's books ever snow days are important for some of these guys anyway that's it thank you thank you thanks tim adam you're up thank you um so it god forbid we had to go back to full remote learning um i think one of the godsends was that we had you were able to basically shorten the year to i think it was june 1st if i recall or you know they the uh well okay unofficially june 1st and then it was like yeah so is that sort of that would be the plan with plan c would be if if something like that occurred perhaps we you know we'd all get a reprieve as of june 1st and then hope for the best yeah is that the thought well the yeah the bottom line for this entire year is flexibility and you know if if god forbid we ended up in an extended period of remote learning to close out the school year again um i think there was a tremendous amount of positive feedback from our parents and students and staff around you know having that first week in june be a close-out of anything you know assignments work kid kids needed support with and then we did need an extraordinary period of time under the circumstances for return of materials um so we would probably pursue that again if indeed it came to that and um lastly if so regardless of whichever uh calendar we choose uh this evening um is there any consideration of teaching outside because at least at least what you've seen so far fingers crossed is that when the kids are all outside at the summer camp it seems like when they're all distancing and and cohorting that it seems like it's successful at least on the elementary level um is that is that a consideration until the the you know the summer breaks you know at the end of september or and if it is why would we not consider perhaps the b model instead where you at least you're getting a few days more of potential good weather than bad weather when you move into october sure so absolutely you know that's why we're pursuing the tent options and um so we want teachers to have the flexibility flexibility to go outside um any time that they determine that that's what their class needs and when it's appropriate obviously instructionally and it makes sense for the the kids and developmentally so many different considerations but we want teachers to have that flexibility you could as i said before consider the the b model um i i don't know that you know do we need the time more up front versus you know toward the end um i i think we probably need the time more up front to adjust than we do in october um and that's just the the rationale there um is as to why our team really preferred that c model as being in the best interest of our students thanks sure thank you thank you i lost track here but i believe adam's up next no you're good at him goes so i uh i i think option c gives the most flexibility for not so much to heat because i'm going to be tony downer and say that if it's hot you know in august end of august it may be hot like you said it could happen yes most likely we'll see i think it gives a few more days for you and your team jeff to adjust to any last minute uh uh changes from the state and last minute could be literally a week before reopening or two weeks before you still need time to adjust as we're saying so i like the idea also i think the fact that there's three days for our students to have orientation and get acclimated to the new reality that they're going to be working with whether it's in schools or at home or hybrid i think it's key because it's going to perhaps lessen the adjustment period for them to get used to already removed so i i support that option um the last question i had is um i know what the professional development for teachers of three days that was recently passed down as guidance from the state department ed it lessened the mandatory school days from 180 days to 177.
going to jump in right quick before scott goes because i know he's going to have a long one and i think it's going to be great but um shame on them for saying that our websites would be up to date as he was speaking i was frustrated because we were hearing the knowledge just as our whole community was hearing the knowledge and shame on them because it was not nice because we did not know what he was going to say they did not know what he was going to say and it was just look on your community website so shame on them but go ahead mr glover i'm excited to hear your rant of the day a lot of pressure thank you guys well um you know i think a lot of people are expecting um we're expecting something big to happen on august 17th i think they kind of still are but i'm glad you guys clarified it so i wrote down some thoughts um that i would like to share to maybe help stir some conversation and maybe the people watching can can have these conversations so uh seat belts you guys only have me for eight or nine more meetings or maybe ten so um but i am not mad at any of the people who presented here and and and have written this plan i thank you and i'm looking at you and i'm saying thank you it's a lot of work thank you so you're doing what the governor has ordered you to do but what i'm about to say as august 17th approaches is that if we still find it unsafe to fully return by that date maybe we should start thinking about what school could look like if we planned it the way educators think is best maybe if some teachers and administrators hear what i'm about to say it'll inspire them to think a little bit differently because i think the traditional way we're looking at this is not really helping us too much but we get mail from all sorts of different people with all sorts of different opinions and no matter what anyone says i have full confidence that the teachers in america will catch our kids up academically when we do get back whenever that is i have no doubts about it we'll catch them up even faster if we could take this giant anchor of substandard standardized tests off their off their necks but that's that's another rant another time you know our families are under the impression that these kids will be okay because they trust us but we're only planning for august 17th because that's that's the date that is being demanded of us um by the governor he's not a teacher august 17th isn't a date i would have picked it doesn't sound like most you would have picked that either um so how can we keep kids safe if we open at 100 capacity i don't know i don't know um but why are we even being asked to i would feel a whole lot better if we let our churches open at 100 first or our gyms or our restaurants or our bars or our movie theaters or baseball or football soccer stadiums you know just stop counting people at home depot just let everybody in you know this is what you're asking us to do open up the casinos have all the slot machines open and all the chairs at the bingo tables and blackjack tables open open everything at 100 and if if if those numbers trend down in maricopa county for two weeks then i think we'll all feel a lot better about opening our classrooms and our cafeterias and our hallways and our libraries and our gyms and our playgrounds and our drinking fountains and our bathrooms restaurants have closed about 50 percent of their tables so how's that going the classroom we already pack like 30 plus desks in there and these 25 pound backpacks that these kids have to lug around so are we going to block off half the desks cool then you've got to build twice as many schools because we don't have any empty classrooms in arizona not really you know and then you're going to have to hire twice as many teachers in a state that before covid had 1800 classrooms last year without qualified teachers you know you know we don't have one toilet and one faucet per student in our schools they share and it's like a high ratio so some of our younger kids they'll go to the bathroom and packs you really think we're going to be able to clean those those thoroughly after every class uses them every time every day you know do you think we're going to be able to like you were saying before you think we're going to be able to clean every single high school classroom during five minute passing periods five or six times a day what's the recess even going to look like those kids absolutely need recess do you think we have the capacity to clean all the balls and wipe down the monkey bars and the swings after each kid uses them these are things that people when they demand that we go back have to start thinking about and substitutes we didn't have enough before covet so what happens when a teacher has to be quarantined for two weeks you know that some what some school districts do is when there's not enough subs they split the classes so instead of 30 kids in a class now you got 45 kids in a class and this is our third or fourth presentation i'm not really throwing shade at you guys but i don't think we have a plan for that other than to hope it doesn't happen um you know who wants to go back to school more than anyone is our teachers we hate remote robotic learning we don't like it at all teachers are all about relationships and we miss our kids so people are saying teachers don't want to go back yeah we do i want out of my house so what do we do we got to start thinking about what a return to school this quarter is actually going to look like and what we want our kids to get out of schooling when they can't all physically be here simultaneously are there things we can do for social emotional learning and wellness are there things certain groups need more than others or differently than others can anything be done in person if so what and how high schools might need something entirely different than our k-8 students and maybe we could do something about that definitely some of our special ed population needs something soon and we probably ought to focus a little bit uh less on core curriculum content and more on socialization and connections and sel and nutrition and physical fitness and mental mental health our poor kindergarten teachers and these little kids who will be starting school for the first time is there something better we can provide for them giving them a laptop seems more like punishment to me than a benefit so if the governor is not going to lead our teachers have shown that they they will and i think we're getting dangerously close to a real tipping point with our teachers again and the clock is ticking to april 17th i mean uh until august the 17th by my account he's 0-2 against teachers and if he wants to go over three keep doing what you're doing governor move the goal post every few weeks so that none of us have any certainty at all you know teachers have not been together in person since like spring break so i'm not even sure the surveys we're sending out that we have a real sense of what our employees all throughout arizona are willing to do to to to come back or not on august 17th i don't think we have a real good sense of that you know the numbers in maricopa county we have to acknowledge are getting worse we have really bus drivers in america are older a lot of our paras and cafeteria workers are older our principals are older that's a high-risk category right out of the gate one out of five teachers are over 55 that's a high-risk category so to me it's one thing to be willing to put your kid at risk but when you put others at risk look we live in a country that has four percent of the world's population of the world's coveted cases so are we ignorant are we selfish are we stupid are we inept or are we just unlucky we got to ask ourselves these questions because it's imagine having to explain to your first grader why mrs seaver's not coming back to school ever again you know or why grandpa's dead now and these are the things that we're going to have to grapple with if we want to be in a haste to rush back to school and you know what people can be as mad at me as they want you want to send me a letter or hit me up to chat then do what educators are supposed to do we're supposed to be data driven decision makers so send me some thoughtful meaningful useful trustworthy verifiable data from experts facts i know that pediatrician suggests that school is beneficial for kids we all know that it's one of the reasons we have school but are those pediatricians really recommending that right now in a county where over a hundred and eleven thousand of our 165 000 cases are in maricopa county are those pediatricians recommending our kids hurry back to school maricopa has more cases than all of our almost twice as many as all the other counties combined so if you don't know someone who has covid or who's on the front lines fighting this you should probably seek him out and talk to him before you demand that we send our employees back and your children back into this bonfire you know again i am not mad at any of you guys for what you're being asked i just think august 17th is going to get here and we're going to be right back where we started from and instead we should be thinking a whole lot more about how we can really make the most out of the time when we can't be where we all want to be which is together once again and school boards can help decide what constitutes credit at a secondary level we could rethink that and i'm totally flexible for that ade for elementary just has suggestions as far as i know for what an elementary day looks like so why not rethink it you know are there times and places we could use for safe socialization and what would the frequency of that be you know these things like cooperative learning and small group work and collaboration are all things you're not going to be able to do anyway in person so why not rethink what our school day looks like and how our school campus might even look like and how better we can use our resources the limited resources that we have right now there are opportunities i think to maybe try and meet safely in person just not how we are accustomed to do to doing that and certainly not in my opinion at full capacity five days a week not until the numbers in maricopa county show a period of decline so for me i don't want my headstone to say he did nothing he just went along and didn't say anything so thank you guys for hearing me out and humoring me and uh i just wanted to speak up and say what i i think is on a lot of people's minds so that's the end of my rant and i welcome your responses thank you as always mr glover and i i kind of had the same thought that when i can go to my gym and when i can go to my church i thought those very same thoughts thanks for your for your time on that anybody else president taylor and my thought is having open comment at our board meetings as well we don't allow that we're reducing the numbers to keep us safe right we're gonna have um starting at our next board meeting because this agenda was already established we're gonna put a link for our august 12th for public comment to go through the website so that we can read those comments during our meeting so that is coming august 12th and i think that's important we don't allow more than 10 ish 12 or i don't know count 12-ish in here and so until we allow some people to sit in the back or i know some other school boards are working on different ideas we need to work we need to not have a classroom that has more than that it's my thought president keller thank you mr glover unfortunately i agree to disagree with you and um i kind of represent that other piece to it um i think that's the beauty of the choice and right now as a parent of a student i don't have that choice and i'm sorry again like mr glover i'm not trying to offend anybody i think we're providing a very sub-par education to our students every teacher is working harder than they ever have and i'm not trying to discredit that whatsoever and they have put thoughtful things together we anyone who has worked from home there there is no work hours you are working all the time and you're taking a a dinner break and you're having dinner with your family and you're back on the couch with your laptop and you're working you're not engaged with your family you're working you are always working when you're working from home and i'm not discrediting what the teachers have put out there they have worked really hard and we are doing what we can with what we have and i have had so many teachers contact me this last week and say please please tell me we're going back to work on the 17th please tell me we will be in classrooms please tell me we will have students they said i'm not meant to be an online teacher and right now i feel extremely inadequate in my job i take pride in educating my students i take pride in them learning and right now we're having interaction some face to face or through this computer but they're self-teaching there's only so much i can teach and engage and work with them over the internet they're having to self-teach i can give them lessons they're having to read it they can log in and ask me questions but i am not teaching i'm giving instruction and they're following instructions and like i said the teachers have communicated to me that they feel very inadequate in their job but as a parent i am willing to send my child back to school had this conversation with them and they're not afraid to go they know that they're responsible for their own hand sanitizer they're responsible for their own safety they know they don't hug other kids they know that and they are responsible for that and they want to go back they want to learn and it's not even that they get to hang out with their friends they want to learn and so i think that that is the beauty of the choice because right now i don't have a choice my choice is gone on how my child gets educated i don't i just don't have that choice we have different options and while i'm saying currently that what i feel my student is getting my child is subpar is no ding to anybody their teachers are great they've been reaching out our higley virtual online our higley virtual academy is 10 times robust than what we're doing right now we're doing the remote learning and we're doing it the best we can and they will get through it and what we have created was for short term and we knew that and we whether we transitioned to our higley virtual academy or in person learning they will have that choice and for those who choose the online learning they will get a much more robust interaction curriculum and i have full confidence in it my child doesn't learn online and that's not their their way or their choice and for parents who who want to choose that we have that choice and for our teachers that we can accommodate have that choice we at that point everyone has a voice on what they choose to do and i don't know anyone who will fault anyone for choosing one way or another everyone has their reasons all of us up here have different experiences with this as as do everyone out there and based on our experience can drive how we feel i won't say i haven't lost anyone to this because i have and that doesn't change my choice on the 17th i i don't know about the 17th on being able to turn everything over we need to give these kids in-person learning that want to be there we need to get these teachers in person teaching that want to be there and i think like i said with mr rotovic i think every individual is responsible for participating in everyone else's safety just like the mask mandate that may not it's not necessarily for me but it could be for you i'm protecting you i'm protecting me it's all of our responsibility to help keep everyone else safe and so i think that it's important that we have a choice and anyone can choose not to and i don't fault them for that i don't felt them that at all the governor since this has happened has continued to push children into group settings they have continued to push children into boys and girls clubs they have continued to push children into ymca's our own kids club kids are pushed into there those are group settings they continue to push them into child care centers those are all group settings and you everyone has to be responsible they have to have a plan ymca was talking today about let us share with you how we've been successful so when in-person learning comes hopefully you guys can learn from us but we have continued to send our children into group settings and so i think that for me my choice is to send my own student to in person i think we need to be able to give our parents and our staff a choice and not keep it at a one-sided perspective and not prevent somebody who cannot learn online or who doesn't learn online not to mention the other pieces of that i have i have three people online at the same time in my home [Music] and i try and do most of my work from home because i am a firm believer if no unnecessary contact so if i don't physically have to be at work i'm not at work if i physically have to be there i am but i try and do most of my work from home if i don't need to my husband's working from home i i'm telling you on tuesday i had to log three of us off because the online the live version the streaming no one was going anywhere everything was just spinning and it's not lack of internet i have cox gigablast and so i there is no faster internet i can get but for me at that point the importance sorry is my husband's work when he's on a conference call trying to work um so we all had to kind of get off and let that happen but there's so many logistical issues including the social emotional and we have to recognize that and our kids are expected to be in school and it's not asking teachers to babysit i'm asking teachers to educate and educate at a level that meets our students we have talked about that of providing the education that meets the level of our students and if we can meet the level of our students for those online great then we can meet the students and and those are family choices and i think that we need to look at giving the choices back to our families as well to make that choice including our students or our staff our staff needs to have that choice too and mrs martins have said you know we're willing to work through things the best we can and everyone has to we're all having to make choices we never wanted to in the last six months so i totally hear you and i too like mrs kaler have my melon ballot to to send and and voting this year is really important whether we agree or disagree on how it's been handled it has been thrown in our laps and i agree shame shame on them we all had this waiting for this great press conference to be told nothing it was really frustrating and then to be told we're going to give you benchmarks but you're going to make that decision at a local level um so yes shame on them and if you were going to do that why didn't you do that long ago if and make that option um at the local level and um so i i hear you i hear all of our families i hear the emails i hear both sides and i get it and i don't fault anyone for it i think actually today i received more emails today saying please resume then i did not but if we resume in person and those who are asking for us not to return they don't need to return they can choose the online option for right now if that's meeting their family needs and so for us to say we won't return in person i don't agree with and i think that um we need to look at that to be able to give them the choice i hear everyone who's saying i'm not comfortable then that's okay i appreciate that and and you have the choice but give us the choice to return in person as well thank you mrs reese and this is exactly our emails every day right here we get one and then we get another one and and this is exactly what we see every single day so thank you for bringing it to life on the school board president taylor i just like to say in closing tonight is not a discussion about how i'm voting tonight we have to get additional information in reference to casting a vote so tonight we're not voicing our opinion as far as reference to voting and i think i'd like you um in closing to review over the last page on the timeline so the community members that are watching will understand the timeline that's taking place for us from here on in sure thank you curtis can we bring up that timeline again one more time any other questions or comments while we look at that last slide and we're going to change it from i think august 7th to august 8th for our meeting at 9 00 a.m to go over surveys and benchmarks so moving on for some future agenda items i just had a couple um just again my my board can we're going to talk about a policy for the superintendent for a threshold a dollar amount that came up this evening with our the mahoney group and with that we'll do a informational meeting or an informational item with the mahoney group so we can go over our insurance policies that we have and then i still would like to see at some point if the board would like is a conversation and or informational and or vote on an in-house versus outhouse attorney i guess we just need to have that soon so especially in copen so um those are my thoughts anybody else have anything we we put some dates on um the gifted and talented program towards the end of august the handbook for athletics and eligibility and we're also going to talk about the fees during that as well um textbook adoption process in october and then mr lotson highs big lots course guides we're going to throw you right in there in november so anything else all right and here is again our proposed updated timeline but again we are going to meet august 8th not the 6th at 9 00 a.m and with that i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye good evening you
do we have to meet the 177 school days yes at this point yes yep so unless there's further guidance throughout the school year where we have we've seen this past school year that is the number at this point so um that being so if that doesn't change and we do have snow days that we can't do remote learning then we can see an extension of last day of school but um but beyond that i i pray support version c before we ask for a motion does anyone else have any questions or comments on the three options provided i just want to add that there's no more public comment either nobody's nobody submitted additional public comment a faith has a comment not much of one i just i mean if you want to hear from all of us i agree with um what tony just said i we saw that the governor can change his mind on a dime you could get two days it may not even be two weeks and um i think you need as much time as you can to adjust and i i think option c gives it to you um and we're all in the middle of global warming so there isn't going to be a winter yeah so adam don't worry you're going to be outside in january but i think i i do think i think c is the best option yeah options i mean as i said before without having a final date from the state to receive guidance we as a district need the time to plan the parents the time to plan having those orientation days built into the schedule with third occupancies the teachers get the routine that you know everyone gets to know what the routine's gonna be i think that makes the most sense so that being said um does someone have a motion we literally fill in the blank with the version catherine i'll make the motion um okay i gotta read it off the agenda uh i move that the cheshire board of education approved the revised 2020 2021 school calendar marked as virgin c thank you catherine is there a second adam s i i gotta be honest with you i flip between tabs so i'm not sure if ann put her hand up first or adam so i i saw adam first it's all good with me seconds and uh the motion is move cheshire publication approved revised 20 20 21 school calendar marked as version c is there any discussion from the board refer to this question yeah um do sorry if i missed it but do we have continued flexibility throughout the year based on current executive orders or well that's that's a an important note that things could change again flexibility at any minute and right now is it's been outlined uh we would be able to count those three orientation days uh as our student days it'd be a flexibility but you know again two weeks from now the governor may put the kibosh on it so i would put a caveat that the 8th of september could be a first student day for all and we wouldn't be able to do orient those orientation days we would we are exploring other contingencies for kids if we're not able to do that but there's no question that the days as we've just outlined are in the best interest of our students i just hope to hope that we the governor allows us to keep that when does your when does your the current executive order end beginning of september yes okay and so he may he may re-up that but we don't know at this point well right like for example the 180 day reduction to 177 hasn't been issued through executive order and nor has has the law been changed so technically it's kind of just a declaration hanging out there there's not it's not legally binding yet until he issues another executive order or the you know i guess the legislature could change it but i don't know that that's going to happen sure okay we all just have to be open-minded about it this year flexibility is the key feel like if we're any more flexible we're playing uh yeah okay we're gumby obviously our parents and teachers being very focused around this too uh any public comment on the motion and i was just texted for jeff to please check his email again okay i just had one come in at 907.
i don't know this way to the motion or not but we can see exactly one individual talking about what they would like to do for their child for the first month of school so that's the only email i have on the covet or direct email okay i just got two more can this be a parent vote um at this point i think we need to move forward and you know doesn't meet the needs of all parents um again we've had some that wanted to do it um so it has been out there for several days now and i received a total of less than 10 emails in either direction and we do have to tell our parents at some point like this schedule needs to change the sooner that we do that the better we are and we'll support them in you know with their kids and everything in that process we're one of many districts including southington meridian and wallingford also looking to move their start day after the uh after the labor day weekend thank you barring an additional comment uh read the motion one more time move that the cheshire board of education approved the revised 2020 2021 school calendar marked as version state uh all those in favor aye aye it is unanimous the motion passes thank you uh i as far as a chairperson's update very briefly um i think i communicated this to the board yesterday just through an fy email so uh after governor governor's comments on monday about the hybrid option for for the largest schools high schools um just so folks watching understand i know there's a lot of information out there um it's it's i'm thankful that gary will not put this out there that he's considering that option commissioner uh cordova cordona also seems to agree with it but and i think jeff alluded earlier we have not he has not received official guidance from a state department education that that is the option um been approved so the point is we're hopeful that it will be the option an option so what the governor says until the state of our education actually publishes guidance to the school districts in this case jeff who can't immediately act upon it so what the uh what the board chairs have done through cape uh the connecticut associations of boards yesterday was asked uh that the commissioner get clarity in writing essentially the guideline that is the case please write it down and submit to school districts asap so we could solidify his plans and also ask the cave's legal uh council patrice mccarthy to clarify that as well so we expect to receive something concrete soon but it does not mean that uh superintendent stolen is waiting for an official confirmation you know he actually can't um pull trigger so to speak but i know i know the team is planning on a hybrid option we just need confirmation from the state i know people seen the news the government says this why aren't we doing it that's one of the reasons why so it's not just us it's every school district just you know again following following rules um i don't think i had anything else just a quick update for the board uh earlier this evening we met with the teachers union to set ground rules uh guidelines for negotiations we are starting the next four-year contract negotiation with our local teachers union so we set dates and so forth uh before the meeting which is great we still went forward uh but beyond that i don't have anything else and given that we're going on three hours and 15 minutes i'm gonna end my update there um before i adjourn this guy uh call for a motion to go inside this question do we have uh definitely last-minute communications we want to address or is that pretty much it well i got two emails suggesting like saying they wanted to adopt schedule c so i don't know if those were the ones but they got their way i guess well let's see let's see how things play out uh we'll see how flexible we are at that schedule yeah that being said i do have a motion um i move the cheshire board education i'm sorry i moved that the cheshire board education uh adjourned into executive session to discuss unit negotiation uh with optional um part uh absolutely having uh marlin solano vince and massiana uh attend because they are part of that discussion uh with no action to follow is there a second cat and seconds all those in favor thank you we will be adjourning the executive session to discuss collective bargaining negotiations there will be no action to follow uh so for those of you watching please don't wait around for us to come back because there'll be nothing to discuss uh for those of you that have um tuned in whether through the whole meeting or part through thank you very much on behalf of all of us um we thank you for your time and patience um i know there's a lot of information shared tonight uh superintendent solomon is going to update the faq on the site if you feel that your question has been answered or gotten to um i would say let's give jeff instead a few days to catch up on emails but certainly reach out to any of us i i do want to thank on behalf of all the boards board members i know all of us have been in contact with many folks out there parents teachers other stakeholders we are getting your feedback we are sharing it so thank you for that keep it coming that being said um we're going to executive session and mike let us know when we're able to have that discussion
the hurricane or the tropical storm yeah yeah her power goes out very quickly where she lives yeah i think we might i think some of us might lose power over this [Music] that's odd i think there's a tropical storm at susannah's house that's right here though i have 6 28 so i'm planning on starting in two minutes i see i have a quorum three yep four eight people seven yep there's seven of us wow getting dark bernie yes and vicki just texted me she tried to join the meeting but she got kicked out he did dana's and bicky you did that's what she said something about removed by the host or something i don't i didn't do anything like that but um i'm gonna sign back in i have 6 30 who am i missing bernie just uh heather i just pinged her to see if she's getting on all right we'll give it another minute bernie dana said she tried three times and she's getting uh heather is also having trouble getting in all right i can't i can't control that i know i'm just telling you can they try calling in right now do they have the right meeting id number i'm just gonna tell her i'm gonna start danny danny are you on yeah you're here danny's here yeah okay like to call this meeting to order secretary please call the wall mr chu here mr sismar here mrs gloss mr hong here this is lex here mrs reese here mr simmons here mr winston here president becker and we have a quorum everyone please rise to salute the flag i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united united states of america and to the republic for it it stands one nation 19 health emergency and in order for the board of education to conduct its business this board meeting is being held via video conference and streamed live on youtube on the district website at www.event.org in addition members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the url here i'm sorry if somebody needs to mute themselves please thank you you can join the meeting the url with the meeting id and password you see before you on the screen upon joining the meeting your participation will be muted to ensure there is no disruption to the business being conducted by the board of education the new jersey open public meeting law was enacted to ensure the right of the public to have advanced notice of until we attend the meetings of public bodies of which any business affected their interest is discussed in accordance with provisions of the sac the east brunswick board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be published at the board of education offices written notice is also provided to the sentinel of the newark star ledger of the home news tribune and the municipal clerk of east brentwood all board of education meetings with the exception of executive session discussions on videotape for later broadcasts and individuals who speak at the board meetings should be aware of these videotaping rules good evening dr valesky do you have a superintendence report for us no president becker i do not my report basically was the communication i sent to the community yesterday at 4 30 okay thank you moving on to for the good of the cause of the public members of the public may provide comment at this meeting through zoom by entering the url you see on the screen before you and then entering the meeting id and password in order to be recognized use the chat feature select the zoom meeting host then enter and send your name to the host you will be recognized to speak when your name is called and individuals will be invited to speak in the order in which we have received your request again somebody needs to mute themselves thank you the board of education recognizes the value of public comment on educational issues and the importance of allowing members of the public to express themselves on school matters of community interest to protect the privacy of all students and staff concerns regarding individual students and staff members should generally be addressed by a first meeting with the appropriate administrative staff all participants will be limited to three minutes duration is there anyone wishing to speak to the board tonight we have no one in the queue we have no one in the queue no okay seeing none i will close the public portion moving on to our human resources agenda can i please have a motion for item 1 personnel actions mark moved by mark click secondly is there any discussion this is a roll call vote will the secretary please call the roll this is true yeah mr sismar mrs wass yes mr hong yes this is lex mrs reese yes mr simmons mr winston yes president becker yes motion carries i don't think we have any committee reports tonight any uh board members have anything for the good of the cause for the bot the board okay seeing none we do have a need to go into closed session whereas the board of education must discuss matters which are not appropriate for discussion in a public meeting the board of education intends to discuss matters as follows those items on tonight's agenda whereas the late of the closed session is estimated to be 90 minutes after which the public meeting of the board shall reconvene and action will not be taken can i please have a motion to go into closed session thank you for joining us tonight be safe stay well board members please log out and log into closed session you
to order this special meeting of the governing board of the cave creek unified school district number 93 today's monday august 3rd 2020 is 502 pm um roll call we have all five members of the governing board present item 1.3 formal adoption of the agenda i would like to make a motion that we amend the agenda to go um to move item 2.1 after item 3.5 so we would do after the pledge three one three two three three three four three five and then two point one so that is my motion second um we have a motion in a second to approve uh as amended remember brown aye busby aye hatcher remember hatcher did you vote on the agenda sorry i was muted i okay um i'm an i member rich aye you would join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america america and to the republic and one nation [Music] 3.1 approval a search agreement between the district and the arizona school board association presented by myself and mr hyland i have to scroll you see the governing board we're going to review discuss and may consider approval of the search agreement between the district and asba we're in the search for new superintendent um we've got exhibits a and b so we're going to discuss all that um the discussion is going to give their fill in the blanks for timelines that we're going to need to do if approved agreement will be put in final form for me to sign and the first five pages have been approved by the board's attorney so mr hyland i know you wanted to have some discussion before a motion just because of the nature of the items so if you'd like to take over please yes ma'am thank you and good afternoon everyone i hope you're doing well it doesn't seem like we've been that far removed since we last had a chance to talk i hope you find this an exciting opportunity because of obviously the internet is looking for the superintendent but there's a lot of work ahead of us this first agenda item provides for you to uh have a review of the search agreement itself as your president mentioned the document particularly the first five or six pages the boilerplate has all been reviewed by your attorney and approved but with that i'd like to point out a couple of things on please do stop me at any time that um you need to for questions uh first off this disappointment uh is uh simply a matter of uh allowing us to help you it does not provide any opportunity for us to wreck it to be a representative for you we are not a member of the district and so we do the work that we're uh asked to do and we do that with your blessing and privilege the term of the agreement has not been established yet because well you haven't approved the document but if you approve the document then the term of the agreement will begin today and generally what i put in will be the last day of the fiscal year which would be june uh 30th 2021 that would be as far as it would go obviously our intent would be it would uh end sooner than that um the district may terminate this agreement you may terminate it for cause or you may terminate it for purposes that are not based on cause cause would be uh breaking the agreement in some term for instance confidentiality or open meeting law violations on our part and we can do the same on the second page there's a limit of authority again i somewhat address that but we don't have any authority other than to fulfill your needs uh changes to the agreement may occur along the way and if we agree together that something in the agreement needs to change we'll write that up and we'll um make it part of an amendment to the agreement also um asb is not title entitled any workers comp i know that's always a potential concern when you have a vendor working for you we have our own workers comp there'd be no reason for us to ask to use your workers comp in this process the outside services we may use uh that we don't have it's item 13 i want to verify that you understand the only outside service that we plan on using at this point is universal background checks they would do a final criminal background check and such on finalists for us and indemnification simply and we've never had to go to this which simply means that we're going to hold you harmless and you're going to hold us harmless to the extent that the law permits we've never had to use indemnification during this process um on page three this represents the complete agreement uh there's nothing more to it than what you've been presented uh the laws and venues that apply here the state of arizona maricopa county and asb may not nor will we assign any aspect of this to another group for instance there are other search agents we're not going to farm this out it's going to be our search mediation if something does occur where we come to a disagreement uh the terms of the agreement established that we will mediate again in the last seven years that i've been involved in this we've never had a case for mediation on page four confidentiality there's a number of aspects of confidentiality that will be maintained uh one is obviously has to do with open meeting law has to do with going into executive session also there are trade secrets and there are things that we utilize that are our intellectual property that cannot be passed on there's ever any question about that the district needs to ask me in terms of a particular item or a thought that you'd like to pass on and i'll tell you if it's our intellectual property and we may obtain confidentiality with it conflict of interest there is a potential for some day in the next three years for someone from asba or someone from your school district governing board uh to work for the other party in which case there is a degree of conflict of interest that occurs and we would have to have a discussion related to that at the time again that's one of those things that's never occurred e-verification we take care of ours and you take care of yours um and if you have any questions about your e-verification that needs to go to your hr director of what your process is and how you address that process on the last page of the boilerplate you've got non-discrimination obviously you are a right-wing right-to-work state there's no union involved in that in a right-to-work state you also when you make decisions you do not discriminate against race creed color religion sex national origin or disabilities that's a quick review of the first five pages i know you've had this document possibly you have questions that you'd like to ask so i'll stop there for the moment before we continue answering questions that you might have steve on page two for fiscal agent um other than processing billing what financial duties would you all be doing that's it just processing okay thank you [Music] any other questions okay let's keep going okay thank you all right uh if you would turn to page six that's the exhibit scope of work uh this is our boilerplate also this is what we call a a comprehensive search uh scope of work uh there's 16 items i'm not going to read them all but i do want to mention a couple of things to you because a couple of things are optional um item three in particular conduct uh conduct an online community survey that's the e-survey we've talked before we have a chance to talk about that on the future agenda item this evening but that is certainly something that uh the board either decides to do or not to do uh item seven's important answering inquiries uh corresponding with applicants that needs to remain with with us and and the reason for that is as board members in particular you don't want to get into conversations with potential uh candidates or potential applicants that can be seen as an unfair business practice and it could be seen as somebody receiving information related to the search related to the board or the board's thoughts or even a particular board member's thoughts that would give them a unfair advantage in a particular situation whether it was unfair or not it could still be challenged so one of the things that is important is that we become your your conduit between the candidates and any applicants and the process number 10 conducting community meeting uh that again is something we'll talk about uh in a little bit but there is an opportunity to do that now this as i mentioned at the last the last time we met the community meeting may take a different form depending on where we are with the current health conditions in the state uh in the nation so we'll have to judge that as we get to it but we'll certainly have come more conversation about that later this evening uh media inquiries number 15 again we think it's best if the media inquiries come to me the reason being again so you don't get back to an accord into a corner in regards to a comment you've made or something that could be misconstrued by the media or the public and in projecting confidentiality i mentioned that earlier we'll be talking about that as we go through the process that's our basic scope of work um we represent you we will lead you through this whole process but as i've mentioned at the first meeting you will answer the questions you'll make the decisions we will do the work uh duties of the cape creek provider provide me with all the information i need to make this uh successful search um being president at the meetings is so important if you miss a meeting and miss out on something that is an aspect of let's say the screening process um that catapults into the next meeting the next meeting and you're never quite up to speed so do try i know there's instances where somebody might not be able to illness other issues but try to be uh president each meeting the predicting protecting the confidentially confidentiality item for again just as important for the board um the referring of communications item five i've mentioned and then posting those search meetings that's up to your administrative assistant to ensure that all these meetings are posted appropriately and they're not challenged and then item eight determining the extent of the community involvement again i mentioned that more than once already item nine work directly with the board's attorney when it comes time to develop a contract and negotiate that contract with the board again item 11 i9 forms that's up to your h hr department and in adhering this is maybe as important as anything else we have on this document and that is adhering to all conditions of the agency handbook it's prepared by the office of the attorney general related to arizona open meeting law and i will tell you i um because part of my part of my responsibilities is open meeting law when it comes to policy and such and helping districts with that i am a real stickler when it comes to that so um that is the scope of work for both parties that has been presented uh i'll stand for any questions that you might have so any questions on the exhibit a okay let's go on to exhibit b exhibit b is the timeline now this is a fluid document at this point this agenda item gives you a chance to approve this document but we're going to need to approve it without the timeline because the timeline is something we'll develop in a later uh agenda item today 3.4 i believe it is but what we'll do is i want to go through this and just to kind of explain what the timeline is how it works again it's fluid because what we decide today may not be what looks good a month from now or a month and a half from now for different reasons we may have to move something but we want to make sure that we've got a basic plan and the basic plan if you approve the e-survey um about a second header down we'll have an opening date we'll have a closing date we'll want to make that at least two to three weeks at least two weekends minimum because we want to give staff an opportunity to end community an opportunity to fill this out and then we'll need to report that back later on we need to talk about when that report's going to be because that information needs to come to the board an open board meeting we believe then and also the report needs to be posted on your website so everybody can see it um if you have distr if you have a community meeting or any other meetings we'll need to decide what timing those are going to when they're going to take place planning meetings well we're doing that tonight and the search agreement we're addressing that tonight so those that last half of that first page are things that we're already in the process of doing working with your attorney will be at your determination on the second page page nine community and staff notices i know that i've already talked to your administrative assistant julia and she already has some things in place if the board decides to go out with an e-survey and other things she will be able to communicate with your community one of the most important aspects of the calendar that we'll talk about later is the date of the search when it opens and when it closes again it's always good to have this open at least three weeks and three weekends is excellent uh for the process because the people that are going to be applying already have jobs and we want to make sure that they have time on weekends to get the process the application uh taken care of it's a very lengthy application we'll talk about it in another agenda item but it's not something a person can sit down and do in 30 minutes it takes quite a bit of work to not only fulfill the obligation of what they need to write on the on the application but also all the documents that they need to turn in uh applicant screening applicant screening is when you have an opportunity to look at the applicants so that comes obviously after the search closes the time difference between the time the search closes and the screen usually is about 10 days can be a little longer it's hard to make it shorter because there's a quite a bit of work that i need to do in the meantime because as i mentioned earlier we'll have universal do the background checks for criminal cert in all searches and such but i will be doing other background checks on my own calling references talking to people uh looking these folks up that apply and find out who they are what they've been doing where they've been see if there's anything i need to report back to the board that may be a concern once we do that you'll identify uh people you want to interview that comes under the first round of interviews uh something important to remember is when you choose who the first round interviews are going to be with we do not announce those names we don't announce those names because uh two reasons first off if we put it that early in the process you will deter some people from applying because they already have jobs in different districts in many instances and unless they're finalists they really don't want it to be known that they're out there looking for another job and the attorney general has ruled in the past that you only have to provide names to the public once you determine who the finalists are and then we have our finalists meeting and along with that comes the community meeting if you choose to do that and then the board and then page 10 obviously has to do their work with the uh attorney and to come up with a contract to name the superintendent and then you have a date due somewhere at this point around the first monday in january but that's to be determined by contract and then there is a post hire uh training that you can receive from asba that you would work with our trainers on and we just requested that's done within six months of the time the person takes their position as the new superintendent so we don't have that is a review of the timeline we actually have another agenda item where we will talk about the timeline plug in pertinent dates when the board is going to need to have meetings and be available to do the screening do the interviews community meetings and any other activity that you so choose to be appropriate do you have any questions about the purpose or the content of the timeline i do uh in the e-survey are those questions formatted such that the person can only respond once yeah i've had that question many times and i can't tell you that there's a way to get around the system but people get around systems we've never seen a case where um we have had any concern that somebody has gone in and filled out multiple applications i'm not going to tell you it's impossible to do okay thank you any other questions about exhibit b the timeline okay let's go to exhibit c exhibit c is simply the compensation schedule and we reviewed that uh briefly at the last meeting uh it is 9 400 inclusive of all expenses that we incur the only thing that may be an addition is if you had an additional meeting and i i know there was question about what that means at the last meeting that we had and i will tell you but if i get a phone call that you'd like me to be involved in a 15-minute conversation on a forum phone at a board meeting for one purpose or another that's not a meeting a meeting is when i physically have to be present have the work the type of work i have completed for this evening ready and have those types of discussions we're not talking about a all of a sudden i'm needed for 15 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour so that is the completion now of the entire agreement what this agenda item does is gives you the board an opportunity to discuss it and then uh approve if you so choose the agreement and give authority to your um word president to sign the agreement on behalf of the governing board madam president okay so the recommendation is that the governing board approve asba search agreement as the board search agent for a new district superintendent i have a motion i moved second rich who is the motion i'm sorry i was looking down hatcher discussion um i do have a question up in the contract portion on number six it says contractor standards aspa represents warrants that the scope of work shall meet or exceed industry standards and that all work shall be done in the manner of a professional advisor who provides such services we never had the opportunity to see any other presentations what other competing type of entities can present so how are we supposed to be able to say yes in fact work that is being presented to us meets or exceeds industry standards that's the guarantee asba is giving us uh well we can't but for us to discuss we already agreed we discussed last meeting we cannot talk about the fact that we didn't have well no i have a question about what's in the contract i'm trying to get an understanding here this is a contract that i'm being asked to vote on now it's saying that asba is going to meet or exceed how are we supposed to know that they're meeting or exceeding we don't have anything to compare it to what you would expect the industry standards to be well what do we expect the industry standards to be steve do you have a comment on industry standards i think the industry standards that we would present you would be in part what you see in the scope of work that we're going to [Music] do things like we're going to maintain the confidentiality we're going to make sure that we represent you uh as you present yourselves to us uh responding to the questions and directions that you provide us we're going to ensure that the communication we have that goes out to staff media whoever asks those questions stakeholders i get questions from that fairly represents the district we're going to represent ourselves to the candidates in the same fashion in a professional manner that does not jeopardize any aspect of what the district stands for or does we're going to ensure that we fulfill all the obligations of the scope of work in terms of making sure that when we say we're going to advertise uh we're going to absolutely do that we're going to be available we're going to make sure that those things are done any information we provide you for instance later on you're going to be provided with information related to the salary we're going to that would be an average of what the districts like yours are paying we're gonna do that in a fair and appropriate fashion we're gonna do it based on data we're not gonna uh just give you numbers so in in brief that's what we're gonna do we're going to follow your direction we're going to follow our own scope of work we're going to follow the guidelines presented in the agreement and we're going to make sure that we represent ourselves to your community and all applicants in a fair and appropriate professional manner i i appreciate everything that you've said and thank you i'm still trying struggling here with the piece that says you will meet or exceed how do we know you're exceeding industry standards all you've told us is this is what your scope of work is you haven't we don't have anything to tell us what the industry standard is the industry standards i think based on the things that i mentioned and how would you judge that uh you'll judge you'll judge our work and my work uh every time we get together um if if we're not meeting your standard and part of that is really where you think we should be as a as a board um you're going to tell me and you're going to tell uh asp either want to continue with us or as i mentioned class meeting whether i'm doing the job for you or not so in part that's going to be your evaluation of us there is no quote checklist of things more greater than what i mentioned but you determine whether we're doing the job um thank you president hill i think maybe i would like to make a motion then to table this agenda item 3.1 at this time second okay we have a motion to table remember brown uh there is uh no you can't yes you have to if you're motioning to table then we have to take a motion a table and vote on it for our policy there's no vote required for that yes there is i'm looking at our board policy right now we have to vote to table it one person can't table it we have to vote to table our our policy is very specific policy b e d d dash e a vote required is a majority to table it that's in rules under b one on eight b e d d dash e to table you don't debate it you don't amend it but you do have to require a majority vote um i i don't know what you're looking at but that's not how i mean that's not how our policy is it absolutely is under emotion one there's a motion and a table indefinite or definite neither are debatable neither are amendable but both require a majority vote no no no you cannot have one person table in a minute you cannot do that scroll down to work look down where it says table and go across no debatable no amendable no vote required yes it does it says majority i am looking at it right here no you're not you're incorrect you're not reading across the line properly yes i am you cannot table emotion without a vote you cannot do that independently it has to be voted upon the the all it says is table every time we have tabled anything in this district even recently we tabled an item several a month or so ago you have to vote to table the motion in one person cannot table a motion it cannot be done are these two different policies you [Music] you cannot table something independently we have to vote upon it you no no yes we do i'm not incorrect mr hyland have you ever dealt with a table before in any meeting can you help me with this i don't think yeah he can give an opinion he doesn't have the authority at this he can give me an opinion do you want me to call dr burdick or our lawyer uh if we would table this and no we are not tabling it without a vote a reply from from our board attorney that would be that would work okay i'm calling for the question i am going to call for the question because what you're doing is inappropriate i'm calling for the question actually um i'm sorry we need to we need to place this on hold for a minute everyone uses not their video i'll be [Music] back our attorney says that to table an item we have to take a vote are you wanting to take a vote on tabling the item yes okay we cannot discuss it the most that we have to table and then based on that we'll move forward the motion is the table and i would also like her opinion in writing sent the email to all the board members okay we have to have a motion to table we have a second to table the vote a vote i is to table a vote no is to not table remember brown i busby hi hatcher no hill is a no rich no okay we're going to continue our discussion do we have anything else to discuss can i make a comment sure um regardless of what wherever someone stands on this okay but janet it can only be about the item we're talking about are you talking about what i i have been talked down i am keeping to you because we have to obey open meeting law does this i understand that all i'm asking is for a conduct i'm making a a a a request for how we conduct ourselves in this meeting okay and if that's inappropriate i'm sorry but you know there is no reason for people to get angry and have uh attitudes pop toward one another we're here for the greater good of this school district and to move forward to do a thorough search to find a superintendent getting getting heated tempers and and attitudes and getting nasty with other people serves nothing to move us forward so all i'm asking is that that gets put aside and we conduct ourselves in a manner appropriate for the task at hand are you asking a member brown be sanctioned somehow no i'm just making a comment for all parties involved here it would be nice okay then we need to do that moving forward do we have any other discussion or questions about item 3.1 steve is this a fairly standard uh agreement for the search for superintendent across the industry well it is i can't tell you that it's standard across the industry in all uh forms but it is pretty standard yes and it is definitely standard for us um how we award this other contractors may give you a little different format but it won't be substantially different is this the contract oh sorry is this basically the same con contract that you use with other districts that use your services yes thank you you're welcome um steve you had mentioned under scope of work these items that are all listed these 16.
order the oswego community unit school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman yeah mrs doyle here mrs cloner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan here mrs moyer mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of allegiance one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice good evening i would like to welcome everyone who is personally in attendance at tonight's school board meeting as was stated on the board agenda this meeting is open to the public in accordance with phase 4 guidance issued by the illinois department of public health and the illinois state board of education we are all social distancing as per the guidance and all individuals are required to wear a face covering at all times while in the school building we will be accommodating those who can't wear a mask by live streaming this meeting at www.sd308.org also if anyone would like to make a public comment to the board but can't do so in person because of the mask requirement you may always submit a comment in writing ahead of the meeting and your comment will be read during the public comments section of the meeting the directions to submit a written public comment are listed at the top of the meeting agenda we certainly recognize that wearing a face mask for long periods of time is inconvenient and sometimes uncomfortable however it does provide the best known protection against giving the virus to another person and it will be required of all individuals during this meeting if anyone needs a break from wearing a mask during the meeting please feel free to go outside for a break and take your mask off as you continue to remain six feet apart from others just put your mask back on before re-entering the building please understand that we will be monitoring the building and will be asking anyone without a mask to put one on or to leave the building we appreciate everyone's understanding and willingness to abide by these expectations for our collective safety and health thank you okay item 4.1 for public comment on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card or submitted your comment by email to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that comments are limited to three minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters including names or specific job titles or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow up to your questions or concerns will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card to ensure that all topics get addressed we will hear four comments per topic this evening and prioritize in-person public comment all other comments via email will be added into the minutes as we've done in previous meetings thank you michael raymond hello you guys hear me good enough i just want to thank you for inviting me here today and also for allowing me to speak i really appreciate the opportunity um as you can tell i have my little guy here today he was to be starting hopefully starting kindergarten i guess i'm a little distressed that uh for some reason if you're a protester or a rioter you're good to go but if you want to go to church or school you got to worry about coving and it's just driving me nuts i don't know you know i don't have any other children so he's my one and only he needs to be in school every kid needs to be in school there's no doubt in my mind um i don't know what you all are thinking um i just get the email that says you know what we're deciding not to do it after you send an email telling us to go buy all these supplies which we did and then it's well maybe we're not going to have school in person school i guess my idea would be i'm sure there are teachers that don't feel safe i'm sure there are parents that don't want to send their kids because they're worried about the virus let them remote learn i know there's teachers that want to teach and i know there's parents that want to send their kids why can't they be allowed to do it and that's really all i've got to say thank you thank you carrie samar good evening my name is carrie somar oea elementary advisor i am delivering the statement on behalf of the oswego education association no one wants to be back in the classroom more than teachers but the conditions must allow for a safe return the oea supports the recommendation of the superintendent and recommends to the board of education that the 2020-21 school year begin with remote learning that includes a transition plan to in-person learning when conditions allow teachers look forward to beginning work with the district to implement a remote learning program that meets the academic and social emotional needs of students create a transition plan that is in accordance with state and national guidance and return students to the classroom as soon as it is safe for students staff and the community thank you for your time brad boyer good evening i'm brad boyer i just wanted to start out with a quote from the american academy of pediatrics who a month ago recommended that all schools return to normal as soon as possible in the fall they said the importance of in-person learning is well documented and there's already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of the school closures in the spring of 2020.
your comment to us first jamie clark inclusion is not about bringing people into what already exists it is about making a new space a better space for everyone educators superintendent and school board officials who have been voted in by their constituents i jamie clark mother to blake and parker clark stand here before you today with the hopes and dreams that school district 301 will rise to meet our students where they're at specifically by opening a blended kindergarten classroom something that does not currently exist in our district therefore my son is being sent to an environment 60 minutes away a foreign environment for him a self-contained special ed classroom that offers less of the things that my son needs for his social disorder autism therefore i require district 301 to do better you see we live in a highly ranked district for a neurotypical developing student but if you check greatschools.org you will see that we are failing our special education population evidenced by the reviews themselves being less than favorable this district makes this makes our district less desirable for parents and children with special needs if you don't know this i encourage you to visit greatschools.org and read the reviews for yourself and then i ask you is that really the reputation that we want or that we are willing to settle with does this already vulnerable group have to continue to be invisible when all they want is to be seen heard and accepted like everybody else there are many children with special needs in our district children's with with ieps and 504 accommodations and greatschools.org shows us that we aren't making the grade we demand our teachers to differentiate their learning and dismantle the idea of one size fits all but as a district we too must consider why this population is not closing the achievement gap the system is broken and we need systematic change not just for my son blake but for all the families who struggle to find adequate placement for their children after speaking at the school board meeting last two weeks ago about inclusion i can't begin to tell you the countless parents and teachers who reach out to me expressing their support the outpouring of love for this cause did not just come from special needs parents but also parents of neurotypical children and teachers that thanked me for speaking out i was thankful and presently surprised by the calls from the parents in blake's blended preschool classroom who consider themselves friends of my son they wanted to see him back in school with them next year i can't express the joy that brought to me because i know how sweet my little boy is and to see other children appreciate and understand his differences is what education is all about one of the biggest reasons for selecting to have a blended early education classroom program is to integrate children before they see differences and to offer peer modeling for children who need it these children then create strong bonds and many of the children in the self-contained classroom are sent away from their home school their peers the familiar faces and the teachers their safe place to start kindergarten in their community the idea of being buffed away from all that a child knows seems counterproductive to me when we are currently in a model that helps them to flourish versus the possibility of regression they need their typical peers to include them and to play with them at recess and in the classroom because they struggle with speech and social skills school is a number one place to improve social skills especially when you consider my son blake and those like him spend 24 hours a week outside of school on additional therapy because we know that early intervention is key but these are one-on-one hours and so school is the only outlet to have consistent peer interaction my son is not the only one who wins with inclusion everyone wins with inclusion this is how students learn to be empathetic and compassionate to children that are different than themselves inclusion takes more than students reading it in a book they see by learning they see by experiencing they learn when they actually get the opportunity to put it in action blake longs to be included and the biggest mistake would be to not include a child because all you see is a disability and not the holistic child and what he is actually able to do when given the opportunity and support to do so and by not doing so you limit his potential as a human i think about the countless family that will be coming into our community in the upcoming years we need to stop treating our district like a farming town and start realizing that they are building hundreds of new homes in our community our neighborhood alone which houses country trails is slated for 925 houses this is 400 more homes than we currently have in our community which means we'll be countless new kids coming over the next few years that is roughly 13 million in tax dollars every year from our neighborhood alone we know our four elementary schools are already bursting at the seams or we'd have a classroom in our district for these children and with the prevalence of autism being one in 54 as the latest cdc statistics that were published on march 27th of this year i should not have to stand in front of you today imploring the district to create a classroom that supports my son's needs or to give him a fighting chance in a gen ed classroom with support nor should i have to be the one talking about the importance of inclusion we are all stakeholders in district 301 but this kind of advocacy should be coming from you the educators and the decision makers yet every single day another mom calls me in our district asking me to be the voice for her child as i stand before you today fighting for mine i knew that there would be a day when i would need to realize that what i'm advocating advocating for is not just mere accommodations but instead i'm advocating for someone's basic human rights today that advocacy is for blake clark and those like him who deserve to be included and the district doesn't have anything that fits his true needs because we have only been given one option an option that takes away more opportunities from him than what he currently has now and so i will say it again inclusion is not bringing people into what already exists it is making a new space a better space for everyone today i stand with blake clark and i hope the district is wise enough to make some thank change jamie uh next mary jane battaglia do you want to say something go ahead mary jane and anthony i'll say this i think it's disgraceful how a little boy is being evicted from school where he should be and it's breaking our hearts and it's putting so much stress on our family should all be ashamed of yourselves that's what i have to say anthony battaglia we lived here about 30 32 years now started in saint charles illinois brought our family here look for places that we can move our family for better housing for a safer community for our children to learn better and to be safer recently we moved into highland woods uh my daughter also moved out of chicago area came all the way here to highland woods to grow a family start a family she started a family here we pay an exorbitant amount of taxes that 87 go to schooling and i am totally disappointed that we are lacking any education that saint charles uh lomborg or even huntley which is another community further west than here has and that's for children with with extra needs so i also back my daughter and state that you know if you want people to move in here if you want this development to happen i see a lot of new developments coming in i see a lot of new builders coming in here should we tell them that there's no education for children with needs with special needs and see how many will move in here you need to your your educators you need to build a formation or foundation for children to be able to grow in and to learn in and we do not have that at this point and i'm sorry to say i'm disappointed and schleicher good evening everyone my name is jen schleicher and i'm a parent at country trails currently about 1 in 20 children have some kind of disability that gives 19 kids the daily opportunity to learn about diversity collaboration and inclusion the fact that this district and the administrators in charge are not jumping at this opportunity completely blows my mind if you are a parent of a kid without special needs they are missing out to why is it that a child with disabilities spends hours every day being taught how to interact with others but we don't spend time teaching those without disabilities how to interact with them people fear the unknown and the unfamiliar fear leads to prejudice mistreatment inequality and bullying this is not my opinion this is a fact and the fact that i am forced to stand here and point out the injustice is being carried out onto many of our community's special needs children disgusts me and to those in this room and listening remotely it should discuss you too anyone who sits back while knowing that this is happening should be ashamed and i encourage the board to dig much deeper into this because it is happening to many families in our district if you want to learn a new language what's the best way to do it to become truly fluent you have to immerse yourself in it right how is inclusion any different kids listen to social stories about diversity in school about inclusion and bullying but that is much different than actually living it every day adults like everyone in this room have to take online training and seminars at their jobs to talk about the importance of diversity and acceptance some still don't get it maybe it's because they were never exposed to it growing up everyone right now do me a favor close your eyes for a second imagine a situation where a student was being sent to a different school away from his friends away from their family and community against the parents wishes because they were different imagine the parents fighting for their child to be given the opportunity to play with their friends develop relationships and just fit in imagine the parents and child being given reasons like the other school is more equipped for your situation or we just think they're better off as special needs parents we are all told that we are part of a team and part of the decision but it is honestly never felt like it now imagine that the reason the family was given was their skin color or sexual orientation or gender raise your hand if this would outrage you i really thought that we were past this i thought this was a fight that was already won neurodiversity is no different than any of the other diversity covered on the daily news to exclude many of these children in the district because their brain works a little different than yours is completely unacceptable inclusion is a right not a privilege for a select few we will know that inclusive education has really become embedded in our culture when the term is obsolete thank you next week grab it [Music] good evening my name is kiera gravitt and i'm a special education teacher at prairie view and i'm also the vice president of our teachers union i'm speaking to you tonight about special education which is one of our most vulnerable population i ask you to please look at all aspects when deciding what the plan is as we head back into school such as meeting iep minutes effectively which was very difficult during remote learning as well as student placement myself and others be very happy to sit down with you and have a discussion so we can work collaboratively to come to a best outcome for these students i hope to hear from you all thank you so much dave chapman good evening district 301 board of education members my name is dave chapman and i'm an eighth grade social studies teacher and president of the teachers union thank you for all your time i'm preparing to reopen schools in a few weeks i know this is a difficult and challenging time for everyone involved the union has been discussing with the administration return to school plans some of which i'm sure will be shared with you tonight the union continues to reiterate that safety should be a driving factor in decisions made we have a great and hard-working educators in this district who have and will continue to meet the needs of their students no matter the platform please feel free to reach out to me with any questions about returning to school to better understand the perspective of our educators thank you for your time i will receive some public comment video this time we'll read those you want to start laura all right um two people text me that they can't hear anybody or so we haven't seen yet just the people up front they said they couldn't hear too so hopefully we'll do our best all right okay um will there be any orientation to acclimate students so they know what to expect when school starts on august 31st regardless how they return to school thank you stacy and bob miramamba sorry hello pam i am sure this someone has commented on this but i was wondering if the board had considered putting kindergarten and first graders as a priority to be in person and spread out in the building hire more teachers if they decide to go all remote i am concerned that my kindergartner will not learn to read and write as well as at home and maybe make him behind for the rest of his school career thank you for your time and good luck despina caras dear 301 board members my name is kelsey hendry and i have been teaching first grade in this district since 2014.
well good afternoon everyone i would like to call this meeting of the darkest school committee to order for monday august 3rd 2020 roll call please miss gentler chris oliver here shannon jenkins here kathleen admiral here mary wait neutered mary thank you here he is here john nunes yeah thank you miss cancer uh once again i'd like to welcome you all to the august 3rd meeting of the dartmouth school committee i would like to remind everyone that per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law chapter 38 section 20 the public will not be allowed to physically access this school committee meeting the meeting will be conducted remotely members of the public can access this meeting via live stream at www.youtube.com forward slash dhs tv media in addition the event will be re-broadcast on dc tv channels 9 and 18 on the following days wednesday and thursday at 5 pm friday at 6 a.m saturday at 8 a.m and sunday at 2 p.m school committee reserves right to implement additional remote participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable that being said uh we have allotted a few minutes on tonight's agenda uh for public comment uh just a reminder that anything uh that you wish to comment on must be related to tonight's agenda and for those of you uh who do not know who do not know the routine i simply uh if there's any that were sent ahead of time we can uh miss gentler can read those now or i'm going to give you our email address and you're more than welcome to send them over to her and we'll revisit this following the meeting so any public comments can be uh emailed to our recording secretary kathleen guenther at dartmouthschools.org once again kathleen genther that's k-a-t-h at garlic schools dot org so i'll turn it over to you ms ganther do you have any uh public comments as of uh no i do i have four perfect and they're all and they're all relating to agenda items correct uh correct so uh we have one here from kathleen baldwin um she writes to us the following questions out of the three million dollars from the care out of the three million dollars from the cares act how much was awarded to the schools how is it being distributed among school costs transportation ppe sanitizing efforts cleaning supplies materials for students and homes her second question is have any staff been cut teachers or teachers assistants her third have any school buildings been tested or fitted for ventilation systems i know that quinn in the high school has had mold issues in the past with some air conditioners provided in specific locations this however doesn't provide a collective view of the air quality within all of the schools number four please outline all specifics of the hybrid plan rotation of days am and pm sessions number five specifics on considerations for other than classroom teachers related services many related service providers ots pts speech therapists apes go to more than one building what options are available to address this reality related service providers also work with students in different classroom and grade levels at the same time specific specifics on how to address this question mark how do related service providers provide inclusion services question mark mark specifics question mark excuse me number six what resources money and supplies are being provided to students with the necessary materials needed to complete purposeful effective therapy number seven what is the timeline for the final plan to be shared with all stakeholders number eight during the ten day delay of school starting what is the plan for educators and all staff to do will teachers be given time to plan their lessons therapy and set up the electronic needs number nine how will we handle substitutes and sick days if a teacher therapist is out sick or for a personal professional day how will parents be informed therapists are not provided substitutes but will need someone to notify parents etc especially if it is remote respectfully submitted kathleen baldwin our second public comment uh inquiry comes from joanne avila and she writes will co will public comments be allowed at this meeting uh with to which i did respond that yes it would be and has been since meetings were held remotely uh number two were other buildings outside the school departments controlled considered i.e vacant buildings the new library southworth library question mark number three what happens to the children who see specialists for reading and math number four have you considered the financial impact on two-income families by doing the hybrid model and number five with sixty percent of parents wanting their kids back to ins in person learning why are you not planning for that amount of kids and getting an accurate number to work with for your planning uh the third public comment that has been received so far today who is i'm sorry who was that from kate the the last one i read was from joanne avila thank you this comes from maria souza and she writes please stop discussing and rehashing our name and logo the community strongly supports it this is well known please focus on reopening schools and educating our children there is a pandemic going on and kids haven't been in school in months less divisive politics and more education please the last one that i had received so far this afternoon comes from jose fernandez please ensure your focus is solely on children returning to school and not political agendas of individual members the community supports our school name and logo any committee established that may discuss the name and logo should be around its education and history and no attempts of changing it and erasing native american history we cherish native american history and want to preserve and continue to honor their contributions to our town's history that is what i have received so far great thank you so much miss gunther we appreciate that and i'm sure that some of those questions especially around mrs baldwin's uh concerns will be brought up uh during the uh dr gifford's reopening presentation as well as maybe some of the other ones we'll be discussing however as uh just as a reminder during public comment uh we do uh allow public comment we listen to the public comment uh we do not respond directly to um this has been past practice for as long as i can remember now we do not respond directly to public comment however if it does come up um during the time of the meeting at certain point that's one thing um so that being said i will uh is it possible for uh miss granto to uh forward those emails i'm doing that right now so we have them for our records i am doing that right now thank you kate much appreciated i apologize mr chairman thank you uh miss gentler thank you mr nunes no worries at all at this time the chair will entertain a motion to approve the right mr oliver excuse me i've had my hand up for a while i you know what the problem is i i can only see myself i'm not seeing anyone else right so if i may we received several emails earlier late last week where the people writing the emails explicitly asked that those emails be entered into public comment um specifically brooke worley sent an email i know david aaron sent an email and those emails said i would like these entered as public comment for the meeting so we're gonna accept emails that come today but not friday we need to clearly communicate that to people you can only send public comment on monday um or if they want it to be public comment it has to be noted but we can't sort of set up an arbitrary deadline and say we'll take things today but not things from friday that's fine uh kate do you happen to have those specifically um i do in front of you and i i'm more than happy to listen to those um overwhelming though overwhelmingly though we've gotten 150 plus emails at least my selfish chair so i don't often get the opportunity to see the details in all of them so you're more than welcome to read those i have no problem with that okay i also have a another one i just received from rene vieira to just give me a moment and i believe this question is from mr rotty if you could stop spotlighting me so i keep so i don't keep losing my gallery view um i would appreciate that i know i'm sure it makes for better tv um but i'm continuously having to go back to my gallery view when i'm only seeing myself so that would be appreciated if you could just leave it on gallery view for me uh mr aaron's rights at the july 6 meeting committee member jenkins asked if the second mas c resolution regarding anti-racism could be postponed until the next meeting so all members including ms waite would be able to vote dr jenkins also suggested the administration provide a presentation highlighting some of the ways the district is teaching about race and diversity superintendent gifford stated the administration would prepare something i'm sorry i think that was already read at a different is that the email that you were referring to um shannon yes but i believe he also asked if the resolution will be taken up and the reason why i highlight that is because i that does relate to the question of the diversity um committee that we're discussing one moment please yes i see it uh mr aaron's rights um no i'm sorry i don't know that i actually have that one shannon or i i haven't found it yet um forgive me i'll read i'll read ms um vieira's comment and if you could just come back to this maybe and i can find these other ones for you sure i have no problem with you revis coming back at the end of this thank you um so the discussion at the last meeting and i'm looking at the minutes now said that uh we were in support with sending that resolution uh to be sent to the policy subcommittee on uh anti-racism that's right that was that was what i remembered as well dr jenkins i'm not suggesting that we should respond we don't respond to public comments but mr aaron specifically asked for that to be read into the record says for public comment and at the end of his email it says the august 3rd agenda does not take up this resolution will the school committee be scheduling a vote on the masc anti-racism resolution on august 3rd if not when we don't have to respond but he did ask for that to be read into the public record in public period so that so that being said i'm going to i'm going to clarify this moving forward we're only accepting um public comment the day of the school committee meeting so if anyone wants to once the agenda is posted typically unless there's a legality problem with that comments will be taken on the monday of the the day of the school committee meeting starting that day because the genders are usually posted 48 hours in advance so i think it's only fair to kate who's going to be responding to these and the amount of emails that she gets that we ask moving forward as of today that any agendas that have posted the political opponents are sent to ms genther on the day of the school committee meeting okay would you like me to read ms vieira's comments sure this is one that you just got correct sure dear dr gifford and members of the school committee my name is rene vieira president of the dartmouth educators association and i address you remotely this afternoon regarding the reopening of dartmouth public schools the dartmouth educators association recognizes that the best way for students to learn is in person in the classroom the dea also recognizes that the superintendent and administration have been working hard to address the health and safety issues associated with a re-entry into the school buildings the dea recognizes that guidance from the state has been slow and limited the commissioner's recommendations do not align with the practices presently being followed by the massachusetts state government local governments and many businesses nor do these recommendations come with the financial support necessary to be able to effectively put these guidelines into place the members of the dea want to return to our buildings to do what we do well where we do it our best but we value the health of all of our lives students and staff above all else and thank you for your time respectfully renee vieira uh to shannon's um question about the other email i received i can also read that concerning i believe the um the dartmouth logo uh like just give me from ms worley would you yes please ms worley writes i would like to submit this comment for the school committee meeting i urge the committee to take up the issue of the dartmouth indian mascot i live in dartmouth with my husband and two young children when our kids are old enough they will go to dartmouth public schools i strongly support the removal of the indian mascot and logo and i'd like to address a few of the common arguments of those who feel differently notion one you don't know the history the tribe approved the logo there are a few things problematic with this statement the first is the distinction between the logo and the mascot the logo was updated to correct historical inaccuracies in the 70s cheryl angel's maltese chairwoman of the aquina tribe gay head helped with this redesign when she was a student at dartmouth high school this is not an approval to use the likeness as a mascot and andrew's maltese supports the district engaging in a dialogue to investigate the use of the indian as mascot she also said in an interview last year that the term indian refers to more than just the wampanoag tribe and that it is important to consider the effect on other schools who interact with dartmouth students if historical maps are accurate the majority of the town of dartmouth lies within the territory of the akushnip wampanoag tribe one of the original 69 wampanoag tribes only three of which still exist the mashpee wampanoag one of these three also wrote a letter last year to oppose the use of the native american mascots notion two as committee member noon said at the july 20th meeting i'm happy being an indian i've always been an indian and will continue to be an indian we do it respectfully we do it with pride we don't talk in a negative or derogatory way about them and we act very kind to them aside from the obvious contradiction that he is in indian yet he is kind to them i think it's important to address the respectful and prideful aspects of the statement a large number of healthy male wampanoag warriors who were sold were sold into slavery during king philip's war the very nature of the mascot especially one with a logo depicting a brave aggressive young warrior is to create a stereotype this alone should be enough to dissuade us from using their likeness as a mascot but further the mascot does not honor the full experience of a wampanoag village excluding women elders and children if we truly wanted to be respectful and yoke pride we could start by teaching and honoring the spectrum of experience of the people of the first light the truth is unless one is truly native american they will never be a dartmouth indian and to be proud of representing a stereotype only serves the person making the claim not the native person represented if you are confident that the town of dartmouth and native americans and surrounding communities as a whole support this there is no harm in opening up the comment to the public to address the idea that the school committee has better things to do i do understand the weight of the work you do both of my parents were public school teachers and so is my sister and i know that you have your own battles to fight the question of the mascot though does not belong does rather belong on this list if you haven't already please read the american psychological association's statement on the harm of the use of native americans as mascots i also i also know systemic racism is a centuries-old problem and feels overwhelming that is why these little actions are so important we can make a difference in our small ways this is only one respectfully brooke worley thank you brooke thank you miss gentler anything else that have come through since i don't see anything else at the moment okay so so like i said earlier uh we will revisit uh any public comments that have been entered um or emailed to kate kay towards the end of this meeting uh that being said at this point in time the chair will entertain a motion to approve the regular session minutes of july 20 2020.
you somewhat alluded to the fact that these are pick and choose for us or are did i misunderstand that let me turn to that page and explain it when we when we uh send this out and we send basically the same document to everyone unless i've been pre-advised or something someone wants it's different but these are the things we list this is what we call a comprehensive search um there are times when a district will say you know we do some of this ourselves we're going to have our hr department do some of this work um if this work is determined that it's going to be done by your uh hr department then certainly we would uh you know have to reorganize for instance advertising the vacancy um if you want to advertise the vacancy and don't want asb to do it we'd take that out and we'd put that under yours now how would that occur i've never had that one occur but it would dramatically change what we do and dramatically change your responsibility in this effort so um this more simple example is conducting the e-survey or and any other aspect of community involvement if if you don't want to do that then it comes off our document and if you do want to do it then it stays on our document so that's the the pick and choose so to speak but i think the the key is you know a thought by the board do you want asb doing asb doing the full comprehensive search or do you as a board and then with your administrative current administration want to take on any of these responsibilities so in improving this we would be approving using you like doing the survey through you not creating our own i'm sorry would you do that again say that again please i make sure oh so like with number sorry oh uh community survey number three that would be you would be doing the survey for us that's saying we're gonna have you do it instead of us creating and disseminating our own yeah that would that would is something we talked about a little later you've received a copy of the survey as we presented we would be responsible for putting that online we would be responsible for getting that link to that survey to the district posted on your website you would have to do the communication with the community uh that it was uh there but then all the information would come in it'd be uh report and our report would then be our responsibility to bring to you um to re so you had an opportunity to see what the community was saying uh the the two other options is we have no responsibility for the community survey you as a district do it all on your own or you don't do it at all um in this scope of work what what exactly is the scope of how the advertising will take place the advertising takes place in uh we would look at that in a separate agenda item where we will talk about how you want to represent the district under another uh variety of fashions uh once we put that advertising document together and that has to do with what we're saying about the district what we're saying about the community salary um district prior position profile those types items then that advertising uh goes out to um we have about over 60 closer to 80 contacts with universities and colleges around the country they receive it the state department of ed receives it the all our in-state universities receive it uh asbo for instance um receives it so we we canvass it uh pretty wide uh also other state organizations like ours they received the information i received i think four uh search notifications from other states today and then we post those on our website we hope that as we put these out they do like uh for us so it goes out to a variety of um of different sources we also of course post it on our own website and we do have a cadre of folks that have shown interest in the past and we make sure that we touch base with those folks also if i know somebody who has been talking to me about a job whether it's whether they're out of state or in-state and are looking for something that's like your district size-wise location-wise then i make notification of them that the position is open thank you welcome any other questions okay we have a motion in a second to approve as presented remember brown no river busby i hatcher i i'm in i rich all right had a 3.2 stakeholder involvement uh presented uh by myself and mr highland but mostly by mr hyland um let me get to it oh my gosh this this is a question and i that you've asked and i've alluded to a little bit uh what i've done is i have attached our normal e-survey you can see if you've had a chance i hope you have to look at that it has a variety of different questions they come in a series for instance leadership skills background in terms of business skills and such academic programs and such uh what a what your community has an opportunity to do and when i speak of community i'm talking about the whole community staff students board stakeholders i have an opportunity to go through and answer these questions and identify things that they feel are important under each question they also have an opportunity to make a comment uh sometimes those comments are very supportive understand sometimes those comments are rather critical um could be critical of the board could be critical of the district any comment that is made that is not appropriate uh either poor language or as an attack on someone uh i would take out i would report to the board that that occurred but i would take that out often no i probably had to do that with in the last seven years or so i probably had to do that maybe three or four times as all the last two questions i think are important and we get a lot of feedback here uh one question being what do you consider to be the two or three most significant strengths of the district what do you consider to be the two more strengths challenges of the district so in in in filling out this document your community has an opportunity to express their thoughts and uh converse with you in regards to it even though it says are you a student or you a parent or your staff member the response is we do not trace back we do not know where they came from we just know that x amount of people from the staff filled out the response x amount of students filled out the response but it is not identifiable and you won't have any information related to who said what uh in regards to their comments once we collect all the information is collected and that is done all electronically of course then then we receive a report that report i would forward to the board for review and then as i mentioned earlier it's important to have an agenda item on an open agenda meeting to go over the report um my responsibility there would be to give you a overview from my perspective your responsibility would have discussion and comment related to the report the purpose of doing this is well two-fold you get a chance to see what your community's thinking it's a trend it's an issue of transparency and also gives you a means but we should start formulating ideas about questions and the type of person you're looking for the timing on this should be that this is done and received and we have had that conversation our apartment you've had that conversation related to the report prior to the screening some boards have chosen to do it the same night of the screening other boards have chosen to do it a week or so ahead of time uh so that they have a little bit mindset so when they do the training they have these things in their mind what they're looking for that maybe the community has pointed out so i guess you should go ahead and with the recommendation is approve the e-survey attached as part of the new district superintendent search second may i interrupt for just a moment please okay uh that is one aspect of it the survey the other aspect of it is i mentioned earlier the fact that you could put together a community forum to uh introduce kindness to the candidates uh mention that that's a normal process but it may not be possible other than electronically depending on health conditions and what we you feel and your community feels appropriate at the time so that would also be a portion of this motion if you wanted to have that as a consideration we wouldn't plan that tonight but it would be something we would start planning at the screening meeting okay well since mr hyland said that um do um remember hatcher are you open to amending it to also having the potential of a uh in-person um community forum as part of our approval is this survey in addition to the survey yes in addition we'd have both hopefully and in person with questions in addition to the survey who facilitates that madam president miss hatchery members of the board that would be mean uh the normal process is we schedule for about two hours uh let's say you have three finalists uh we'd want to do it in a formal type setting uh auditorium gymnasium somewhere where we've got plenty of seating plenty of microphones uh and what we would ask community members to do is when they come in we have con we have question cards they can fill out a question card uh they come to me they present the uh i present the questions to the finalists they respond uh at done about an hour worth of question and answer um then generally i think it's a good idea to have an open forum type of thing in the lobby or wherever convenient where the community can mingle with the applicants talk to them shake hands talk about as they said talk about things that are on the mind of the community and then also there's a ticket out the door the ticket out the door is the opportunity for any community member to then uh make a statement to you what they're thinking of the candidates that you presented to them sometimes it's very direct sometimes it's you need to hire that lady that's got the red sweater on or you're making a mistake uh sometimes it's a little more generic something like wow you've got three good conditions to choose from good luck with it hope you get the best one um again it's transparency but also for the community also gives you as a board an opportunity to see how they present themselves in front of a group uh they're on stage they've got the opportunity to spend time introducing them so they've got an opportunity to spend time answering questions you get to hear what they how they answered a question what if you know somebody may ask a question related to special needs students and the person's uh experiencing special needs students you can hear what they say you get to hear if they make connections also the um the purpose of having the mingle time not only is again transparency but as a board you're there as observers and you get to see how they handle themselves in a in that type of setting or people gravitating to them are they are they speaking easily and openly with with the community and the community will pick up on these things and they'll they'll tell you in their ticket out the door what they believe in terms of not only how they answer the question but are they a good fit are they making a connection with your community thank you any other questions um you had asked member hatcher if she was going to amend the motion and she asked for clarification but nothing ever came from that so remember are you amenable to amending that yes yes so the motion be we approve the e survey as attached as president of district superintendent search and also um pursue an in-person community forum at a later date okay all right any discussion on that um a couple of questions how are stakeholders defined stakeholders uh our definition is anyone who has an interest in the district uh your your community members are stakeholders the uh staff whether they live in the district or not are stakeholders you are stakeholders uh we use the broad sense that anyone that has an interest and um uh i think that that allows you to canvas the entire uh district again the real key is that the district gets the word out to the broadest degree of representation of your community they possibly can so that you get as many people responding as possible now with whatever advertising or promotion or spreading the word that you're doing do you have a mechanism to assist us with a way to reach out to people who are in the community but are not don't have students in the school district our communication director and i have had a conversation about it just recently and yes she would help uh the district with that uh her name is heidi heidi vega and she uh uh very interested in working with districts in any fashion will help promote more interest in this process are the survey results going to be made public these survey results are public once you receive it it becomes a public document once you present it at the board table it becomes a public document that's why we say you should or at least we recommend that you should publish it on your website so that anyone who can go in and see what the community was thinking thank you any other questions okay we have a motion and a second to approve is amended uh member rich i'm an i member hatcher i remember busby i remember brown aye item 3.3 advertising uh presented nominally by myself but it's presented by mr hyland sorry can you scroll um so this is a little different because we're going to discuss before we have a motion because as you saw below there are various versions available so we're going to in our discussion as you're looking at the background discuss approving asp to construct and publish an advertising document related to the position so this is going to be basically we're going to um have a starting place to talk about what we want in our advertisement so uh there is some information we'll have to give to asba basically mr hyland is going to give us examples and then we're going to discuss what we want our advertisement to look like um mr hyland if you could present thank you thank you uh we we keep the format it's consistent uh well when we do these but the information obviously is not uh i took the opportunity to present to you at least some thoughts in regards to the document and i think what we should do is go through this one section at a time the first section being capri unified school district profile i went through and looked at things that are on your web i took a look at things that i thought were important and i i wrote a about a page there that i thought represented you now that's just my thought your thoughts obviously on this are much better than mine but um i thought it was a starting place let's i think it'd be good to break it down into these components and talk about the district profile first question would be is this an output profile is it does it represent you well uh do you want to change this add to it subtract from it start over on it that's your discussion to have it's not quite i don't think it's quite accurate at the moment um because the numbers have changed on students and do we want to include rio verde as part of the boundaries uh we now have eight schools with the e-school so there are just some things like that what would we call this in an academy of excellence so it'd be one high school or one e-school i guess yeah that's probably more so we did we did men at least that too one high school one middle school five elementary schools and one e-school is that what you're wanting to add to at least at least that one sentence beth yeah and i would defer to uh miss lynch uh to get the most accurate terminology for that maybe it's not e-school but whatever the district prefers to call themselves i'd be happy to get that updated thank you um if we're going to add rio verde to the towns that service the school district we should add north scottsdale rio verde and i believe there's a very small section of what's classified as phoenix as part of phoenix in there but yeah we need to add scottsdale that's actually a fairly sizable at least land area and we might want to put in that our district covers 175 roughly 175 square miles so in order to give them perspective of how big a physical size exactly is did you say 175 or 125 75 thank you yeah and scott still is a big besides-wise there is a good chunk of scottsdale steve will you verify uh will you verify the district size or is that are we supposed to do that for you and the uh final numbers on college scholarship the verification of numbers you're speaking about the 5400 the 5400 the the district size i will verify that i will verify that sixteen thousand three hundred uh thousand sixteen million three hundred thousand dollars came off your district website so verify that okay thank you could we possibly i didn't realize we were going to the next paragraph already but if we're gonna update the scholarship amount would it be possible to use numbers for 2020 since that's a little more current if you have them yes and also when we have a wide variety of rigorous programs ranging from foreign language there's no mention of evid oh yeah we need to add that and i don't know if it's something that we don't have uh dual enrollment on there either or any mention of special ed [Music] you mentioned sped uh what was the dual enrollment so even dual enrollment and sped added to that the programs is that correct well those are all programs that that are part of who we are i know but it was those three yes yes so right now we're looking at adding scottsdale rio verde to and then our square foot our square mileage confirming our student population adding the eighth school but the terminology needs to be confirmed by hr and then adding evit dual enrollment and special ed and then also changing the scholarships from class of 2020 to the correct information for our scott from 2019 to 2020 correct yes okay then i then i'm going to add one thing if you're going to put sped in there uh i think we need to add gifted because it's a form of special education just a different form gifted instruction yeah madam president with those things in mind um does the district um work with a specific j-ted we are with evitt east valley you're with eva with east family would you like that mission yeah that's i think remember busby mentioned that uh eve it's what we want to add we are we're with them so it'd be evit dual enrollment special ed and gifted instruction added to um the programs if this is going out on a national basis is there is putting the acronym evit uh truly descriptive of what it what the program is for someone who may possibly be living in wisconsin that's going to apply for this would you want it well that that's a question that i'm asking do we need to have it more explained in a different way yes written down defined you're absolutely correct and if i when i write this out i'll make sure that that occurs so it a different state someone from district state knows what that is because you are correct different terminology different states and do we want to mention anything about the arts since our performing arts is kind of a big deal for us and our sports teams are well right i mean we're talking about academic stuff right now um so i just i not to cut you off jim on that academic vein is that something that's worth mentioning well maybe keep it just like i mean because we're kind of going from like the stuff we listed is like like while fine arts is big and some of it's in class some of it isn't so maybe we just stick to like the like the school school you know what i'm saying unless you feel like fine arts needs to be in there in the well i don't know i'm i'm asking because i know that like the performing arts you know theater is a big deal with cactus shadows and um to have a a superintendent that has a good understanding a very good cross-section of understanding of a multitude of programs including you know fine arts or performing arts is would always serve to be a good thing why would you do that i prefer fine arts because if you do performing then you might have like oh sure i mean it's i'm something referencing the fine arts i'm fine with fine arts being add fine arts yeah i would maybe break this up into a couple of different sentences so that it reads and so if we have one run long on run along on sentences yes we would not get good grades in an english class for a run-on sentence before district we better make sure our english is good well so for the profile are we good with knowing that we're going to have everything verified for like scholarship number square mileage students how do we feel about the additions we've made to the profile are we good with that um we don't know i need a verbal like yeah like that if you want to add off of the uh off of dr burdick's monthly letter she had in the uh june letter 11 million 500 000 in college scholarships and i believe i that that june letter was was her um presentation that was also given at the graduation ceremony so i would assume that's pretty close eleven five eleven five yeah okay so what do we think about that is our profile adding those items are we good with that is that somewhere comfortable i'm good with that but going back to the english grade we did on this at the end of 2019 we need a period and not a comma there's a couple of typos in there throughout all of these documents they're dated they're stale dated that survey is 2018 and then as you read through this the dates aren't current and i just want assurance that all of this is going to have correct dates because if we are sending out a survey or an advertisement or something and it has 2018 or 2016 on it that doesn't serve to put us in a very good light two things regarding that uh the in the the documents i sent you yes are boilerplate yes like for instance 2019 as mentioned all of that will be updated the other thing is once uh once this is uh typed out my part then it also will be edited by others to make sure like the commas are in the right place and the periods are in the right place one thing i would like to ask um especially that you mentioned uh you know the run-on sentences and such some districts have asked me simply to uh do bullet points since there's so many items to bullet point these and uh make note of it that way because then it's easier to see easier to track is that something you think would be advantageous for your district just to have it that way that's actually something i was going to suggest so thank you for reading my mind no i like that because it's easier to read and it shows we have a lot and then it takes out the run-on sentence no i agree i think the bull point's a better way to go you don't lose you don't regret about bullet points no it's just backing up for a little bit of clarification the actual enrollment we're gonna get that number corrected for where it's kind of approximately well yeah i don't expect to say 52 000 yeah i've got it written down they're going to clarify like if we're closer to 5 500 it's 5 500 not exactly okay i'll check that out with your uh central office okay steve in the first sentence um okay it should i believe it should be cave creek unified school district instead of number 893 do i have that incorrect it's not 93 it's well i've got eight on mine wait what pretty of eight where where are you i'm i'm i'm in the very the very top sentence i have 93 i have 93.
the negative impacts they're talking about are mental health issues and increased suicide rates among students so i'm going to tell an anecdotal story not to talk about myself but i'm sure this is a story many people have my wife and i moved to oswego about four years ago and the main reason we moved to where we moved was because of the school district and the grade school we have a five-year-old who's going into kindergarten she can't read she can't even be left by herself for extended periods of time she's five so my wife and i both work because we don't have the luxury of demanding that we don't go to a school so my question is what are we supposed to do under these circumstances and i would say that the only fair thing to do i would encourage you to vote no on this tonight and i would say that the the only fair thing to do for young kids would be to cut off the e-learning and provide some sort of voucher or payment to go to a private school because there's no way kids at that age are going to do virtual learning and get anything out of it i mean it's just absurd to even think about thank you joanne johnson good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak i've been a resident of oswego for over 20 years and have put five children through the oswego school system two of them are still in the school system two of them actually opened this very school that we're in and i cannot say enough about the teachers the staff the administration they care sincerely care about our children i can't help but to feel that the administration tried to do the right thing by giving us the opportunity to choose remote or in-person learning and i actually bragged about the fact that our school district stood up and did the right thing now i don't know the specifics behind the root cause of why we're looking at this question tonight the only thing that i can possibly come to is that our school district our board has been put in a position where their backs are against the wall and don't have the ability to provide the level of in-person safety requirements that our state is probably requiring because it all comes down to union and politics i don't give a about politics i care about our children the cdc as was mentioned is talking about children that are in high school that are taking their own lives if you've not seen there's a there's a youtube video called numb created by a 15 year old student a short film that depicts a child that is quarantined and trying to do remote learning and the mental anguish that they go through my children one's in eighth grade one is going to be a senior they are at their wit's end our children as stated by the american pediatrics association need to be back in school their mental well-being is at risk and the fact that politics are prohibiting us from being able to do the right thing for our children is absolutely unacceptable there are studies from other countries that show transmission from children under 10 years old to an adult is absolutely zero i understand that there is risk in going back our doctors our nurses are walmart cashier that is their job they go to work and they risk there is not much more in this world more important than a child's education it is not okay if a teacher is not comfortable coming back fine step down and we'll get somebody who's younger our school district i don't know what the percentage is but i know that my children's teachers are all young and they're not the at-risk group anybody at risk fine you know you do you but i know what's best for my child we pay some high taxes and if we are not able to get the education that we pay for at the very least there should be a voucher my children are both in ap classes straight a students and they spent more time doing homework when they were in in person school than when it was remote learning remote learning they sleep till noon they get up they do about an hour worth of work and they're done and they're still getting straight a's what does it tell me my children are not working hard this is a joke and my chil i put things in three groups we have our special ed kids we have our ap kids we have our gen ed kids our special ed kids they're getting clobbered by this they are getting farther and farther behind our ap kids i cannot answer a question for my children i can't help them and then the last is a gen ed that may be able to eke through this but the bottom line is it is about our children and i do urge a no and i urge us to get creative to figure out what we can do in order to get our children the education that they deserve all right that being our fourth reopening subject public comment we'll be closing public comment and all other emails regarding reopening plans will be added into the minutes okay item 5.1 board member comments we'd like to begin i'll just um start with uh saying you know um i um as well as my fellow board members have received um hundreds of emails um i i can say that i have been i'm doing my best to read them all i appreciate everybody's feedback people weighing in on this and many most and most of the emails have been very kind and um even when people have not been happy um with the paths that they've heard you know um people have come with a solution have been solution focused solution oriented and have acknowledged that we're all in a really really really hard position and i so i just want to say i appreciate the feedback i appreciate the emails i have not been able to respond to all of them i might not be able to rescind all of them but they are being read um and these are all things that i'm i'm hearing and digesting and i'm really taking to heart so i just want to tell the community that i appreciate their their involvement and and them reaching out so i'll go ahead and go next first i just want to say my name ruth kroner i don't want anybody to uh accuse faith dolquist of saying things that i said again i think there's some confusion last time and i get it our faces are covered and you maybe don't recognize all our voices maybe we sound the same faith i don't know i echo heather's comments about receiving lots of emails and appreciating the input from the public and i have also been reading all of the emails though not being able to respond to all of them i just want to say um this is not what any of us want nobody likes this nobody wants to be having to make any of these choices i personally want my children to be in person i want them in the classroom i know them i know that they learn best in person they want to be in the classroom um even my 13 year old who for years begged me to homeschool him was that was not going to happen he immediately he no i want to be in person but this is not about what i want this is about i'm not sitting here at this table to get what i want i'm sitting here to have the responsibility to make the choices that's best for our district and do i think it's best for students to be remote not really i think it's best for them to be in person but that's not necessarily possible we have to look at the whole picture and i agree students are falling behind and struggling and the kids that are already struggling are going to struggle more and i wish that i could fix that i know my kids are going to struggle my i have a senior also who's ap classes and that sucks but we don't always get what we want clearly i hope that tonight's presentation can shed some light on all the intricacies and all of the things that these people our administrators are dealing with and trying to make these plans and do the best for our students they care about these kids too their parents as well we're all parents up here on the board and so we get it and i can assure you that what happened in the spring with remote learning so to speak is not the same thing that's going to be happening it is not i'm not saying it's not going to be hard because it is going to be hard it's going to be hard for teachers it's going to be hard for students and it's going to be hard for parents but i hope that we can pull together as a community and support each other and encourage each other and i'll echo some comments that i made a couple weeks ago and attitude is everything that's one thing that you can control is your attitude and if we can try to be positive about this that is going to help our students get through the struggle so there have been some great emails coming through the last few weeks i don't know that there's a balance or an even number of pro in school pro remote but they each had valid viewpoints some of them i was able to respond to some i've had some text messages with um a couple i've had some phone conversations with the phone conversations are important because we were able to dialogue and answer each other's questions that an email is just not going to and we can understand the difference between private sector and public sector what a company with employees can do when they're checking temperatures and and keep control of their employees and what guidelines we follow through and when that's explained i think the understanding is a little bit different i get the concern i have a kid that's been out since january that was doing home learning before our remote learning and that wasn't great either so yeah i need i need my kids back in school but it's as ruth said it's not about what i want it's not a political game uh politics are out of it there are things as a school board there's a great word out there called mandates things are mandated of us and there are guidelines and there are people governing bodies ahead of us that we must follow and adhere to and follow the rules whether good or bad that's something that we must do i am concerned that we are going to lose a lot of kids i understand the administration is going to be doing their best to do the job i hope we're going to get some more information tonight but i think there's going to be struggling kids i volunteered in a in a classroom there are teachers here that can attest to that and there are kids bouncing off of the wall thank goodness for the tas that could take some kids out of the classroom so the teacher could focus keep those students occupied with some worksheets and i don't know how this how the parents are going to manage or do that at home so yes i want in-person learning but we have to make the decision based on the information that were provided i look forward to any new information that we hear tonight but i just again we need to understand we are on the same page we're not it's not an us against them we're all parents we all want the best for our kids and this is not forever it can't be forever so uh hopefully we'll we'll get through this tonight we're going to focus on on the school year and getting started and supporting all of our students the best we can thanks i'll take a crack at it um ali swanson so i am voting no tonight but i just i want to be clear why um over 70 of our parents want kids in classrooms and their voice has to be heard and we can say that we're taking all the politics out of it but we were elected by the people so i think i think that what i'm hearing in my conversations is that it's breaking down into two main points for me and those two points are instruction and safety um do we have a better plan for delivering instruction this fall yes we cannot i think we can all agree we cannot have a repeat of what happened in the fall and i appreciate all the hard work that's gone into it and i appreciate all the work that will go into it because we are going to ask more of our staff we just are but i also don't personally think that a kid's sitting in front of a computer for eight hours with a 40 minute lunch is going to result in authentic learning for a multitude of reasons and most of them start with me being a teacher i need to be in the classroom it starts with the importance of building relationships so while i understand what we're doing and why i continue to be disappointed with the ispe this the illinois state board the illinois department of public health the cdc they need a plan that can actually be implemented by schools so yeah our goal is to get these kids in school actually the you know great comments so far by everybody i think for the most part the board is in agreement on what needs to happen and what's happening why i think our votes are going to be a little bit different tonight for different reasons but i spent some time thinking about this and there's a few things i want to say you know there's there's the hard part of this right so um our administration has done an incredible job in creating not one not two but multiple solutions for us to return to the classroom they spent their summer their nights their weekends working on plans and what it's coming down to tonight that we're going to be talking about and looking at i don't know if we're going to comment more than this is to say the reality is as matt alluded to the seven of us sit here tonight because we were elected by the people that live in this community we were given the awesome power to make decisions to ensure that eighteen thousand kids can learn that's a great responsibility it's also a great burden on tonight's like on nights like tonight and yet the reality is is that this board of seven you will see is not going to be allowed to make a decision and the reason is and i was joking with someone but it's kind of true mommy and daddy are fighting and so the illinois department of public health has published a guideline that is in direct conflict with the cdc that is in direct conflict with the american council of pediatrics that is in direct contact with the kendall county health department and that is in conflict with some of their own employees and so i understand the the guidelines that we're going to look at it's impossible one kid shows up with a runny nose they are home quarantined for 14 days they have to have two negative tests and everybody that came into contact with them is also out it's in literally insanity i mean if you think about it it's it's that first day back by day two we'd have 100 kids out per building by day three it's 500 by day four it's i don't know that's how we got to where we are today then i have to take a step back and say yeah we are here for education and yet we get guidance that some sports are okay but yet they're not following the same exact precautions that have to be used in the classroom which i find ridiculous so trust me i i understand you know three and four wanted some in learning i think that's a realistic number i thought it might actually be a little higher than that but that's where we are um and and and we're gonna go forward from here and um i i also will be voting no but i i i hope and i pray because that's about what we have left that we're having a different conversation on october 1st and that's my only request for for the district is that we are while we're running the operations we need to be making that plan for what happens next thank you um i want to say that i agree with ruth and ellie that the um expectations for online learning in the fall are much different than they were in the spring a lot of people were very concerned and i think rightfully so i think that the way that it was rolled out in some ways was because no one knew what was going to happen with kovid and so they had to be careful because teachers were going home they didn't know how many people would get sick they didn't know how many parents would get sick and i think the load was made very light because that's what the thinking was but i know with the fall now we know that some people have been quarantining and doing what they're supposed to and so the expectations can be raised and it is realistic but i want to stress too that for the parents that are concerned about keeping up with that that i think that you can communicate with these teachers and with these other specialists that your children are seeing so that you can get what you need for your kids in a reasonable way and if you're not getting that you should definitely contact the board and let us know you need to reach out if you need help of any kind if your child is struggling emotionally and you don't feel like you can do what it takes to make that child safe or feel what they should feel reach out to the school district there are people that should be helping you if you need help with tech because i know tech can be hard for some people please reach out to the school district um parents am hoping that all the parents in the district are going to be as supportive as possible of their students and that means that sometimes as a parent you have to do things that are kind of annoying to you like getting them out of bed when they're teenagers or making their making your kids change out of their pajamas into their regular clothes and i hope everybody here knows i've been teaching for 30 years i've taught in five different districts i am not saying any of this lightly i'm not i thought about it and i've thought about it every which way um teachers you need to be ready to oh wait i want to go to one more kids the kids in our district know at least if they're third grade and above they know the technology i hope that they will use all the skills that they use for the other kinds of technology that our kids are on constantly and we all know that that's true we know that they're on technology constantly this is an opportunity for them to be on for an educational purpose so if they need help they should reach out to other people and they should help the little ones that they have contact with in their in their homes the kids that they have access to that maybe don't know the technology teachers i really hope that the teachers in our district are ready to deliver a strong model for the fall i really hope that they're ready to do everything that they can to show that this is not springtime this is not the same deal this is a different expectation and as a teacher i know that i'm ready no matter what happens to me and honestly i'm on the board here but i'm in yorkville and and yorkville has plans to go back in person um for me logistics and safety are the two things that go through my mind the most what brent says is true illness is inevitable illness is absolutely part of every day as a teacher that i've ever had and parsing the difference between symptoms that come from covid and symptoms that just come from something else is more than my pay grade i don't know why they're coughing or sneezing or tired i don't know why their headaches or their stomach aches or why they have to go to the bathroom a lot and sometimes i don't even know if they have a bathroom related issue because i can't see that and the idea of trying to keep something going that is continuous for children when all those things are kids are popping out having to go to the nurse they have to go home they're on for 10 days that is logistically very very difficult and you don't know when they're going to come back and the last thing i'll say is that discipline is something as a community and as a society that we need to decide we're going to engage in we need to engage in discipline for the sake of our health and we need to engage in discipline for the sake of our children's learning and the families that i've heard from who are determined to get their kids in education are very disciplined about it whether or not the school district is and that is beautiful and i thank those families very much i guess that just leaves me and i don't know that there's much i can add beyond what my fellow board members have said beyond the fact that i want nothing more than for my kid to start the year in person she also needs it and it's impossible it is not possible and that is something that i look in her face every day and regret because even sitting at this table we can't do for our kids what we want to do and it's heartbreaking but as a school board we have a code of conduct we have an oath of office we take when we take a seat at this table and number one in that code of conduct is that we'll represent all school district constituents honestly and equally and refused to resp surrender responsibilities to special interest or partisan political groups and what i keep thinking of when i see that number one thing that we are required to do is that we don't have the ability to always do that because of all the rest of the policies in here that require us to follow state board standards that require us to follow public health standards as brent said absolutely mom and dad are fighting we can't get a straight answer it's it's not available if it were the people at this table would have found it because we have spent months trying to get the right answers my hope is that we can understand that there's nothing there there's nothing that can be done that has not been done that we understand that hopefully if we can change the way we begin this year it can lead to us being able to be back in the classroom in some way safely sooner and that we can get our kids back where they need to be so i thank all of our administrators i'm appalled at the way the community has has targeted them with disrespectful ignorant comments threatening them that is not okay that is not the community i want to raise my child in and it is not okay i really appreciate all of the community members who have reached out respectfully to everyone at this table and to other administrators and i want to thank them for participating and for continuing to engage in educating themselves about the issues going on and looking for ways to help solve the real problems that we're facing right now so i appreciate that greatly dr sparlin we know that last spring we had given over control of this pandemic decision-making to you and you've graciously given it back to us for for these kinds of decisions because it's important that the people elected to represent your community get a chance to represent your community our community um so i appreciate you giving us that opportunity this evening and to all of our administrators that are here and not here thank you it's it's i was reinformed again tonight this is not the end this is the beginning of the work but they will be able to focus and provide something so much better than what we saw last spring that it won't be recognizable at least that's my strong hope that's that's pretty much what i have but thank you to everyone in the community that is struggling um we're struggling to we are all in this together so i thank you all for speaking up today okay now i gotta find my stuff again so item sick or wait attackers 5.2 yes 9.2 it's your super tennis report good evening board and i'd just like to start off by thanking you all for your heartfelt comments very well appreciated and as you all know on saturday i sent or said afternoon i sent a message to our community informing them that at this evening's meeting that under item 8.1 that i'd be recommending to the board of education that we approve to start the year with remote learning as i stated in that letter it was a very hard decision based on a variety of factors which we'll we'll address under item 7.2 under information this evening as you can imagine i've received a lot of input and as you all said you have as well much of that input that i've received has been affirmation that this recommendation uh didn't come as a surprise as many of the large districts in our area have either already made the decision or are making this decision this week as well i did also receive correspondence stating the opposite the reason i sent the letter on saturday was not only to be transparent with my recommendation but also to be informative in hopes that more people would be watching this evening's meeting because it's very under it's very important to understand the why and it's my hope for those who are watching this evening that they have a better understanding of the reasons behind the decision by the end of tonight's meeting so i'm going to save the rest of my comments for under informational items thank you can i have a motion item 6.0 approval of consent agenda can i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the board of education meeting on july 13 2020 open and closed session and from the july 21st 2020 meeting open and closed session mrs moyer hi mr lightfoot hi miss morgan hi mrs swanson hi mrs croner hi mrs dorial aye mr bowman aye motion passes 7-0 item 7.1 item 7.1 is an informational technology proposal that outlines how our district can achieve one of their goals that we've been talking about for years and that is how to get to one-to-one technology uh mrs dalquist is going to start us off and then we'll hear from our director of technology uh mr oleson faith so thank you for the opportunity you may recall way back on march 16th before we'd heard a whole lot about covet 19 before we voted on the referendum before all of those things we made a presentation about the dire need to replace some of our chromebooks that were aging rapidly and we're going to kind of come in large waves of need both for the budget and for our students as cobin 19 progressed and we looked at what the fall would look like that even increased the need and the demand to have this conversation again with the covet guidelines our current number of devices they're saying that we should not share technology so even when we do become back in person we have a great need to increase that demand if we are to go to remote by choice or remote for all that also it puts a demand on our services as we would need to put computers in homes and in the hands of our students and staff and as we push those devices out it is much better to have a common device that we can all train and say here you press f1 and this happens and those types of things and we also can manage some of the software and applications that would put out to that so i'm going to turn it over to kyle and he's going to walk through some of the logistics of the proposal good evening i'm here tonight to discuss purchasing one-to-one chromebooks for grade levels uh five through twelve all students would get a chromebook in those grade levels we're also proposing to hire five additional technology staff members to help our teachers with the new adjustment of technology we're planning to implement a student depot to repair chromebooks at one or both of the high schools this would mean that any damaged devices would get sent there and it's a great opportunity for career training and on on top of that we're also planning to increase the bandwidth throughout the district to make sure that we're prepared for these devices to come back on premise this slide i'm going to discuss the device costs overall for the next four years i'm promote proposing a lease to own option so i wanted to really showcase what this whole program would look like in its entirety so we're going to focus on the first column on the 2021 school year so it roughly is going to cost 759 000 for the first payment of the four-year lease and then if you travel down that column you'll see that 140 000 worth of funds have already been set aside towards devices and then we're applying 615 000 from the digital equity grant to the total of our revenue of 755 000 towards the 759 000 cost which leaves us at the district sorry at the district level of 3604 so now if we travel across the columns the lease payments still stay the same because it's the four year lease and now in the 21 22 school year you can see uh the top two payments would be a 50 technology fee for all students in the one to one program plus the device funds that we have set aside so now you can see the revenues would be about 571 000 leaving a total cost of this program of roughly 188 dollars moving forward this slide is going to showcase the difference between the 50 technology fee from all students and no technology fee at a cost to the district so the bottom column shows that uh in 2122 if we don't pass the fifty dollar technology fee the district would be paying six hundred and nineteen thousand one hundred sixty four dollars per year for the remaining three years so tech fees would increase the sustainability of this program by 431 thousand dollars per year it would end up saving the district 1.1 million 293 000 over the term of the four-year lease additional costs to sodium associated with this one-to-one program would be our off-site content filtering our increased bandwidth at the building levels for a cost of about fifty six thousand dollars the additional i.t staff members would cost 275 000 and then we would be installing or putting carts with additional chromebooks in each of the buildings to cover if devices come back uncharged or repairs loaners anything like that so that would additionally cost us four hundred and fourteen thousand dollars for this upcoming year the next slide will give a summary of the cost to the district for the upcoming year so 759 000 for the lease of devices minus our funds and grants leaves us with 3 604 the additional support of software staff and bandwidth comes in at 414 000 bringing us to 418 000 total our current budget for the year we had set aside 720 000 so if we subtract the 418 we have a surplus of 301 thousand dollars still as a part of this program our timeline is going to hopefully be to place the order for chromebooks we would like to start hiring technology staff in august and september so that way we can get them trained now to help our teachers accept delivery in september october this is really an estimate at this point it depends on when we submit our order to find out when we can actually accept deliveries we would distribute devices hopefully in november december and then implement the student depot in november december as well so tonight i'm here to seek approval to purchase the student devices to hire five additional technology staff members and then implement a 50 technology fee for all students in grade levels 5 through 12.
i didn't always want to be a teacher growing up but life has led me here and i absolutely love my job i have my masters in literacy and my reading specialist endorsement both degrees i obtained so i could increase my expertise on how to help six-year-olds learn to read my absolute favorite part of every day is when i get to meet all meet with my small groups for guided reading i try to have two to six kids in a group where we just pause the world around us and explore books we question authors purposes create character analysis charts and make predictions at every turn of the page we work on skills that build the foundation of strong readers these small group times are when i get to know my students best because they aren't competing with 25 other children in their thoughts and ideas to be heard if we go back to school and face to face i strongly plead the district to find funds to create or purchase some type of clex sorry plexiglas contra contraption so that teachers can still continue to use this small group time effectively giving up our small group time would be extremely detrimental to our little littlest learners who need this time to work on so many skills one of my biggest beliefs as an educator is children learn to love reading when they are an environment that encourages and supports their exploration of reading because of this i have over six thousand books in my classroom i have teacher read-alouds two student libraries and two bookshelves of my own guided reading book sets all brought with my own money because i know how important books are the handful of districts who are returning to school are requiring teachers to empty out their classrooms of all non-district purchases which includes books sure we have electronic books that the kids can access but is that really building up the children's ability to read one of the first skills we teach when learning to read is directionality directionality is reading words left to right and reading top of the left page to bottom of the left page and then over to the top of the right page how do you teach children that very basic and beginning skill when they can't even hold a book if we go back face to face my second request is that the teacher the district research and provide a way for our books to stay in our classroom at least in the lower elementary where our kids are learning to read a few suggestions are a pair of germ gloves for each student to hold touch books and then a few extra plexiglas contraptions that kids can put up on their desks where their arms and books can go behind the glass the kids could wipe the glass down after they are done with the book the germ gloves would then stay with each student for the year teachers have a lot of heart from the community over remote learning i'm not sure where all this hatred is coming from because let me tell you prepping remote learning for first graders is not easy i normally only work 50 hours at school during the week and 10 hours on the weekend i arrive at school every day by 6 40 and leave by five even as a sixth year teacher when remote learning was sprung on us i was putting in 60 to 70 hour work weeks consistently with a three-year-old and baby at home i was prepping and engaging i was prepping engaging and six-year-old appropriate activities i trade making the lessons purposeful i recorded videos for every activity with directions and screencasts to show the kids what to click and where to click i did weekly video check-ins whole group and each day did a few small check-ins on google me i met with students ranging from nine in the morning to six at night because i know not every student could meet me at the assigned time slot i wanted to give remote learning wasn't perfect and there were many learning curves teachers had to conquer but many of us put everything we had into providing the kids some type of education while schools could not open currently the district's plan is to have me teach some kids four days a week a day of remote two groups of kids two days a week and two days of remote and one group of students full remote that is four different class groups groups of students i know we're being told they'll be learning the same but really to accomplish teaching four groups of students and providing each group in equitable education realistically speaking teachers will be putting in 80 to 100 hour work weeks trust me when i say i have three degrees and only making 50 000 while having two little kids at home is a hard pill to swallow when i look at working 80 hours a week i want to teach every child who i am giving but i also want to be the best teacher i can be my request to the district is that you honor the research make our class sizes smaller for this year 12 to 15 kids and please please give students who choose remote leaning their own separate teacher that way that group of children can receive every bit of instruction social emotional support and everything in between they need please do this for the children and so that our teachers are not stretched to their limits thank you for your time kelsey hendry 301 admin and school board members everyone has their own opinions on how schools should open and what would be best for their families but we need to look at the safest option for the whole 301 community a safe and equitable plan for all is what is needed during this unprecedented time we need to stop acting like sending our kids back to school is going to be normal there will be nothing normal about it i know the school board and district administrators have tirelessly been trying to put together a plan that appeases everyone and unfortunately in the end it will probably backfire because you can never please everyone when you try to simultaneously offer so many different options to fit the needs of everyone in the community you end up with a mediocre plan at best i believe one plan should be focused on so it can be the most effective as possible under these unfortunate circumstances there are too many community members parents and district leaders advocating for a return to school with no regard to the negative consequences of that choice it's sad to see the lack of common sense towards safety being ignored it is also sad to see the misinformation being spread about a virus that we are still learning new things about daily i am sure the pressure from politicians and parents telling you to open up schools is overwhelming everyone wants to get back to normal but since when has this virus operated on our schedule i am hopeful that a federal incentive for reopening school does not cloud your ability to make the safest decision for all the safest decision is started the school year with a full remote learning plan just like many area school districts have already decided including u-46 district 300 barrington 220 arlington heights district 25 huntley 158 among others u-46 superintendent tony standard states i cannot accept the loss of life we will main we will remain predominantly distance learning through the first quarter district 300 will start with fully remote learning due to a rise in covet cases and corbin 19 cases in king county i think is this is the safest way for us to approach this right now said fred fred hyde superintendent of district 300.
so moved second and the motion on the floor by dr jenkins a second by mr news on the motion any further discussion roll call please mrs gunter chris oliver yes shannon jenkins yes mary waite yes john nunes yes definitely thank you kate we appreciate that uh next up on the agenda under old business superintendents update on return to school plans i'll turn it over to our fearless doctor bonnie gifford i don't think i've been called that yet ms dollar thank you so i'm going to share my screen and hopefully i work it okay present and before i start i just want to say and um we did receive a number of comments my latest superintendent update i invited folks to send their thoughts so i i did receive a number of those um for consideration as we develop or continue to tweak our plan i also want to say that um to remind folks that this is an extremely complex situation our team has been working for weeks uh continuing to get the guidance from deci and trying to make the best plans that we think would best serve our students and keep our staff and students healthy and safe i don't have all the answers yet i don't have all the answers even what miss baldwin presented tonight but we are continuing to work on all of those we're aware of all of those in as i said between the central office the teams of teachers who have helped and the building admin um we're working very hard to try to create the best plans we can and know that they don't please everyone so to begin with i just want to go over quickly deci and the timelines that we've been given and as everyone knows desi has required each district we've said this before to develop three plans to support our return to school we did present our submit our preliminary plan on july 31st as required this was simply a template asking for a summary of the three different plans which one is the hundred percent in person aligned with safety precautions the second one was the hybrid model same thing aligned with safety precautions and a full remote model i'll talk a little bit about next steps about the august 10th date as we um get to the end of this presentation but as i said um as it says there we will be making a selection and it will be due to dusty by august 10th at the bottom you see that each district was also asked to do what they could call a pressure test or a feasibility study looking at the operational system the instructional areas how many students we could fit according to the six foot distancing um what how we might walk students through hallways etc etc so we asked each building and mr kylie helped a lot with that to try to get a sense of what might be possible in our schools just a quick uh timeline you can see that deci continued to provide guidance along the way um some of it came later than we would have liked such as the transportation guidance we've had special ed guidance summer school guidance and each one of them is about 20 pages long so we continue to try to um sort through that and use as much information as we can as we develop our plans we've also had continual meetings with the commissioner our roundtables meet across the state the executive board and of course we're in weekly if not bi-weekly um contact with the special ed uh department from desi continuing to provide guidance so some of the general safety requirements that we're um looking at as we look at a hybrid model i have to say up front that a full return is is impossible um and i can talk a little bit more about that but that will be pretty much impossible so we're thinking of looking at these um general safety requirements as we think more towards a hybrid model at this point so we're using a six foot feet of social distancing with our desks i was actually in a couple of the schools with mr kylie today uh looking through various rooms as we continue to support the building principles on all of their logistics and thinking through what they're going to be doing for everything um we're having excessive furnishings removed and will be increased signage about cleaning etc one way in the hallway for um group movement lunches will be served in classrooms restroom and hallway supervision and increased cleaning and sanitizing one of the things we're looking at for the restroom and hallway supervision is with some of the grant money that's been allocated for covid response is to try to hire extra support monitors that would continue to support recess time bathroom visits etcetera increase cleaning and sanitizing mr kylie has been working with our union afscme union to try to think about can we increase time that folks are devoting to the buildings to be able to continually clean those areas such as the bathrooms and classrooms after lunch etc so to continue to add time um so right now we're in conversation about that as we've said students would remain as much as possible with their cohorts and we'll talk about that in a minute and a grade level for example a grade three classroom with about depending on the class size 10 or 12 students would be in their classroom for most of the day uh we've worked hard with our nurses as well and again with the building visits looking at really pinpointing what an isolation area would look like what are the protocols for visits and treatment how do students flow through that area and um with bathroom access etc so we've been working on that and have some very good ideas moving folks around in the buildings and re reusing something a room that wasn't a nurse's station might become a nurse station so the buildings have pretty good idea of what that will look like the transportation guidance when it finally came out said one student per seat seated diagonally we're looking at approximately 20 students because we want to be able to maintain a section on the bus where if a student does happen to get on the bus and exhibit some kind of symptoms they they can be put aside or separate from the other students um one of the things a couple of things we would want to make sure folks knew that with this um really significant issue that we have students would be assigned to seat they would be assigned a one drop off and one pickup area only we've accommodated tons and tons of them in the past that will not be possible students will be assigned to seat they'll be lying they go from for example the way the roots will run uh even when they get picked up from school the person in the back seat will go on first etc etc so that the person in the front seat then gets off first mr kiley is pretty confident that um very confident that given this guidance we we have the capacity to transport students in a hybrid method and he has obviously gone ahead um and purchased lots and lots of ppe equipment and it answers some of those funds we're using for that some of the funds might be used for the additional monitors etc here is some of the items that have been excuse me have been purchased already and of course excuse me one minute depending on the person's role such as a nurse such as a therapist the additional they would have um access to more intense ppe equipment um as necessary we do not have a shortage at this time of any of this hand sanitizer dispensers are being put in all of the classrooms so as we said we did conduct a feasibility study starting with jesse's minimum three foot requirement uh as you know it the dust that came out said three to six feet and obviously with that there's just no way we could get all of our students even using as it says here non-traditional teaching areas the gymnasiums the auditoriums um there had to be redeployment of staff there was as i said the potential for layoffs because we would need let's just say we needed more math teachers to split math um classrooms and we don't have the properly licensed personnel so does that mean hiring different personnel and some personnel don't have the position so it was just becoming a nightmare to make that happen plus with the transportation guidelines it would just be either additional buses required did i spell buses right yeah um and double routes etc so um they're not i would say very few districts across the commonwealth that even are going to be capable of doing this and good luck to them so our hybrid model for folks what we've decided on for continuity of learning uh trying to maintain small class sizes is that we were looking at an alternating day with two cohorts of students cohort a and cohort b we are in the process now of trying to identify and split students into those cohorts it's it's it's difficult everything's difficult but what we want to do is put siblings together so that parents have their children you know would be we know this is difficult for parents no matter what happens so that's our intent at this point um so students that let's say in cohort a would come in they'll follow their daily schedule teachers are teaching every day in their classroom they would go home with their assignments independent readings projects to complete whatever it might be it could be a flipped classroom kind of a scenario where the teacher says okay in preparation for tomorrow's the next day's class watch this video come back and we'll have questions or read this book we'll have a discussion whatever it might be as an almost like a college class where you go home do your assignments and come back on the second day cohort b would come in and have the same lesson so the teacher is teaching the same lesson two days in a row students once again on the remote day are working on completing their videos their projects etc the middle school is is experimenting with and um jonathan's been working with technology uh bandwidth wise etc that students on the remote day would be tuning in via a zoom connection to listen in onto what the teacher was speaking as a reinforcement um and additional learning we're just looking at that right now at the middle school and according to the guidance and we're going to try um our intent would be to get high needs students what's qualified as high needs students in every day those are students in our smaller classrooms our past pals programs um they talk about ell students right now we have only um on we would be looking at level one and two students and getting them in and we only have ten across the district elementary wise and four at middle and high school so it wouldn't change the numbers in the classrooms really to speak of students will be graded and attendance will be taken right now as it says a student who chooses to not return to school our plan is and we're still waiting for the guidance from dussy i'm i've been told that tomorrow was supposed to hear what the two vendors that they're they're partnering with will be we're supposed to hear that tomorrow for a learning management system so once we know that we will be able to let folks know um i mean there's many options you can you can have people in charge of it you can just turn it over like almost like that's up teachers at the other end you buy into that and students then access a remote learning platform put out by one of these vendors i understand one of them that they've been talking about is located in florida and is very successful and then we have the remote learning um right now and oh there is a spelling error there d missing um as of today with the conference with deci and the commissioner they're continuing to say this is not recommended through their medical experts that they've been consulting with given the virus trends in the state and they're continuing to once again push for as much in-person learning as possible but if we do have to go remote our plan would be that the schedule their regular daily schedule students would be following that with real-time face-to-face lessons teachers would be teaching not taped lessons like enrichment things like we did in the spring so that's why we say on daily basis students will they will be visually connected with their teachers for their content we will want teachers to report to their buildings and work from their classrooms and attendance will be recorded etc grades earned and at this point um i put this in we have not made a district decision of course we don't know about sports but according to the commissioner he was recommending if students chose remote they why would they then be allowed to come in for other things again no decision has been made special education as you know has had enough a grade as far as guidance goes so these are some of the things we're looking at again with the special ed students the significantly challenged students coming in every day um beth and laurie are working hard working on evaluations and how to get those conducted now um remote as we can see we did have some folks attend some online classes this year to help with them learning about teletherapy our speech pathologists team meetings will be held primarily off as a remote and but the important thing to note is that students to the best of our ability have to receive instruction and services as opposed to the model we used in the spring which was more just resource and support so the guidance has really been upgraded and we are required through with fape to offer instruction and services and of course as we say to the maximum extent possible we're looking to bring in those kiddos with significant needs and our pre-skates preschool students because as you know we have an integrated preschool some of the technology issues we've been um mr galesha and his team have been working all summer to make sure that we're ready to go as you know in the spring it was catch us catch can people were satisfied but it was um kind of quick and dirty if you will so some of the things we've done is um we want to upgrade our teachers devices so we've had some additional laptops being ordered and processed um whiteboards the normal whiteboards being installed throughout the district but again preparing for the extra bandwidth the expanded bandwidth because if you think about it if the teachers now all come in for remote and working from their classrooms that's going to have a huge huge impact on the bandwidth that we have been using so far so that's in the process and um obviously we're renewing some of these licenses for these important software packages that we've been using all along so the chromebook chromebooks we've purchased more chromebooks right now we have as you can see pretty much um it's going to be pretty much let me think a second eight through twelve we have enough for we're going to have enough if we have to do it for a six through twelve one to one and enough carts in the elementary to disseminate as a one to one so basically we have enough for everyone we have enough devices for everyone and um the team like i said is cleaning them repairing them inventorying getting everything ready for deployment whether it's we show up in school on day one or and then we leave or we don't show up at all we'll be ready for either one some of the financial support we are receiving um i asked mr kiley to put this in to let folks know that there is there is quite a bit of money that's available and but you know we have to apply for the grants but we have the um corona relief fund the user money of course and um we're waiting to hear on a remote learning tech grant that we did apply for so we hope to hear on that any day now and that would help us buy additional hardware and then of course the cares um as you can see we're not sure that's that's for some school but it's basically non-school specific okay so next steps um so jesse dussy said that they are supposed to tell us give us any feedback on the the template that we sent in and again it was just a summary of basically what i just told you on the three plans we have to continue negotiations with the the union we have a meeting on wednesday the last negotiation session we had we talked a lot about safety and health and we want to continue those negotiations to talk about these plans that we have um suggested i am also going to now that especially once next week which i'm hoping that we then can make a decision and we have enough data to make a decision of what we're going to try to start school with send uh information or actually i need to gather data from from the community from the parents explicit data household data students in school are they planning to come back are they not planning do they choose remote and are they planning to ride the bus if they do come back this kind of data will be very very helpful for not only from the district's perspective but also from the building's perspective as they're continuing to ensure that they can fit all of their students in classrooms etc we have had conversations with our local health agent um and other stakeholders by meaning like nurses etc and we will continue to do that especially as we get closer to deciding the what plan we will implement and ensuring that we have followed all recommended guidance as far as health and safety go um obviously the buildings will continue as i said i was at buildings today with mr kiley and we'll continue to work with folks in the buildings to work out problems in logistics and help them prepare for what their cohorts look like so the final implementation plan i was mistaken and i found i clarified that today as the commissioner's meeting we will not have to vote on the entire plan itself as as we've drafted so far and continue to tweak i know there's errors etc but um but what will have to be voted on and submitted by august 10th is what we are choosing to implement whether it's the hybrid the remote etc there is the possibility if um the chair signs a letter to desi he said today he would offer districts a couple of days extension which i think we might do only because if we have our meeting on the 10th i really want to then be prepared to be able to submit that um the next day or the 12th or so so we'll we'll probably do that as far as the 170 student day go again that was clarified again today that is not bankable um that has to be up front days the one thing we did suggest to the union was that we hold off a couple of days not knowing what might happen a few weeks in do we need a couple of days to rethink retrain re we look at what we're doing do we transition to another plan so we will continue to have that conversation whether we hold our own pd days out and then use the i'll call it the commissioner's days um up front those days are meant to be for training for health and safety logistics in the buildings setting up the classroom well the classrooms will pretty much be set um ensuring that folks know about their um the various plans the hybrid and the remote and how it will work in their school and any other logistical things that have to do with this transition to a different learning atmosphere and as i said the vote on our implementation plan okay and that's all i have i know we had some questions i hope i was hoping some of them was answered in the in the presentation um one i will i will talk a little bit about arrival and dismissal because this news has a specific question but um again we're going over that we went over that with buildings today working out a plan for that how students are um walkers go we'll call them walkers that meet their parents etc so we are working on those dismissal and arrivals one thing for example at the high school if it was a hybrid model um parents instead of driving up front would drive all the way around the back of the building students would go in through the um like the music area the um cafeteria area um students that are parking would park their normal way and then go into the athletic room athletic area and um other students obviously would get off the bus and proceed through the front foyer um so all of that is being looked into and worked on uh lunches we said that that would be in the so anyway why don't we stop there and if folks have specific questions as i said i'm sure i don't have all the answers um but i'm not sure there's much we haven't thought about just don't have the answers thank you dr gifford i know that was it took a lot of time and a lot of effort to put that together and we still don't have all the answers that we're looking for so i know i have some but i will uh open it up and turn it over to my colleague first so um uh i'll start with uh this is wait yes hi um dr gifford one question is you know my two high school kiddos are getting excited about clubs what are your thoughts i know we've talked about sports being delayed what about clubs that run in the evening with kids coming back into the school are we going to try to move those to debate deca completely on have those be virtual and will um the stipends still the same with the same staff like what are your thoughts on that yeah i actually had a conversation with mr tebow today about that and we are going to play it a little bit by ear right now we'd love to consider having them we would if it was possible and we were in a hybrid model we would certainly want to try to do the cohort a cohort b kind of thing and um so is and if i guess there are certain clubs like a debate club for example that could certainly be virtual so either way we would try to keep as many as we could functioning and in that case yeah stipends would just remain the same right okay thank you and also i just did want to mention also we've decided because someone asked about food allergies and because students would be close we're gonna we're gonna tell folks it's a non-peanut district and i know other districts have done that so thank you it'll just be off limits i mean i can't monitor if a student brings a peanut butter but and also don't forget they'll be six feet apart at their own stations not running around the room and the room will be cleaned after so we've made that decision as a district thank you mr wake start your drinking so i'll just start by saying thank you to everyone working on this um some time back i had an opportunity to visit an aircraft carrier and i was talking to a fighter jet pilot and he said in order to land their fighter jet on an aircraft carrier he had to get his head in a window that was like about one foot and i'm sure that's kind of what it feels like to you you're flying a fighter and you're trying to fly through this little window um it's really hard work and i think we all very much appreciate how much time and effort you all have put into this um mine is think i think i have a couple questions but i also want to make a comment because i'm seeing a lot of emails to us and comments about social media well all the parents say they want fully face to face right why aren't we doing that and i think it's really important to to emphasize right the safety of everyone involved here has to be paramount right i understand as a parent how tremendously difficult this all is for parents marketing parents but the safety of the people who work for us and the children who come into our buildings has to be our number one concern and then the second thing is you know what's sort of best for their education because then we also get the flip side why aren't you going fully remote and this is a very difficult decision but we know how important it is for our kids to be in school with their teachers so this is a really hard one and i really appreciate all the work that you've done on that i think one comment i would have is i talked to a friend who is a pediatrician and she was very eager to figure out what the local district is doing health-wise and i said i think they're probably working on it but i would recommend not just the health department but the schools directly reach out to like particularly local pediatricians just to share your protocols with them finalized and then the other question i have is for mr kylie um do we have any indication when we'll know from the town what's gonna happen with that three million dollars um is there a timeline are they gonna hold on to it and wait and see what are what are we hearing from them well uh so the three million dollars is an entitlement uh that the town has been allocated um so the good news is that that money is available to the town the there is some question as to um if there will be a change as to what that money could be used for so it is possible there's initially there was a great deal of discussion from local municipalities over whether those funds would be able to be used as revenue replacement so because of lost revenue there is a substantial financial impact of this pandemic to the town so tax revenue the thought was that at some point those monies may become eligible to be used as revenue replacement and then it may make sense for the town to utilize them as such the town has been um great talking to me about asking me about what we need to do what we're trying to accomplish um the reality is that depending on what option we choose um it's a great difference as to what the financial impact would be so as dr gifford said it became apparent pretty early on that the that the full return um utilizing proper social distancing wasn't wasn't going to be uh feasible for us but if we had besides that there were a whole set of circumstances that we had to um overcome including financial ones that that made it prohibitive we we would have had funds though to address those between those funds that the town has allocated and the other funds on that on that slide that i listed there the cvr is a significant amount of money um and the and the esser money is also uh you know a significant amount so between the two we have more than a million dollars that um we the school department will be directly allocated i would anticipate that depending depending on the modes that we we use of these three plans throughout the year we may just use that million dollars so we may not we may not need to go beyond that and um but there's the full reopening plan if that ever happens this year depending on what the guidance is at that time there's so many different financial possibilities that um you know us uh relating to that but in terms of the hybrid plan or if you have to go remote at some point um you know we we could address those with those other grants thank you you're welcome mr news i think you had your hands up go ahead i do thank you uh mr chairman uh uh echo my my colleagues uh my thanks to the administration uh for this report i mean it's 55 pages long it's a fluid document so we know it's gonna you know like new england weather wait five minutes it'll change type of deal but at the moment uh dr gifford under the uh the hybrid model uh you talk about a student or students that are not returning to school uh educated through a learning management platform uh are we are we sending that to the students or are we going to send that to the agency that is running it so that our students are getting our curriculum well again i'm waiting for tomorrow's details for the two vendors however our the only way we could see this working and not put an extra burden on our teachers to expect them to provide remote learning as well as in school learning is to put them on the they're calling it the desi learning academy so it's it would be a separate academy or learning platform that students would enroll in um i don't know the cost yet obviously desi is you know the state will be picking up some but there will be a a per student cost for the district as well so will new we'll know more um that we can then once we know the details of what these vendors are offering us we can make those uh decisions one of the things we did think about was similar to we use the flip program this past two years with us one of our guidance counselors uh receiving a stipend to oversee it we thought that that could be a possibility where um at each level we have people at least overseeing making sure students are staying engaged with that platform uh reaching out to them if something's going on so but i think you know the number of people that have expressed interest about what a remote learning plan might look like i think would obviously want to keep their do what they can as well at home to keep their students engaged okay can i mr news can i interject real quick here because last year we actually had experience with this so i can i actually know what these things look like and most of these big online providers we worked with the high school to make sure they're aligned they're mostly sort of common core aligned which is a little bit how ours is so the overlap like we went through class by class the overlap with the dartmouth high school is not 100 for instance or any level um but it's pretty darn close they're getting all of many of the same major things from these online providers and i suspect that jesse is looking at the same things that we looked at um and they align really quite pretty well with with uh with the curriculum that we give in our and it's not specific to dartmouth but it's pretty close thank you shannon i appreciate that yeah you would have had that last year being the weight thanks for the thanks for the input uh dr gibbon is like and again as i'm thinking here with this alternating schedule uh how are we going to be with students per se almost getting they're going to they're going every other day and yes they're going home with information to take care of the second day but you know i get a little bit concerned that you know per se they're not going to get a full year's worth of a curriculum and after what we went through you know the last three months last year some of our students are probably you know no fault of theirs or anyone's you know behind the eight ball coming into the this school year and how is that going to go forward this year right no we we are obviously concerned about that as well but um miss oliveira with the team of teachers is working very hard to try to condense some of that and really focus on those essential standards um we weren't so far off last year we were happy to see when we did analyze our curriculum what had been addressed already and if you recall desi put out um what did they call them the power standards or whatever it might be the learnings that students should have under their belt to progress to the next level we were very close to almost have have addressed pretty much all of it so at this point we're not so far off with that what we're more concerned about i would guess is students that obviously have very significant needs and have obviously regressed over time and how are we going to get them back especially if it is a remote you know it's it's very worrisome yes okay uh a couple of questions for mr kiley uh it's obvious in some instances the uh you know with the classrooms happen to be modified as a lot of extra equipment i mean do we have storage space are we renting storage containers to put them in so that good luck willing this blows over and we're able to go back full time the equipment is handy to get back set up in the classrooms right mr news it's a big issue of course because uh the classrooms uh you know in order to maximize the space certainly can't be set up in the way they were before so we have rented storage containers uh we'll have some at all of the schools and some are already here um they'll be watertight but their primary use will be for furniture so um as dr gifford mentioned you know we're really working on uh eliminating um as much of the extras in the classroom as we can to buys that space for students so it's it's challenging because especially at the uh in the elementary schools where you have an awful lot in in each classroom a lot of materials and a lot of opportunities for kids to engage with things in the classroom that we're not going to be able to have um you know under this model but yes storage containers are our current uh solution to that yeah and hopefully it's short term exactly yeah and the last question i have regards regarding bussing uh and i'm looking at my notes here is the discussion with hell we're going to put for discussion purposes we're going to put 20 students on a bus starting out lying and coming back type of deal what happens when that bus gets full and there's still students to be picked up well and that's why what dr gifford mentioned is really important that we have a clear understanding as to are you are you asking for us to transport your child or not and we're going to need to know that answer so that i can design the roots i mean our transportation system was already pretty complex i've got to say and now what we're going to be doing is essentially doing it twice two separate sets of students so um we're going to have to have this is the only place you're going to be picked up this is the only place you're going to be driving it's it's very different because we have provided a extremely high level of service in the past but for this for the safety of the kids we we need to have assigned seats we need to know who is going to be getting on and off each of each and every one of these buses so um it's it's going to be a different system for sure we're prepared we're working on it okay thank you mr guideline dr gibbon i'm all set at the moment mr chairman thank you mr nunes we'll turn it over to uh this is amaral thank you i'm gonna try to get this night like you i i don't like seeing my face get big it's really distracting um i i mean i have a lot of questions i uh i mean commend everyone you know planning this is just you know it's on paper it's very comprehensive it's it's 50 something pages long um but my mind keeps going to the you know what's going to happen at day one uh how are we gonna keep all these things in order and how are we gonna support all of our students the way they need to be supported in our staff um i wanna i guess start by going back to um a couple of the questions that i that i had that um ms baldwin actually addressed um maybe regarding like the ventilation like i i believe the the guidance suggested it's not in front of me now opening windows except for in inclement weather and then i noticed on our planning it mentioned um it wasn't very specific i think it said something to the effect of as needed or if possible um but if you could speak a little bit to to that as to what you um are thinking of those schools that are really old where we have had issues with the mold and that sort of thing um in order to keep the air as healthy and clear as possible so i don't know dr gifford or lord mr kiley mr kylie has been working with that so i'll let him take that sure so i mean as as you sort of suspect and alluded to there um mrs emerald the the schools are are old um so we're dealing with equipment that's mostly original to those buildings um we what we are focusing on um is in conjunction and supported by the guidance as you as you stated um opening windows to promoting extra ventilation into the classrooms we are currently and we do this normally with preventative maintenance during the summer making sure that all of the ventilation equipment is operating fully we are committed to changing filters more often um we have also committed to we will run the ventilation equipment all night which is something that doesn't hasn't always happened in the past for obvious reasons you you actually want to try and save some money and not run equipment when no one's in the buildings but it can make a difference in terms of air quality certainly at the beginning of the year temperature in the classrooms which as we all know who have been wearing masks now for months is an issue um and will be an issue for for the kids and and the staff in those classrooms so if we um you know operate that equipment basically 24 hours a day it will make a difference in the classroom so those are the and we're obviously committed to maintaining that equipment making sure that uh if there are if as we do this when issues arise we're responsive and quick to to make any needed errors thank you for that um switch it back to gallery view again um my my next question i think was something that um ms baldwin also mentioned uh but i'll just summarize it is in in my mind you know i'm certainly looking at things through uh the special ed lens or the high need lens but i also consider all of our kids high needs at this point they haven't been in school since march i know there are going to be so many kids who who just have we don't even know what that's going to look like when they return but in regards to those students that require um you know related services by staff who traditionally go from school to school throughout the day say like capello's or the you know the different folks that just move around how is that how it could you talk a little bit more about the planning um for for that dr gifford sorry yeah no yeah i had to mute um it's still a little bit of a work in progress i think um i know miss townsend and miss jodwin have been working with the related service providers uh pretty extensively but um as far as people going from school to school at this point i mean we would treat it i mean my thinking is right now treat it as any staff member entering where you we will have the hand sanitizer available the mass the distancing etc um and adhere to the safety protocols as we can oh something just slipped out of my head the other thing we're looking at is that if folks are providing let's say reading specialists that those same kind of thing that students the two three four whatever they meet with those small groups at a time would be spaced accordingly um in a certain area so yeah i mean miss baldwin certainly had some very good questions and um as i said before we don't have all the answers but we're continuing to do the best we can to make to have the safest place we can something along the lines too that i've been worrying about kiddos who aren't so those students who have who are prioritized has having high needs most specifically those students who are whose ieps indicate a sub-separate placement um but look forward to and obviously benefit greatly from uh inclusion you know uh within that how how how is that going to be changed in any way students going in for a certain point in time of day [Music] with support needed is that going to be impacted at all we're working very hard to maintain those iep minutes on each part of the grid so we would expect that those students would be able to go into and don't forget the classrooms themselves will be 9 or 10 11 students at the most anyway so we would expect to be able to do that it's it's it's not easy to think about especially you know all of those grids that the minutes have to be and and the special ed teachers that might be on one day working in the inclusion classes how do they provide the minutes um on the other day so we're working to try to help and figure that out and of course jesse hasn't been very explicit on that either except to say do it right right um and how about the this might be from mr kylie you know i can't even comprehend how you're figuring out how much ppe you're gonna you need you've got these high needs kids who um for personal care reasons require the staff let's be real they're going to be they're going to have gowns on in these classrooms which is going to be quite intimidating and then there are kids who no fault of their own are going to kids with or without special needs are are going to be playing with their masks and things are going to be happening and um you know they may be coming from home with masks or but um do you know so have you acquired access to however you're doing that math to account for all of the changes that need to happen five times a day three times a day all of that multiple times in it in an hour um i mean i'm living it so i'm just i can i can just tell you it's it's probably triple what you're thinking or more um have you secured and or could you give like a ballpark of what you anticipate being ready like we have enough for two months of classes we have realistically we can go through the holidays or we might run out uh in the end of october do you have any kind of numbers regarding that i guess what i could say is that um we have we have already procured all types of ppe not to say that we're not going to be buying more um including you know well before school starts receiving more i've not found a particular ppe products that i can't obtain so i don't want to tell you who my vendors are because i don't want everybody else to call them right now but um but i have found it available uh to acquire gowns gloves masks face shields um all of the safety goggles all of the ppe that we would uh that were recommended by the department of ed for um sort of the situations in which um a a staff member might be in a position to be you know close to close to students and be interacting with students in a way other than just um you know wearing a mask um so we've been able to acquire um what i would say i would estimate to be already more than a month of of school in some cases in terms of masks we've got months of supply [Music] anticipating that those are going to be a popular item for sure um because everybody's going to be wearing those we will be acquiring more gowns more gloves we actually have months worth of gloves already um gowns probably and face shields are the things that are high on my list of procurement but again i haven't had i haven't had a problem i have some that i'm expecting in a couple of days i'm not a problem acquiring those but i agree it's hard to estimate the the department of ed issued a document that had some estimates some formula that they came up with i'm pretty sure that they just had a best guess with that um so i agree that it's going to be challenging well that's good though that you so far haven't um you know come across difficulty accessing it um but uh i think i have i have a lot of questions i don't want to take up too much time but i had one more that my printer is not working so i had to screenshot my notes oh gosh um oh and i think dr gifford you sort of answered this already um but just in case once we come forth with uh the plan that we will be going with right most likely hybrid but we don't know what's to come will there be an opportunity at that point for for you know you don't want to sign a contract until you couldn't know the details and um even for myself i um my son full disclosure is out of district but you know i don't know how i feel about him returning no matter how difficult it is working um uh i lost my train of thought sorry um yeah will families then have the opportunity to sort of sign back up or get back into the other lane of remote at that point or will they sort of be stuck wherever they decide once we uh survey them again i guess is your question that if we say rem um hybrid and then people opt for the remote uh deci plan but then we go to remote can they come back to us is that what you're asking i think so i think that's a good that yeah that would satisfy um yeah i think that's the most um not concerning but something to really think about because i'm thinking yes because we would want them back to what we're doing um especially given shannon's experience where the they're probably similar pathways um and yet then part of me says i would hate to see us flip-flop a number of times and the kids go back and forth it's it's a hard thing but i think um once we have once the parents have like next week a better understanding and they get to digest all of this and they get the we ask them for the information i mean we certainly would entertain people having second thoughts you know it's just for planning purposes and making sure we have enough space etc that it's pretty important that people try to make the best decision they can for their family and thank you and i i i won't ask any more questions right now i have a lot of them but my my head's exploding but um i just want to thank everyone you know we're we're this is just you know we would talk about the emails we've gotten recently and i've been a little bit disappointed in the tone of a few of them insinuating that people are not up late at night or are not sleeping at all um and and not focused on getting kids back to school um so anyway i had to say that because it's been bothering me but um i thank you you know classes would have already been set teachers would have known we would have been getting letters out this week to families who their classroom teacher is so we're all in this together we can just do the best we can um but i appreciate the effort of the administration but just trying to get it together appreciate it that's all you're welcome they've been working hard i will say again ask me any questions call me in the office because i want you all to feel comfortable you are going to have to make a vote so we need to make sure you have your questions answered thank you dr gifford thank you um this is amarill i share um all my colleagues comments and concerns um first off foremost thank you dr gifford thank you mr kylie the rest of the school district administration and staff that are you know going on zooms volunteers that are volunteering hours going on zooms to meet with um you know different group faculty groups uh there is no ease make no mistake about this this is no there's no easy decision um you know first and uh you know first things first is there was a comment about uh returning to full reopening i've gotten some of those questions as well the bottom line is this district cannot we've determined dr gifford and her staff has determined that we cannot safely reopen the downtown public school at 100 capacity it's just it's not feasible it's not safe and that's why that was taken off the table uh that being said the two plans that we're looking at here we're looking at the remote plan as well as a hybrid plan um in full transparency i am not convinced on a hybrid plan um i i've had questions come up of can you guarantee that my child is going to be safe in school can you guarantee the staff are going to be safe in school um no we can't let's just make that clear we cannot guarantee that anyone will be 100 safe from from covet 19.
okay i have 93. all right i printed these documents off when you first sent them to me so sorry about that thank you we're not it's number 93 madrick your attention to the bottom half of this paid governing board vision uh governing board beliefs and such that i took right off the website is is it absolutely correct i can look on the website okay you're talking about the vision yes okay all those statements you believe are correct and again we'll run it by uh the central office to make sure they agree too okay okay all right um dad i've got a lot of information here that i've taken notes on but i think it's pretty easy uh the additional schools edition of scottsdale rio verde the e-school will clarify the name 175 square miles we'll verify the student count will verify 2020 um current uh scholarship uh as uh mr brown said maybe it's more like 11 million 500 we will bullet point all those things like fine arts performing arts sports dual enrollments fed gifted and even j ted and we'll make sure it's definitive so people understand that okay that sounds good to me how does that sound can i see some nods yes or no or okey dokey okay let's move on to the next item are we looking at the the district community which basically is like our yeah i wanted a selling point i didn't have a as much to work on there as i was hoping so i made it pretty brief um and i was looking to you for information you thought should be included uh in that area of district community well in addition to cape creek and carefree we need to refer back up to the district profile where we added rio verdes uh north scottsdale phoenix but in in addition to what is written here our school district i believe is reaps a huge benefit from the involvement of the community and parents and you know when we're looking for a superintendent we need to have a superintendent who is comfortable working with the community at large and is comfortable with a lot of parent involvement because there are many school districts out there that have next to no parent involvement and to bring in a superintendent who comes from a district with low parent participation it would be somewhat of a culture shock i would believe to come into a district where there is a lot of support from parents and community well could we say something like we encourage and cultivate parent and community support within our school community either that or something to the effect of community and parents involvement or support is you know a big part of who we are it helps define you know us it adds to the scope of what we do in the school district something something to um create the understanding so they're gonna get they gotta work with parents and community exactly because we don't want someone to come into this role and not uh and be blindsided not that it's a bad thing but you know if we're being honest about who our district is and i think it's awesome that we have so much participation but what about the big shock if someone's coming from a district where they're not exactly experiencing contact we're all here and we're all very very much woven into the fabric of this community and we're all we all know that there's a lot of parent participation but this is kind of unique to what a lot of school districts experience it's easily stated i can make that a part of the write-up okay are there other other other aspects of the community that you think need to be mentioned i'm just kind of curious about something um you you mentioned in there it's 90 minute drive to the mountains are you referred like flagstaff yeah wow how long is it yeah yeah i like adding the parent and community involvement any other additions to that section that look good to everybody um you know that's easy to do i can't make that happen with where you mention local activities you know there are a lot of activities here that are desert based like hiking for instance horseback riding and of course those are activities that don't appeal to everyone but um there is a certain draw to like hiking for instance i don't know how you would put that in but having a school district situated in the center of the snoring desert puts us in a very unique setting yeah well i i just where i'm going with this is from an aesthetic point perspective where where we are situated is it's we're in a breathtaking area i mean we've got these mountains we have phenomenal sunrises sunsets we've got the desert we have all of that that that's something that we should capitalize on well do you want sonoran desert mentioned in there because that might be something that if you say sonoran desert they kind of anyone from out of state would may not know what it is just something no i'm saying would you want to add that because when people i think we should we should if we're going to be descriptive of the cave creek school district community this desert is part of our community and you know some and it's actually used as a teaching tool for some of the elementary schools and to bring that in i think adds to to the quality of what we're trying to promote here the spirit of the west is still alive here thank you thank you no we don't have people riding the school on their horse and you know hitching up out front but um we that we embrace the spirit of the west with a modern day flair i like that i also like your term breathtaking i'll work that in also okay how's that sound everybody yes good okay okay um district operational information that's stuff that you're going to have to get from you're going to be getting that from um our uh a final draft before it's sent out or is this the draft that gets tweaked and we approve the draft with edits and that's that and then it gets made into a final i'm going to we our last one of our later agenda items has to do with the timeline and we do have a floating date in there i believe don't quote me but i believe it's around the 17th of august middle august um my suggestion is going to be because there are a number of changes you want me to make my suggestion is going to be that at that meeting this comes back to you in final draft form for either retweeting or approval as written um and then you would send it back to me uh julia would send back to me with your comments and your changes and then we would have it published right after that now the the format that you would bring it back to us is that the final format it would be in or is this just sort of a word document and then you have some other format that it would go into once it's you know like to be made ready to be sent out for a national search yeah it would be it would be initially a word doc for me and then uh katie katie link in my office is my assistant she will actually load it into the electronic format that would be published is there a way that we can actually get a look at what the electronic format would look like i think it would be nice to be able to see a sample of what you're going to produce on our behalf so we know what's going out there i can send that i can have katie send that up to julia it won't be your district uh i can have her send that up in the next couple of days you can see what the norm looks like now okay um okay so we're going to give you all of our suggestions and tweaks and then we'll need to a later date come back and then we'll see the final and then that would be uploaded to a digital format that's what it then would be uploaded to the digital format right but i'll send you a like digital formatter i'll have katie do it ahead of time so that can go out so you can kind of get a flavor for what it looks like that's a good question you can see what the final looks like after that we've got this is probably the biggest question and that is the position requirements um just want to make a couple comments about that before you start your discussion the one thing you definitely and i tell all boards the same thing don't back yourself into a corner um i do think i mentioned at the first meeting and i'll remind you that if you say that you want a person who's the superintendent's got 10 15 years experience in a like situation in arizona and a like-sized district that has a a phd has experience as a special ed director as a principal as a teacher for 10 years you're not you're going to back yourself in the corner you're not going to have that person i equate this process as a funnel at the top end of the funnel you you've got a big opening and although you want to compress it to a definitive point you don't want to go so far that it narrows the scope to the point where you don't get a lot of applicants you want to get as many eye implicants as you can the process will let you narrow that down enter and suppose you mentioned it already twice i wish i could remember your exact examples but you said twice along the way here tonight you'd like to see a principal one of them was community you'd like to see a superintendent not a principal you'd like to see a superintendent who's going to mingle with the community get involved in community be part of the community and be part of that activist take an activist role in the community want your exact words and that's important and that's part of that process is as you move through this you're going to start saying things and thinking about things that you haven't thought about before like like those two items you define those tonight as something you're looking for other board members are going to do the same thing so my point is i would leave the focus a little wide to begin with and let the process narrow down who that last candidate is but that's just a suggestion um i've got a draft here that gives you an idea what i think it should look like um and it's relatively definitive without being overly definitive and then i gave you some suggestions uh in example form on later pages that show you some things that uh you other districts have and that you could use so i think it's up to the board now to have that discussion of what you want the final product to look like now on this um you know where you've got the cave creek school district profile and then the community profile you have an area for notes for additional information is that for our purposes for this discussion or is that something that's included in the final document well those those are the notes i took and you took based on the conversation okay now i'm i'm assuming that since this was put together in a word document the final will be formatted differently than what we're seeing well it will go into like i say go into the uh katie will put it in the electronic uh format okay will the structure be the same yes okay because you have like district operational information and you have one two five five items and then the sixth one is on a separate page is on a different page and so those kinds of formatting things i'm assuming are going to be cleaned up okay yeah that'll that'll get cleaned up and keep in mind uh when i speak to your cfo uh maybe other that's just a kind of a shopping list there may be other things that your cfo thinks are important to your district that need to be in there for instance as it says the last one other financial information um bonding capacity things like that may be important so we'll leave it we'll leave it up your cfo to say what's appropriate and yes we will katie's job is to make it look as nice as she can very good thank you um on the as we start to discuss the position requirements you have um like the bullet points of requirements you know like the degrees and um experience and then if you scroll down you had um is that different than um the examples of position qualifications or are we looking at the same thing in two different places well it's kind of the same thing only different okay and here's what it amounts to the the first paragraph is just the first couple paragraphs just basically intro uh then position requirements that those are the things that maybe you absolutely have to see and what i've listed there is you have to see a master's degree or higher you have to see five years successful teaching experience you have to see a minimum of three years experience as a principal and or other public school level administrator those are absolutes the way it's written those things have to be in place if you don't have those things in place you're not a qualified candidate then i put down experiences public school superintendent but i put prefer that answers the question that i mentioned earlier and i put down holes in arizona's superintendent's certificate and i put prefer but that's just what i put you can make all of those six five bullets absolutely required or you can make them all preferred i could say position requirements and then put preferred behind that and they're all preferred how far do you want to open the funnel is the question the items then below that are more characteristic of a person demonstrates excellence interpersonal skills you have to judge that when you interview them you have to judge that from the things they send you in terms of answering questions you have to judge that how they represent themselves at the community meeting so those items are more representative of things you're going to glean from an interview and glean from references and things that have been written about these folks on the next page must be a leader with passionate vision of education for the future well you can't just you know get a document that says that you have to figure that out as you work so that's the difference between the two uh groupings um one is what's absolutely required or preferred and what are those characteristics you're looking for okay when so in looking at those if you scroll past so you go through the salary contract timeline additional information what is the difference between the qualifications that we just went over and then um we have examples one two three and four and five is that also variations on what you're talking about like example one is you know requirements and then we have preferred in a separate set of bullet points there's another example that has you know you yeah those are just other examples of what other districts have done for instance if you look if you look at example one uh the district that wanted to present that fashion they just wanted it short sweet and to the point they wanted to keep the funnel pretty wide open so they said that's what they wanted okay excuse me representations of what different boards have projected in the past and i wanted you to see what because again you haven't done this before so you need to have a variation i thought to make a decision what you want okay so our job is to narrow this down right now well like you did like you did with those first couple items uh you need to tell me what you want if if the first representation i gave you is adequate that's fine if you would rather take a form one where it's a little less definitive a little more direct that's fine too if you make the first representation i gave you but don't like all the bullet points want to take some out or add some up to you you're doing oh i'm sorry beth go ahead um i like five uh i would i would tweak a couple things but but that is the one that i favor the most i think uh are you saying example five i'm sorry beth is that what you're yes example i'm wondering maybe do we want to go around the horn and each person like talk about what example they like and then maybe we're gonna need to come back and just kind of nail down like what we're going to require because all five of us need to be in agreement on the requirement like we have to you know so do you want to start with um we could start with beth and then we could reset to alphabetical since you started just maybe go through and tell us what like beth for you what you liked example five yeah so what i can do is i'll i'll tell you which one i like and which one i absolutely don't like and the reason why okay my preference is five i would eliminate number three because it's uh it's narrative i like being like three within the preferred the example three i would oh okay you like five but you don't like example three you're not talking about i like scenario example five i like example five okay i would eliminate example three um example one to me is pretty darn short okay so that's kind of where i am as an overall picture but i have more to say when we get into the specifics okay um remember brown did you have an example you particularly liked or didn't like just not for like specifics but like just the way it's set up i was pretty flexible on those i think if we need to funnel our information into one of those examples format is there a style i think i'm like like was there a style of an example that you preferred over another i think i like number five it seemed to work especially with the bullet points that we have on the on the pages before uh where we list underneath position requirements and then probably just a comment um underneath that position requirements that fifth bullet point that says hold a current arizona superintendent certificate and then it's preferred in parentheses i think if we're sending this out nationwide do we want to say you know preferred but not required because i think we're gonna get to that in a minute this is more just like the style that you like and then i think we're gonna have to each bullet point on what item okay so as far as style you like number five yeah i like number five i think that works good for us yeah i think if you're looking at style we're not saying we're gonna go with everything under there because if you look under number five under the the seeks there may be some stuff i think we're just looking more right now we're talking about like style of how it's written so you like five five works okay remember busby no i five is good i i prefer something that has bullets for many reasons um but for the person reading this bullets seem to be a better a better grasp or a better way to grasp someone's attention okay um so all of these are workable one would probably be my least um favorite okay um i like one because it's short but um i like five i think the bullet thing is just i like that you can look at individual things i think the only thing style-wise i like the preferred position or you know if we have the required and preferred um when we start looking at the part where it says the governing board seeks the superintendent i don't know if we need that many like when we start getting to the nuts and bolts i want some but not a lot because i think you know if you see that many you're just gonna you're not gonna i'd like to narrow it down i think five works as long as we have you know we're looking for this these are our preferred requirements because we're not we don't want to box ourselves in um or we can tweak it on that but yeah five works for me i like shorter rather than i like shorter and more direct rather than flowy could we create a hybrid from all of these i'm sure we could i think it's more just like what kind of styles we like and we don't like it's like you like number five if we can get it all on one page yes please well because you know and i think all of us know if we get to where you have too many pages of stuff the important thing gets lost and then you start getting bogged down into tiny details and that might actually you know where you don't have too many requirements that narrow down a person if we start saying we also want a person who can do this and has a really great golf handicap and also plays the violin that's just as narrowing as you need to have three years here and two years here and you know so i like the idea five i just want to make sure we don't make that so when you have that many things it's so broad i mean it's nearly superhero level so we might as well go well i can't provide you all that i'd love to but i have no golf handicap and now i i don't feel like i can be your superintendent so i like five just maybe not quite so verbose but i also like short stuff but i can i'm easy i just like kind of yeah one page would be good you go past more than one page i think people just aren't they're gonna look at it but they're gonna start not paying as much attention uh remember rich you have an opinion on style yeah similar to yours i like one and five i prefer brevity but yeah number five if we could do it on one page okay so we like the style of five um and i like how in the example it talks about the best fit because it's not gonna be a perfect fit because that doesn't exist so i like that phrasing um do we need to start like nailing down with the five of us do we want to in five it says preferred position requirements um in the one that was initially with ours if you scroll up to we have requirements and then we have preferred in parentheses do we want to delineate do we want everything to just be preferred or do we have some things that are nuts and bolts you have to have this this is a requirement and then do with maybe something else as scott said is have something and have it as preferred in a parenthesis yeah everything should just be preferred or do we want to nail down so we absolutely have to have this to be our superintendent if we're doing a national search it's quite possible that there's someone who is otherwise qualified to apply but they don't have an arizona superintendent's certificate so what is the process to obtain an arizona superintendent's certificate if you're already have that certification in another state generally there's reciprocity between arizona and most other states and it's become actually easier than it was ten years ago or so because the the uh there isn't as many people looking at this time as there was 10 12 years ago so if i if i'm in georgia and i've got a superintendent certificate generally speaking and come to arizona i can present that and the state will accommodate me now i said generally speaking we don't control it only the state controls it the state has uh the authority to make the determination who qualifies and who doesn't but generally risk property works one of the things that often occurs at least has in the past is to have an arizona certificate you need to have a couple of courses in arizona history government and now they've done that online just take a test and do a quick uh do it that way so sometimes that person's first certificate shows a deficiency in those areas so they give it to them for two to four years or something like that the intent that they fulfill that obligation um the the reason you might want to leave it preferred is that you do open that door that you were talking about you have a highly qualified person and maybe you want them to work toward that certificate even if they don't have the reciprocity but you also don't want to back yourself into the corner of saying and i had a district recently that we didn't work with that i talked to that had done this what they put in their document was um has a has a current arizona certificate or has the ability to get one well what does that mean it really doesn't mean anything yeah anybody you know i shouldn't say anybody but a lot of folks have the ability but will they so you keep it at least so it doesn't back you into a corner either want it you don't want it or it's kind of preferred could we sort of wordsmith it to um they the person holds a current superintendent's certificate arizona is preferred because if we're if we're doing a national surge if we make an arizona superintendent's certificate um like a must-have we've we've delineated it down to that small group we've eliminated a lot of people and initially it's my understanding this process is to make the pool as big as possible so that there's more to pick from and if we get super specific we're going to eliminate candidates you know john doe that lives in bangor maine may be you know the superstars superintendent but he doesn't have an arizona certificate so all of the sudden he's not going to apply well could we say current superintendent certificate re required and then in parentheses arizona superintendent certificate preferred uh i believe that's what was asked and the answer is yes is is there um [Music] is it appropriate to say um you know the expect you know preferred or the expectation that the certificate is obtained in whatever the period of time is that has to it has to i see i don't know what the the nitty-gritty is of the process so i'm sort of fumbling with this question because i don't know the process it's an excellent question and it's what i mentioned earlier what this district that i was talking about that we didn't work with um but i found out later what they've done and i happen to know the one of the board members and i said you know the problem you got yourself into and what they did is they said you know has arizona's certificate either in place or has the ability to get one well okay so i asked this board member i said okay so how long did you give them to get it well we didn't define it well who's checking to make sure they do get it well we didn't define that either i said so what if they don't get it then what are you going to do and she just kind of looked at him and said i don't know and i said that's why we would never asp would never recommend that you either say they have to have it or you say it's preferred and then it works itself out because you want the best candidate you can get and you don't want to lose the best candidate just as you said because you said has to have that arizona certificate in place right now if that's what you want that's fine but they may also not be your best candidate you may have that person like you mentioned from north dakota or whoever that um really is your best candidate but they don't have a certificate so your your point is well taken and i think the key there recommendation wise would be set on either prefer or no don't say anything at all about it well well you say they want arizona and then you know in the one you suggested like the one you wrote if you go up from all the examples um under the first par position requirements the one that you had where it did say hold a current super arizona superintendent certificate preferred that sounds like so basically we're saying it's not required but we prefer it you're saying that's probably the safest bet to do with something like that so we don't box ourselves into a it gives you the board the most room to work once you look at your applicants so north dakota is great that's not taking about the running but we are saying we would like for you to have it without being so it's better to say arizona preferred as opposed to hold the current superintendent's certificate arizona preferred either direction it's fine either either way fine you're not you're not closing the door too tight in either way okay i would i would my my vote would be to just say hold the superintendent certificate with the understanding this is going to be a national search and for a potential candidate to see it written out arizona superintendent's certificate preferred that could immediately make someone feel like they would not qualify why should i go through the time to fill out this application so if it just says superintendent certificate in parentheses arizona preferred that i sort of feel like is a little bit broader definition of the exact same thing that we're looking at and we can we say that um they they need to hold a superintendent's certificate but they're eligible for i think that's what he just said we don't sorry about we don't want to get into the whole eligibility thing like just say you need to be a superintendent and in parentheses we'd prefer we prefer arizona well by eligibility i mean they've got the qualifications to go for an arizona certification the problem with that is i cannot tell you that they do and you cannot tell me that they do only the state department does so you put yourself in a position and saying okay we think you will go forth and get your certificate and for some reason the state says no [Music] don't put yourself in that position to test it but that's also something when you do the employment contract that we can have written in that if we need to put a time frame if they're coming from out of state that they need to have a valid superintendent certificate issued by the state of arizona absolutely and then you give them a time frame and then you give them a time frame and then write that into the employment contract and then you're then you've got a deadline that has to be met well it's absolutely appropriate but by the time someone shows up for as a candidate as one of the finalists you know one of say three people that are being interviewed for the position by the time the candidate gets to that stage of the process would we have communicated to out of out of state superintendent that in the event that you you are hired you would be required to get this certification within x amount of time i always tell uh those folks then unless i have other instruction from the board people from out of state will call me and i say what's the first thing i need to do i said well even before you apply for the position apply for your certificate get that in place see that's where i was going with this is the person from out of state who is proactive and does their homework ahead of time already knows that they need to get the certification and you know i'm interested in that person who's already done their homework and knows what needs to be done i don't think having to spoon feed oh by the way person you need to go do this they should already if they're that interested they should be taking the appropriate stuff yeah they should know if they want to be a superintendent here they've gotta say the phrasing be that we want that is opening it up to out of state but you know reminding them is there a cost involved in transferring a superintendent's certificate oh yeah the state the state charges i can't remember i don't recall what it is cost relations but when you need a certificate it's relatively minimal it's not okay it's not like five dollars but it's not like five thousand exactly okay okay all right it's closer to five than it is five thousand okay okay i don't know the exact numbers well so charge you for each certificate so if you want my superintendent principal and teacher it's you know it's like forty dollars forty dollars for it don't quote me on forty dollars but that's how they do it sure no i understand knowing where we're trying to go with this do you have a phrasing that doesn't sound clunky or boxes us into a corner that meets what we're what we're saying yeah let me let me um can i back up a second though we focused on that one thing um you i'm hearing that example five is kind of where you're headed nothing like that right okay and i've also heard you want to keep it short but not too short keep it to a page okay so my suggestion would be if we look at the first paragraph we do keep it simple the the unified school district governing board seeks a exceptional leader with high standards personal integrity and good moral character period the governing board understands the candidates and they and don't fill in anymore because if you fill in more you make it longer the governing board understands the candidate will likely possess and that's fine and where it says preferred let's start right there with that word five points i think a master's degree is absolute they're not gonna get a certificate without one anymore oh yeah does anyone or did any of the five of us disagree with that at all i mean i think that's a no-brainer but that's my scott's shaking no janet's even have a problem with the masters or higher i don't think i think some of these things need to be not in the preferred category but in the requirements just without requirements and that would be one of them that's kind of where i'm taking you on this so it looks more like the first example but so master's degree is an absolute three-year successful teaching experience that's very important to your teaching staff that they know this person's been a teacher um everyone see me see head nuts i'm seeing scott nod are we good with the minimum of three yeah okay and then the same thing is true minimum of three years successful experiences your principals like to see that now we take the word preferred off position requirements as a header like we did in the first example and leave those as absolutes those are three things they have to have so when you do your screening those are three things you're looking for actually ahead of time candidate a meets the basic requirements candidate b doesn't i'll tell you and then the next two experiences of superintendent district level in new york public school and holds an arizona certificate of the time application would you like to put the first three as absolute and the last two preferred and change the last one to hold that holds a super certificate arizona certificate preferred and i would work on the language what makes sense does that work for you to do it that way i would prefer that language you know preferred arizona yeah okay i i like the first day being required the second two preferred and then we we tweak like you just said okay now on here where it says preferred position requirements these are kind of givens these are the non-negotiable requirements am i understanding this correct yes and if you if you what was just said the first three would be non-negotiable okay well if they're non-negotiable we can't call them preferred we've got to just comes off okay okay it says but now it says position requirements the first three are the position requirements absolute the next two are preferred position requirements okay whoa we don't we're not going to make it a requirement that the person has had superintendent experience that's okay i mean you might have someone that hasn't been a lot of people coming into superintendent i mean do we want to take out the possibility that we have someone that's been an assistant superintendent but never been a superintendent yeah i wouldn't want to lock that in um okay that it's a superintendent preferred that's one thing maybe like putting it down to two people and they are really really equal but one has been a superintendent one hasn't that that could be something like okay that's our tipping point that you're totally equal people but you do have this you have this one extra nugget of experience that isn't required but we prefer it and you have it you see where i'm going with that yeah yeah just put the word preferred in parentheses after that were like we had in the uh the pages before easily done what do you all think about though uh the district level administrator do we want to leave that as preferred or required because otherwise a principal can jump jump to a superintendent's position i'm fine with preferred i mean we've seen principals jump to superintendents i would rather keep a preferred and required but i mean that's also something where you know i'd like to have the option that if we have a person that came in that hasn't been superintendent or district level but it's this amazing principle that has certification and we're like my gosh they can take us somewhere new i'd like to have that option but you know i'd like to see someone with district experience but i don't want to i don't want to require that are you saying take it out all together i mean i'd like to see it i also i'm not saying take it out at all i'm saying um i'm suggesting that it be required that they've been a district level administrator i think that might take out more people than i'm concerned that could take out some because that would eliminate your assistance superintendents because if you if you keep that then that opens that all up that would include the assistant superintendents because that's a district level administrator so that would actually include um somebody just said that they wanted to take that out i thought no no i i don't want to require it i just want to keep it as a preferred yes but that's my vote i mean we need to come to an agreement on best wanting to make it required i'm not so we need the five of us need to decide or at least come to a vote on how what that if we're making that required or preferred i i like that as preferred okay beth you like it is required i'll i'll defer to the group on that because it's what you just said a minute ago catherine when we get down to the uh looking at um the applications that could be a tipping point also i think i just you never know i mean it could not be we could have someone walk in that is a past superintendent that's done it for 10 years you're like wow you meet everything you never know if you're going to get i don't want us to be the districts like you can't come to us unless you've been because there are school districts that won't even look at people if they've never been higher level and that's keeping out some really great younger innovative leaders that are principals and they're you know giving a chance i mean that may not be the direction we go but i'd like to have that opportunity if someone comes in and blows us away having not been a district administrator but has all the key has all the necessary tools has all the requirements but can handle that i'd like to keep that open as you know we keep that person in mind to what everybody thinks okay um jim do you have an opinion on that keep the funnel wide janet make it as broad as possible so put it as preferred so keep those last two preferred and then tweak like we said about the certificate yes on that certificate point is it just easy to say hold or able to attain an arizona superintendent certificate mr brown the reason you don't want to be able to is because that isn't anything you can really stand behind because how are you going to judge that yeah because then we have then i think that's when it gets into that whole thing about you're getting into contract negotiations and then it gets lawyery are there certain things you can narrow that in that are required for a super i'm assuming there's certain qualifications that are required to get a superintendent's certificate there are certain requirements for a superintendent certificate absolutely um but are they uniform from state to state no they're not every state's a little different that's why sometimes when a person comes in with a certificate they'll give them a temporary that's good for a couple of years uh they're getting away from that more and more because we need to get more superintendent certified folks in here uh i think just just as a as a focus point i think i think you're having a great discussion doing a very good job of discussing this but i think that what you've come up with is is probably a nice settling point and that is the first three absolute the next two are preferred with the caveat that the current superintendent certificate and then arizona preferred means something too it's kind of like miss buffy said a person went out of their way to get a certificate in the state they were at they showed that they had the the inclination and the will and the energy to do it that proves a point to begin with now when you that counts it once you get into the negotiation part of this is you've got two years we want you to have that certificate within two years in place i think that's fine okay are we good okay yes i think it's very yeah it's to the point that gives us okay on the next part do we want that's where my that's an awful lot of stuff what i'm going to do is lead you through that little exercise and it's going to be what i'm going to call it is what don't you want because you what you do want is you want it concise enough to fit on one page you got about 15 bullet points so i'm going to go down through it and ask you to kind of talk through each one of these and tell me what you don't want don't tell me what you do want just tell me what you don't first one is has experience working with the diverse population multicultural multi-language uh second language learning environment does that fit your district i will tell you the district that used that use this particular information was a reservation district our diversity numbers are very very low yeah like like extremely yeah like 19 maybe so yeah i think that's not it's great but it's not something that's going to be yeah that's a leakage delay on that is everyone okay with not number one yeah both two then student-centered programs committed to growth every child important yeah yeah i like that that's what it's all about well i think that also goes we talk about programs and activities that covers what we talked about up earlier because we are a district that has lots of sports lots of fine arts lots of culture we need a superintendent that's going to encourage that in our kids because that's what we expect that's what our that's what our community is we want someone that that wants to push our kids to grow in many different ways so i i like number two the third bullet the third road is kind of like the second bullet restated in a different way about being student centered and academic success is bullet three necessary no i mean i would hope it would be understood they want the kids to do it well this person is is an educator is currently a superintendent or an edu an educator to whatever capacity if they're applying for a job for a superintendent there is some amount of assumption you've got to make that this person does have a commitment to furthering the education and building up the student and so to restate that is well it's somewhat redundant to the second one and to restate it again i mean to me that should be a given i i shouldn't have to ask the person that's applying is this who you are that they that skill should already be there it should be should be the innate skill and if they're not a student-centered person that's something that comes out in an interview yeah well and i think if they if they do any digging on our district they'll see the expectations for academic success are i mean they're already there so we don't want someone yeah i think it's kind of redundant yeah i would take out number three any do we agree on that can i see some knots if you think yeah i don't want to push i mean janet and i are yelling so if the other three of you if you're like no no you have to keep it just i i hope you're not really serious that i'm yelling no i'm saying we're popping in going we like this we like it i'm just like do i have head nods so okay so we're ditching three the fourth bullet is uh having to do with curriculum planning and instruction absolutely yes yeah i think we're seeing right now yeah we need someone that's been around with some of this yeah that's could we re um wordsmith this a little bit and maybe where it says dedicated to the implementation of programs has maybe we could make that demonstrated success with implementing programs or enhancing student learning demonstrated success in the implementation of programs how's that oh yeah i can make that work and that makes it shorter so that goes with my shorter bullet points but are you going to include the curriculum planning and instruction piece that's not coming out right oh i assume that was going to stay there and then at after after the comma demonstrated experience yeah or success whatever it was that i said demonstrated is a better word and it also leads you to a question that you can ask at an interview i'll have you demonstrate it yeah your experience um scott and jim how do you guys feel about that yeah that's good sounds good uh number five yeah the knowledge of current arizona state standard state assessment protocol and core standards well is it gonna hurt us with any out of state exactly if we're if we're doing an out-of-state search that's we've this is a question that's going to eliminate a candidate and let's be honest man our assessment protocol in the state changes every year so well there's no way uh one person is going to know 12 years of standards yeah that's just impossible they should have a general overview of maybe what standards are you would think they would know that but that this is impossible for one single person to even know this but by the time someone comes by the time someone comes to a final interview or is in the pool of a final candidate one would hope that that candidate would have done their homework and sort of investigated just exactly what standards are in arizona because during an interview that would make for a very interesting conversation oh you're from florida so tell me what are the standards for your fourth grade math or whatever it is and then it from that you can um get an idea of where innovation and creativity are coming from because that standard in another state is probably not exactly like ours yeah i'm fine with i think that's off yeah that's a very specific i mean it's almost like a requirement yeah i agree you're gonna find out in your questions real quick how do you feel about ditching them doing their homework yeah that's a cut because like remember hatcher said that's impossible for anybody to know and we don't even know it and we're in arizona i mean it changes so quickly that who who knows jim you okay with ditching that okay i i rarely i rarely take exception with a board member for good reason but i will tell you beth it is possible and i live with one for 46 years so she can tell she likes to be here in any grade you want to know that is very impressive i never argue with her on standards um models high expectations holds others accountable for the same standard of accountability honesty and integrity [Music] i think that's important it goes to uh yeah because it is it's important but look at this from another perspective this is not a quantifiable type of thing that we're putting on here okay so your definition of um integrity accessibility etc may be different from the candidates okay this is um there are other ways to ask like as we go through here there's other things in this list that speak to some of these things and the only reason i'm bringing up a different perspective on this is try to whittle down the list a little bit so that it fits on one list this it is very important but it works into some other areas on this list i'm just saying i'm good in or out i i like it because um the this person is the leader of the entire district and um to me my saying is the tree shakes from the top and you know for a teacher the principal the principal's character and characteristics are it tends to be how the rest of the staff follows so the to me the same thing is and many of these things are quantifiable uh curriculum planning so forth isn't necessarily quantifiable so i i actually like that one and i would i would uh prefer to leave it in is there a way to take this one about high high expectations the next one um sensitivity for diverse views and then the one below that that's management style that deals with complex problems is there a way to um sort of massage all of that to make it one those are three different things to me they're three discreet descriptors one has to do do with uh one's character kind of thing how they how they are as a role model um the the second one um it is what it is they're very discreet for management style what what are like the non-negotiables for a management style i mean could we say though that i mean well like i feel like the model's high expectations while the others are discreet it does cover the other stuff because then i you go after that like high expectations is this very broad i mean accountability is a broad topic honesty not but you know but then we start getting into like certain management styles and things like that i feel like we're almost getting it's getting too [Music] yeah they're gonna they're going to set the example mm-hmm i think we leave those three in because that also gives us some questions that we can ask during the interview process what's your management style i know on the first one the involvement and commitment to school and community that we could ask the candidates to give us some specific examples and then i think after those questions coming out i think we'll begin to see what kind of a management style they have but then if we can also follow up with that you know with an open-ended question of you know tell us how your management style solved xyz and then that gives us a chance to discuss a little bit with the candidate like a question like how do you define accessibility involvement and commitment to a school and community yeah like that kind of question like push it back on them that this is what we want how do you define what we're looking for yes okay you know i know that number three i don't i think number three was the one that was not a fan favorite am i correct number three was the exam example number three oh yeah okay did you find something well yeah one of the um statements that's on here a visionary leader who seeks and transforms ideas into reality celebrates innovation focuses on success accepts risk and builds a culture of growth and problem solving through continuous improvement i like that because innovation is really important when it comes to education and this this statement encompasses a lot of things that are are very relevant to our classrooms our district and especially right now given this the environment that all schools are in being able to be a visionary to see beyond where covid19 has placed us and to have a plan to take us to whatever the next level is is important so would you put that in in the place of some of these i would i would take that statement and put it in i would the the high expectations someone who is in a superintendent's position i already expect them to have high expectations otherwise how did they get to that job you can't achieve the role of the top person in the school district with low expectations and in that bullet point though that includes a lot of other things but it does it does and what i'm saying is we can wordsmith some of this you know i look at this as sort of a starting ground and how can we massage these ideas into what is really who we are as a district you know just because it's here on this sheet of paper i'm not taking that as well since it's on example number five we have to go with that one that's a suggestion and how do we take that and make it our own well if you take that thing from number three that encompasses like the very last one of the one we're looking at the leader with the passionate vision that actually is in three along with some other stuff so it could be something that we take that and we could kind of knock out some of these others like you know working with people and things like that follows into that broader point under example three that covers several of the bullet points that we're looking at right now i mean with just so i'm not getting off into the weeds here for these these attributes are we looking for broad or very specific i'd like fraud i mean because i think scott's right you give them abroad and then you're able to go in and question okay this is what we gave you what do you see as you know i'd like to know like when we talk about um diversities and opinions how does a superintendent what do they think diverse for use and opinions are because it could be different like they go this is what i think a diversity is and i'm like wow that's that's you know depending on where an individual comes from is going to dictate what they see is diverse because the verse in cave creek is probably going to be a lot different than diverse in l.a so i think maybe if we make it broader then we open it up if we get less specific like some of these are very very specific further down the broader topic it gives us more of a conversation in the interview rather than just like you know do you know this accounting procedure or something like that so you know like beth from your perspective what what are like three really important attributes that we really need to go after that we really need to make sure that this person has student-centered is one communication ability to communicate is the second one and experience in not only educational activities but uh also the peripheral activities of budget and finance those are the four biggies in my mind okay see that's much more succinct than some of these i mean i like that better than the has experience and knowledge in school law finance fiscal planning federal programs grant writing and credit a lot because see a lot of the stuff that's in there the stuff that's that would come out in an interview like the grant writing for instance that that's something that more than likely will will come out in an interview yeah their experience yeah exactly and so some of this stuff and there's a lot of things on this list that are extremely important but are you know we're going to make this list so big that we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot and you know eventually we're going to get somewhere between 5 and 1 on here and we're going to have like 1.375 or something right now we've only agreed upon two though right yeah so oh yeah well we've dumped three so i mean you know so we yeah so we have two that we've agreed on and if we add those four somehow we craft statements revolving around the four skills that a superintendent should have we would be up to six how many how many bullet points do we want to have in this category five i mean definitely definitely not more than ten i mean five five i would i would say five or six why would mine because like i like what steve said and the one that really sticks out to me that is something that we've but then also we cover it somewhere else like the willingness to become an active and contributing member of the district and community we've emphasized that multiple places we don't need to i don't think we need to so maybe the four that steve gave us covers those items that knocks us down to like six and so there are bullet points that are descriptive but we're not just like and we'd like this and we'd like to do this and we'd like to be able to be able to do this on the weekend and i mean i like i like we're seeking someone but i'd like it to be succinct because it is going to be you know if we're getting into the weeds just even discussing this the person looking at it well that's my point do the same thing that that's my point and they're going to guys are going to glaze over they're going to be like i can't possibly meet all your expectations it's almost like i would do a round robin and everybody give two or three attributes that's really important and out of all of that there's going to be some duplication and then number five is is it clearly has too many yeah well so what are those four that you gave us that we hadn't really like you said something about finance however you articulated finance i really liked because it was pretty you need to know it but you know it was pretty to the point what was what did you say about that i said you asked me for what are the uh what are the primary areas and i said the student centered was one i said communication was another good communicator uh experience in the educational realm uh is another one you know gram and instruction and then budget and finance to me those are the four before biggies all of the others in some way shape or fashion can can almost fit under those four depending on your word and it's been mentioned by more than one of you that when you get into the question and answer process uh you're going to very quickly glean what they know what they don't know so if you wanted me to take and scrap all of these basically [Music] and write four that are specific to that those items i mentioned i can easily do that plus um if i went back to example three item two visionary leader who seeks to transform ideas in reality celebrates uh innovation i started with that that's kind of the broad scheme you know and then and then came up with those other core student-centered communication budget finance and education if i put those four you'd have five bullet points that were pretty solid well i like that because you'd have the broad over topic and then like even because the two we've agreed on are actually two of the ones you mentioned we agreed on student centered and we agreed on curriculum and i mean i know we're going to agree on finance because that's a necessity so i like the idea of doing that broader from from number three and then doing the four underneath because those are i mean we need communication finance curriculum and student-centered i think that's and that's five and if you're someone looking at that that's kind of a like visually five bullet points is just kind of a nice and and keep going going to look at this on the 17th i think it is you can always at that time look at it sounded good but let's add one more okay you can always make some adjustments when you when you've approved what we're going to put out how do you guys feel about that yeah with that broader thing from number three and then having steve kind of massage those other four that we've already kind of mentioned some wouldn't he would bring back oh yeah we'd look at that again a draft okay well i think what we do is you know when we get to is we would approve approve this item as a first draft knowing that it's going to come back as a second approve of for draft having a final reading later so we would approve this as a draft as a first if if it's going to come back with modifications to it then i'm a little confused why we're approving something if it's coming back changed and not just put it back on the agenda because we kind of approved dc even do the changes let me let me chime in if i may um what we've done is we've you've done an excellent job of discussing this i mean it was really good to hear all the things and you all stayed very focused and i think you've come up with some good things i think the the motion can be to direct aspa to take them take the input from the board and really re-uh draft this and send it back to you for consideration i think that's what they want me to do i can make a motion to do that exactly what you said okay you can say so moved if you'd like go moved second do we have any discussion are we we good with that do we want to do that as our vote as the redraft okay um so the motion is what steve suggested that janet moved and um jim seconded uh sorry so steve's gonna take it and redraft it and come back with some new model yeah okay so that's what we have uh member brown i busby hatcher i i'm an i rich hi okay item 3.4 district specific questions for the application presented by mr catherine before we go on can we take like a five minute break yeah we've been on here for two minutes so let's it's 7 20.
i'm going to ask the first question just to clarify that's a technology fee not beginning this year the following year yep for the 21-22 school year i have only two questions for you one had you factored in i'm assuming that our students that are able to take advantage of the fee waiver for income will also be exempt from the technology fee to the student depot we just heard that we can't share devices are we able to have students working on other devices for student depot that is something we'll look into to make sure that we follow all the safety protocols if it needs to be done by staff members we can definitely handle that to start out the program thank you i have a question kyle um we faith had presented about using all the devices that are available at the school sites um is that and factored into this um cost and and need if we take all the devices that we have that work at the different schools and we use all of those we still need this yes we have lots of chromebooks that are out almost at the end of their life the batteries are not charging things are not working well so we'll be pushing those you know out but we're already seeing from the ones that we pushed out to the springs sometimes the batteries those they're just not at their they're at the end of their lives but we're trying to use everything that we already have correct the second thing is when will you know about the grant that was listed up there it could be any day that we would find out it might be as long as a month what we plan to do if that and it's it's a grant that we really should qualify for it's not like a competitive type of a piece but if we don't we did talk about it our board meeting back in june about taking back some of the elementary social studies curriculum materials that we needed to pilot and using that money for the purchase of devices and tonight when we vote will we be voting based on the idea that we will get the grant but that something will change if we don't get the grant it will be that based on the grant else using the as we discussed at the june retreat using the social studies curriculum funding studies is the backup money because this is not a year when they will be able to probably adequately pilot a social studies curriculum so we don't want to just have money sitting there that can be utilized and who gives the grant who issues the grant it's a federal technology equity grant okay i have a question that goes back to what you said a little bit right before he spoke you said you talked about managing software and applications and we are one-to-one in my district um and we have chromebooks and there's some concern that some of the classes especially like the arts and the really anything with software there's some software that won't run on chromebooks so either you have to get a different type of software for that class or you my hope is that we would not tell them they need a new just pick a new platform because i don't think that's fair to staff right um especially if some of these things are being used in the real world so i guess my my concern is what are we doing is there some kind of patch where when these kids take these courses that we can load it onto those chromebooks for a certain amount of time whether it's a license or and has that been factored into the cost that hasn't been factored into the cost but i will say that ron in the technology department his main primary role is to deal with applications and make sure that we're identifying that and we're polling the teachers and addressing these concerns moving forward so supporting the teachers correct right so like i just wanted courses that would need additional modifications or even possibly a different device during those times but they're very small in number and we would be addressing that okay like sometime in the near future yes and then i had another question on the chromebook hearts i put a big x through mine and i will tell you why because we had carts in classrooms in some classrooms and kids would get the computer out and last year we switched to you come with your computer charged and you bring your own cord and you are responsible for it and now we have a ton of carts sitting around the building so before we go out and buy a new bunch of carts i want to first make sure that we've exhausted all efforts and you're new so there's a cute little district right to the you know that way yeah with it with a lot of carts hanging around hallways that they may be able to sell for a better price than what 84 000 is charging you yeah so i would just recommend that we exhaust all other efforts and talk to you know i mean we're a bigger district than you used to which i can appreciate but like we have a lot of things that happen with a lot of other districts around here and then my last one was the hiring of five additional staff so i was gonna question why you needed five additional staff but you said it was for training and and training on the software right so my question would be we're going to have a lot of tas we're going to have a lot of dean's assistants we're going to have a lot of other people that are in our buildings right now that right now are wondering am i going to have a job right so i would repurpose those people before and and retrain them before i would want to hire somebody else and that you know for what it's worth and you know like these are people who in our district our librarians do it do a lot of the stuff and we do have tech people but before we go out and hire five new staff members i would hope that we're utilizing what we have right now on that same vein do you anticipate the five additional tech staff would that be an ongoing is would that be an ongoing um expense an annual expense or is this um to really get us off the ground um in this you know first year year and a half that we're we're working towards this or i would personally see that as an ongoing expense when we're adding this number of devices i would see those employees as necessary to continue this and make this program thrive throughout the district as much as possible and then this is um you know so we were talking about you know one to one for you know k or i'm sorry fifth through twelfth um as we are looking at um you know providing um support giving students uh that are younger devices for remote learning possibilities um that would just be from our our current inventory and there would not be a fee associated with that we're not looking to implement a fee at kindergarten through fourth grade and then one of the things that will happen for our devices that aren't nearing the end of their life because we have some of those at the junior high in high school too as we get back to that and we purchase those for our junior high and high school students those devices that are now at the junior high in the high school when we get them back and they're not distributed to people's homes and things and we've cleaned them and we've done all of that they can then come to our elementary schools to help with the student-to-device ratio at our elementary schools can i ask this too where'd the number five come from the number five yeah like did we have i did we have tech tickets that would support work for five individuals or are we just so some of it and and all that kyle tuckes is definitely more expertise in that but i've gone through with other districts of when you make a large technology purchase and how they have to be touched distributed and then a lot of our staff are going to need training and knowing how to do that and have people on hand at the buildings and certainly we want to train our instructional coaches or we mentioned our librarians i think we've had a lot of success in other places of using students to do that but until you get that up and running it takes quite a bit of staff to do that i could see us either diminishing the five at a later time or changing their role to be a lot of what we would need to do and sound instruction with technology and we haven't utilized our technology department to do a whole lot of that piece of using them to really boost instruction and talk about where we want to go with instruction and how technology helps us get there but that is a great need here and we need that expertise and that ongoing side-by-side training for our staff to have that happen and that was something that we began discussions um you know in our teaching and learning committee knowing that there were a lot more possibilities out there and that we were probably going down this path towards more um curriculum and resources online and sort of the future and uh and so you know outside of these circumstances i know it's it is something that we've obviously been talking about for some time and knowing that's a path that we wanted to explore a bit more so um i did have a question i was a little con i was on the total cost for 2021 slide you had listed our current budget as 720 000 and probably just not reading reading it correctly but and then but on the other side we say that our funds annually including this year was a hundred and forty thousand so what where what's that 720 referencing so the 700 the funds that are there that are 140 are some of the typical funding that comes just about technology that is just from that that's kind of outside the district budget that we write for and have that granted the 720 000 is what we have within our district budget that we were putting toward the acquisition of devices to keep up with the dilemma and the scenario we discussed back in march okay thank you i just want to say i love the idea of having the student how do we phrase that sorry the depot the student depot yeah i actually was talking with my brother-in-law the other day who is in texas in a very large school district and that he was telling me that's something that they have in their school district and it runs very well and it's a great opportunity for students to gain technology experience that can help them to get a job a great job and even some certifications like some technology certifications i don't know all the words for those things but i think that's obviously that's maybe not something that's going to happen starting right now this fall but in the future i think that's going to be a great opportunity for our students i just wanted to get some clarification on these dates so i'm sure that there are people who are listening and watching right now who are wondering like why in the heck is it gonna accept delivery in september and october um and i just you had explained that everybody is buying computers right now for their schools and so it's just a matter of there's a delay in order processing because there's such a high demand and then also i think people are going to wonder why why are we not then distributing until november december and can you just kind of explain the process of what like how these devices come to us and what you're going to need to do before we can distribute them yes so we're going to have to unpackage the devices import all of these assets into our inventory system to make sure that we're keeping track and can identify purchase cycles before we can start distributing them out to staff and students we are currently already planning how the curbside pickup and all of the distribution models we're taking the time that we have from ordering the devices to getting the devices to hopefully speed up our timelines as much as possible are we gonna have to like power everything up and download software and stuff onto them or will it already come that way yep it'll already come that way ready for us and obviously if you get that done sooner this would speed up you're not looking to wait until november december just for the principal 100 as soon as we are ready we will announce that and start doing pickups have you checked amazon i hear prime's got one day delivery sometimes we'll check into that mr olenson thank you for the presentation thank you for answering my questions earlier today a couple of things here i notice that we're using both the word um purchase and the word lease could you clarify that a little bit yeah so uh we're purchasing we're leasing to own it's different than how you would look at a car lease where you turn over any sort of asset at the end of this this is almost more like a mortgage if you look at it that way it is for equal payments to own the device outright by the district at the end of that right and so one i think we kind of hit on it tonight and i know you you you did for me but should we get the i'm trying to look at the big picture here the four years worth um should we anticipate that that that budget of just over seven hundred thousand dollars that we currently have as a light eye line item is we're going to continue that for the next four years so we're not really looking at spending this incremental amount of dollars above and beyond what our budget is already calling for does that make sense the way i'm asking that question it's already budgeted for is that the short version yeah yes and if you think about it you guys are more eloquent than me tonight um and then i had i had just a broader question because i i and i think a couple of us have the same question is you know we're we know the district owns a certain number of chromebooks already and we're going to one to one we understand that concept how many are we talking about a hundred percent new chromebooks for the two cohorts of five plus junior high and then high school or are we talking about twenty percent of the existing chromebooks in those two buildings plus this order we have our end-of-life devices percentage is so high that we are addressing both of the cohorts now because by next year we would be potentially back here trying to implement a similar program in the lower grade levels if we were to do percentages to start the program and then one last question um in in your experience uh in other districts and and working with your counterparts in other districts uh personally i've seen districts where you know freshman year you're given a computer and you're told that this is it don't break it or you know you're gonna have you're responsible for it and then the the student keeps that for a certain number of years i'm assuming this is a similar model we're just trying to make things a little bit easier by charging a technology fee on an annual basis instead of a lump sum up front is that correct correct the the technology fee makes this a sustainable program so we can project our incomes and our expenses to make sure that we can make this a program that lasts for more than just the four-year lease and then let me ask the fun question which is you know we i'm sure you're aware we have very active parent organizations at all levels of the district and if those organizations are able or we do internally with our own fundraisers able to add money or equipment is that something that we can do to defer some of these costs further that's something that we can definitely look into or we can look into how software could help with curriculum and other alternatives you know to help with the one-to-one programmer thank you so i'm looking at a lot of questions that relate to how other districts have implemented policies on technology use i presume that we'll start looking at some of these policies through our policy and legislative committee as well as we get these developed over the next few months i think that this would be a good time to kind of look at what that needs to look like for for the future this is this is a very different way of looking at technology than what we've had before for policies so hopefully you guys are able to figure out how you can organize some time to discuss that with your committees as well we can and i still have a question to ask yeah we're trying to transition out um and just for clarification for those listening and as i'm looking at it this timeline really doesn't come into play or in relevance to our remote learning program so this may piggyback more on a 7.2 question as we talk about end-of-life devices and things in dire need since we're not going to have these hopefully we're coming out of e-learning by the time you're delivering these that's my biggest hope that it's not curbside we're delivering those in person in the classroom the inventory of sustainable living breathing no not breathing but battery battery life chromebooks power cords we're we're good to go on what we anticipate the request to be for e-learning starting in a few weeks based on the need and demand that we had in the spring yes if there is a whole lot of new need that we didn't somehow people were saying that they didn't um you know that they need now that they didn't before we still have a bank of them here but that isn't an endless supply so i don't know how to predict i always try to under promise and over deliver and we're still calculating and getting track of how many students and staff need that but we certainly have a lot at the buildings and met that need last spring so i would definitely recommend that we not go by last springs numbers as the requirements for devices is different because the instruction needs are different and i know that with all the school buildings we've had several buildings we've pulled from already but that we've had several buildings we haven't touched yet so i'm assuming that of course you would look at those and look to provide the technology as soon as possible to the people who need it first and internet access as well and kyle and his department have sent out a survey to families to talk about bandwidth at home and those pieces because sending a chromebook home where you do not have internet access is pretty pointless does that request going to go through the building or the district i'm sorry man the building goes i'll read the request for the device as we move forward is that going to go through the building it comes through the district can we have can we move that technology survey because it's it's buried pretty deep at the moment can we move that a little bit higher on our website so that families can let you know as soon as possible if they're going to need it that way you have more time to plan and if you happen to get a few in trickling in earlier we can make sure we can provide for the start of the year we also like my big concern is that we want to do two cohorts worth of chromebooks at once so in four years what's going to happen you're going to have to do another big large like why i technology the technology fee he said would keep up with the cycle to make itself all right i think we're going to have a big hit can i clarify one thing on the seeking approval slide what you're actually seeking approval for is to lease the student devices so i just want to clarify that so because you'll be least to own though at least to own right but that you're we're entering the lease just so that it's clear instead of purchasing out right yes yes so it's really a zero interest financing more than a lease okay have we put out there i know that the technology survey went out um i've seen a lot of comments and i might have dismissed some things but um that people are ready to turn some of their devices in because they have made arrangements at home has that gone out how to how to turn their how to turn their devices if they have a district one in it has but it sounds like we need to state that again it sounds like we need an uh well i mean for real it's a very different game than the spring so i don't think that we can count on any information we had from the spring is reliable for this year because it's so different so i definitely would be looking to see a district-wide communication go out in by the end of the week for sure that says what to do if you have a school device what to do if you need a school device what to do if you need internet access so that it's big and bold and it's most accessible to the people that are least able to access our website because they don't have devices and internet and make sure that we have reached out in every way we can other than electronically thanks anybody else okay item 7.2 josh do we have the other presentation ready oh okay item 7.2 is an informational presentation that highlights the updates that we've received since the last board meeting on july 21st as well as some of our five-year projections this this slide that you see up there now over the past week we've as i just said we've received many different new guidelines from a variety of organizations new state guidelines were issued on july 23rd for the from the illinois state board of education as we mentioned earlier there's conflicting information from the illinois department of public health and the cdc the center of disease control that we will be addressing this evening we're also keeping a close eye on the continual increase in the positivity rate of cover 19 in the north central region which is kendall which where kendall county is located along with the increasing positivity rates in the regions boarding our hours we have some results from the union survey that was sent out to the teachers we have a more clearer picture of how many substitutes are planning to return for the upcoming year and updated cost for our in-person uh and remote by choice option along with our five-year with our five-year projections all right slide three this slide highlights the language that the illinois state board of education from the it highlights language from the illinois state board of education from june 23rd to their most recent guidance on july 23rd and as you can see on june 23rd isb strongly encouraged schools and districts to provide in-person instruction for all students especially those under the age of 13.
arlington heights elementary district 25 superintendent lori being defended her decision to start the school year remotely after originally planning for in-person learning over the objection of nearly half the parents in a survey who wanted a full return to classrooms i do have the responsibility however to answer all employees questions with full honesty and transparency and as i find areas where i can't do that and feel good about the answer i have the responsibility to face that the answers are not yet fully formed it is apparent there are still so many unanswered questions please be honest and own up to that and don't put students and staff in harm's way because you don't know we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has already taken 150 000 lives so far no one knows i am begging you to please err on the side of caution when the health of our student community estate is at stake thank you carissa lafleur this is a public comment from kelly mckay hello pam and dr stern in light of the upcoming school board meeting tonight i'd like to reiterate my hope for the performing arts continue this school year my hope is that the district will work with the music directors and all the schools in 301 to continue the arts in whatever way is feasible and safe music is playing singing and performing yes but it is also an avenue to learn about humanity to engage the student beyond the playing and singing is a fundamental at any level our music directors teach music through discussion listening reflecting composing and comparing music through the ages the music directors are creative outside the box thinkers it is my experience that some music is better than no music singing over zoom playing an instrument over google me or learning the historical con context of a musical piece keeps the students engaged in communicating with their music director it is not the best learning environment but is doable and feasible one many parents of the district students have reached out to me to express their genuine thanks for the work that all the music directors did during the spring 2020 e-learning they appreciate all the online extra work our music directors did to maintain a pulse on the students their emotional well-being as well as their musical skills thank you for your consideration kelly mckay next one is from vicki hi pam for parents that requested four-day in-person instruction for their children does the district have a target date to inform the parents if their children will be enrolled in the four-day program also if there are multiple children in the family if one child gets into a four-day do all the children in that family we personally have children at each level high school middle and elementary and are anxiously awaiting to know how many days our children will be in school versus remote learning at home kind regards next one is from allison morris hi pam i'd like to have more thought put toward the a b split in-person and e-learning plan with the deep cleaning schedule happening on weekends and wednesdays the current plan on monday thursday and tuesday friday split exposes the students with names beginning with m to z to the unclean school building has there been any thoughts put to this this doesn't seem to be the best solution thank you the next one is a public comment that was missed on july 20th but we did inform the submitter that we would read it tonight it's from mr lloyd miller good afternoon i will be watching the remote session of tonight's school board meeting but i have some questions that i would like answered one why is it that like every other month the students have a half a day followed by a full day off for teacher institute days this is extremely difficult for many parents many families who now have their kids for two days during the week i've inquired with other school districts and none of them have day's office 301 what is happening with these half days and teacher institute days there that cannot happen at another time number two you stated that wednesdays every week will be the remote learning for deep cleaning of the schools that is going to happen what is going to happen on those wednesdays that cannot happen between the hours of 5 pm and 7 a.m the next day this is yet again another day that working parents have to be the teachers when we have jobs in the school of our own to tend to number three you are discussing moving the start date back to the end of august why are children already missing out on so much class time with other half days teacher institute days now you want them to miss out another additional two to three additional weeks of class time we understand the school district has certain mandates from the state when it comes to coven 19.
uh we are that is what we're doing right now what uh mr kylie what dr gifford are doing with the meeting with the board of david board of health meeting with other stakeholders that we are reducing the risk i think is the best way to look at it is we're reducing the risk to students and staff in the district to as low of a threshold as possible um i i actually asked dr gifford last week and she said well why don't we wait till this meeting i'm going to offer it up to any one of my colleagues i would like to um go in and visit the schools um i would love to do so i'd love to do a walkthrough of these of each school i want to see what classrooms look like i know in my own district what a classroom with a six feet of distance looks like um with everything off the walls extra furniture removed it's a very sterile environment um i i want to make sure that before this decision is made this committee makes this decision i want to know that i've done my due diligence as a school committee member um to vote uh for the best outcome i i understand both sides i have a freshman going to dartmouth high school this year there is nothing more than i would want for her and i know she is she has had her days which she you know she wanted to try her she wants to try out the fall volleyball uh she wants to do sports she wants to get back into the classroom i want to see her in school but i want to know that we're doing 110 to keep our students safe um i know there's no guarantees um and i honestly i don't know you know it's all about uh risk does the cost outweigh the rest and i i personally don't know what the answer to that is um you know i do thank everyone um but i i would like to offer it up if any one of my colleagues if anyone else would like to do a walk through if there's more if there's more than two of us that want to do it if you can break up uh to visit different schools um that's a possibility we can talk about we can set something up but i i want to know that what we're doing because the data is changing every day and there's there's i'll i'll recognize a couple of you in a second uh data is changing every day in regards to coping 19.
let's um make sure you guys mute and kick off your video and then come back by 7 25. okay thank you so okay i think we're just talking janet and then we can we'll start up again oh okay okay catherine before before you get started we kind of skipped the last page of that uh of that document when we went to position requirements and it went and then went to the examples to work it out there's still another page there that's got salary timeline and additional information oh you're right okay guys so janet are we okay you're right scott we need we didn't cover that whole thing are we okay with going back knowing that that with that other stuff we talked about mr hyland is gonna tweak it and come back but we do need to go through that other stuff are we okay with revisiting that you're right we skipped that whole part are we okay i'm good i'm good yeah beth yep thank you scott okay um mr hyland can we go back to yeah because we we skip through whatever we're seeking and then we need to actually go back to the page where it's like salary contact timeline i think the additional info is kinda but we need to talk about the salary contact and timeline oh you're you're muted yeah what i was what i was saying is if you didn't approve the document you just screw me to go back so now clarification wise i can go back to it now that we've gone recess and i'll just say under salary and um contract um the salary that i put down is 155 to 175.