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so let's say 7 23 we all come back um stretched and refreshed and take a few comments before we dive into this hey john before before we break yes so my document there's a bunch of rows that where what it's what it said what it is is getting cut off yes is it possible and what i can do is i can share the the actually this is like a pdf of it you know josh has entered some stuff i think um where he's put his name in and what's completed and stuff like that and i'll go into the raw document and um where we can see all of the lines in the full description and all the questions etc john yeah and i had kind of a follow-up procedural question i knew a lot of these rows that you're saying with uh the completion on them i think they're hidden if if you feel comfortable with it we can since they're already completed we can focus on the stuff that hasn't been completed yet but i figured i'd just throw that out there okay so yeah go we can go ahead and show everything then okay everybody see you in five minutes john john i think this mike i think that's that's great approach matters i i just encourage us to really think of where it is that the energy commission can make the biggest difference maybe that's obvious but you know i i agree with uh john's analogy about we don't have to take on the whole elephant or what exactly he swallowed the whole element or what whatever it was um but so i i just want us to be really strategic and targeted because i think we can have high impact if we pick our spots wisely based on the highest impact from a from a greenhouse gas perspective but also the highest impact that we as an energy commission can actually influence so that that's i've been looking through this list with that with that lens i encourage others to do the same others comments i just i think it's good good plan uh you know let to just go through it today and let people go into it on their own kind of keeps people from being on the spot so just need to make sure we get get the people that that weren't uh in attendance today make sure we get that message through them as well yeah i also think it's uh it looks like a pretty good path forward um it'll allow us to kind of continue to do some more reading i know i went through and kind of picked the uh the groups that i thought i would be the most interested in and then we can go uh i i assume i just wanted to clarify i guess this is kind of a question too john um that once we kind of get the groups uh that we you know that for the newer commissioners to get involved in and then i see that you know each group each working group has an assigned uh project or a list of assigned projects that it would be with uh uh that working group would then choose from those assigned projects which uh items they would take on this is that uh is that correct i would say that's generally correct so without having this um hard and fast in my mind certainly and the working groups could potentially decide to do it differently by the way carlene and i discussed this in advance so i think we're generally aligned but um so there could be working groups and the working groups could meet or the working groups could actually decide to split up if there's again enough resources into sub-working groups and so there might be you know the housing in the built environment might say um we have enough interest and energy and resources to be able to take on three tasks all under that umbrella of the built environment working group and have three parallel groups working on things um it could also be that a working group says like mike was saying um we don't have to eat the elephant in one sitting and we're just going to work on one thing and we're going to knock that dead in nine months and then we're going to move on to the next thing that sounds great others thoughts going going gone okay so um what i'm gonna um do here is um facilitate this but i'm gonna really ask that other people step in and in particular lean on josh a little bit and really all the commissioners to help us understand each one of these items we really want to have a dialogue i mean if we go through 28 of these and they're 10 minutes each then we're going to be here for a marathon city council kind of meeting till 3 a.m so that's not that's not my intention um but hopefully what we can do is get through some of the main issues here um have a general understanding of them and then enable us to be able to fill this out um as we discussed over the next two weeks so the first action is something that missy suggested and that is the development of an opportunity assessment for uh four different categories and josh i was hoping you might be able to help us in saying um if you look at the questions is the task to create this assessments or are they going to be created by osi and maybe a consultant and we're just being asked to review it can you tell us a little bit more about this um so that people know what they're signing up and are there going to be four i assume there's going to be four different assessments because yeah so so i think the thrust of this uh of this point came from the idea that whenever we're putting out any of these programs like even for example electrification um that it's important to constantly assess the situation with homeowners with a single family with so it's it's kind of an overarching uh concept that you know these things are happening in dialogue so each of the subcommittees for example are going to be in dialogue with these different areas and that that you know that dialogue continue uh to get feedback to understand exactly uh what's happening what kind of again as as the prompt says what the opportunities are um to to to some of your questions though john it seems like you were thinking much more kind of of a uh you know something that's basically developed um as kind of a footprint to maybe do a carbon footprint for self-assessment um i could see i mean i don't think that there's anything that's precluding uh you know us from from doing something like that pursuing something that that people can uh you know put in some of their information i will say uh that we have done um quite a few uh surveys uh that get to some of these questions so you know that's that was kind of part of the a20 plan in general um surveys that went out to different people to get the sense as to what the opportunities are in these different areas so again i mean i think it was a bit broader in scope and something that should be done throughout our work but if if you guys if the commission sees this as something that they want to develop more concretely as kind of a tool i think that that could make sense as well i don't want to dominate the discussion i have a couple of questions still others questions on this so the concern that i have is i really don't know what i would be signing up for here um i i don't know if i'm being asked if i sign up to this am i i'm working on a tool that is then mailed to or sent to individual homeowners or individual business owners to assess um what opportunities they have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions where they could then if they um sign up and or check a box you know five different boxes that they then could then talk to someone in concierge services or trained volunteers to help them i don't know if this is looking at surveys i i really don't know what people would be thinking when they sign up for this what's the defined task do do this with this very clear completion date and completion um sort of fulfillment by you know yeah by a certain date i that i don't understand i don't know what missy hasn't hey john i think you just dissected this one a little bit and we're going to be here like you said till three in the morning yeah i i'd suggest i'd suggest we just say you know this has to be better to find clearly and and take that forward we should go through the list of that mindset is it clearer is it actionable if it's not then we need to rejig it for when we do meet to assign names and do things like that good point so josh that's good osi has some homework here okay yes i'll take it back and try to see if there was anything in particular um okay so let's go on to the next one so um jumping down um to the second action item two since the first one's complete um you have to go up a little bit josh i can't see number two there we are um so the next one is monitoring and supporting state and federal clean energy legislation and again i think there's a number of questions that unless you can answer right now it would be the same thing that referenced where this would need to be responded to so we really know what we're signing up for so i think again i mean it's and i think john maybe some of your confusion is that these are kind of overarching themes across maybe all of the subcommittees um so uh you know we've been looking and and i think all the commissioners are very um familiar with this uh anytime that we have issues uh you know that we run across a lot of times it comes down to state legislation so a lot of times you know when it comes to the building code for example we can't go beyond the state building code uh when it comes to net metering the fact that net metering is uh you know we have issues with net metering um so i think that again it's it's not so much a specific action or a specific ask as it is you know looking at what we're doing throughout these different subcommittees what we're trying to accomplish uh and and really trying to work on the legislative side of it um i know fong who uh was on the line earlier i'm not sure she's still on um she has been uh you know kind of looking at very specifically some of that state legislation um and so i think having the commission who has all this experience and all this information um especially up at the state level policy level uh help to guide uh what how we can basically move these different things throughout these subcommittees is central for us meeting our goals so again kind of an overarching theme more than just a specific ask so this sounds like more ongoing than like you say a specific task yeah start on a particular date and on a particular date it's just going yeah and the first one is mike yep sorry god mike good morning oh i was just gonna say i think yeah this is ongoing for the commission but i do think once a year when the state's setting its or when the city is setting its lobbying agenda that's a good time to have it as a standing agenda item here so that there's overlap yeah yeah i think that's i don't know that there's a committee needed or anything like that it's just something that comes to the commission yeah i think that that makes a lot of sense where you know we have one time where we actually look at all this kind of in conglomeration but in the meantime it's kind of baked into what we're doing i think that yeah okay and i have a comment i think it's as part of this um down the receiving end and lansing sings how cities including ann arbor um acts in in lansing and you know a lot of what the cities do they work through their their normal places like the michigan municipal league um national league cities etc and and they have a lobbyist of course um but you know they're not as sharp as you know some of the concerns that say that eibc or the great lakes renewable energy association or something that comes in on a on issues that would be important um you know the argument is much sharper and the michigan municipal league for example was very pro-solar taxation so you know it sometimes uh i think the organizations that that these things flow through don't necessarily represent our interests as as we would like them to do so i would suggest as part of this that we get an audit done and let's see you know understand better how the city oh puts forth his legislative agenda um and who they rely on to make sure that they're relying on on you know the real players um who are in this arena down down there um and and ways we could we could leverage those things perhaps a bit different i'm going to give you one quick example the sustainability directors network is a national organization but there is no state chapter of the sustainability network sustainability directors i know of three in the state who are either on have been curtailed or uh let put on not loose or their budgets have been basically zeroed out um and i think that's a you know a not a good thing because it weakens the whole issue of sustainability in lansing a simple thing the michigan energy office could provide grants for sustainability directors across the state with their current budget design as far as i know no one had asked that and no one's promoting that or pushing this so you know ways that we could strengthen the some of our players and partners and stuff or maybe get some new partners as we move forward to try and move some of the legislative stuff i don't know that that um i do know that missy and i do know this individual sustainability directors have gone into lansing and testified but not not as a group and i i was surprised to learn that many of them went separate and distinct from the paid lobbyists who those cities work you know work with so um i think we could get better at this but let's start first with understanding exactly how the city projects its legislative agenda in lansing and who they work with and how they get this job done i'm not convinced they're they're playing with this you know the strongest hand they could be um carlene or josh if you can take notes i think carlene you said you'd take some notes um so thank you anybody else on um number two um monitoring legislation number three just real quick uh moving back to um number two so um like a sub action item then would be coming out of it is just to learn what the city's lobbying program is and their process and who we rely on for our informational resources on on what on on like the organizations that are the organizations actually representing the city's goals is that is that what you're saying martin i said let's let's let's from an energy point of view let's understand how the city interacts with lansing or in the federal level what what is what do they do i mean they probably if they an issue comes up they call call their lobbyists or they don't they rely on their other organizations or they don't there's some sort of methodology there that i think we need to understand better so if we're going to help them do this maybe we say this issue would be best handled by such and such organization or we think your lobbyists should be saying specifically the xyz so that we get better i mean how do we support their legislation yeah you know increase your your lobbyist budget and give more dues to michigan municipal league i mean it's too amorphous so i think we need to understand what the city's system is for for influencing the political process so that we can come back and be better informed so we can be more strategic in doing this because i i'm in lansing a lot and i'm with organizations that do this and there are issues that come up a lot that the city should i believe be weighing in on and they're not all right thank you that's all i have what's my favorite maybe i think commissioner eaton or council member i should say eaton has given us a little bit of insight into that when we put together um suggestions for the lobbying agenda but i think a lot more depth is probably warranted let's go on to the next point i will say really quick uh mark there are uh different organizations that we've relied on in the past you know a lot of times the process uh indeed deals with the mpsc so for example if there's a way during rate cases to get involved we've looked at rate cases as a possibility so i don't know if you guys are familiar with michigan maui but it's an organization southeast michigan organization that specifically gets into uh state legislation so things specifically in my my experiences with uh street lights um and and sometimes some somewhat rate case related things um but they they help us in some ways so it's not only i think the lobbyist approach even though that's a really important one and one honestly i probably have less familiarity with but there's other i guess other tools in the in the tool kit that we use as well but anyways okay next point um number three support the 820 summit um again i mean again if people put their name here josh people need to know what they're signing up for and from my perspective i don't know what support the summit means and you can see some questions i don't know if anybody else wants to chime in and specifically to the the community outreach working group question i think it makes a lot of sense to have it within a subcommittee um that kind of focuses on this type of thing as far as outreach goes um i can tell you even personally i'm not quite sure if you know a lot of detail has been developed as far as you know what the a20 summit would look like going forward but i can i can ask and try to see okay so um dropping down this is a little bit confusing the way this is because we've got a mix of bold and new items in here so if we go down to line um a row i guess 11 um so um this is contributing to the design of an energy concierge service the concierge service so everybody knows is basically um a go-to position potentially populated or staffed by city people on you know actually employees of the city of ann arbor it could be under a contract it could potentially be with trained volunteers i assume and the idea is um designing this program um there is an an outline a couple of outlines for this already um and um the only comment um that i have here is that the prioritization um in the matrix is like very very low like like near the very bottom there are 44 actions and this is number 42 out of 44.
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it also which one requires training and a a modality ability to broadcast and to receive student feedback we have that in placement soon there are protections in place with that and their login is required we also preferably all students and the vast majority of them are rather all teachers and the vast majority of them are reporting to campuses monday through friday during normal business hours and they are working from their respective classroom or area there are a handful because of either having family members that are especially susceptible and they are working they're not leaving their house they're quarantined not because they're ill but because they're worried about others in their immediate family and their children that have makes them susceptible because they have an underlying medical condition or a loved one that lives with them we also have about a third of our staff district-wide are in a group that has one of those underlying conditions and so we're trying to be flexible while also support the operations our principals have worked very closely with our teachers and support staff through those categories and presently we're able to support both both areas vast majority of our teachers are able to do it and a majority are excited about coming back when it's safe to do so but about seven out of ten as i mentioned have are concerned or very concerned and so we share those concerns we're not going to rush back until we feel like it's safe to implement a phased approach where we look at a hybrid schedule teachers are required to behave and perform just like they are during class they're dressed professionally their spaces their zoom areas and conferences are appropriately arranged and they're in an area where there are no distractions whether they're having to do it from their home or from the classroom they also were required some bare minimums required in terms of returning phone calls within 24 hours of email list messages and also contacting students soon at least twice weekly most are doing more than that and so there are also expectations on the student side it's not a past fellow environment in fact in high school if you missed 10 days you're not logging in after you're not participating you'll be dropped if it is a junior high kid or an elementary student they may well have to repeat that grade if they fail to progress so far we're after a good start the first two days people are working hard this first week is being used to get everybody acquainted we're not rushing back into it of assignments and kids we're making sure our students and the teachers have the tools they need and are connected given we're sending virtually 2 000 people on time and 100 teachers i think it's gone very well and that's a testament to our principals that are here in the room spent director in the i.t department that have worked tirelessly and so when i say tirelessly last thursday they were there until 12 30 at night i know that because i was with them the night before they're there until two in the morning our administration teams were there on thursday until 10 30 11 at night and the next night late as well getting prepared so we put in the work we are prepared the expectations have been set for everyone i'll also add mr president that the students if they participate in inappropriate posting the material or if they're handing out information coming back to harm the district they'll be long-term suspended or expelled depending on the gravity of the situation but we're not going to tolerate that we've made it real clear the conduct that they're demonstrating while participating soon is the same that's required in the classroom are there any requirements or questions and requirements set forth for students for faculty members mr waldo yes i guess i know we have an asu curriculum and the lincoln about how it actually functions and how the kids actually access the curriculum i know they go online but are they meeting online and zoom each day at a certain time or are they just going on there and getting to work off the internet and working independently or is it some beach or could you walk us through like you know a typical elementary day for a child in junior high in high school let me do this as permissible mr president let me ask the respective principals to take us through it's a great question so the question i heard is take us through a day in life of the elementary junior high high school student virtual on a virtual basis but looking at and i'll have a mic out too we'll start with dr ironstone and take us through the day good evening nice to see all of you the last two days that our teachers have been working with our students they are all online students have teachers at 80 a.m every morning they do roughly 30 minutes of zoom time where the teachers are taking attendance to determine who is there they are talking to the students talking about what happened yesterday the day before which was their first day arguing where they are and then introducing a new curriculum that they're going to take the kids into just like we did when we were in regular classrooms then after the 30 minutes of zoom the asu and both the lincoln instructional programs have videotapes that are done could be kindergarten a person writing a story with the kids doing coral reading with the kids first grade generally they start with english language learning um first grade they can be talking about commonly used words which we call high frequency words and how to turn those into sentences so these are the same types of lessons that we as teachers 35 years ago drew up on a paper book and instructed to our students it's just gone into a different modality which is online my sixth grade teachers i was talking to them today and my fourth grade teachers ask the students to go up and converse with one another about three items that they want to talk about relative to being in home and not being able to be in school and they showed me some of the responses today fun questions the teachers said let it off indicating three things that they did while they were quarantined the kids are now tapping onto that saying oh and i did this and they're having conversations with each other very positive conversations so i'm excited the teachers are excited i hit all the classrooms today and the teachers are feeling good about things they're working their way through the challenges of technology and they're happy to see their kids their kids are thrilled to see them they're conducting teacher office hours every afternoon for an hour and a half and at that time they're on the zoo and they take pr phone calls and they tell me that their phones they're getting messages during the day and also phone calls from parents and parents were feeling very comfortable calling their teachers who they had called last week they contacted their parents last week we have a strong level of communication uh i guess i'm thinking about the nominal rigor in the curriculum i know last spring you know we did have things for them to do but um i understand it from most schools it was you know maybe an hour's work at best but is this gonna take anything close to what a normal day of school would be for them to consume in the assignments they're they're online four hours a day at my school from eight to noon and then their assignments that they're given that they have to complete in the afternoon work out to about an hour and a half kindergarten's on two hours a day because their attention level is pretty limited right now and they again my teen kindergarten teachers put together packets of work to complement the lincoln learning program and they had a had a personal handout to the parents much like her graduation so they greeted the parents had their masks and gloves on and talk to them and there was a nice touch of communication so those kids are working on their work in the asu curriculum as the students start next week progressing through their curriculum there are benchmark tests that will determine where each student sets reading math science and social studies so the teachers can look at the results of those benchmarks and determine where each student sits academically and if they have to they can work in those teacher work hours or office hours either help the students a little bit more talk to the parents or more challenges if they need them so they're [Music] busy doing school work roughly about the same amount of time that they would be if they were actually in class that is correct good that's excellent and i have a feeling it's a lot better than most most other stories if you ever have a chance come visit next week they'll start embarking on the academics so please come in we'd love to take you around and have you view what the teachers are doing thanks good evening our schedule is set up so that we have kids online starting at nine and they're receiving direct instruction from nine until one well we have 45 minute class periods so 99 45 is first down in a five minute transition between that the second period um we have first through fifth hour from nine to one so that we can get that enrichment piece at the end and right now we're just that's about a 40 minute piece uh 40 minute class that we have at the end and we just have that there so the kids can have something that's engaging and fun to do at the end of the day at a better instruction period and when they come back then they'll still have when we do go back to in-person instruction it will hopefully be a seamless transition back into the classroom at those same periods uh in the same schedule so they get on to zoom this week the teachers are um they are on zoom just about every day this week just getting the kids used to the lessons but once we come into so starting next week we have it staggered so there's a minimum of two zoom lessons per week for every teacher and there will be some staggered independent coursework that they can be working on but the teacher is still available during that block of time so that they can get active with the kids and help lead them through some of those independent pieces of it but math so there are a couple of uh areas where they said they're going to do a live stream lesson every day and just record what they so in case kids can't get to that lesson all the teachers are recording their videos and just leaving them in a recorded spot in canvas for the kids to access so all of our home pages have been set up so that they're they're all exactly the same and the kids go in they're gonna see the same ping pong pages they click the same zoom links and so it's really an easy transition from for them for from class to class and then from 1 to 3 30 our teachers have office hours tutorial so they can schedule they they've already started scheduling times for those kids that they can call in and get help um whatever technology or curriculum or anything else that they need and then our short day friday we do have it from only 9 to 11 so we can get our capstone class in with our kids and then allow for a check-in with each of those teachers on friday and then still have office hours from 11 to 1 30 with the teachers each one of these class lessons is recorded so the kids can go back and review that they do so how long is the recording character that's a good question we haven't determined a time period so i know you didn't have a limit on it so that's a great question i'm going to write that one down and we'll actually determine we don't have it if we actually didn't have a date set for how long so it's not going to be a short period of thinking as long as we need to keep them on there so that's a really good question i actually need to see how long we can keep them on there and then they would have them one-on-one with the teacher in the afternoon that they needed it correct right sounds like a good deal that's actually an advantage over a traditional classroom because in the classroom they miss something sick and can't attend right they can go back and bring up the lesson they missed it does allow for some flexibility for families give us a little bit of background so the high school schedule we the teachers have their office hours from eight until 11.
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okay for the first category uh declining cases are less than 100 cases per 100 000 individuals for two consecutive weeks for that benchmark at that point in time it says we have reached that uh for the next benchmark two consecutive weeks with percent positivity below seven percent according to this the benchmark has not been met but again this is for july 19th uh i think mr carr has seen some more data that says it has decreased if you want to touch on that a little bit yes again pulling data from the arizona department of health services page which was where this data they they caution us about going to current data because it's not a complete data set it's the data lags however we we can watch that to see where the trend is taking us and where it's going knowing that while it's not complete data it should be representative so if we look at the subsequent weeks following that july 9th knowing that the numbers may change that july 19th excuse me date of a number of 13.2 percent has since declined to 11.2 percent and subsequently to 8.7 percent we would highlight that this week's data the data as of starting sunday 8 9 only has one data day of reporting in it so it may or may not be representative but we want you to know we're monitoring it with the idea of hoping that it is representative and hoping that it nears us to a decision consistent but as of the one day of data that's available for this week the the positivity rate has declined to 4.5 percent um our hope is that that trend and that's as a county that's a county that's not local level and as as we indicated we we hope to look even more local that is an indication that if that data trend holds through the week that we're we would be very close to meeting this benchmark you know and we'll hit this later in the in the analysis that you suggest one of the things that we can all do is respond to the cdc's the arizona department of health maricopa county health departments call for widespread testing as we have widespread testing that does two things one it makes sure that the data is a larger data set and more representative of where we really are two in the event that that comes back with a positive perhaps somebody is asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic it identifies that your positive early in the stage allows you to quarantine and slow the spread again helping us to get back to school sooner than later so i know you'll hit that point later but we know that that's where the data is trending we're monitoring it regularly we like where it's going and we hope that that allows us to return to school sooner than later and invite your participation in making sure the data is accurate thank you mr carr the last benchmark is two consecutive weeks with hospital visits for covet-like illnesses in the region below 10 percent again pulling this the benchmark has not been met but if you'll notice it is it has by on july 19th it met it and it is trending down so we expect to meet that benchmark and dr mccord if i can add again there is data available on the department of health subsequent to that and it indicates again those numbers may change because the data is always changing in the last two weeks but the week following that declines further to 6.4 percent and the early data for the week ending 8-2 is at 3.9 percent so all indications are is that we've met that metric and we continue to meet that metric thank you dr mccord can you remind us sorry can you remind us when when do we expect to see the data updated by the state weekly was it every thursday is that what you said is the projected date that that the latest yes the so this is from oh this is where it is yeah on the right side is is when they update it for what weeks oh perfect so i've got it outlined there thank you that's all right uh it looks like a class schedule i know um i think that i would i would imagine that it would come out the same if they do it for school districts specifically but i don't know yet just um here we are just some anecdotal type stuff uh arizona is currently 35th in the nation and tests done per 100 000 population via john's hopskin uh university this is pulled and here we are just a graphic showing where we're at related to that um local data the health department has not made opening trend data available by school district or zip code at this point in time you can get it for zipcode but you can't get it necessarily by the trend maricopa county is indicated again like we talked about they'll be making data available at the local level in our area town of gilbert zip codes have six gps boundaries zip codes again a third of our district is in the city of mesa we comprise 10 total zip codes east valley zip codes chandler mace queen creek gilbert tempe aj scottsdale is 49 zip codes and gps student resident zip codes 89 largest zip code is 85234 majority comes from six zip codes again some local data is available but it is daily case only which meets criteria one which would speak to criteria 1.
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so it looks really big if you're just pulling out the kids but it sort of mirrors what overall the caseload has been so those are just some of my thoughts on the literature um and perspectives on this thank you so much dr westerfer and i'll just plug that we're going to have a conversation at the school committee meeting tomorrow night i won't get into details in this show because we have people much more knowledgeable than me but we're going to talk a bit about community transmission rate and school opening and and um so we'll have that conversation so if if if you're interested in that conversation you know school can be meeting tomorrow night may be interesting to you but thank you i think at the this point we'll transition to having a conversation um about testing and testing of symptomatic and asymptomatic patients and um and at this point we'll go to dr garcia who's going to comment and bring some information on that thank you thank you for being here sure thank you um it's great to be able to be here with everybody and i i appreciate you all taking the time to listen to us speak a little bit about what we know about covid so um certainly i think it's important and testing comes up all the time um where i work uh and um it's you know concerns uh family members calling you know should i get tested should i not what does it mean um and i think the the the interesting thing or the important thing is to understand that symptomatic testing um can happen should happen and um and it helps us to know that if somebody is positive and symptomatic then we understand what we need to do for the family um some quarantining those kinds of things even though they don't have to necessarily be hospitalized so that's important and that is we do have that capability in our community um we live in a great community and that capability is here um the asymptomatic testing you know how do we know if we're not testing everybody um well uh so there are a couple and i think you're gonna hear about this more tomorrow but there's certainly uh something called the positivity rate that we look at and that's to decide whether the community is testing enough asymptomatic folks asymptomatic kids and adults to know that that um you know we are actually testing those patients and so the world health organization has uh recommended that you want a uh a positivity rate of about five percent there are a lot of different recommendations so anything under five percent um really means that you're testing um and we're currently at two and a half percent i looked at um the john hopkins website um for a state um and so that is really important and i think that that helps me understand that we really are testing enough community members to know that they're we're testing asymptomatic as well as symptomatic a positivity rate of a hundred percent like you might find i don't know in georgia or someplace that's really um off they're off the charts is um uh probably just testing the the ill not necessarily the asymptomatic as well so i think we're we're in a good spot here and um the testing is actually working and i think it's guiding a lot of our decisions um individually and then as a community in the society um so that's that's what i can tell you about testing and obviously the testing we're talking about is pcr testing um and um there are a bunch of different ways to do that it could be a nasopharyngeal swab it could be um some places are now doing just sputum uh sorry just saliva um so there are a bunch of different ways to do that but in general our our testing here is um uh a nasal suave or nasopharyngeal swab and you can get results back um um now much better than at the beginning of this um usually within 24 to 48 hours if not even sooner the rapid tests are even faster so um again symptomatic important um go to your provider go to your healthcare provider uh and and then asymptomatic um as we as that becomes more and more readily available for us to continue doing i think we're doing enough now thank you and i want to note i probably should have been more explicit about this at the beginning that these are all responses these structures there's about eight questions that our different providers are going to respond to these were responses to questions that came in via email so if people are watching thank you for those of you who clicked the little button in the google form and shared those because i think uh i what i really appreciate about the questions is they're all questions that i'm getting all the time i'm sure you as medical providers are getting all the time these are really really critical questions uh from our community and for our community um so we're gonna stay with dr garcia for the next question which is some tips on how to stay safe uh what are active measures uh that contribute to staying safe in the current environment without a vaccine and all the other things that were already mentioned sure so thank you so i think um it's really important as our our kids get ready to go back to school uh um if and when you know when that happens i think it's really important to know that the basics are where where what we're going to focus on it's what you focus on at home it's what i focus on here at work um at the hospital it's what we focus on um you know in our offices um and so it's really kind of the basics hand hygiene is incredibly important um you know having that that bottle of hand sanitizer by the door when you walk in um i think is really important the social distancing that you'll hear from this and read from the school plan um of how to keep some um you know some space between um the uh children and you know that six feet is really important um you know some place to say could you go up to ten feet i think you know six feet is probably is probably a good number um face coverings really important i have to admit that early in this uh pandemic i was um on tv saying that you know save the mass for the doctors and the nurses don't wear masks um you know we all learn okay so um now we're recommending everyone have those um face masks and it's really important to have face coverings um as for our children especially as they're trying to interact as well and and then the other thing to just drive home is flu vaccine this fall is important uh probably like no other year it is so important and so um it's it's important for us to understand that if you you know if if you have a flu vaccine and we and and you know if you develop fever without the vaccine it's hard to know is that the flu or is that coming from covid um so we're really stressing flu vaccines i mean 100 of us should get our flu vaccine this year um unless there is really a medical uh contraindication so that that is also going to help you stay safe and then i know the school is looking at other things and you know including things like screening right so here at work i get screened it's online i get screened every day all of my employees get screened every day um for fever um you know we still have travel questions some places don't um and so that's really important and um temperature check sometimes people are doing that we're not doing that here but that is also something that people have found to be um helpful so all of those screenings will be helpful and then i think um just to kind of um uh finish up a bit i know there's some concerns about like within a school system about kind of the hvac system and what is the air flow and so you know what we've recommended all along in hospitals um is that uh you know the the and we've been able to keep people safe in hospitals and in doctor's offices by uh really paying attention to the top three or four that i talked about the face masks and the hand hygiene and all of those things um and this goes to the the question about whether or not it's airborne or droplet and realistically um yes if you can um open windows and have better ventilation that's great but most most of us have been able to keep people safe at work and patient safe by really just a meticulous hand hygiene and face covering so thank you uh i want to note that there's a couple questions have come in i i think um we're about uh more than halfway through the questions that we received in advance so please keep those questions coming and we'll loop back to them after as we go around the horn so thank you for commenting and asking some really good questions along the way i'm going to go back to dr stores who's going to talk a bit about quarantine and isolation of individuals great thanks mike so this actually came from a great question and i give a gold star to whoever pointed this out as they cited in the plan from the school that there was a difference between what the school was planning when you have someone who is a close contact so say someone was in school and someone else in their classroom got diagnosed with coronavirus with covid19 um the document says that one of the options is to wait four or five days and then get a test and if that test is negative then that person if they are asymptomatic presumably that child if they're asymptomatic can go back to school and that's a little bit different than what has been said um in the state of massachusetts and in the cdc which has basically said if you are a close contact exposure and that's something we can talk about later but basically if you're in the same classroom it's kind of counted as a closed contact exposure that basically you're quarantined for 14 days that even if it's a negative test there's still a risk and there's still a risk that maybe you got the test too early and it was falsely negative and so the quarantine was supposed to be for 14 days now looking at and looking at this from an outside perspective i went back to the original document and this actually comes what was developed at amherst in other school districts came from massachusetts guidelines and is actually verbatim from massachusetts guidelines and i want to bring jill back in because um it turns out that this is something that others have brought up as well and is an active point of conversation so i don't know jill if you want to comment on it sure sure thank you so when this original guidance from the department of education came out um many many nurse leaders and managers and local boards of health all picked up right away immediately on the discrepancy between the two um with the classification of not the classification of somebody who is independent identified as a close contact but the time frame on which the recommendation for this person to stay home currently at the local boards of health if they identify close contact they will recommend the person stay home for 14 days and also get tested and regardless of the test results you still need to stay home for 14 days department of ed is saying you can get tested after a few days but then depending on your results and if you're well and your test is negative you're able to come back to school originally department of ed said once school starts they're the ones that are dictating what's going to go on with the recommendations for isolation quarantine but they have realized that because there's such a discrepancy between the two they are going back to the table with um dph and as as a joint effort they're going to come out with new recommendations and that was brought up on a dph conference call just yesterday and they did say new guidance and new recommendations would be coming out hopefully within the next week um but if they will be changed hopefully changing it or reconfiguring it a little bit but it's definitely been brought up and it's definitely a topic of conversation on every call that i go on twice a week yeah i think you know to take a step back from that um you know realizing again this may change as evidence changes and develops and kind of keeping an open mind to that um but again to stress the big thing you know we all worry about the asymptomatic person and the close context but really the symptomatic people um are really the concern and you know as a parent i know right i know oh you know my kid has a bit of a sniffle they're gonna be fine they should go to school this is not the year for that and i think we really need to be careful because whether people are truly asymptomatic or as dr wester mentioned if they are merely have mild symptoms and we know that kids especially smaller kids have mild symptoms and so really keeping that in mind when we're talking about quarantine and isolation and trying as a community to take a really conservative approach to ourselves and to our to our children and thinking about you know do they really have symptoms and should i be more conservative and kind of keep them out and make sure this is not something else great thank you so i think that's an ongoing one that i think with miss consolino you know that there's continuing dialogue and and appreciate the question and the research on that one as well um we're going to go to dr everett um who it was responding to a couple questions that really centered around weighing the risks of remote versus in-person school for families in our district as well as across the commonwealth whether to return the school for families for students is a family choice and the first just the local context is for our students in phase one that survey went out actually a couple hours ago so this is a very timely that we're doing this call this evening because i think there are a lot of questions and i know dr everton talking to me beforehand given his role and his work is receiving them a lot from from patients of his as well so i'll turn it over to you dr everett sure thanks um it is one of the more more common questions that we've been getting at the office these days is what do i do about returning to school what are the risks to my child to my family should i go back to school should we stay at home and we've we've talked about this a lot in our group and what i've been telling a lot of families as far as a decision to go back to school is to is to look at a number of things when you're asking yourself these questions first of which is what the spread in the community is like uh dr westerford said earlier you know the the decision about going back to school in some places like georgia or florida is different than where it is here where we've continued to manage to keep the numbers down um and so keeping an eye on what the spread in the community is is an important thing to factor in when deciding about school and that's something that the school administration will be looking at as well the second thing to look at is what the school is doing and what the uh you know what the school's doing about ventilation and about sanitizing and all those measures and you've heard a lot already you've seen in the what's been published about what the plans are and i think so you want to think about that and also like how your your child would be able to kind of participate in that as far as what their risks would be and then the third thing is is to consider what the risk would be if you know if kovid were to come into the home i mean each family is a little bit different that's one of the biggest things about this whole and down thing is that each family is experiencing differently some families will um you know maybe have somebody at home who's immunocompromised or who has you know multiple risk factors or under multiple generation family and even if the risks were really low it may be that that's a that's a concern they wouldn't want to take that risk to have kobe come in the home so you had the capability of staying home and were able to do that and you want to take that risk and that would be a reasonable thing to potentially stay home and do remote learning versus in person um on on the other hand we know that there are definitely risks to not being in school as well we've seen that a lot in our patients who for whatever reason um you know can't interact as well with the remote learning and perhaps there's uh you know they're involved in special education or they just don't interact with their with the screens and it's really or they're not able to access their therapists or therapy through school and for those kids it may be that being in in person school is a really valuable um resource and is more important um we're also seeing you know an increase in risk uh one of the important things about this is is mental health and we're seeing a definite increase in anxiety and depression in our practice as far as you know not having access to people at school or not having those social connections and so um thinking about the you know what are the risks of kovid were to come into your home versus what are the risks if the children aren't in school is it really going to cause you know increased stress at home you know what are your resources and so those are the kind of the ways that i kind of weigh that out another thing to consider is you know thinking about younger versus older kids and it does seem as far as we know that that younger kids seem to be less affected all the research is a little confusing as far as you know um you know whether children carry the virus and or whether they spread it but it does seem that the younger children at least uh don't seem to spread it as much as say the older kids do additionally all of our kids may be able to interact a little bit better with remote learning um and so this is something to consider like how old are your kids what is your capability uh to care for them at home these are the things that we um are are thinking about and advising when we um we talk about it another question that came up that i would think about would be if i have a high risk children if a child who has asthma for instance should that be a no-go should i totally stay away because my child has asthma and i wouldn't necessarily say that that would totally uh keep you out of school certainly going into school if you have asthma the covid is a slightly higher risk if you have asthma but overall it seems that covid is is not affecting children as much and even children with asthma you know you have to kind of it wouldn't be a no-go to not go back into schools what i would say um and in fact i'm wondering if this fall if for instance if we get a lot more people vaccinated against the flu or take all these distancing measuring measures that we're doing to eliminate to reduce the risk of getting coveted is also going to reduce the risk of things like the flu and other communicable diseases that have well and so the hope would be that you know children going back would not be getting uh hopefully a sec so that's all these are things to to consider thanks peter and on that uh the last question we got that we'll address here is uh relatedly how can i improve the health of others right and that was it was a great question that to think about i think the question that came in was you know if i had the capability of of keeping my child home is that something that i should be doing and that's an excellent question i'm not um sure how to answer certainly if you if your children staying home and doing distance learning is something that you you think that he he or she can do and that you didn't want to take the risk of being exposed to covet in the school then i think it will be a reasonable measure to take um one of the things that i really wanted to to focus on as far as like how we can protect our community would be to mirror what dr garcia had said earlier which is about the vaccination right um and and flu vaccination and also getting all of our other vaccinations up to date as well so there's two things one is that we're making a big push this fall to get kids vaccinated against the flu um one of the reasons being is that the more people that are that are protected against the flu there's a lower chance of going to get a fever that we have to figure out later in the fall well you have a fever now is this the flu or is this coveted or something like that so that would be one reason um the other thing is not just flu vaccine but other vaccinations as well and one of the things our office is going to be doing is not only putting a push out to try to get kids more flu vaccines and get people to be able to you know come through in a really expeditious way through the office but also to get kids caught up on their routine childhood vaccines as well because of the pandemic we've been seeing overall you know the kids that we've been doing more virtual visits and so we're seeing some kids are getting a little behind on their vaccinations and we want to make sure the kids do get caught up on their vaccines to be protected against all the other illnesses that are out there before they get back to school so that's going to be another thing that we can do to to help keep the community more safe is to make sure that we you know get our all children just caught up on their vaccines and get their flu vaccines as well thank you all um that was fantastic before we go to the question and answer i didn't know if you know sort of we slotted different uh medical professionals to be answering different questions but i didn't know if there was anything that any of you wanted to share before we get into the the q a part and i think to um to add to what peter was saying go ahead to um to add to kind of the the community is really to think about other community members and folks under stress um you know we are a very diverse community socioeconomically um and while some of us may have capabilities and we'll be able to do remote learning um and may not feel as much pressure i think this year probably will be bumpy i don't think it's going to be straight through i think that there's a good chance that cases may rise as we all come in from the summer and it gets colder out and we're spending more time with people and it may mean that school needs to shut down for a time in order to decrease that community level which we've talked about the community spread is the word and so thinking that you know if you yourself are in a good and your family are lucky enough to be in a good situation um knowing and identifying families and other things that you can do for folks that may not be in that good situation as a community is is something to strive for esteban or dr garcia were you going to jump in as well yeah um thank you yes i just wanted to comment a little bit of hopeful news i think we are understanding that all of the social distancing and other things that are that are um helping including flu vaccines down in the um southern hemisphere at least what i heard today was that the amount of flu and disease the burden of disease is less than in previous years um and so i think that the social distancing and face coverings and flu vaccines are going to help us not only prevent the flu but obviously covets so this is this is a hopeful sign i i think great any other comments before we go to the q a yeah i mean i'll just say that uh you know the one thing that i continue to push in terms of community spread and i want to thank publicly our state representative um representative dome um on this is is you know what we've been doing to get our percent positive in hampshire and franklin county because in the three districts i work for it covers those two counties is doing by town by town it's a 47 town city and town excel spreadsheet that we update every wednesday that hasn't come out yet today but you know i i do think trying to get a good sense of community spread is going to be critical and and it is something that we're actively working on because we are even seeing significant difference between hampden versus new hampshire versus franklin counties um and so you know it is actively something we're doing something i've mentioned or is that you know our borders are porous right emerson belchertown and pelham and shoots very right you drive across the lines and so uh in western mass in particular where towns are relatively small we are actively uh focusing on that and we plan to publish them on a routine basis so there's a number of good questions so i want to [Music] start there's a question about should we have kids tested before they go back to school so anyone can jump in with thoughts on that one um i would say that asymptomatic testing at this point before going back to school i don't think is needed um i don't think the research has really shown that it would be helpful and the reason that is is because um you can test today and be positive you know three days from now when you get your exposure so i don't think asymptomatic testing at this point is needed for kids going back to school that's my my opinion okay any other comments or um the next question hey oh i'm sorry i was gonna i'm sorry mike i agree i think um you know thinking about the the only thing that comes up that i wonder is travel and those folks that have traveled from a state that does have a high infectious rate um not necessarily testing but but that may mean quarantine for some time um so taking that into account and travel plans and where you're going and realizing that that is changing right rhode island more than just recently um their rates went up and now they are a higher risk state so um if you are planning to travel just just knowing beforehand if you are going to a high risk or more high-risk states and what that requires as far as quarantine when you get back i do just want to jump in that i think it's important to read every that a negative test has limited value it's not predictive for the future it looks at a single moment of time and even then it's not a hundred percent so when we're talking about testing the the downside of doing a lot of asymptomatic testing is the false sense of security and the relaxation of the other important measures that are known to contain tournaments the next question talks a little bit about college kids return um but also about research about micro droplets um spread covid so i think dr westerfer was interested in jumping in talking a bit about the micro droplets piece sure um you know this is an area of controversy micro droplets um are sort of the five micrometer or less uh particles so the super teeny tiny droplets um that is what we call airborne spread so it gets suspended up in the air um and it could be you know theoretically in the room for hours now the research on this um really does not support that this is a primary role of spread when you look at the things even where you know 60 people are in a room in a chorus what's happening is they're singing they're projecting droplets and droplets and droplets and and not wearing masks and so rather than just suspended in the air um for hours for a later uh sort of somebody comes in the room a little bit later that's not the primary sort of way in which it's thought to be spread so it is a potential way um that we we can't rule out and there there are probably some certain events but when you look at the research that looks at at the procedures um that we do in medicine that generate tons of aerosols and if you would see it you would see it then um a lot of these studies show that it doesn't really seem that even in those instances in the highest risk population that many people um are are testing positive so it really just doesn't seem like it is uh very common and the thoughts from anyone else okay um a couple questions uh but this one had a nice friendly hello for dr everett so i'll explain this one um just about when flu vaccines uh this year will start becoming available sure and that's uh i don't have specific numbers on that yet our nurse manager updates us all the time we're having regular conversations about planning flu clinics and how to get the most kids through as as efficiently as we can and the last i heard was the beginning of october although it may be i suppose it could be a little earlier than that but i think we're shooting for october we're getting a lot of our our clinic set up which should be before like i said you know before the flu starts to show up which traditionally over the last couple of years i can't the flu can show up as early as you know certainly in november although past years the biggest seasons have been december january but we want to get kids uh vaccinated you know earlier in the season if we can so i think we're looking at october for that and we'll certainly be sending a lot of information out about getting kids in when that when that happens all right thank you i'm going to skip around a little bit i'm just to keep the order making some good sense um you know so the question i'll just read it uh dr garcia's reference day asymptomatic testing is helpful are there any plans to specifically monitor the asymptomatic testing rates in amherst or new hampshire gowdy to guide school plans um i can talk about the school piece earlier but um i don't know if any of the medical professionals want to comment on the kind of modern asymptomatic testing area um sure i'll just jump in and say that um you know we are um i think uh right currently um uh some limits on testing and asymptomatic testing i think that will increase as the um fall rolls around we'll be able to do more of that and i think the the other as well your your personal providers i'm sure um it's been a challenge to get enough testing supplies enough manpower to do that but we certainly want to be able to have that um you know available so that's that's our goal uh and i think that um it'll be up to um kind of the individual schools and and other um folks to make determinations currently a provider can you know often determine whether somebody needs to be asymptomatically tested um for travel or another one of those reasons but we may we may broaden that i think and then flu testing is going to be interesting and important as well um and our plan is to have that um um be able to do kind of drive through flu and um um kovid and strep you know so i think we're trying to to think of all of those things we can do at the same time that might present the same way so um [Music] yeah i was just going to add that you know it is one of the things that we're looking at so last week last wednesday which is the latest data we have was on the fifth when you look at the towns in hampshire and franklin county our percent positive rate was 1.3 percent which actually mirrored amherst uh one of the things that's going to be a little tricky and one of the things that you know i sort of i'll speak about this tomorrow night a little more detail is that amherst is going to be hard to calculate because the population of amherst is variable and particularly with the umass decision last week it's going to be lower so you know i think thinking about hampshire and count franklin county rates are going to be the way we were planning to approach it even before this umass decision so right now it is a little cumbersome to calculate those but we have our spreadsheet and we just plug in the numbers every wednesday evening when they come out and it is something that is actively going to be be our focus both in terms of having kids come back in school whether they stay in school as well as whether we increase the number of students in school because our plan has phases to it and we want to make sure both the numbers stay low and also that there's not significant increases because it could be the case the number's still low but we're starting to see a significant influence that we may want to pause some of our you know having more students in the building so we are looking at again both the testing rate as described earlier but also the number of positive cases per hundred thousand and um so far this area looks um hampshire and franklin county um is well below the metrics of any recommendation from any kind of uh respected agency or you know cdc world health harvard global health what new york state new york city uh lots of other places are doing and i'm intentionally not comparing us no disrespect to miss dr westerford some places that have metrics that uh would not pass muster in the northeast um for instance miss cancelino found i think it was i don't know if i want to mention the state but a state far away from here had metrics of whether you had to wear a mask or not based on um numbers and and for us like all the medical professionals have said wearing a mask is is the way we're going to do school it's not based on what our numbers are it's what we're doing the numbers are really about you know the safety being in school basically you know are we getting is there an increase in number of cases and also are we having enough testing in the area to satisfy and make us feel comfortable and again i won't get ahead of myself because school members will have lots to say i imagine on that tomorrow night it's definitely a topic of high interest this week and particularly in the commonwealth but i just wanted to um to mention that as well um you know one of the things that's also come up is you know with some of the colleges coming back mandating asymptomatic testing not just an amherst in the local area how that was going to affect actually the numbers and that's you know in my conversation not with folks in this call but other people in public health it's more reason to have a hampshire and franklin county number because it sort of it may it may look thing make things almost look better than they are if you're testing you know that many asymptomatic people as opposed to people who are symptomatic and uh you know because we do have a couple colleges in the community it seemed like it was an important thing to have um so there was a couple comments um you know i don't know there's a couple uh thoughts on this which is um desi had some guidance that came out this week the school district's having more in person in hybrid school than some districts are currently planning or proposing and and i think that some of that there's another comment about that below um based on you know some of the positive uh numbers in most areas of massachusetts um and so um i don't know if you all want to weigh in on that i you know or not that's that's more about um kind of state policy but if you're interested in weighing in i'm happy to give you the opportunity [Music] i mean i think the the only thing that i think about um from a parent perspective is still having the choice and the ability to decide what i think is best for my family and for my kids um and so whatever mix that is and whatever offer that is um you know i think knowing what the options are and being able to choose between a more conservative option for which i think for always you know 100 remote distance learning versus whatever the type of other model is you know i think is an important aspect i don't know that trying to increase a little bit here or there necessarily kind of makes a difference in in the grand scheme of things i i think one thing to that i think about with all this is that the data is changes quite a bit and one of the things that this whole endemic is required is a lot of flexibility here and so the numbers are low now and i think the district has chosen to kind of take the stepwise approach back and then and then follow the numbers and then follow the science and see where we're at uh which which i think is is important i mean following the science and seeing what it tells us and then being able to respond to that um as as college students come back and you know when more people come back to the valley we don't know what the numbers will do if we can all as a community continue to take the measures and wear masks like we've been doing my feeling is that the numbers are going to continue to stay alone we're going to be able to move um and move along but um but that's something that i think we need to just i guess respond to and keep an eye on what the numbers do and then and then keep um you know an eye on that as we decide whether to go back um yeah whether to send our kids back to school uh and i think having the testing available is another important thing to make sure that we continue to have that testing and i think i'm seeing that that that you know we're planning to get more testing available in our offices as well and i you know dr garcia said that it certainly has clueless plan um so i think that's going to be important for us so that we can keep track of what's going on in the community thank you so there's a question and i think this one i'll comment on i'm going to try to put a link to a presentation from our night that's already on our website so this is not nothing that isn't already posted publicly but the question was about phasing model uses five percent as the threshold um so uh what what anyone who's interested can take a look at that presentation uh the short story is five percent uh is used right now by new york state the centers for disease control the world health organization um have used that metric uh other places like the harvard global health institute new york city particularly because of the density in new york city have used three percent as their metric um cambridge massachusetts another district um that we often compare ourselves to and connect with uh have used five percent and so um it is uh you know something that the school can be discussing you know this isn't a posted public meeting of the school committee so i get to speak and unfortunately for them well fortunately unfortunately they they have to wait till tomorrow night but you know along the way we've tried to take the uh approach that we're going to use the most conservative metrics that are being recommended in the field there is some disagreement about five percent of three percent in the field uh we've opted for the more conservative metric and and that's the way we've approached this whole thing is you know let's collect what the recommendations are from a reputable organizations and let's pick the most conservative one i mean this came back from three feet versus six feet of social distancing and school committee myself and others uh very quickly uh recognized that we thought there was value in being conservative with that you know we have another metric that we're using which is a number of new cases per 100 000 people again looking at hampshire and franklin county as i mentioned earlier and i think for for reasons that were discussed it's one of the things that both metrics when combined uh capture different data points that we feel like will be a good reflection of community spread and community testing availability the school committee will talk about it tomorrow night i'll certainly talk about in more detail tomorrow night but you know what you see if you are looking at the presentation you know on slide six we really tried to do a uh try to find data of what was being recommended what were people uh in the field doing what was the recommendations um and again we didn't focus on you know i will mention it's oklahoma i believe that has different metrics for for mask where we were looking for the outliers in our opinion we were looking for you know again national international organizations uh what recommendations there were i don't claim to be an epidemiologist or a medical doctor but you know we've all dug in and i did connect with somebody over in the eastern part of the state on this uh to get some some thoughts on the metrics and and where we landed was again a little more conservative than some of the recommendations but it's a place that at least for me i'll only speak for myself and just constantly know if you want to jump in you can but we feel comfortable that we're we're being as conservative um as we can be based on the recommendations that are being made by experts in the field jill is there anything you want to add to that or sure and i think having metrics in the reopening plan gives some clear-cut data points to look at so we're not questioning you know do we need to move forward do we need to go backwards and it gives us that based on the trending over the last couple of weeks like we're gonna we're gonna look at what's happened in our community in the last couple of weeks leading up to school and then you know can we phase in more kids going into you know the middle of october and that kind of stuff and um superintendent morris and i also looked at um adding something in to look at the change over time to see if we've increased drastically you know by a certain percentage that's going to indicate is it safe to continue on the way that we're going or do we need to take a couple steps back too so that was an important piece to put in there too right um [Music] so see another question came in what do you think about students eating and drinking in shared spaces um and questions about toilets so again anyone can jump in on that um i think i'll just describe that um the recommendations we have from cdc are students should be six feet away when they're um not wearing a mask and so in classrooms that's how we do it we wouldn't have our students eating in the cafeteria where first of all the cohort model sort of falls apart uh but also around the distancing uh piece not to answer for anyone else but just at least set the context we're also trying to figure out ways where students can each eat outside as much as possible weather permitting we don't live in you know san diego where that might be possible a little more often than it is here or georgia um i don't want to leave out georgia dr westerfer but um but you know we are trying to think about that and take the advice we had but i'd be you know very curious for anyone's thoughts on that particular question can i just ask what's a toilet bloom i i think that this is referring to the potential aerosolization of virus because uh viral rna has been found in urine it's been found in stool and the thought is that when you flush a toilet it generates sort of potentially can increase droplets spread um and sort of spread up and it can become aerosolized the problem is is we don't know we can prove in a lot of ways that that we can detect the virus but it's sort of hard to understand that detecting the virus doesn't mean that that virus can then go infect somebody in fact we know that in a lot of circumstances it can't um and what we've not been able to ascertain yet from a research standpoint and just my sort of my background is as a as a researcher an avid consumer of medical literature um is is we we haven't found that that we can determine that that leads to infectivity so a lot of places are recommending obviously uh reducing the number of people that are in the bathroom when it is when a toilet is flushed um and you know lids if they're possible um also to help when it's flush putting the lid on the problem is we don't we don't know that any of this is effective or necessary um those are just sort of some of the thoughts circulating in the medical community um is is ensuring that you know that bathrooms have have adequate ventilation which um typically in buildings they might and then you know lids on the toilets if possible when they're being flushed and then just ensuring that there aren't 15 people in a bathroom all at once well we are and also just enhanced cleaning of those spaces um i think is really important i think early on in the pandemic we thought um uh many of us uh that you know surface surfaces and touching was a major way of of uh exposure um and it's clear that that's still a risk but um uh not as much of a risk as somebody coughing on you or sneezing on you and so that uh to me is um you know core we wanna the bang for our buck is gonna be the face coverings but then i'm sure the skull is gonna take care of the the cleaning of those height what we call high touch high touch surfaces that's still important but probably not as much a risk as some of the others so we are about out of time i want to just mention uh one thing and then thank uh thank all of you so uh at the very beginning sasha figueroa uh who works for the district mentioned that all of uh our live streams we have a bunch of town halls on monday one for elementary one for secondary uh the way we do it is if people need translation in spanish or in portuguese there's a there's a separate line where there's simultaneous translation we had people accessing those lines today so i just want to note if anyone is watching this and felt like oh someone would love to watch it but you know linguistically there would be a challenge we're doing that for all of our sessions so please know that while you won't actually hear dr rushford and dr garcia and everyone you'll hear what they're saying today is probably a high end for the translator's work so thank you all for the translators who are doing this this is a pretty technical one um but we really do want to make sure that people access those ones and much like we did today we put it online at the beginning and sasha's put it online at the end and actually has some of the ones from monday as well uh but i also oh and korean as well i apologize but i really want to thank all of you this has been really helpful um for i know many people in the community i got some nice texts from people who are watching who are finding it uh refreshing to have people who are medical professionals and not me i'm talking about this stuff and i found it refreshing as well i appreciate that that also that you offer different perspectives that there's not unanimity in the field uh on many of these issues and and you know deeply appreciate you taking time out of your incredibly busy days uh especially these days um to do that with us so thank you i don't know if there's any you don't have to have parting words but if there's anything any would like to share before we uh close up you should feel welcome too well i guess i would just say thanks for i i appreciate being a part of this and i mean as all of us are physicians here but i we're all also parents in the the school district in amherst so i think it's it's important to me to to be a part of this just as part of being part of the community as well because this is something that we need to address this pandemic you know together and i think one of the things that dr soares had brought up maybe before the session was just one of the things that we can do during this pandemic is to make sure they are thinking of the others in our community and thinking of the other different perspectives that are there and just you know just being thoughtful one another is is an important part the mental health toll that this pandemic is taking on all of us is huge and so taking that moment to think of each other and having these sessions where the community can come together and to to work on it i think is really really important so i appreciate dr sores and dr morris putting this all together and being a part of it thank you yeah i just want to say i think you know to families out there um just to remember whatever decision you decide to make is the right decision if you decide that you're going to do totally remote learning it's the right decision if you decide you're going to go all in on school it's the right decision try not again i think as we mentioned before as you see there are no right and wrong answers per se to this there are no absolutes in this and so whatever you decide is the decision for your family then that is the right decision and hopefully um others see it that way as well so yeah thank you for allowing us to to be able to talk with folks and um it's really been a pleasure yeah thanks for thanks for um having us i i appreciate this a lot and i also i just want to take just a minute um you know we talked about how uh you know dr sores and dr everett talked about how we can look at the others in the community try to understand where they're coming from and be respectful that people have different situations um but i would ask everyone in this time you know the same plea that we had back in march is is to try to keep the community safe in other ways so a lot of it isn't like i mentioned what we're doing necessarily at school it's what we're doing where we're traveling um how we're gathering and the other choices that we're making and those have implications for our community and so as a community um you know this is one of those times where i think that there does need to be some transparency in terms of what we do um and the decision to you know my child are they maybe a little symptomatic maybe i could just send them through um you know that's this is not the time to do this um to particularly keep everyone safe because we all have family members um and and you know some of us have different situations so it's just a plea to try to keep the community safe yeah and i just want to say thank you i uh really enjoyed it and i learn a lot every time i get to participate in these and um uh get your flu shot yeah yeah and uh you know please if there's questions about anything here you know we we these folks don't uh they're not employed by the district but you know about our plans please email me morris arts.org i can definitely forward it along to ms consolino school committee at arts.org we want to be continuing to engage the community on on these issues it is changing it will continue to change as mr dr sword said earlier um and so thanks all of you thanks to our school committee members thanks to judy torres who i should have mentioned by name before as the one who's organizing and doing incredible amounts of work to make sure this that everyone has access to this um regardless of the their first language or primary language and uh thanks to everyone and everyone have a enjoy the lovely evening we have it's starting to cool down and uh hope everyone is doing well we'll see you soon thank you
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yeah um so that's pretty darn good considering roughly 2 600 kids and it's not counting kindergarten which was around 175 you know what we had to plan for yeah hey yeah hang on let me just uh you have to make um we are at 2287 responses for grades one through 12. right so we're probably probably roughly maybe 200 250 calls have to be will have to be made yeah and then our kindergarten families we had maybe 300. i'm just waiting for this 161 um and last time i checked enrollment was 179 so only about a dozen kindergarten families still need to give us an answer yeah eric do you mind just going through one through 12 the percentages um yes so okay we don't need that one we don't need that one okay for september 2020 the model i choose is um 82.2 have picked the hybrid model um actually i'll just do you one better and i'll show you i should have done this earlier too um so 82.2 percent um 18 about 1881 have picked the hybrid 17 percent or 389 have picked a remote and this little sliver of 17 have chosen to withdraw or from bps or homeschool their child um and then um for those who aren't withdrawing and then here's your boss 61 say that they're going to take the bus at some point um that's 1395 versus your 34 and a half um that state that um 789 will be driven to and from school um and then our little sliver here um i i believe the influx for this is those that picked remote learning uh may not have known um and and um which one to pick um for withdrawing so i think that the red and the orange here i i think are very similar numbers at the end of the day um i think this is your big one really for transportation at sixty one percent thanks and eric what's the can you share the kindergarten number of the 161 that responded because we were planning on about 175 of coming yeah sure let me if you want uh yep there we go um so 161 and that is looking at um let me zoom this in a little bit for you all right uh 128 or 79 and a half percent are hybrid 21 students or 13 are remote and 12 students 12 12 parents have indicated um withdrawing or homeschooling it's really important that that uh you know in different meetings that we share this is that we really you know that's why the first uh six to eight weeks of school i think it's eight weeks of school we're having the half day program for the kindergarten students and so while there's a cost there with transportation we talked about this with finance but we really need to get our kindergarteners engaged and teach them school get them in love them really set up those relationships with the teachers because if we have to at some point quickly go remote we need to be connected with them and have them learn the technology and so forth and it's important for the long haul of the district to make sure we don't have kindergarteners um overloaded in a class for next year and we want to make sure that we have more of these properly so this is a pretty good number so far john do you have any do you have any plan to announce those survey results um well we need to work with them first before before we announce them but we probably could share them at the board meeting next week yeah it only closed actually you know what now that i'm in here i actually they stayed open a little late they technically were supposed to close it at four o'clock but i left them open a little longer for some straggling um some some stragglers that um um either didn't get it or asked for a couple minutes so um um yeah they just we're just closing them you need to do a lot of work because like i said we have a develop a script actually this afternoon for the for the schools we're going to be bringing in anybody we can each principal to make calls to the those is that they can't the principles really can't make their class list properly without that information so um it's critical and then and then we're working on a cohort letter as well you know it's pretty straightforward um my last name and then in the bus company take all of this and get that going so i mean we've gotta turn it around power outage didn't help lots of good three four days is the cohorting going to go by neighborhoods or we don't know yet yeah we're thinking last names to keep families together that was what what the the last names yeah okay that was that's like alphabetical yeah so some final that was where we left it off the principles today so we just double checked some things and yeah well no matter what you choose not to be good enough oh no no not at all not at all no it's amazing it's almost right down the middle i'll get an email that says you know we're rotten for deciding on hybrid and then the next email will come in thank god you did that you're socially distancing the kids more better way to start it's just every single decision it's almost half and half it really is all right thank you for sharing that uh okay reopening ventilation so you said about the bathrooms that's good yes there's good news about the bathrooms at least that was reported to us so you know go ahead ken yeah so the um i'm actually uh looking for the document that we where we talked to the teachers last night because we talked about ventilation there also that's right take your time see if you can find it that was actually some good i found it now google's just not cooperating and letting me scroll let me see if i can find it okay got it okay i have it up too if you so the the expectations are that everything will be working at the start of the year we've uh we've had our maintenance mechanic joe degrandy going through and um checking all of the the fans and the motors and fixing them as he can we've also got a uh mechanical contractor kind of follow going around after him as he identifies things that need to be fixed they're going in and fixing them in some many cases we're replacing motors some of which have been you know out of order for quite some time um i should have started the beginning of we as part of the summer cleaning process we replaced all the filters and all the unit ventilators and in the the rooftop units so once we get everything running we will have the major systems running two hours before school starts and one hour after school ends any spaces that are not appropriately ventilated will not be used until we can get them appropriately ventilated um and i had one other point all filters and unit ventilators what was the other thing you said air filter all filters and unit ventilators and the rooftop units oh the roof top units yeah and the other point that i i made last night to the teachers and we need to make clear to everybody uh ventilation doesn't necessarily mean comfort it means bringing in fresh air from the outside and exhausting and i use the example of last night i was sitting in my family room on the on the meeting and i don't have air conditioning in my house but i had the window next to me open so i had plenty of ventilation but not comfort [Music] and these units we have are are designed to bring in air from the outside and we have exhaust fans in many classrooms in other classrooms the the air just naturally exhausts out uh into the hallway so that's the ventilation update good point i didn't know the difference between that that was good i'm learning a lot so basically you're saying all the classrooms are going to be hotter not necessarily so many of them have air conditioning all right any miscellaneous discussion but the basic objective of that is just is to go through and get get everything you know everything working as it was intended to work and that's pretty much all you can do and starting that two hours before is that a new practice because of everything going on yes and uh the same with the the uh the exhaust fans and the bathrooms will be run 24 hours a day seven days a week so the the the electrical costs are going to be electrical costs are going to go up a lot so it's going to be something we have to talk about anybody have any miscellaneous discussion i appreciate everybody being willing to move this uh our meeting a week later than normally uh scheduled no problem because it was very very helpful for me yeah we're just so concerned with reopening it's just you know two to three hour meetings a day with our principals and really working all the details throughout as best we can so there's just a lot of work going on john are you going to be able to get time off to bring your son to college um that's the plan for monday monday morning and come back tuesday night yes wow overnight there's no other choice and then then we'll talk about i was going to send a separate note to you guys i'll send a separate note on friday a little with a weekend update to the board so just how that's going to schedule and how that's going to work and i've been in touch on it so it's been hard it's been hard uh this summer to uh especially to enjoy this last week or two with them it's been very good we're working it through some time together it should be nice thank you for asking debbie okay well no one has anything else i guess we could join the meeting at 7 14.
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572. so that's uh that's another uh 90 000 to the good yeah and so you told me something you mentioned some things that were you had more of what did we actually under run tomorrow um employee benefits were were more positive than we thought they were going to be one reason i think we talked about this last time but i hadn't had it incorporated in my numbers yet we got a refund of our dental insurance from may i think we just got that in july and our unemployment has been running lower than we originally expected um transportation variance was also more positive the refund we got back from all-star was larger than the number they originally gave me i think what happened was they the number they originally gave me was for a certain point in time and they ended up not bringing their drivers back for another week or two after that point so they saved more money and included in the refund okay yeah so that was that was good the dental rebate was in one time savings right yes um ken can i ask you two questions one on the unemployment on the numbers that you're using we've only gotten our unemployment bills through april is there more did you estimate may and june do you have may and june and we just don't have ours yet um i'm pretty sure we have may already and we and we estimated the the balance based on that bill okay um and then the other one that we wanted to talk about maybe we talked about at the last meeting i can't remember is that we have that sewer charge the 41 that's due june 1st but doesn't get isn't late until july 1st that we talked about the possibility of moving that forward um so that joan doesn't have to rush around july 1st every year and um get that payment as the first payment out before it's late um that is not in here correct correct so you're suggesting we should do a journal entry to put it back into 1920.
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those would be the ones i'm referring to gary they go a little more detail so that is that's that's that's our most up-to-date plan when it comes to site plan yeah i see a c205 and yep i mean c206 will be more specifically for access management premises so we're showing the alignments uh for garbage truck turn movements through through the lanes as well as having how we work through with the fire department there were there were a number of different things that we had to meet for the fire department so you'll see those on c206 as well i i don't think we're opposed to um providing some green space um we we were just directed to provide as large of a pedestrian area uh as we could i think so i think there is some space for for planters or you know some some kind of a raised bed or something i feel like i think on north or on first street north of the drop-off there's a sniffing area that could have street trees that grade and planters could have some ground plantings uh at least something to consider i i i'm speaking for the team but i i don't believe that's an issue at all i think we're not opposed to that we can probably provide that for the next month's meeting anyone else corey or john or jeff yeah jeff oh jeff you're on mute there you go oh i want to support um laurie's comment and i think somebody else maybe tamara commented about the faux wood um i'm against that as a material and i would be against wood being used even if it were the real thing because bringing it right down to grade especially along um along the sidewalk there will be impossible to maintain it it won't it's an inappropriate material for uh this downtown site and i'm definitely against any kind of uh faux material uh being introduced um i think camera mentioned the ac units i'd like to see those delineated on these renderings because they become a prominent part of a building facade and i mean unless it's unless it's not being done with through-the-wall units i'd like to see what what the architect has in mind there i had a question about the lobby it's an awfully big space and there is no delineation or no designation as to how that space is going to be used um you know where's the on-site manager's office going to be is there going to be any kind of kitchen or kitchenette facility it's definitely a lobby uh too big for 90 some rooms so i'd like to see some uh articulation of how that space is going to be used where is the sign-in desk going to be lounge areas etc and along those lines i mean if that space is really just going to be lobby and not dining or that sort of thing um i'd like to see the corner opened up a little bit more um it sacrifices usable floor space on the inside but it's an area that's so big anyway that it would be nice to open that corner up for sort of a sheltered uh pedestrian experience there at the corner uh people are going to be coming out checking out and uh you know waiting for uber or waiting for their ride or whatever it'd be nice to have some some kind of a sheltered space for them uh maybe even some kind of benches that sort of thing um i think the corner material was mentioned the sort of helter skelter metal panel different color kind of thing i i don't like it um i'm even having a hard time reading the word fairfield at the top of what's here just in the rendering and people are going to have to find this building so i'd like to see something maybe a little bit more we've been keeping with uh with kind of a downtown type material and then the relationship of this building to the adjacent building since we don't have photographs to evaluate from and you don't you don't show those in your renderings i'd like to see you know i'd like to be able to evaluate kind of you know how this building bangs up against its neighbors um i think that's about it um i like the idea that you drive through the site in order to to accommodate drop-offs and i like the fact that you've at least provided a little bit of parking on site maybe for staff or whatever but i like the idea that uh you know we have another downtown hotel now that does not accommodate any kind of drive through like this and i think this actually works pretty well so i like that um and i like the the rest of the massing of the building um so when you guys come back next month you know maybe maybe you can address some of those things jeff brought up about the lobby do you could you guys talk about that a little bit so i think i mean i think probably all of our concern would be that um those spaces become i don't know offices or something and you the shades down all the time instead of windows out on the street could you just talk a little bit about what that large space is going to be hi tomorrow so the ground floor space um and to address the uh jeff's comment as well from earlier uh we haven't gotten that far into the design of the ground floor yet but what we intend to do is put all the public amenities spaces along the uh along the storefront so you'll see a lot of activity there's not going to be much backup house spaces that are aligned towards the primary streets we'll keep those back house functions and administrative offices towards the parking courtyard in the back um so everything that you will see along this uh along the street front will be you know public amenity spaces uh the dining area where guests are eating breakfast in the morning you know registration hotel check-in and things like that okay thank you continuing well while we're talking about that i had a question on that too i noticed there there were three what look like guest rooms in the lobby are those guest rooms or are those management overnight spaces those are guest rooms and what what will happen was once once we finalize the layout for the ground floor uh there'll be a separation wall that separates uh the guest room corridors uh versus the rest of the wing so oftentimes if you if you uh go into a hotel you'll see the public amenity spaces and then you'll see a corridor that leads off into guest rooms on the ground floor it'll be similar to that okay thank you uh is there a basement under this building no no basement thank you john yes thanks richard and i don't know i want to talk about the streetscape as well uh and i don't know whether that's jason or brandon but uh i'm the new kid on the board uh i'm uh the liaison from the public art commission so my pitch is for public art uh the city council unanimously wanted the art commission to sort of um touch base with new developers who come into town and encourage public art in in their building in their projects so i guess my first question uh um jason or brandon uh have you considered uh public art there are some nice locations uh uh within your project uh and if so what are your thoughts i'm going to go over this um so we haven't no but i um speaking from the team i'm sure we're opened into looking at different ways to display public art along our street fronts that that that's great and along with and i really like uh that i can see into that building as a pedestrian so i think the pedestrian experience is awesome um and um you know i'm with jeff and in terms of you know i'm not so sure i think he said helter skelter uh sort of a uh a knockoff mondrian or whatever on on the building i'm not so sure uh that that really fits within the surroundings um but there is the corner it's a very prominent corner it is a gateway other people have have talked about it in fact what would be the back of the building is probably going to be the most prominent coming up from here on uh so that uh that back of the building really i think deserves us some attention um the corner that's there there there is kind of a a cut out and i think jeff mentioned possibly for people waiting for uber and things like that um that might i mean even inside because there's all around it or um you know a relief on the side or if you do as jeff suggested open that space up uh that it would be a very nice location uh for a kind of some sculpture or and um a rotating art gallery uh a number of people have been very uh interested in it so that it would keep it unusual there are a lot of local artists that uh you could find to be able to supply a sculpture uh for for for your site and i i noticed the the entrance on on first uh there's that uh wall that's that's lit um that would be an excellent location you know for a mural it'd be really dramatic and it would be a nice way of engaging folks that come into that that courtyard and um i think in your presentation you mentioned that it it is a prominent location it's also a very historic location i don't know if if you realize that but right across the street is where the first framed house in ann arbor was built elisha ramsey's home was built there and so that it elijah ramsey and john allen were the two folks that came together and purchased the land uh and there's some bronze plaques that are there you know you might want to think about recognizing that and leveraging that either inside or um or however but i like the massing of the building i really like the the open uh the windows and from what i hear you're going to maintain that so that as a pedestrian that's that's an exciting place i would cross the street to go kind of check it out a little bit so uh well done uh and i would encourage a public art um if you could thanks thanks john see who hasn't had a chance anyone else i would just uh support some a lot of the comments made um tamara's point about the awnings um i think they're an interesting gesture but they're on the generic side and i like the words you know adding some character if possible would be ideal um that's for the designer to work out but um you know that i think that there's some potential there i like i like the gesture of it though um the just a couple of little points that um i was supporting as we talked as we're all engaged here um given that the the street is becoming a two-way street i think we don't want to miss the opportunity to get some landscaping in there on first there's quite a bit of space there i think if it's sometimes if it's too wide open it just turns into like a little bit of a to open space right um it's a chance if it is becoming a two-way street that's gonna be a big change for ann arbor people that are used to it as a one-way street kind of speeding that kind of just if you have deciduous trees there it'll slow down the flow and become more integrated to the ann arbor feeling i would strongly suggest incorporating those um i would like to see like tamara mentioned the beginning more context as the planner here it it's really it's going to be helpful to get more of the photos and things like that in there i'd love to see what you do with that but i think it's i think it's a neat project um i do wonder about the the broken shapes and rectangles and things um if that's the busyness of it is it what is it saying besides busy um i just it doesn't do a lot um as far as like a message or even interesting shapes to me and that's it okay thank you i um most of my comments have been said already but i'll add a few i i agree with the comments about ephesus in a northern climate it it sort of had its day here most of us have stopped using it so you might want to look into that a little bit the the spots that would particularly concern me are at the roof line of the second floor on the east and south facades above the projected second floor then that would come in contact potentially with drifted snow we get a lot of that and i know dynamic is based in atlanta so we have to think about snow and durability here and ephesus has been problematic and so too has cement board if there are any places where where that would come in contact with moisture it just doesn't have the longevity that you might hope for so i give that some thought i also agree that the multi-colored panels in the tower are too busy and a little confusing um and jeff touched on this a bit i think the chris is there any chance you could pull up one of the renderings yes from the um presentation today or from the agenda one of the last ones that shows the corner the very last one number 12 maybe and then up at the top in and i i understand the geometry of the tower and it's defined by this upside-down u-shape thin element but i wonder if at the top if you should drop that lower line significantly maybe all the way down to the window heads below so you create a large valance up there and um in a top and then it also gives you a backdrop for the signage that that top could be monochromatic and the signage could be pin mounted to it and it'd be clearly seen i agree with jeff that it gets kind of lost in the confusion of all the multi-colored panels and i'm just not in this is a personal taste thing it's not in our guidelines but the multi-colored panels i think are lacking um city hall attempted a similar thing and and i don't think it's been all that successful it's really the only other place i can think of that that is trying to um and that the this is more a thing for kristen and chris i noticed in the write-up that going for lee gold um brings with it a premium of uh going from 200 to 350 far which is significant and that's like a 75 percent upgrade and as all of us know when when you're you're going for lead you don't know if you've attained it until after the building is built and usgb does their their inspection and and makes the award so i don't know where that leaves the city if you don't attain leed certification and and the building was enlarged significantly based on that assumption and i bring that up in this one because i think lee gold is a pretty high bar for a boutique hotel like this there are going to be 93 unit ventilators that are controlled by guests and there's a large laundry facility there's no sign of solar which i i saw in the in richard this is ross with dynamic we've actually met with and have a sustained green consultant on board and have gone through and identified our path to getting the lead gold so we're confident that we're going to have five or six points above the threshold needed to get lead goal that we are targeting so that even if some don't come to fruition down the road as we get through the project if you know for whatever reason the contractor is unable to dispose of waste and gain that point that we've got extra points to give so we'll cross that threshold for leaked gold does it include solar not necessarily that's one of the ones we've identified as an option for extra points beyond what we need because what we're required to provide to get that point but we aren't including that in our base design at this time okay then i i bring it up just for the sake of chris and and kristen it's really not in in our purview but it concerns me it seems like a high bar for this type of building but i'll let that go um so then that is everybody um what what we try to do because the turnaround time is so short for you to submit uh for next month's meeting that we try to give you a summary and i think i've seen chris writing did do you have a summary you could provide and then we we could all weigh in and say what two or three items we think are most important yep i've been taking notes so is this customary then you want to get uh some feedback on what uh what the issues there that were brought up so i was gonna i was also gonna write them up also but we can go over some of those issues richard it might it might be helpful if we recap because we've been taking our news since we're very familiar with the project obviously it might help we kind of read back what our interpretation is of what design direction we've been given and you guys can get your name on whether we got the message is that would you rather chris if there is yeah i'm willing to do that there's something that so these are the the main items that i've noted that the general massing of the building is good but then we should revisit a few things in terms of color material selection uh number one being we're not doing the wood at the incense because it's either photo wood that nobody likes or a sustainability issue or a maintenance issue down the road so we're going to revisit that material selection the colored metal panels at the uh at the corner we're gonna revisit so that it's not as busy looking and perhaps a different uh patterning or indoor color selection there so that it is a little more contemporary and not as dated or a random feeling a request for revisiting the rear side of the building and that was one thing we want to get clarification on is to one degree we need to address that since what the understanding what the guidelines say is that the street fronting facades or facades that are visible from the uh immediately adjacent street are the ones that need high quality materials to what extent we need to address that around the courtyard sort of side of the building so that may be something we can touch base with you on separately after this that for our rendering and for our elevations we need to more clearly call out where our ptac units are the the three-wall units uh but there was a request to look at whether or not we could do windows in the stairs uh and to take another look at the audience similarly how a lot of the horizontal elements are lining up across the building so that there's better alignment and sort of or visual and organization floor to look at uh making sure we have all as much information as we can of the ground floor layout so you can see that our public spaces and open spaces are the ones that are fronting the street facade and then we look at doing some planting along first street so that we have probably north of the drop-off uh either a planting bed raised planter or well of some kind and then last that we take into consideration uh some way of trying to incorporate public art whether it's at the ground level uh or on the courtyard side on the uh large exposed beside their uh engaging the context more by incorporating some public art or other contextually appropriate treatment that was what we had as our main takeaways i don't know did i miss anyone's big ticket items i i would also add maybe it was mentioned and it went right over my head uh take a look at the awnings uh you know ethis doesn't sound like because of the northern climate it's something that's going to be supported um you know make sure to state if there's a retaining wall that's either shared with the west property obviously bring that contextual pictures to the next meeting yep um so you mentioned the streetscape uh possibly i believe uh mr perkins had brought up possibly a sheltered space maybe at the corner or something depending on how the lobby's laid out to um possibly have like a a you know a pickup area or maybe a park bench or something there right that would be part of our looking at the ground floor layout and all the internal space to see if we can carve some space at that corner to make it a little more opened up but that's yeah i think everything else was mentioned but if not by all means it's a good time to discuss if there's more information that you want flushed out camera um you just said uh asked for some more clarification on the rear um materials are certainly more probably important on those uh two primary facades but also we we talk about in the guidelines the materials reinforcing the massing and the concept and the character and the context so we don't just say on two sides of it you know it's a it's a three-dimensional building you can see that um backside if you go to the west end street um i was able to at least get that far on google maps and view and you look right into the whole back area there's a lot of around there by pedestrians and in the neighborhood where you're going to be able to see that back area i mean just it's a it's a building you know make it a three-dimensional building don't just it's not a two-dimensional thing um so that's that's why i wanted the clarification everyone's uh design guidelines are written a little bit differently and so we are just making sure we have the correct interpretation before we revisit that side yeah and i mean i understand why looking at that um i just would encourage you to you know what i said just you know looking at it as as as a full building uh if the homeless shelter can do brick on all sides if you can bring your materials around all four or six sides whatever you got um just one more little thing um just maybe when you come back with your renderings just uh take a look at the diversity of the um people on the street just to go back to the streetscape for a moment it seems to me that that 40-foot drop-off is really close to the intercept just my experience with city engineering and traffic i'm a little surprised but allow it that close somebody stopped stopped at the light since you know it blocks the car from pulling out of the drop off i think the drop-off is centered on the doors that you have don't know that that's really necessary the drop off could slide north a little bit and maybe allow you a street tree on either side of the drop off and some landscaping again further north but just something to check out anything else i think the summary was pretty good yes okay all right thank you very much we'll see you next week um and i think our our meetings are the second wednesday of every month so that'll be whatever date that is in september can everyone else stay on we're not done yet um also under new because i i added the idea that corey brought up about adding sustainability features to our guidelines and um so we propose that and leonard supports the idea of us forming a subcommittee to um look into that he gave us some direction so i think so far laurie and corey have experienced interest so anyone else is interested just let me know and i'll i'll send you around and figure out a time that we can meet and um and decide what we want to do um there's one more public period this is the opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes to comment please call 80 eight zero zero nine three and enter the meeting id which is nine one two five four two six one one one four city staff will select followers on your in order to electronically raise your hand to include your desire to speak please please through your phone you'll hear an automated announcement and the host that host is allowing you just double give it a minute you say anything kristin have callers okay all right so i think we're done we've missed something someone would like to bring out okay would someone like to move a german so moved hey gary in a second tamara all in favor say hi hi hi everybody thank you okay thank you you
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and i really have that heart find it hard to believe that um something that is potentially advising residents and businesses and anybody on how to do something gets such a low ranking but um i don't know if you want to speak to that josh but otherwise i think it's pretty clear um i think to many of us have been on the commission what this would mean yeah just just to say i totally agree with you john i think this should be at the top of the the priority as far as it goes you know everything that i've experienced personally i mean we have a solarize program we're going to start with things on electrification all of that entails that we need a support network where people can turn to and i mean we've done research for example then this is something in one of the subcommittees maybe the the building and built environment that we go into more in depth but i've had phone calls for example with boulder and other areas that have concierge services so we've done some of the footwork for that um i think it's really important that that be a central piece in us going forward especially with the the community outreach side of things yeah i was going to say that i think that this one has come up before when we've been talking about things for the community outreach group so i know it's listed as here is the full commission but i think it could be um set for that specific group subgroup if people are interested as well so i also think this one i mean we'll talk more about it um next time but i think it fits that definition of things that the energy commission can do well i mean this is the community city interface which is kind of where we we sit but i shared john's surprise that it was that low low on the prioritization but i wouldn't let that stop us work on it yeah i agree and you know since country or services can deal with everything from um energy efficiency to um what do i do with my new ev and a bunch of other things um potentially this in a sense is spans the full commission and it doesn't it could be a working it could be a specific task-oriented group to ember's point but um it could draw from people that are interested in all these different areas and the design would potentially have like a tree structure that says you know if you enter at the top and what is your question and then you have different legs depending on whether it's energy efficiency or whether it's um you know a solid waste question or whether it's electrification of transportation or whatever it might be so think of it that way in designing an overall program yeah not to get into too many uh too much detail here but boulder has this really great model you know and boulder county and boulder do it differently one actually actually outsources it uh to a company that basically gets experts in all the different fields so they have an expert renewables they have an expert in energy efficiency and expert electrification and so that way whenever someone has a question they get unbiased uh information because a lot of times when you call up a contractor they're gonna sell you whatever they have in their lineup and a lot of times they're gonna be you know marketing that to you um so i think that kind of unbiased uh there's a lot of different models but we can get into it more you know if this goes into one of the subcommittees and i think that's really the the unbiased part is really important not that we get uh attack then later for saying well you know we sold a much by bigger renewable energy system that was necessary if someone had just done x then they would have saved ten thousand dollars on their solar system because they should have done um these energy efficiency things first for example okay the next point is um um line or wrote 12 provide input into the 820 youth and neighborhood ambassadors program um josh you need to comment on that um so again yeah i think community outreach i think a lot of these are going to be figuring out where they should go as far as subcommittees go but maybe josh you and carlene and i have a quick meeting afterwards and we might move some of these around so if we agree that they better fit to um community outreach then we move it from full commission to community outreach for example anybody have any questions um specifically related to this it means ultimately it is it's an outreach and getting people um that would be in their neighborhoods that would be sort of energy or 820 ambassadors um um you know like the kind of thing that julie um has done for solar and have that on a distributed basis both for youth as well as for neighborhood and be great to get some youth commissioners involved in this and maybe even you guys recruit other people for this any questions row 14 where josh's purser is hey john can i ask a general question um i've gotten a little confused so what is what is the ask here um because we have our sub groups um and we're supposed to figure out where each of these line items fits in a sub group or i know some of the things don't fit into the subgroups right now some of them are assigned to subgroups and um so what we wanted to basically get an idea of is to your question um do these belong in the full commission or do they belong in a subgroup and we've talked about that in a couple of cases and then since we have um new members and some people who haven't been involved in subgroups giving them an overview of what kind of tasks have been suggested by osi by the office of sustainability and innovation and what kinds of things can be derived from the 820 plan so that people can say yes i'm interested in doing x or getting more information on x does that make sense no yes no i mean that helps and i'm really sorry i'm looking at this spreadsheet and um uh so just so that i know what the object is do you want us did you say that you wanted us to sign up for things that interest us yes or what where you're willing to work work on them and then we've added a column between j and k um that then also it's at least it's on the shared drive that will just where you could say hey if i'm gonna i'm interested and i want to work on on this task that's described in column e um that i put my name in that and are you willing to be an owner or a leader of this and then also another column hey i think i know sally sue and sam that are not on the commission but that would be also um good people to work on this and i've talked to them and they would be willing to work on it with me okay anyone else have a different idea john i just had a quick question um in regards to like you know signing up for the different items um did you say that we would get like a google sheet so we could uh we would all have access to it uh i thought i saw that in an email but i just wanted to confirm correct uh i'd when i i just just to have in mind uh kind of when do you think that would be oh that might be a josh question so um it's already we already have a shared drive you may not oh given access to it yet um it's gonna it's in google right now and josh is the city's intent is that we move that over to microsoft sharepoint um just from a city transparency point of view and everything that the city does was with microsoft but for the time being we'll stay with google and we just need to make sure that all of you have access to that sheet but most most commissioners do and if you guys haven't been given access um carlino note this question and we'll make sure that we give you access to that within the next 24 hours this sheet you're talking about when you save that sheet it's what we're looking at yes yes that's the sheet i also don't think i have access to the google drive so we can yeah we'll send out a a blast after this just so and then if you go up a level there are a whole bunch of other documents including folders for different groups um that some of the subcommittees if we wanted to make an entry into this is that gonna be clear from josh how how to work this thing if i want to write something in here yeah there's a i think there's a way to do uh track edit um so that way you can and that way we just know who who input the information in fact if it's a google doc i think it's even clearer who contributed and how okay um we're hopefully going to move faster than this we're in row 14 now which is input into advertising the survey and input um josh anything there this is i guess would be an annual activity and would be potentially something um that would come either to the full commission or to a subgroup of the community outreach is that sort of correct yeah i think again the community outreach it makes sense um unless commissioners want to come to the full commission but okay questions comments what's the solar access white paper what is that share legal feedback what legal feedback does the commission have that feedback um these are things that were imported from the old action item tracker that sort of did and to be honest with you i don't know we were talking about line 16 mark is yeah i'm trying to it says i completed it but i'm trying to remember exactly what that was that i completed it's been a little while okay yeah it's not just me my god i think this goes back to um the group that chuck hook um worked on looking at a solar access ordinance and that was that was basically the end for legal concerns and that's why i think it's mark completed um and that's right john that's it exactly yep thank you yeah so that's what that was i mean if you want john we can also hide some of the complaints yeah we might do that yeah that way just you know it helps us go faster and that doesn't confuse people okay so we're now row 19.
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and same thing with the other campuses teaching teachers are taking calls from parents students they'll have their a meeting room and so if the student needs to help on yesterday's assignment or anything in particular they can click the link and then i'll take them right in the teacher will let them in and then they can activate their whiteboard with zoom so they can actually work with the student they can work the problem themselves it's a math problem they can write it down the student will be able to use their annotation they can interact with the teacher so the teacher can see what the student's doing getting wrong getting caught up in a step so that's that's what we see in the office hours being used along those lines in any of the core subjects um with our aim we also are trying to limit the time that the kids are on screen time so they have four hours from 11 o'clock until three o'clock we break our day up if they normal day if we were here on campus if they have a morning class um block one or block two those will be they will have a live lesson on monday and wednesday if they're in an afternoon class after lunch normally in this online environment they're going to be having their live lesson on tuesday and thursday and so they'll have a nine-minute class with that teacher um it may not be a full 90 minute recording of the live session but they'll have the lesson and then there'll be time to work on just as if they were in the classroom that goes for any of the classes across the board they're following that format if they have a skinny they'll have that same opportunity to do a live lesson with their kids and it's broken down based on a morning class onto monday wednesday and an afternoon class on tuesday thursday and then they have the office hours at any time on friday and that's when we're trying to catch up one of the things that we're trying to attendance is hard because just what he was saying things come up down and have different things that are happening kid may be working we're taking attendance every day they may not be able to get to during their lifetime and if they're expecting on that lesson participating in some way then we're able to track that attendance to the campus analytics that are there to resume we're able to see the students participating we want to make sure that the students are participating to be able to generate and that's what dr wright was referring to earlier [Music] um how are we handling hands-on live classes like music and cte classes so music they are they're still connecting with their students daily they actually they were talking about being able to have within within zoom you can create a great gap run so the teacher will assign and break mistake physically in the building you can say okay go to the practice room you need to work on your part so they can set a while the teacher can drop in on that room and see how they're going with their practice or whatever the keys may be in any class the other hands-on classes the cte for example this first quarter our primary focus is getting the academic portion of that the book work for example with cabinetry they have to do their ocean 10 certification that's something that they hit part of this first quarter and get that done and depending on how things go or if we're back in session after first quarter then they're able to get into the hands-on party if we're not able to at that point then we just have to have that discussion okay how do we safely bring in kids to the lab to be able to do that some of the lab stuff can be done at home we demonstrated that during fourth quarter last year culinary was a great example kid every kid has some kind of kitchen in your home mrs shores was telling the students okay film yourself doing this lesson in the kitchen and that was a graded assignment so the teachers are really flexible in how they're getting the curriculum and getting that hands-on piece and with the technology we are able to put some of the programs that the students use on site we're able to get the adobe creative cloud creative cloud and students are able to access this from home so the digital photography the graphics communications classes they're able to do those projects from home on their laptops so it's really a pretty pretty good opportunity the opportunity to have those resources good this also is an item that we probably don't need to vote on so we'll just move to the next item on the next item on the agenda is item 4.4 it's a discussion on the gaps created by this i'm learning and i'm sure we've touched some of those already is there anything that you'd like to add to that dr wright about the gaps created there are a couple important supports that we haven't discussed before that is when we're servicing students on campus those either children or youth will receive meals breakfast and lunch depending how long they're there breakfast and take lunch home they're served the meals we also will continue to provide meals at 20 different stops community-wide and we're serving two meals at once in a bag and we're going to continue doing that as long as the feds continue to provide support for them we're anticipating that will be continued beyond september or august before we have the funding so far we're going to continue to do that as long as we can we are also in close touch at each campus especially 6th grade through 12th of those students that might need additional emotional support and so they're being invited in individually or in small groups various talking less than 10 to receive either group counseling or individual support as needed and so we recognize that our special ed director has done an outstanding job communicating with families to make sure those in need of direct supports we're prepared as of monday to receive those unless we're dictated differently and if the closure is extended but we're well positioned i think that is the other thing is that the school facilities continue to be closed until we're in phase two which would call for a hybrid learning twice weekly online in the opposite days um allowing some a lot more physical distance it cut your population behalf that's where we are and i think that's everything else we've covered pretty thoroughly and if they're i think mr baldwin might have a question yeah um thought this came to be about extracurricular activities sports in particular where are we with that are we going to have sportsness okay the question is too are we going to have sports right now i would say yes but the timing is in question we're in phase one of the arizona extracurricular activity uh association we're in phase one the aaa guidelines for practicing i think we have a blind date as soccer starts in a couple of weeks football doesn't start until the end of the this month first part of september games wouldn't be over until as late as october there's some motivation trying to see if we want to just push everything back and have fall sports play in the spring and have spring delay in the summer months all of that is yet up for discussion we'll have more within the next week to 10 days [Music] jennifer okay so that's alternative that the aea put out but then they're still making their final decision within the next week to ten days okay thanks thank you again we won't need to vote on that the next item on the agenda is a question and answer regarding the most frequently asked questions and i think we've added and if you've answered a lot of those is there anything that you might want to highlight in the most frequently answered question ask questions that you would like to share with or dr wright most of the questions we're getting now that we're in school on a virtual basis is how do i get help if i need it we've handed out information on hard copy it's on the website short version is there's a helpline to call and there's a technology help desk to email and the response is significant it's quick now yesterday of course that was the exception because we tried for 2 000 kids at once and so it was backlogged we're providing support through normal business hours and also well into the evening recognizing some parents many parents work are going to need i don't know what the current backlog is but i understand we were catching up on that the biggest question the biggest hurdle was getting people to log in getting to understand how to enter their information and to provide their password so every day after this we'll have fewer of those we had initially some questions to assume we had just an intersection that they had a technology and problem on their side we were able to get it resolved on our site as well and so all in all pretty smooth but we do have supports there the elementary school has a designated position and a teacher that's helping out provide that support for both teachers and students and the teachers individually i would like to say i have received i have encountered a lot of email with positive feedback on the responsiveness of our teachers and i've also received 100 messages of one positive on the communication principles i think they've all without exception done an outstanding job and so uh all of these women and this gentleman here are available if you call them they return your calls email they return your email jennifer you have a question all right well thank you uh the only item left on the agenda is the announcement of our next governing board meeting and that would be september 5th 5 o'clock at this location so we have a motion to adjourn have a motion to have a second from ben all in favor work adjournment say aye aye jennifer gave me all right thank you very much
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looking at this next slide this is just a picture of our school district and the blue dots indicate different zip codes and those are notated off on the left and so just to give everybody an idea of where that's at if you'll notice you know we have some larger zip codes in the middle of course like the eight five two three fours eight five two nine sixes but we also have uh pieces that go much farther within the mesa area and so when that data comes back hopefully from maricopa county related to specific school districts they calculate are they using a logarithm of some sort to make sure that we're not encompassing all of those positivity cases in that area and that it just isolates it to our boundaries and that'll give us a more clear picture and sorry to ask again so we think that that data that we're hoping that that data that's more local to our district should be available this friday that is correct okay and then again just zip codes what i did was i pulled some of this information up by zip code in certain areas and again just to caution you uh those of you that are watching those of you that are sitting there on the dice for example 85204 is primarily in mesa and this is a sliver of what's in our school district but for the entire zip code you know they show 2150 cases and so i just lined those out and totaled them up again these change all the time and again not all of them are represented of what our entire district looks like because some of those numbers are a bit misleading in the fact that we take a portion of that zip code and dr mccord i think it's also important to recognize that a couple of those zip codes that have larger numbers i believe include some long-term care facilities that would skew that data and we highlight this so the community knows we're looking at the data granular to make sure that we're looking at the data that affects us uh and so that we can make a wise decision as we localize this data that's correct thank you for that and sorry one more thing just also those are cumulative cases that's not just active as in the last two weeks this is since this is since we started counting them okay so i think that's something to remember too just because there was a case at some point right doesn't mean that it even has any effect now except to say that those people might have antibodies correct although we don't know for how long so thank you and just to follow up with that miss wood i think also that doesn't reflect any contact tracing that may or may not have occurred with that aggregate number we know that that's been lagging as well so that 11 374 number needs to be taken very judiciously and very lightly in some respects assumptions for the east valley data for criteria one maricopa county is meeting east valley likely would be the same based on this is the same graphic that was on the other page for criteria two which is positivity percent positivity east valley testing is likely same or lower than maricopa county likely not meeting at this point in time but again the data is lagging criteria three hospital visits maricopa county is not meeting east valley is probably not different they're likely not meeting but again trending down just to kind of reiterate not just as a county but also for east valley just some data related questions that have come up and and we'd like to point some of those out uh the town of gilbert website says we have only had a six percent increase in the last seven days isn't this less than seven percent requirement well this data is case occurrence data criteria one which requires a two-week decrease seven percent is criteria two which is percent positivity town gilbert is not reporting this data next one is the maricopa county health department curve shows a downward trend doesn't this meet the requirement yes this is criteria one which is currently being met at the county level department of health website shows that seriology percentage positivity at 5.6 percent doesn't this meet criteria 2 no because criteria 2 is based on pcr which is nable's nasal swab or throat test which are at 14.1 positivity the seriology measure test measures antibody levels after you've had covid and then a local fox note news reports that gps zip codes had six thousand eight hundred twenty two covet cases with a population of two hundred fifty four thousand one hundred fourteen people this is an infection rate of two point six eight percent doesn't this mean we are okay to open this is criteria one case rate we do meet this criteria but the county does not meet criteria two and three at this point um where is the official data coming from and how accurate is it and this is the arizona department of health services and let's see well i won't have to click on it it's their website their dashboard that you can get that what is a data lag data seems to be taking about a week to be fully visible in the system arizona department of health services is only using historical data with a two week lag and as you guys saw when those get reported those the two weeks dr mccord can i insert here something here though i do want to say um that we have noticed that the turnaround in testing data it was taking a week to two weeks and now the average seems to be three to four days so we have a good um we have a good metric there that will help in all of us being able to actually know if we have it or not and be able to address it appropriately as well as that's something that will help i think with this data lag if we have the accurate results within three to four days i think that we should be able to start seeing more um accuracy sooner data data is in a in a more timely fashion i agree does this data include hospitals and care facilities that doesn't represent our local area should this data be adjusted we do have hospitals and care facilities in our local area and they would be included and so i don't know how you would adjust that but they would be included in that number because again they're counting people what is the importance of positivity rate and why was seven percent chosen higher positivity rates indicate an increased likelihood of community spread and seven percent is a rate that arizona department health services felt was acceptable to start to reopen schools on a hybrid basis are there other metrics that support these or would be more valuable in considerations well there's almost an infinite amount of data available these seem to be ones that other states and districts are utilizing in order to determine whether schools should be open a couple more should we be looking at demographic data i.e do children really contract the spread at the same rate this there they should say there's a lot of conflicting data and reports on this topic without many actionable conclusions i know some reports had come out recently and again i think part of this is that there's been so much information out there that people's heads are spinning when it comes to that that's why even having the arizona department of health or maricopa county coming out with a set of parameters benchmarks i think it'll help us out in the long run and what can we do to improve the metrics criterion one and three follow all the federal state and local guidelines criteria two that's the testing uh get tested the more tests that there are likelihood of the positivity rate going down if the trends continue to go also some recommendations continued again to follow the local state and federal guidelines related to cova covid actually we're probably getting this and that's request that arizona department health services make the trend data available by zip code and maricopa county doing the same um possibly using east valley zip codes for decision making encourage people to get tested implement all of the other adhs guidelines and monitor other states and school districts and learn from their experiences and again going back to what you directed me before is be ready with a phased-in approach that if we are able to come back sooner and later or sooner rather than later in a safe manner that we're ready to go so our kids are back in class and that's it for this moment any questions regarding that or anything that you haven't you want to add so dr mccord assuming as we start to look not just at the historical data that we know is lagging but also try to anticipate where that data is going in our decision making and we localize it we know we're going to come back tuesday in a special board meeting to to look at exactly that if the board agrees that the indicators show that we're moving towards the ability to safely return to school how quickly could we return to class that's a good question mr carr i'd like to say the next day but that's that's not how it works we also have to uh get a measurement of who we'll have in front of those children how many are available for that and so i would at least i would say would at least take a week but we would have more definitive information for you on that on tuesday any other questions board members any other questions comments dr santa cruz if i may go ahead if if we could just keep in mind um that we want to look for ways to meet the needs of our students and staff the very best way that we can that that we can find using this data and using all the um the guidelines that we have available of how to keep classrooms safe as we get back to school keep our teachers safe that's and keep our students safe that's our number you know it's a huge concern but also recognize that we need to find maybe creative ways i appreciate the idea of maybe a phased-in approach as we get back to maybe some of those other guidelines that we can really try and look for ways as the data is trending and allowing us to really meet the needs of our our families as well as our staff and i think we can do it and i i want i want um our families and our staff to know that this this is our goal and that this is what we've done and that's what we want to do and that educating our kids the best way that we can is is what we're about and that also we can do it in a way that you know will meet the guidelines it's going to look different but we can still have that in-person opportunity as we as we perceive thoughtfully and using the guidelines and data that we have and just but keep moving in that direction so thanks doctors i just wanted to add i think that the looking at the metrics and looking at the data to make sure that we're doing this in a safe way to make sure that when we open the schools that hopefully we can continue and not have to close schools down because of a raise a rise in cases i think that's really important for our community we want to continue the trust with our community that we're going to watch out for the best interests of student staff and the community in the way that we open our schools mr jetty any commentary i i just want to tag on to what everybody said i think that that all of us want to get back to school as soon as possible safely and that we that we follow the metrics and what is safe for our community and our school district and so on um i think that that you know we we need to make sure that we um communicate that we're doing the very best that we can and that we're going to continue to do the very best that we can and we will meet on a regular basis to make sure that what we have what information we have is accurate and i think that's i think you said it dr mccord that you know sometimes your head spins because there's so much information out there but hopefully the arizona department of health services will give us some more data that we can actually use for gilbert public schools and we're hoping i think you said this this thursday that maybe they were going they haven't done that before they've just made it county-wide um but if we can get some information that maybe can help us to know what we can do so that we can make sure that that everybody is safe in our community but that we also do the very best we can for our children's education and i would also like to just say that i know that i think it's this is an okay time for me to say this um one of the things that in many of the emails that we've received from parents that that touches my heart in many ways is that you know the frustrations that that they have with their kids being upset and bored and all of them i can't is there a way that we can get since all of our schools have social workers at this point and i'm not sure what the plan is and maybe we're going to talk about it a little bit more on the online learning art would it would be better for me to wait for that it's up to you go ahead okay you know just some some way where we can have something so that if kids are really getting frustrated that that the schools can help out with some of the social emotional with their social workers um maybe you know i'm not sure exactly what that would look like but i think that that is something that this year because our parents supported us having the social workers in our schools that that would be a very important factor so that maybe sometimes when parents are really frustrated they would have somebody that they could get in touch with or maybe some groups for some kids or whatever but i really i really feel that's important too thank you i agree thank you thank you ms eugetti and just as a concluding remark our commitment to faculty and staff to the community and students has been the safety of all concerned and our direction has been focused on metrics and data that will help us provide the appropriate rationale for opening our schools once we have done all of that then we will move as swiftly as we can in that direction and that continues to be our commitment as a board to you community and staff it continues to be the direction in which staff is going they have not stopped working as it relates to trying to interpret the data to provide information to the board and to provide the direction that we might need to make appropriate and cogent decisions so know that that is our focus aside from an occasional notation someplace over the last couple of weeks in all of the emails we have received i speaking as one board member and i think i speak on behalf of the board the politics of all of this have not entered any of our conversations in the open or in private and we are in communication with the superintendent individually as often as we need to be so the center of this entire exercise is working to get young people back into the classroom we know that teachers want to be in front of their students and we understand the frustration that almost all of you are experiencing as it relates to the electronics and the online service we hear you we're working but we're going to continue to put safety as our primary concern at this point dr mccord anything else no sir thank you board members any other commentary if not then we'll move to item 3.02 fall sports schedules dr mccord i defer to you again thank you dr santa cruz governing board members i have mr steve mcdowell our district athletic director um gilbert high grad state champion and all kinds of things i'm trying to give you time steve so you can pass all this out okay um he's going to talk to you about where the aia is in terms of fall sports and how we'll try to be moving forward related to that all right i'm assuming green light means i'm on uh before we get started i want to thank you the board for your contributions to our community um as dr mccord just said i've lived in this community and been a part of gilbert public schools for 40 something years now as a student first i'm not that old i've worked with all of you and for many of you as well so thanks for for what you do for our community dr santa cruz dr mccord i just gave you a schedule of what the aia executive board has approved as far as a phased-in approach for fall sports they are taking a phased-in approach as we've already talked about as well tonight for our for our school district they're starting with some of the lower impact lower risk sports like golf as you can see that their plan is to start that on august 17th other outside sports cross country and swim will start on august 24th badminton and volleyball and fall soccer will start on august 31st we don't have anybody participating in fall soccer and then football will start with practice on september 7th and their approach their their goal there is to as many of you have discussed to have a phased-in approach as far as that goes starting with the lower risk sports and ending with some of the higher risk sports as you know we've been going most of the summer we started back in may with our phased in approach to return to activity we were in level one for three weeks and then we went into level two for us which included throwing of balls and things like that sharing of equipment we followed all the cdc guidelines and all the guidelines we were given by this the county and the state and then we took a three-week break when everything in the states started to climb like a lot of districts around us and then we started back up and we've been going for three weeks again now and so i can tell you through that time our coaches and athletic directors have been diligent in following the protocol that cabinet approved and that you have proved to put before them and we have had three coaches and three athletes during that time have tested positive luckily two of those were during our three week break um i can say with confidence that those cases didn't arise because of our workouts because we haven't had any more than one person in any given program at any given time who's been testing positive so our coaches did take that to heart and they knew that we were taking a risk that the kid that you were putting trust in us and they took that to heart the picture on there by the way came from the aia website uh paragraph two of what i gave you talks about modifications for fall sports that the aia is also added if you go to their website and look for those modifications they actually have that picture which is a workout taking place at mesquite high school so what we are doing in our district was used as a an example for the rest of state as what could be done you can't see in the picture because it's really small on this all those kids are wearing masks you can tell they're socially distanced and they're working with their coach and with each other to improve their skills so that's just one example of what's been going on for the last nine weeks in our district with this phased-in approach we also feel since a lot of our students student athletes have been less active during this time than they would normally that it's time for us to prepare them for the schedule to follow and that we hope in the future that we can start going on to level three as we prepare our athletes to get them physically ready for the demands that will be put on them as their sport cont as their sport starts up in the fall any questions about the schedule thank you mr mcdowell uh just before i open it up for questions i would also like to ask you to convey our appreciation to the student athletes and the coaches involved in each of these fall sports for maintaining their level of diligence as it relates to all of the guidelines that you and your team set forth for them and offer our appreciation for continued success as they follow those guidelines and through their season as abridged as it might be thanks dr santa cruz i will pass that on to them thank you sir uh board members any questions and if i made to address one issue that misha getty brought up um we did have a lot of kids in our district that had the rug pulled off from one room last spring and um in the athletic department in our district we believe in serving you know the heart mind and body of our athletes and we took that time to actually train our coaches in addressing social emotional and physical needs of our athletes we had dead zoo meetings with guest speakers and we had co we have coaches and athletic directors who've been diligent this whole time keeping in touch with their athletes giving them an emotional support and and contributing to their overall well-being because obviously what happens in the mind and the heart is going to affect what happens to them physically and all three of those need to be addressed and so that that is a movement that started in our district three or four years ago and it's one that we will continue to grow and develop thank you for that as you know i know for so many of those kids sports is their their outlet and their life and so i'm really glad and you know i think being a sports fan myself it's been hard not to even be able to watch games and and you know deal with that kind of thing so i think every i think i really appreciate that you're doing that for the kids well and that originated from our coaches and ads they just wanted ways to help so we got on the resources to do that thank you sir ms humphries yes i i did want to thank you and everyone for the hard work that's been put into this i think this is really important and i appreciate that they're um being careful but trying to provide those opportunities to students i mean a lot of students you know this might make a difference for a scholarship or something um could you just remind us what it means when we go to level three because some people may not be aware of that thank you um yes level three would be still following social distancing guidelines as far as a number of participants in any given field or any given gymnasium level one was just physical workout level two added sharing of equipment like a ball level three actually involves more hands-on more one-on-one type drills and then level four would be opened up to to full full scale whatever the sport so um if when we go to level three that will actually add closer contact for our student athletes to be in closer proximity to each other we have districts around us who have been in their level three what we would call level three for ten days now and it this whole situation has opened up lines of communication among all of us district ads and ads across the state we all communicate on what's going on in our districts and those districts who have already opened up and gone to level three haven't seen any adverse effects yet that's good to know yeah they continue to monitor that um we also use data from other states i know texas they're like three weeks ahead of us they've already started their football in their eight weeks of summer open workouts that was actually regulated by their state they had 66 000 kids involved in football they only had four kids test positive during that time so it's definitely been closely monitored around the state obviously and across the nation thank you mr mcdowell mr carr i know at our last board meeting you had some concerns uh related to athletics have we addressed those concerns yes this was uh met this you know i think the questions were how are we moving forward and this addresses that i think related to that we also talked about some of the other activities that aren't necessarily sports extracurricular activities that don't necessarily fall under the aia that would you know our band competitions our performing arts etc and i know there's some people here asking that um meets my knee but i do have to ask the question um esports is it dangerous and that's why it's being pushed out to the last start of september 15th or i guess so i just don't like they put sports behind that i don't know it seems like my whole life we've been trying to get kids off the couch and now they're calling sitting on the couch playing a game esports so but it's definitely growing and that is one season that wasn't affected last spring so those kids still are and that is a game it's a team sport it's not just individuals so there are definitely a lot of positives that come from that mr mcdowell just just to ask the question on those other extracurricular activities your fine arts and so on they also have competitions that are outside of aia um and perhaps someone else needs to answer this question or we can get that are those you know the abode is and and so on are they moving forward with their uh plans with the performing arts do we know on that as well uh they are they have moved forward we we do apply our phased-in approach or level approach was applied to all activities not just athletics the cabinet's been done a great job in our district of communicating that so the band kids the you know rotc kids all those kids they're basically following the same phased-in plan last i heard i don't know if it's changed but last i heard that abode had decided to cancel their ban competitions um we do have another uh organization that runs those in the state that at least one of our schools belongs to is a lot as far as i know they're still moving forward with their competition i don't know if they canceled or not but they did decide to cancel banned competitions but they are still going to have marching band they are still going to support the sports and move forward as far as that goes it might take a bit of the stadium to spread out the band kids far enough about it we hope that's a problem we have to tackle okay ms wood any questions comments concerns just thank you and again just a reminder that this is in place we'll follow it we'll follow the guidelines the best we can we will follow the guidelines and then we're hoping that this sticks but there will be there will probably be changes that come up but we'll adjust and we'll do the best that we can and we'll keep the students in mind to make sure that we do the best we can for our students as i talked to the executive director the aia david hines he every time he i talk to him he'll say well as of 10 15 on and give the date this is the plan so yes it has been very fluid and change has been the one constant thing this far but it's great to have the dates there are areas of the state that don't think they can follow this plan but gratefully the aia has decided to move forward and not wait for everybody but for the majority who who you know can follow the guidelines and return to activity they're deciding to go ahead and move forward and then they'll make accommodations for those other schools that can participate at this time they'll make those accommodations as a year moves on steve do you think there'll be any repercussions at all from the major colleges conferences today that that are getting cancelled i mean in fact 12 in the big 10.
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all right thank you everybody so nice thank you everyone all right yeah you want to be friends okay we can be friends eric thank you very much
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to me it seems to if we did a journal entry just for logistics that um so that you have 30 days or 29 days to pay it instead of that one day we do pay ours um in the the year in the june month instead of the july month and it just seems to me that it would make your life a lot easier i'm all for that if everybody else is what does that do to the financials it would reduce the the give back by 41 000 or 42 000. for just this one year um it's just a timing to make the day-to-day operation easier on july 1st yep and and then that would be okay with the with the town i mean we're not looking for every penny it we can bring it up to the board of finance i to me it makes a lot of sense it's a practical thing there's a lot there's a lot of moving pieces around you know dealing with all the covert related spending and things like that so i want to make sure that we don't you know uh shoot ourselves in the foot if that makes sense yeah but but it's not like we're paying more money it's just a timing issue and um if we're if there's ever a year to do it to say we're going to move 40 000 back to the prior year this seems like the year to do it maybe we just put it on the list of items to talk to the board of finance about okay good idea and thank you for that marcia and did by the way i know we had our meeting today but i had to leave a little bit early do we know the when the special board of finance meeting might be held next week because they folks had no power or internet this week so they had to push it next week it will be when next wednesday as far as i know okay eileen was there any chance that that was going to be a little bit earlier in the afternoon like like a five o'clock ish kind of time because we have a board media regular board meeting schedule for seven so we just wanted to make sure we could attend uh harkening to bob's comments about covid and moving parts we want to make sure we're able to connect i'll reach out to the team um we didn't nothing had been said yet um about a specific time so i'll bring that up and see sure sure and even i mean like a six or something even 6 30 if we could be first on the agenda and go through our pieces and then dismiss the board meeting to just if so we could all cooperate together considering the massive power outage this past week just really inconvenienced everybody is anybody by the way on this call still struggling with getting power is everyone here back i've been watching the ever i've been watching the eversource thing and the numbers that are remain at least that they're reporting that it's still on that power really low now so it's less than one tenth of one percent so um across the state so it's really i am open i was surprised actually that we don't don't have a board at finance meeting tonight because everyone should have power back at this point so um in fact i guess we'll look brookfield brookfield brookfield i find it useful to keep my eye on that stuff so brookfield has fewer than two are out [Music] my parents are in bethel they just got it back at eight o'clock last night okay i got mine back last night too so um okay well that's good news ken about the the results coming in better and i think that's uh we need to we need to make sure that as we communicate to the board of finance uh send them a copy of our report that we feature that it is better than last last month we ought to feature that we have a decision that we need need to make um and uh um and then bring that up when we meet with them next week so then we can decide what's the timing on when we actually call the ball on the books being closed well i have to file a report with the state by august 31st so i'm hoping that i have to have this finalized within about a little over two weeks so i'm hoping for the next week to 10 days that'll give me time to get everything in the proper format for filing with the state okay can i just ask on the revenue side the medicaid reimbursement was um less than we anticipated and i'm assuming that's because of the the school shutting down i know that that's a number that's kind of been struggled with a few times where it came in around 50 000 but we budgeted 75 and i didn't know if that's something we could expect for next year also or if this this um missing the target revenue was more in line with um you know the kovid shutdown well it's definitely a deeper problem than that yeah yeah the the bigger problem we've had is with uh a number of people not willing to give the parental consent for us to track their services okay i know that's been an issue for it's been brought up as an issue for years i didn't know if that and what did we put in the budget for next year ken oh i should call it this year yeah we're in this year now bob yeah by the end of this year so oh we are in this year we dropped it down to 50 000.
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uh real quick john i just uh fired off an email with the link to the spreadsheet to our energy commission group okay thank you those of you who don't get it just let us know yeah we and yeah so let us know if you can give everyone editing privileges yup great so actually row 15 um support public engagement and outreach um josh we'll move this down to community outreach yep and this is on i guess on an unneeded basis so there's not a specific task that needs to be done starting this date and ending that date right it's just something yeah yeah so there's a there's quite a few of these that are just kind of broad yeah yeah keeping it up weaving it into the things we're doing not so much a specific ask but yeah so row 19 action number eight um i don't really know that we need anybody else working on this carlene do you want to comment on that rather than me once we get the dates for the uh for when the ordinance will have its first reading and then in particular the second reading but before the energy commission um we will be we as in the um transportation electrification committee or group will be reaching out to the full energy commission requesting that you share with city council your position on this and advocate for it the more the better that's that's pretty much it it should be pretty um straightforward at that point yeah and hopefully by then we will have approved the resolution that we talked about earlier in the evening which you know puts us on record as a commission um can i ask a super basic question so i just i got the link that carlene sent um did you say row 19 or item 19 well i'm looking on the screen and it's row 19 and item num in this case number eight action item number eight okay for some reason my rows are not matching up to yours but i'll figure it out are you seeing what josh is showing on the screen where he shared his screen well that was really hard to look at so i opened it on my computer and i'm looking at it at it on my computer but on the computer the link is off by a row but i'll figure it out okay so yeah it's it's in in the column b action item number right now we're on number eight and we'll just refer to it with those numbers going forward any other questions i think that's pretty clear number nine action item number nine um support development of a comprehensive ev strategy so there is a white paper um that emily drennan worked on and there are some also earlier versions that charles griffith did from the ecology center's perspective so this is definitely a comprehensive task it you know supports a whole lot of different a20 actions as you can see here in column f um so um anybody that's interested in working on this jump on board comments or questions carlene yeah just it seems like this is maybe the overarching one that all the other transportation electrification ones probably fall under good point yep so number 10 which would be to j's point a subset of number nine um the city four c's uh and you can see in column f where it is the creation of a bulk buy program meaning a discount program where if the city works with a couple of retailers or suppliers that if a certain number of units are sold just like the solarize program that josh talked about earlier if you get enough enough people to put solar on your roof in in your neighborhood then you get a 10 15 20 discount we would potentially do something like that with evs possibly linked to chargers possibly linked to to mark's point maybe even renewable energy if people put solar on their roof and link that all together and we get a discount and that could also be also electrification of bicycling so potentially there's already one e-bike program and that could be another and you can see um there's specific action items in the plan in column f um that refer to that did people have questions for us on that or do you know enough to be able to put your name in not really a question just that pointing out that that's such a high high on the prioritization matrix and again i'd say it's one that uh the energy commission is really well positioned to be helpful on so agree yeah you look at those priorities number two number 11.
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they seem to be fall when the sec falls then we know something really serious is going to happen i think they'll be the last if anybody does i know those presidents and those athletic directors have a lot more things to consider than we do at the high school level interstate travel for one a lot of states have bans on kids traveling from across state lines and being quarantined and everything else and so luckily here in this state we did have some teams who were going to travel out of state but those games have all been canceled so we know that we only have to work we don't have to worry about interstate travel um there's a lot of finances in those decisions at that level that we don't have to consider as well and so does it make us nervous absolutely is it going to have a direct impact i don't think as a direct as some might think like i said when we have other states around us who are weeks ahead of us texas was another hot spot when we were hot in arizona and when they plow ahead and move forward and we find that they're able to participate without their number spiking then it gives us a lot more hope thank you mr mcdowell mr carr something else i i just wanted to uh i meant to do this when it was my turn but want to express my gratitude to mr mcdowell and to all of our coaches i think if our community realizes may not realize that back in i think it was early june we discussed this plan and and approved it and at the time it was before aia had a plan in fact they borrowed things from our plan so in terms of keeping these activities going uh are the extracurricular activities as a whole going our district has been at the front of keeping those activities going uh sometimes we fail to recognize that so we authorize that and so i i think everybody at all of the schools involved with athletics and mr mcdowell for your leadership because we have been in front of the state on these things well thank you for that but once again i think that goes back to you as a board and to our cabinet you know the gps cabinet's been very supportive of us and we all recognize it you're the ones that have your neck stuck out in this situation as far as that goes so thank you for that compliment but i think that really should be reflected back on all of you you're the ones that are in the line of fire for making those kind of decisions so thank you for your trust in us and for allowing us to continue to move forward thank you mr mcdowell board members anything else if not then we'll let mr mcdowell loose here for a little bit i'll mask up and we'll move to item 3.03 on site learning plan dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members i'll bring up jared ryan wherever he's at he's right there and i want to reiterate that and i think one of you said it earlier i believe it was item three of the most recent executive order um because a lot of people are asking why are you doing this why why why is this happening and and please know that i understand your concern and uh but we are we're trying to follow the rules the executive order and i'll just read this one more time it says each school district and charter schools shall begin offering free on-site learning opportunities and support services for students who need a place to go during the day as required by executive order 2020-41 and shall begin august 17th and then it has a list of other areas down below but this is where this stems from mr ryan and his team and our folks have been working in cooperation to make sure that we get this set up and ready to go and i'll turn it over to him so he can explain what that looks like thank you dr mccord president santa cruz governing board really appreciate the opportunity to be able to present to you this evening a plan that um has been in the works quickly it came to together for us but stem from a number of conversations that the entire group cabinet teachers principals parents have been involved with a number of detailed conversations to make this come together coach mcdowell just finished up presenting and and you have nobody better than coach mcdowell uh leading the way in terms of athletics coaches who respect uh his word and the things and his guidance and the direction and he's had a tremendous amount of success our programs have because of that our hope is to emulate much of what he has done in building confidence within our community and support for our students by rolling out an on-site learning support plan that both meets governor ducey's executive order as well as taking advantage of the opportunity to serve our population of students that are most in need there are a number of groups that fall underneath that categorization but we view this as an opportunity for us to be able to do some great work with our kids but also while while trying to ensure that all the safety and mitigation strategies that have served us so far throughout the summer continue and we learn and we get get better moving forward as dr mccord stated this is part of executive order 20 20 51 mr reid i appreciate the words earlier outlining the fact that it does seem fairly strange for us to welcome some students onto the campuses when we're saying that we're not open for online or for in-person instruction and that has certainly led to some confusion i've re received a number of emails phone calls what not asking for clarification regarding that and so hopefully at this point in time it's widely known that we're meeting the details of that executive order we had a few things to consider as we were as we were planning this we know some of our surrounding districts and we know some campuses that are opening up large areas within a campus and bringing in a number of students without much structure much detail to that plan we also know some others that are putting a lot of thought and and work behind it and we wanted to go that route we feel as though our our parents our students deserve the best that we have to offer that being said there is a reality of the number of staff members that we have to serve our families in this capacity our our staff members our certified staff members right now are assigned to students online and they're serving them day in day out and planning for them when they're not in front of them online and virtually this has us turning to our paraprofessionals and sports staff members as well as coordinators of various departments and instructional leads and other support staff members throughout the district otm has been very helpful for us principals have been absolutely outstanding to identify members of each staff that are able to assist in this there is a portion of the executive order which allows for us to look at staffing and look at campus safety and mitigation plans and and determine numbers and in this case we're opening our campus to 90 students each of our campuses for service in the areas as outlined through this plan these groups are divided into two categories we have our open lab students these would be students that qualify based on a specific bullet point within the executive order that talks about young children receiving supervision for parents who are working or students that are in need for a variety of reasons qualifying services is our second category the qualifying services would be special education ell gifted mckinney vento free introduced lunch different categories which a student may qualify and there is actually a third component which is specially designed instruction sdi and those students are being contacted personally by fran and her department as well as some others who have students who cannot receive their their requirements of their instruction in online format there are some specific examples to this and typically that's a team or on-campus decision based on iep and other design plans that have been put in place prior to this elementary campuses will be open to our on on campus open lab time from eight o'clock until three o'clock registration is actually open right now until 10 pm on wednesday so tomorrow night communication has gone out through dawn and her team to every parent within our community as well as specialized service instruction uh information going out to specify those specified groups that we've categorized that qualify for a variety of different reasons so once again elementary campuses eight until three o'clock for that on-site open lab the bullet point that talks about young children we've discussed that and believe that really refers to our elementary population which is why you'll notice the open lab setting is only available on our elementary campuses junior and senior high school or secondary schools all have specialized service or qualification area availability for students to go in and be able to work with support staff members that are assigned to those areas some questions have come up related to the specialized areas and qualification areas and what that means in terms of individual support and to be honest it really depends on one staff availability two scheduling in some cases and once again the the ell group the special education group and everyone within those qualification areas are creating schedules for whether it be in person pull out but those are set periods of time that is not in 8 a.m to 3 p.m service that is being provided but rather set periods of time where staff can go in and work with with those those specific students any questions related to the differences between what is offered on our elementary campuses and our junior and senior high campuses or specifics related to the um learning uh the on-site specialized support in general dr santa cruz if i may ask a question thanks i i appreciate that we are meeting the letter of the law as far as the executive order i'm concerned that we're not meeting the needs of these students who are coming to us because their parents are both working i know we're in a hard place but i'm just trying to figure out is there anything better we can do for these students or how do we better meet their needs if if they're going to be there from eight to three and they're trying to basically take care of themselves the best that they can and i know i'm limited on staff because of all the other things that we have but just i guess wanted your thoughts on that sure um obviously something we're concerned about something we've put an abundance of time into discussing and trying to organize i've had an opportunity to speak with a few parents there are pieces that we have in place in terms of our plan of action that are minimum standards if we can have we were even talking with our elementary principals earlier today this is our baseline based on the number of staff members we can have in a room the trainings that we're putting in place otm technology services a variety of others have come together and compiled trainings for paraprofessionals and support staff members who this is going to be a task that they haven't been asked to do prior this will be new for them so to have a support staff member of a different category even potentially you may have transportation assistance or transportation aids now in a classroom working with students it's going to take training it's going to take work to make sure they're prepared to be with our students we're following mitigation strategies which we created over the summer where reduced numbers within a classroom or adults per student so we're optimistic that as this rolls out we're going to begin to find opportunities for us to work more individually with students get more creative with the things that are going on within the day that being said the the actual letter of the law and the intent of the plan as is laid out was certainly to give a safe place for our students to be and we know we're going to be able to provide that and so step one is ensuring a safe place for our students to be who need that from a variety of categories and with a variety of needs and from there i believe we're going to be able to grow and develop depending on the length of time this this continues and that is certainly our our plan that being said i can't guarantee something right now and i certainly don't want to put something in front of the community that makes them believe something is going to happen that that may not be there on day one monday um given the timeline we had to uh to create this opportunity for our families thank you you might not be able to answer this question it might have to be fran but how how are we going to work with some of our children that have some more emotional needs um if they have meltdowns and things like that what what do we have in place for that that's right so they're sorry to put you on the spot i i can share it okay i can share also from susie kadena with our social emotional learning has a very strategic plan outlined utilizing social workers such as you mentioned prior and with identifying students targeted students groups outreach in person and a variety of other pieces that she is working with her social workers on on making sure in place as well and so just as to speak to the the piece that you mentioned earlier regarding social workers and their support but with all due respect there they don't have the training necessarily to work with some of these children no these are two separate yeah two separate pieces absolutely right so on the other side of the services that we will be providing as required by the department of education will be in person specially designed instruction and services that teams have determined students may be struggling or not able to receive completely or to to a proper extent online so if we have students who have some iep goals for example and social emotional needs and we're not being able to address those needs in an online format that might be a student that a team would determine may benefit from some time to come in for some appointments during that in-person specially designed instruction time and receive those supports so basically not every special ed student will be brought in correct okay and under for for the in-person specially designed instruction and services component that will be determined by teams based on students and how they're doing with online and it's primarily for those students have more complex needs who aren't able and one example would be a student who has on their iep to learn braille that's hard to do over webex but we could bring them in and work with them in person or maybe a student has physical therapy it's hard to do that over webex but we may be able to do that and provide that iep service it's for those iep services that we need to provide them with that the in person is being developed to me what about like students with autism um how are you i certainly expect there will be teams that will find some of those students who are not benefiting from online would maybe those students that will be recommended to come in for some in-person specially designed instruction one of the ways this differs from what mr ryan is developing is that in this in-person component it will be either a special education teacher providing specialized instruction or a therapist that's providing it there may be a pair of supporting but it's not primarily a paraprofessional and would those numbers possibly be kept you know the class size is smaller or maybe even just one-on-one is what i'm hearing you say to follow the cdc guidelines we've asked that teams not have more than six students in a classroom and then the teacher the parent and we know there may be therapists wanting to come in and out to also embed some of their service time within that time but if some i'm sorry if some of the kids are high needs you could keep it less than than than this absolutely absolutely sorry um my question is will some of these students just come in for like an appointment time only you know for that exact service or will they be there you know most of the school day what or is there a variety we've been advised that this type of support is more of an appoint it's on an appointment basis so what it might look like for a student is they may start their day online they might come to the district to receive this or to their campus to receive that in-person support for an hour or two go back home and then get back online and finish their day online so it's not taking the place of that online instruction that we're providing now it's to ensure that they're receiving the benefit they need from the instruction that we're providing okay thank you go ahead mr ryan continue a another portion this this piece was outlined by the arizona department of education was guidance related to registration and the ability to provide campuses with a registration list of students for them to properly identify ways of servicing them and so community education became involved with the registration process to ensure we're able to supply each of the campuses with rosters that way principals and actually we have campus facilitators at each location to help monitor and and guide this in the implementation on each campus today we trained over 100 people from campuses across our district on the registration process and how to pull those rosters earlier we talked about grouping of students and cohorting of students and whether we identify gifted as a need or ell is a need or special education or groupings in a variety of ways we'll be able to identify those students in advance and prepare for their arrival on on monday morning we have push out services and extension activities for our gifted students we have ell service providers rotating throughout the district as well assigned to campuses we have a variety of specialists that are in coaches that are going to be on campuses so the scheduling has certainly become complex and one that is going to be successful but certainly we needed time and so we've received questions related to timeline of registration and why that that exists as well as the two-week re-register window the reason that exists is because kathy hoffman has provided guidance that said registration every one to two weeks and so we pushed it out two weeks just to build a little consistency for that two week period of time and then the window reopens for new families to enroll if they should choose mr ryan you just said that you know you'd be having some therapists and mrs rosenbacher said the same thing too the people that will be coming in and helping do these things will they be also required to be teaching online too so that the individuals that will be working with us are not also instructing online or have part-time schedules online and then are free a portion of their day to then be assigned throughout the district to help support campuses and would that be the same with the special education students too they're special education teachers i'm sorry i'm sorry i just stay there get your steps in today for the in-person supports those will be the teachers or providers for those students because they know those students and know what their needs are so they will be providing they'll be continuing their online service or instruction and then they'll be including the students that are in the small group in person into what they're doing online so they will be given they won't be given quite as much of a caseload in terms of online so that they'll have the time to do both we we don't know exactly yet i can't answer that because we don't know exactly who they're going to find people yet to know how that will also but we'll make sure that they don't get on overload right we will be working with them to and we're giving them some strategies and ideas on how to make this work um and fit into the schedule of their online connection thank you mr ryan correct me if i misspeak but the services that are being provided in in what you're outlining this evening uh are are a part of the governor's executive order and in collaboration with uh superintendent hoffman these services in some cases could have been provided by partner organizations like boys and girls club ymca we just happen to have in community ed the service capability and so we've extended ourselves as a district is that an accurate statement absolutely we early on when this was presented or outlined in the executive order we we awaited clarification if you remember when the executive order was initially released the details within the on-site learning weren't clear we waited for the ade to supply further guidance and a piece of that was related to you may or may not provide on all of your campuses you may or may not provide on your campuses at all but if you don't then partner with a local agency and as we met and dr mccord was very very clear that we we support our community and we support our families and and so we've we've gone to task with the fact that we want to provide a great uh product understanding the limitations that might be standing in front of us and so that's where we are today thank you for that i just wanted to make sure that that was clear to our community because we we've stepped up essentially absolutely as i mentioned prior the social emotional learning supports will focus on providing sel activities on sel competencies within the buzz platform with additional supplemental support from sel programs students will receive tiered on-site in-person support based on individual need as determined from sel screeners social work referral forms behavioral assessments and threat assessments this may include individual support small group facilitation and or family outreach susie canadian has done an outstanding job putting together a plan for us to be able to support our community as difficult as that is when we're not together every day and i wanted to be able to share the plan she had in place this moves us forward on parent screenings and others of their children as well as adult screenings and and staff screenings this moves us into what it would look like to return in person with these screenings and tools being provided to our families as they screen their students each day prior to attendance we do have sign in and sign out procedures in place on each of our campuses we're actually utilizing a portion of our vik staff to assist our campuses and vik is opening on august 17th as well for before and after school care for our families and we have authorized vik staff to remain on campus into the school day for a period of time and arrive early toward the end of the school day to assist with the processes of both students registering when they come in or i'm sorry signing in as they come in it's something that our staff is very used to that we're working with our own campus staff to to kind of take a grasp on and we also have nine sites that are currently open as you're aware that began last week over a two week period of time um today we received from some great feedback from the site principles related to drop-off and and pick-up strategies for for mitigation and limiting the number of people on campus and coming in and outdoors throughout the school day while maintaining safety so you'll notice parent expectations student expectations and then the safety measures that follow referred to the 90 students within approximately six to eight classrooms within our world we like definitives we like blacks in black and white we like to know what is in front of us and this is a challenge we don't know yet what registration numbers are going to look like on every campus we don't know yet what the needs of each student is going to be who registers on each of our campuses we're not clear as to how many staff members we have available although we're dialing in on that right now and hopefully by midday tomorrow we'll have that ironed out but there are a number of pieces that are are moving and so i apologize if some of the responses that fran and i give you aren't as detailed as you may like but it is a moving target at this point well i do appreciate how quickly you've had to put this together i mean honestly we would have usually taken six months to a year to plan something like this and you're doing it in just a few weeks so thank you very much for all the hard work absolutely mr ryan i know that you've utilized the safety measures throughout your summer vik program and i think that what you have recommended here is is really good um in terms of everything and i think that really one of the good things that will kind of go along with what mr carr said at the very beginning of the meeting this is going to help us to the information that we get over the next few weeks will help us see how the safety goes and i i think you're you know you were successful this summer so let's keep it up thank you it honestly kristen stoltzman eric dactyl the specialists um it's been a i would be absolutely lying if i didn't tell you it's been been a challenge but i believe the way we're able to start the summer in terms of learning smaller numbers of students variety of campuses if you remember we're on each of the high school campuses and learning this is the next step the last two weeks have been another step coming up august 17th is an additional move toward opening to more students and i think that it's been a positive thing for for our students and our families so we'll continue to learn and get better as we go and just so you know when we get to the phase-in approach and we have students who are are now face-to-face this i believe would still be in effect for those that are uh online as well so we would still have to continue with this portion of it for those students that need support mr ryan if i can just comment first of all thank you to you and your team for all of the work um you know as was indicated by ms humphries we realized that you're putting together a program very very quickly in response to an executive order i think you've done a very good high quality job i i fear it's going to be under appreciated because people are going to be looking what they want and are used to from previous years versus what what we're doing in a in a very short time period that shouldn't take away from the quality and uh and the appreciation i commend you for your services and i and i you know i have to say i hope that the program is very short-lived because we're back in person and providing full services and that's not an indication of under appreciation for what you're doing we appreciate that and and obviously the support and trust from and cabinets work on this and advisement every morning as we put this together so um jason martin and marcy and barbara and john and the whole group don and her communication has been a lifesaver and as we continue forward it'll it'll keep growing so thank you dr mccord to your comment that this program format will remain in place even as we phase open and start in-person learning at whatever point that becomes available that will extend through the duration of the executive order is that correct yes sir that's my understanding and so the expiration date for that executive order in most cases is at the end of the school year that is correct dr santa cruz yes so i just had a couple questions about um the safety are we able to and planning to give our paraprofessionals and other support staff that will be there the like a mask and um or a shield similar to what we have secured for teachers absolutely so their option bonnie has been fantastic at getting product out to campuses and working with operations on both sets of supplies whether it be ppe for the individual employees or whether it be cleaning and sanitation products for the campus from the trainings that have been put together and our staff today i received a couple questions related to trainings friday is going to be a big day of training a number of employees and jen frost and her team have put together an excellent video jack barnes fran and her crew and so the number of people coming together between documentation online links and resources leanne lacey is all coming together that's being packaged dylan has access to that to share it with each of the facilitators on every campus we want individuals feeling comfortable walking in on monday morning regardless of what their assignment tasks may be that they feel trained and prepared and safe and supplied the necessities to be successful and then what's the process that if someone does have coveted if they are diagnosed with either a staff or students what is the process in place probably similar to what you've done this summer sure absolutely so nurse frost has created a a series of letters depending on the scenario if a student potentially was exposed by a staff member who is test positive everyone within that location obviously is notified the person who has been tested or the person who's symptomatic is removed from from that location and and is quarantined based on um based on their positivity or their uh symptomatic responses and and what may be going on we also report to the county any cases for tracing and to make sure that we are identifying if there is a pocket within our community or where we're seeing things um albert and his operations crew comes in and and takes care of the location where that staff member or student may have been those students are then if it's a staff member let's say those students are then placed in a different environment for the next period of time while we ensure that the the classroom is taken care of and cleaned properly and as i said everyone is notified through the letters that that is a potential and then they're given the option if they want to return um or not that family decision at that point in time okay thanks and i think like you're saying we've had these things in place during the summer and had great success and then here we are now doing it again i think we have some patterns of successful having students at our schools you know it's been small but we're we're growing it back and i think that we can learn from what we've been doing take confidence in the measures that we're having in place and continue to hopefully have ideas and things ready to implement as we get to that point where we can get back to school with everybody sure our um just so you know as well our promise to the community has been to if anything over communicate that hasn't been the stance of all school districts and we have felt strongly about ensuring that parents staff students anyone who may be impacted or affected anyway is communicated with and notified of of any potential scenario whether that staff member is in your exact class or just within a facility and we feel as though that's important and the responses have been very positive uh in terms of just gratefulness that they feel comfortable knowing that they would be made aware if there were any cases on campus board members any additional comments questions mr ryan you've been very thorough and again on behalf of the board we extend our appreciation for your work the work of your team and the collaboration of all of who's concerned we wish you good luck on monday as we go through and we hope that you will experience the same degree of success you've experienced during the summer so appreciation to you and your and your team thank you sir appreciate that thank you mr ryan thank you fran we now move to item 3.04 face covering policy regulations gb gb dash r j i c a r b and k i r rb dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz governing board members per executive order item number five and i'll read this to you as well this is all school districts and charter schools shall develop and implement a policy to require face coverings or such as face masks or face shields for all staff students over the age of five until arizona department of health services determines that face coverings are no longer necessary or recommended to contain the spread of the virus and so that's what we have done in consultation with asba and udall shumway they've developed a policy that is very standard and we will be covering that in the regulations contained in those three policies um gbgb-r staffs personal security and safety and then j-i-c-a-r-b student dress as well as k-i-r-b visitors to schools and let me read through this for you if you'll indulge me a little bit all persons including but not limited to staff students vendors visitors and volunteers shall wear a face covering while on any district property in any district facility at any district event whether indoors or outdoors and in any district vehicle including district buses or vehicles rented or leased by the district face coverings should not be worn by a children under the age of two b anyone who has trouble breathing c anyone who is unconscious incapacitate or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance students under the age of five are not required to wear face coverings students shall not be required to wear face coverings when students can socially distance or are outside in playground settings with distancing students shall be allowed breaks to remove their face covering in a safe environment the superintendent may make other exceptions to the requirement to wear a face covering while keeping in mind the health and safety of everyone involved face shields may be an acceptable alternative to face coverings face coverings are to fully cover a person's nose and mouth ideally fitting snuggly but comfortably against the sides of the face and under the chin they are to remain affixed in place without the use of one's hands and are to not have holes they are to be laundered regularly or disposed of appropriately a face covering does not replace the need for frequent hand washing covering coughs and sneezes and practicing physical distancing six feet away to the extent possible individuals are to be reminded to avoid touching their face coverings and to wash their hands frequently to ensure the proper use of face covering staff and students are to be educated on how to wear and care for their face coverings and again legal reference governor ducey's 2020-51 this is the exact same language in all three documents i just wanted to make sure you are aware of that and because of regulations they don't need approval by the governing board but i wanted to make sure that you knew where we were at and this is what we'll be implementing moving forward any questions thank you dr mccord questions board members i i do have a question when we're talking about giving students a break in a safe environment to remove their mask for you know a couple minutes give them a break what would that look like maybe in a in one of those classrooms where maybe students will be coming on the 17th if you have an area available to where you can social distance students so they can take them off and we would instruct the paraprofessional or teacher to be able to do that and i think that they would be able to as professionals make sure that they have those available areas and can read the room in terms of okay i think you guys need a break you need to to have a little breath when it relates to that okay all right thank you this is something that we believe is very important we believe that moving forward in order to get our kids into campuses to make sure our students are safe to make sure our staff is safe we need to have something like this and we will make sure to the very best of our ability that our staff and our students are following us board members nothing else move to item four which is adjourning this work study session if there are no additional comments then i will could i make a comment real quick i just wanted to thank those who have emailed who which we mentioned we've read many emails those who are here at our meeting tonight or some have left but i appreciate that they came those who are watching our meeting just for the along with our teachers and staff for um just want to thank our families and parents and students you know that they want to be part of our schools that they want to be back at school when have we ever heard high school students asking us to please let them back in their school i mean that's a that's a great thing about our teachers and our campuses should know that that means we are doing a great job because our kids want to come back and also just know that we're going to keep working toward finding solutions that meet the needs of students and staff ins and both safety and in their social emotional needs but just want to thank our community members and acknowledge all that they're doing and our teachers and staff as well thank you thank you mrs woods dr santa cruz go ahead and miss you judy i just i just had a a thought about having through my years of being principal when you said students under the age of five are not required to wear face coverings okay kindergarteners are generally five once in a while you get a four-year-old till october so what do they have to show their birth certificate no okay no okay so how are you gonna work that out well well generally it's first grade and above why would not be kindergarten well because it's if you read it it's h5 we look at it as h5 and below or that don't have to wear it so mostly okay so students under the age of five right okay hey don't worry we debated that for like a half hour in cabinet a couple of times so and is there any research about that being okay you know i i i don't know if there's research i did ask that question to will humble of the arizona department of health association i'm not sure if i said that association right but i did ask that question and um he responded that it's probably okay if preschoolers and kindergartners there doesn't seem to be a lot of spread among those young children so that was one concern i had i apologize i misread that that's what i did five times trust me okay any other questions for the work study session seeing that there are none then we will adjourn the work study and move to item 5 brief board meeting and before i open that portion of it is there a desire on the part of the board to take a brief break or move on i'm seeing move on okay so we'll move to item five point zero one miss wilson please call the roll again miss laurie wood here mr reed carr here michiela eugetti here ms jill humphries here dr charles santa cruz here mr president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you miss wilson and with a reverse order in mind item 5.01 is calling the meaning to or and then we move to item six the consent agenda and available for a motion i move that we approve the consent agenda as a as presented there is a motion is there a second oh second it has been moved and seconded that we approve the consent agenda as presented any commentary question at this point i i just had one question if we could just hear a little bit about the renovations for these three high schools and the security and the reasons for that um the renovations of course will include if you remember mesquite high school how we had some entryway securities that we refurbished over there looks really good it's a good model so moving forward as uh for our plan we have some thoughts and ideas and some plans for highland high desert ridge high and campbell verde high and um that's that's just continuing on with ensuring our campuses are safe and secure and eventually we'll do this to all of the high school campuses yeah okay that's all i needed any additional questions seeing that there are none then we will vote on item six the consent agenda all those in favor of approving consent agenda as presented please signify by saying aye aye those oppose the same motion carries five zero we move to item seven and that is adjourning this brief board meaning yes mr carr before we adjourn may i just take a small liberty yes please go ahead um earlier this evening uh mayor jen daniels tendered her resignation effective tonight i just would like to extend my personal gratitude and perhaps the gratitude on behalf of the board for her service she has been a strong supporter of our schools and has been a strong supporter of education in general and just in my role as liaison to the board from the from the board to the town of gilbert would like to extend my gratitude on behalf of all of us to her thank you mr carr and i appreciate that you have taken the time to apprise us of that and please extend our gratitude as well on behalf of the board to mayor daniels any other commentary questions then with none we will move for adjournment those in favor of a german please signify by saying aye aye those oppose the same motion carries 5-0 thank you board members thank you those of you who have been observing this board meeting and thank you to staff for your attendance and for community members who have been in attendance we are adjourned right
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
okay eileen it's a real trust issue yeah you know it's it's very deep so thank you awesome um okay um all right so uh rosa any questions on your phone no this looks good yeah it really does all right i don't think i've ever would have expected to see a year where we under run a budget by over half a million dollars that's uh it's such a weird year we had last year so um yeah have we uh heard anything further from the ciac on fall sports because i think that's the biggest swinger we got facing yes the announcement just came out today they're going to go with their plan from june 30th and they're moving forward with their modified sports season planning to happen that's what they said today wow yes just literally just came out in the last hour i think that surprises me so it seriously surprises me how do you play football if you have to keep kids six feet apart with masks on in school locker rooms a chance to do remote football it's called uh called madden madden football be like it just i had one parent say to me they said you know you are being so diligent on what you're doing and very thoughtful about how you're approaching the startup of the school year and the athletic people just seem to be on a completely different planet and and it seems really odd that you can distance your kids you know six feet apart from one another in the school but the minute the bell rings they can start banging heads with each other it's crazy so it's interesting bob not not to get off on this because i know we have facilities at six o'clock so i want to give us plenty of time for finance but the um you know the cite their medical advisors as saying that those medical advisors don't have an issue with with the sports including football and um but i'm hearing i'm i'm hearing i don't know anything official at this point but i'm hearing some different things from uh department of public health at the state level so i i don't know again things continue to change so i don't know if anything cic recommends i don't know if something will change based on anything from the state so all right all right next up linda is the covent purchases so where are we on that do you have something you want to show us ken or uh um not really i mean the number um that uh item and the reopening costs are kind of and i was watching and i was wondering bob i wanted to share a few things because it's kind of a story behind this as ken said covid purchases and the reopening costs are so related uh items a and c um well let's treat the let's deal with them that together yeah we might as well deal with together if you're okay with that so you know like we just talked about cic that's a perfect example things continue to change rapidly you know every day um we're we're learning something new every single day um there is lots of learning and planning going on we've done a lot we've communicated a lot with our families we're we are i've never been so proud of the team and and frankly uh the effort that's been put in over the course of the summer and the hours and upon hours and weekend work for five six straight weeks now that's been gone going on to continue to adjust continue to plan um and uh to quote mrs fitzgerald our long long time music teacher in the district she was quoted in the the national education association uh met little magazine they had the trade magazine saying it's like trying to nail jello to a wall um i had never heard that before but boy does that describe what we're dealing with leave it up to margaret to be uh so uh loquacious so um so again we're doing doing a lot there um to be very frank um there are uh we have budgeted for part of our code it costs the hiring of monitors and things like that we do not have one bite um for any of those monitor positions we put out there that's a concern school's just right right around the corner to monitor lunch and isolation rooms um things like that how are we posting the positions for the non-pro not the non-certifieds yeah they're posted on our you know all the regular sites uh terry put them on indeed um we're moving toward western connecticut maybe there's some college kids who are going to be doing their remote learning i'll have some opportunity trying anything we can um you know i don't know you know how attractive of a job it is and who's available and and uh so anyway that's something that's out there as well you know hiring some of those new positions but also staffing in general around the state around the region um there's a there's a lot of um issues that we're trying to tend to in hr and and see you know to get ready for opening um my my belief is that the in these non-certified positions um there's a lot of kids who just graduated college who don't have work i mean i i just probably love to have an opportunity to make a few bucks don't worry you're trying you know oh yeah the reason i asked where we were posting is i think about where are they looking yes exactly he does one of them for sure yeah so so terry's on that um it's been a little bit less than a week that we've had to post things up but um we really we're looking for those people and it's uh you know it's probably a position for the year uh if people are interested in that so we want to put that out there but like i said even you know returning staff with some of the new laws hr is working on that the concerns people have for their own you know health and pre-existing conditions also uh staff that have concerns with their own child care and so forth so there's there's a lot out there it's a real juggling act um so that's something we're learning um not that it was necessarily a direct covert cost we're talking about existing staff to return but it's important for the public and the finance committee and i'll share this with the board next week at our meeting that there are some concerns for sure and i don't want to sit on that information i want people to know that it is a concern um so some you know we have we have some savings that we find and we have some new costs that we find so share a little bit about savings that are coming up and ken certainly could jump in on these you know uh as we talk um uh ipp has been a service we've used for quite a while uh with para educators um we've been transitioning away from ipp and mrs wygonic has continued on from what dr sapala started in bringing in our own people rather than some of the ipp services which is a significant cost savings and ken can go over some of that in detail in the special education portion of the agenda but there's some significant savings there it's a staffing piece but we still provide the same services um extended school year transportation uh we did the majority of extended school year was um virtual and it was actually the program itself was a real success this year as uh as i understand and um we are really looking at the transportation savings there's some significant dollars there and then we're continuing as always and kendall talked about this in a little bit more detail because gina couldn't be with us tonight but she provided the information um how we're monitoring out placements and staying on top of that because that's that is the most one of the most uh the biggest risks we have in our budget is the volatility of special education as we know from our experience last year and then two years prior to that we're also looking you know where we can pull back and maybe re-prioritize uh some opportunities in professional development that maybe are not as high priority now considering covet and the things we need to put time into as well as uh maybe changing up priorities in terms of technology um and uh so we share a little bit about that um so ken can add those to our known potentials as time develops of savings that he shared with the board of finance last week or two weeks ago whenever it was some new costs that we need to consider um we are the nurses are working to put a ppe kit together individual kit for each teacher so it's like an emergency kit if a child has fluids just just especially the little ones crying beginning of the year making sure they're protected and ordering that um technology uh dr ruby and eric and i have been working with the team um to ensure that remote learning is as high quality as possible there's document cameras we have many in the district but we need to order a lot more to make things work not only to share documents but also turn and move the camera so the teacher can be seen by those students who are remote some other significant software that'll really help um with some of the uh the not only the remote learning home but the remote learning we're going to have to do in school because remember kids are really going to be in their own little desk uh k through 8 and working on their chromebook the majority of the day you know the the collaborative um interactions will be less and we'll need the technology to do that um and then transportation remember we're doing the am pm kindergarten we really want to get our kindergartners in and um connect with them immediately and teach them school and that's really important so mary rose diamond our principal oversee us been doing a heck of a job with dr ruby and putting the kindergarten um essentially half day program together to start the year that's kind of like our mini hybrid so they're in four days a week to get those kids into the routine and have a nice slow rollout and a shorter day for the little ones and the gardeners will be four days a week but morning or afternoon correct correct so that's extra transportation runs so um you know ken's been working on that with all-star um and then just reminding everybody of our biggest exposures like i said about special education we have to watch that very very closely but also retirements you know we're not um at our threshold yet of savings with the aggressive stance we took with uh with the historical on retirements um and then the finals um the kindergarten four day a week is that just uh for the first month um well i think we're i think it's uh we're gonna go eight weeks on that one i have to double check the exact weeks but sorry the the am pm that's the amp and we want it we want to have that so we get the kids used to it and that was with our november ninth goal that we put out earlier this week um because the state still requires that we should be focusing on trying to get to 100 um we all know the health data is still very positive in connecticut and states all around us are either becoming hot spots or not hot spots anymore and that's back and forth um so so one of the things that we talked about early on was the fact that we were going to do this platooning by alphabet so the parents would all their kids would be in or out do we know if we have a lot of kindergarteners who have older siblings who this is going to create inconvenience we already have talked yeah the the principal has been talking with the parents about that so that there is some convenience issues but we're working those out so we're on that and we actually our survey closed at four o'clock today for grades one through twelve we did a separate kindergarten survey um in pre-k survey great uh starting this past friday um it just closed grades one through twelve the turnout's been quite good um i believe um of every possible uh response we could get of uh 24 2500 that we would get back rates one through 12.
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i mean they're really high up okay josh let's go down one public education for individuals and for large businesses um anybody want to comment on this josh or anyone else so bulk buy is one thing but another thing is how do we even just get people educated on evs for themselves for businesses and fleet conversions and this is uh something that we probably need to talk about between the transportation modification work and the community outreach group but this is really um the educational component um things are like range anxiety stuff like that where can you charge on a public charge or if you don't have one in your home all those kinds of educational components and i think like mike was saying earlier this is something that the energy commission is probably well positioned to to work on very much so uh the city in the past did some um some um like eevee uh publicity um ride and drive type of programs that um you know there's certain things that can be duplicated but also some new things that we can we can add into this mix as far as the kind of information and education we can um provide opportunities for in also including into the um the the dashboard the concierge program dashboard that could also be a way to educate and inform folks okay let's move to number 12.
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we're probably missing three 300 400 so we're going to be doing some calling um you know all hands on deck starting to tomorrow with the schools and um you know look comparing unless seeing who who isn't there and then making those calls are you coming to school are you um coming for hybrid are you choosing remote uh learning or are you even choosing we put a question on there are you even choosing to withdraw and decide to homeschool right now generally speaking i think we're 83 84 coming back um again for the hybrid model um but but you know the goal remains being prepared for um 100 in person and obviously the data has to remain where it is it really for the most part isn't going to get better has to remain and we need to get used to the routines of school learning a whole new way of doing school and um enrolled that out we still need to get those desks we talked about in the the second half of the desk shields for the other students so that is something you know we need to go to the talk with the board of finance and have that conversation next week so we keep order that to be ready and give us enough lead time um and um we're also doing a look we had a wonderful plan that said we're gonna phase the purchases but and it'll be a little easier from the uh having to buy all the desks that lasted two weeks yeah basically before we actually had to buy the desks and i don't even know if it's if it's two weeks i think it was last monday so it's a week and a half bob i mean that's that's how quickly this goes and i've got to give um you know all of our principals credit for actually um they're all working under the rooms and so forth and mr belanda has about half of his rooms done and he's actually moving and looking at extra desks and seeing ultimately even for one hundred percent if he will need it the full on 252 that he actually put in his order so he's doing it you know like we said we just keep refining and refining because we don't want to buy extra we want to buy what we need and so i'm just on the phone with him this afternoon so i just this is the finance committee meeting and eileen's on i just want to put that out there that we continue to fine-tune that we would be able to bring this to the uh board finance i guess it'd be wednesday late afternoon if that's what the meeting is going to be and just share that you know and then we would need jerry to you know he's good as far as i understand from ken he's got his orders ready um pretty much ready to go so we you know got to pull the trigger and get moving on that because at some point we're going back 100 percent you know um but we we definitely got it you want some new learnings and you have some new savings yeah so that's that's the story and you know i wanted to just stop there and then let the conversation well so is that on a piece of paper somewhere say again is that on a piece of paper somewhere that we can socialize i mean i don't think you could we could go to a board of finance meeting and we shouldn't go to this meeting without uh here's the savings that we're seeing and here's the here's where we are on you know we had 500 was the 572 was the sure last list and where are we against that and uh that has to we have to get into a kind of a repeatable routine on this that we can all look at it and we ought to be showing that not just at this meeting but at the board of ed meetings from the board of finance meetings in a kind of a standard format so we all see it right and i think the second form is on the things we need to buy what are we at the point we need to buy now or or start launching because you know we had so much approved at a time we have to get into a very disciplined uh presentation on here's what the next uh trigger we have to pull is yeah um and uh we're because we're gonna we're not spending all the money at once which is a good thing but i don't i i i'm a little uncomfortable that we don't have a chart um because it just tells me it's a lot of talk around it and by the way i appreciate the insights that's very helpful but i think it's time to start getting into uh yeah routine and i'd like to see that before it goes to the board of finance yeah well i think rosa you'd like to see it too yeah for sure both of this committee and i think our overall committee our board should see it right so that they're all part of that sure is there anything that we've ordered that is back ordered or is going to take longer than we thought to receive i'll defer to ken he works with jerry on this supposedly we're we're good on the the desk shields uh for the students and for the uh offices and for the teachers that's the ones you weren't worried about i remember right those were the ones you were worried about it's yeah we should get them by around the first of september okay the partitions for the nurses office we had a supplier lined up and it turns out they did not have them anymore so we're going to another supplier and jerry was going to be trying to confirm that today i did not hear back anymore from him about that so those are the only things that we're really concerned about uh gloves you know sometimes you can get them sometimes you can't so there's a little concern possibly with that also but i think we'll be okay there and those are the reasons um maybe on this list that um bob suggested we have sort of that list of everything that we had ordered or will order and we just have maybe like a status update sure um that would be helpful that makes sense good idea and eric actually could jump in with technology on the orders and how that that's going because not only perfect so so we have good and bad news um good news is the board of finance approval of the laptops those 80s uh 91 laptops for the um whiskey in here staff they came today they literally got here at 2 30 today they're in the hands of my department and um they're already being configured the seven the 300 chromebooks that the board of finance approved plus the 450 that i purchased um with my you know operating budget for the year um currently have no delivery date um and um so i am not anticipating them um i i can't even um say anything other than i don't anticipate them for the first day of school um there has been a lot of communication around the state that many technology directors that placed orders for chromebooks back in may and early june have also all seen their deliveries uh be put on delay um and they will not be seeing their chromebooks until october november which is about the time that we will be seeing ours as well so we uh have to work on a contingency plan for that and the state is helping us i mean the state can only do so much but but we have uh the the commission of of educational technology is helping support us um in how we're gonna move forward with an adaptive solution um you know we are working on byod for the you know for the for the district um oh i've got a lot of parents who've been asking us um recommendations on what kind of device to buy for their kid um you know what it should look like what should the minimum specs be um you know and and so um unfortunately we're gonna have to start the school year with what we have um there's been a lot of factory shutdowns um this is the direct information i've received um there's been a lot of factory shutdowns in in china due to various violations um and has put um i'll use lenovo as an example um has put a eight to ten week delay on lenovo chromebooks um we bought dell um but they're all manufactured out of the same factories so we're unsure if we have do we have enough chromebooks for the kids that we know need it um we are based on i'm getting emails that i get emails from people that are like you know um you know are we going to be able to get chromebooks and um based on um what we handed out in the spring yes um you know because our high school students still have their one-to-one devices um uh and we handed out just under 300 chromebooks which um we're working on getting back to prepare for the new school year um but uh you know i just talked with newtown director today for example and and were having discussions i i said are you anticipating your chromebooks in on time and she said no i'm gonna have to work on prioritizing needs and and which students we we need to make sure have chromebooks and and and um and then i i had mentioned that we're working on byod district wide and there was seem to be a good amount of interest on that um but every every district in the state is seeing this problem right now um and then all of a sudden at 10 o'clock on on a you know on a tuesday morning um somebody goes oh i just talked to this company that has you know 15 000 chromebooks in stock um get your orders in and by the afternoon that stock is depleted so um it's it's it's that crazy is this might sound like a crazy idea but i feel like every anything at this point doesn't really seem that crazy anymore but um if there are parents that are you know willing to buy their own device have obviously they would be paying a higher price than we would buy um considering that they're only buying like one or two or something um have we thought about maybe any kind of like a buy back program um if they didn't want to essentially hold on to that device and the cost of it so we would have it for future use um you know once the student is done using it this year do you know what i mean in other words they in other words though we essentially sell the families the chromebook i'm confused i'm sorry yeah so uh just i mean obviously if a parent wants to to buy one and then you know keep it fine but let's say there's a parent who's like well you know my kid needs a chromebook i can't really afford it if they could potentially buy it with sort of a promise that we're buying it back from them at the end of the year so we essentially you know have the chromebook physically for future years after this year um i mean any of those options are available but if if we did something like that i mean i still need i still need the stock well they would be buying because they'd be buying into them the problem is they can't get them either i just swallowed them i should have specified that it's a stock issue across the board i mean um not just like a bulk product you know when you go to best buy or target or walmart and you buy a chromebook you're buying a consumer model right whereas when you know school districts and businesses are buying you know the business model so obviously we can't buy consumer models in bulk um but you know um based on what consumer models out there the pricing is not that far off from going to you know to best buy um and buying a you know 250 260 chromebook is is not that far off from what we end up paying um depending on the year and price adjustments and all that um you know that's um i mean that would that would get us more chromebooks in at the end of the year i i to talk about a buyback program i don't want to commit to that without no i know i just i'm trying to think but um you know that that's certainly um an option and we are we are doing um we are sending out our communication regarding byod i know we've talked about it in our public q a sessions um we we've we've had a lot of conversations with various families who've been asking um about chromebooks you're getting the emails where we're getting them as well um and i am doing a chromebook request so we're gonna announce the byod and and specifications and and you know um tell people about the program and and what our policies are and all that we're going to do that this week um this way for those that are interested and are able to do byod um can start looking this week and this weekend um uh you know lim although limited um i i saw a couple in stock today at target um i saw a couple in stock today at best buy so some of these companies are getting them um it's just a matter of being first in line to get one it's it's like when uh the power went out last week and i tried to go to every store around town to get a generator even though i knew it wasn't gonna happen um you know just you happen to get lucky and you're the one who gets it um and um you know unfortunately that's that's that's kind of the window that we're in but also fortunately um you know a chromebook's not the end-all be-all device here um a lot of what we do now is device independent so ipads can do a majority of of the work um and and so we can repurpose some of our older ipads i'm working with my techs on getting the account of what we have in district for that um not even close to ideal you could do the work off phones um again not even i would never recommend it but it's not impossible um you know we we've got older windows laptops we do have the laptops coming back from whiskenier staff um you know once our teaching staff is set um you know we also have devices coming back from support staff um so you know we we generally recycle uh unusable devices every year through the you know the district's recycling policy um but we're not recycling anything this summer um uh the techs have asked if we can recycle and i've told them to hold on to everything we can um and and um i um you know certainly not opposed to that idea rosa but of course i'd have to defer to ken for that um and any other ideas we've even asked we've even asked if um if the vendors would do partial orders you know even if you can't give us all 150 can you send us 300 and they won't do it um they just won't do it they can't commit yeah i while we were talking um i've been kind of scanning google news and article after article after article is chromebook delivery dates are anywhere from october to february right don't hold your breath if you're looking for chromebooks because everybody's looking for chrome so here's here's what dell did as an example um here's what dell did is is they there was people who ordered in may and june um who stole who's you know i have emails here that said we're getting our chromebooks the first week in august um first week in august came and went and they sent an email and said oh our delivery got pushed back um they delayed us um they're putting uh delivery dates right now um of december for a lot of people just because they don't want to commit they're just throwing a number way out into the future and you'll get them when you're in when your spot in line comes up yeah it's a it's a it's a crunch it's a that's an industry-wide crunch and part of the issue has been factory shutting down in china right and it's not just the chromebook manufacturing factories it's the downstream of the parts because i've heard that even in my company right is getting for a computer of equipment whether it's a monitor display or uh or the components on on motherboards it's uh it's been really bad right um and at the same time demand is high so it's it's very difficult but um okay so um so i guess ken the question i would have for you is how can we create a simple repeatable format that we could look at you know as we meet through these various meetings so you don't end up having to have a different format for every meeting but we also don't talk around it right by just having a lot of words but no show-and-tell is that is that something we could uh you know mess around with and see what we could build this week and um or early next before our next meeting but not not this group's next meeting our next meeting which would be the board of finance would be the first time we'd be showing that and i think we'd want to rosa and jen and i would love to take a shot at it give you suggestions and inputs and ask questions all right yeah we can work to put something together yeah thank you i think that would help because then it supplements your story john that you're talking about because i actually think um we're there's probably with some of the things the savings opportunities we've been talking about there's some healthy offsets right that that's we go with new discoveries so exactly exactly and and we need to i mean the shortage like eric articulated for technology is legitimate but that's you know we have to do our best and we're doing everything in our power to try to be able to open up the school year and be ready to operate and ready to go um we're giving it everything we got and and ken i would i would uh um i would then make the first sheet a savings opportunities on the budget uh school opening costs right it's kind of so you can see the balance of those um and then i would take the net of that and on the second a second chart say here's what we've already been approved for and here's what i'm ready to go for my you know you know my next step right so you always have a uh something that you can talk about the timing and you know uh rosier thought of doing a little report on how we're doing on the stuff we already bought you could put some little notations on that sheet on stuff we've already bought right that you know even if it's just a red yellow green right you know these are green they're all fine they're on track these are red because they're back ordered you know you could you could do with something very simple that would allow everybody to have the same information because i think that's the important thing right now is that we're socializing it and even if you're coming to us i would say send it over to the board of finance so they see what we're looking at all right um it's just i think we have to be very light on our feet you know the other thing i i had a question on bob and you because there was a lot of going back and forth on the motion last monday night and i don't know if eileen might have any insight or marshall might have any insight in terms of the way the approval was we obviously always need to be informing the board of finance with these kind of purchases but is there is there i don't know that they have to actually approve it's almost more like we're communicating with each other and working together and i just was curious about that um anybody recalls or has any insight on that i feel like it kind of went back and forth about you know you have money in your budget right now um and you know if you go over budget you come up with you know because you ultimately get the bottom line the bottom dollar line um amount that it's not you know we can't line item choose what the money is being spent on so if it comes to an appropriation at the end then that goes to the board of finance um but marsha i don't know if you understood differently um that is the way i understood it as well that um um i think that it was an exercise of working together more than legality so john um i would say it very simply um you need us to say yeah we're okay with you going and buying that stuff right the board of finance is about giving us additional appropriation to our budget and as glenn said you can be operating as you go and if we catch up on the uh catch up on additional appropriations after the fact that's okay we'll deal with it you know you have our support that's what i heard um and uh so if if on a monthly basis or even every other month we go in and say okay here's where we are and it's not as long as we're not surprising people right it should be okay that we're all working our way through it so i think for these decisions i don't think you need to wait for the board of finance to give you another approval in order to place okay all right we can work with jerry tomorrow as soon as tomorrow but i think every chance we have at the board of finance meeting we ought to go in and say here it is and would you agree with that marcia and eileen yeah and just to add to what i said working together more than legality assuming that you're going to have at least that amount of savings that um but right now that savings number we haven't committed to anything so that it could be an additional appropriation nobody knows yet yeah i i agree right there was an appropriation for the the first tranche approved at that board so anything past that we just got to treat it like an appropriation request which is different than the approval to spend specific money i think that's i mean and if we're getting way out of line on your additional buys versus your savings then we have to go talk to the board of finance and say okay it's bigger than we thought um and we need and we're gonna need more appropriation but i i don't think we know that yet i haven't seen it on a chart i'd like to see it on a chart can i ask about another expense that i thought of today um do we need to pay for additional like police officers to help with directing traffic because i imagine with the number of parents that are going to be dropping students off i've tried to get down wisconsin at west wisconia during middle school drop off on a normal school year um and that's it's taken me 15 minutes to get less than a mile and i don't know if that's something that you know we would need to request some help from the police department to direct traffic and if that's an additional expense that we would need to cover or if that's just part of the town expense because they're part of the town yeah i haven't heard it as an additional expense yet but i'll double check that with the chief it sounded like we're going to just have some help to get the year started and see how we do especially with hybrid we're having hacking uh the population so that the we didn't think that would be the case but i could double check that yeah what is one of the questions on the survey how many people are going to drive their kid if they're going to school what are you seeing in your preliminary numbers on that we were only looking i when i checked in today with our principal meeting we were only asking uh eric or maureen was just reporting out on uh on the attention we weren't even looking at the the transportation at this point trying to get the cohort letter out we've got it's just there's so many things in the air bob and finishing up the ventilation and desks and it's just it's uh a lot no no i know it is i just was curious no i don't i actually think the chief should be thinking about managing of traffic patterns um because i yeah i live around the corner from wisconsin i agree with what eileen said it's almost impossible to drive through there at drop off and pick up but if you told all the parents you're only going to be able to do a right turn in no one can come down west wisconia and plan to turn left in right um you know we're just going to make you go straight through you're going to have to go do a u-turn somewhere else and come back right they'll get used to that in a day or two and start coming up a different route right and it'll just it'll it'll solve itself but the the i can't even begin to be an expert and i think the guys who live with traffic management need to give some thought about the different schools and how they might control or guide parents on how to be effective um and uh and i hate to say it it's like a simple thing no left turns out of the wisconner parking lot eric can share that percentage by the way i just want to make sure eric has the percentage he said he can share it so that's great um uh before you show that is is facilities at six o'clock i just want to make sure because it's at 6 30.
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so we're moving into what's most likely another working group which is housing in the built environment so residences multi-family even you know office building structures etc so this is um community benchmarking and transparency work uh i'm gonna just since i have before and i'm i'm generally pretty well informed of these things i'm gonna talk and then open it up again if that's okay um i know that the 2030 district is doing a lot of work in the commercial side of this um but um there's a lot still a lot of opportunity um there and that support the 2030 district could could get from that we should probably put that in the comments column um and there's clearly a lot that can be done on the residential side just so people know um you know how they stack up how's their energy usage on a per square footage basis or whatever else how do they compare to everybody else any other people want to comment on that or question post questions just to say that this one in particular and i'm trying to see if there's anything about this further down but uh it really butts up against a lot of the energy disclosure work um that the housing and built environment has been working on as well um so just making sure that there's uh transparency across the community as far as where you know some of the the weaker spots are for energy usage you know high intense uh energy usage areas um so it it i guess it's it entails a lot more than what it leads on but and there's a there's you know in the end there's a behavioral aspect that's linked to all this so you know the hope is is that if people know how they benchmark and maybe not even know even at an aggregate level but um some some tools even allow um with you know access to smart meters and utility data and stuff or even just looking at time of use they can determine um if it's a higher air conditioning load or whatever to then get people to actually change their behaviors and act on it so it's not just providing the data it's how do you do it in a way that people then will act on it and then as we talked about earlier then potentially go to a concierge service and then actually get advice any thoughts any questions so the next item is 13.
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okay we have time thank you okay because we specialize we have to go over thank you so eric what's the percentage you said they're going to drive yeah um sure so so this is grades um one through 12 i have to pull up kindergarten um right now uh take the bus is 61 um and uh be driven to and from school is sitting at thirty four point four percent um that does not equal of course one hundred percent um because four percent have marked um that they're either withdrawing from bps or or homeschooling or that or um some some have marked in that box that they are doing the remote learning option um but 61 are claiming to take the bus and that 61 is of the total respondents or is it of the people who said they're sending their kids to school total so what i think john what you said was close to 85 percent are sending them to school and 60 percent say they're going to drive them that means 25 percent of the total population that is going to school would be being driven depending on i think at least yeah that's a lot of cars that's a lot of cars without being able to carpool so much right yes there's social distancing for you and uh just just for your idea um out of 158 responses at kindergarten um it's a 40 driving wow can they stagger start times not that you need to add any more complexity we're looking at that um right now we're not sure that we need to do that we had a conversation about that today too yeah 60 to 75 cars trying to drop off kids yeah yeah the survey is uh is critical and part of the team is starting to look at that tonight yeah okay all right that's cool all right um all right any question any further discussion on the opening costs okay i think that to do ken you know what you need to do on that right okay um special education costs which was item b on the old business what news do we have so i have two items to talk about one john touched on earlier with the high school life skills program we're moving to replace that the outside contractor who supplies one bcba and three aba paraprofessionals at a cost of about 277 000 per year with a 0.5 bcba which will be from ed advance and three of our own aba paraprofessionals which would be a cost of about sixty one thousand dollars plus benefits i don't know what level of benefits any of them are taking yet so i our average is around twenty thousand dollars so even if you add sixty thousand dollars onto that it's still a savings and aside from the savings we're doing it for for several other reasons with the ed advanced bcba that person can train our staff members the current bcba service would not train our staff members so there was no opportunity to build our own capacity um the staffing has been less consistent over the last year or two and having our own staff obviously gives us more consistency and more flexibility uh with uh meeting the needs of the kids and or moving folks around if we need to so i think uh gene is looking at it as a win-win financially and program programmatically that's great how much business well that depends on what level of benefits the the folks take i think they take 20 000 a year how much is it that's an average district-wide as you know you may know from negotiations the paraprofessionals pay a larger percentage for family and employee plus one coverage so i'm hoping to get real numbers when we find out exactly what they're taking but assuming they did the twenty thousand how much savings is that that would be about fifty thousand dollars okay yeah that covers some of the significant that is noticeable yeah okay and then the other item i wanted to talk about was the um the out placements so what we're doing is we're using that model that we came up with last year where we had you know student one through whatever was 36 um so with our starting point being this past year you know who's not coming back what new kids are added and uh gina put set this up in a google sheet so that i can have access to it also at any time and she's been updating it as she gets contracts or information from the schools where the students are going so there's there's some information in there right now but not not enough to tell you know whether we're going to be up or down for the year now but i think just having this process in place will be very very helpful we've already i already met twice with her and her secretary to go over this and to you know talk about the importance of getting all this information as early as possible and getting it in the that format as quickly as possible so that we can keep monitoring it and raise the red flag if we need to or you know give peace of mind if if the data warrants so we're pretty excited about that i think we're in a much better place than we have been in the past marcia has been wanting to drive a series of key and budgetary key indicators into the overall board of finance process i think that's a great thing and that's one of the key ones that one and the savings for retiree turnover right then another well those were our two biggest risks we have in the budget and this will be a good standard document that we can show every month and the third one we talked about was substitutes um and actually that's the one i'm working on uh tonight long term and short term substitutes and ken and i talked that that if if it's affecting us with long term and short term maybe what we should do is set up a new um object number so we could track them separately that um and just get more data on on how that works and since we don't have any costs yet for this year it would be easy to set up yeah i think that's a great idea actually i think that's a great idea and i see joan taking notes so i'm assuming that's going to happen okay um so ken as you're talking to mrs um [Music] you know i keep reading and hearing about concerns on how this whole remote learning has had you know the impact it has on kids is she seeing any directional trends on needs for additional supports and things like that for the especially for the the kids on programs i think for some she has i think i think it worked well for some and not so well for others i think they made great strides i think by the sounds of it in the esy program which was more synchronous which will be what our remote learning will be look more like in the fall i'm just i'm worried about that being an emerging area that we don't have our hands around yet yeah um it may not be out placement and maybe in school programs paris uh you know the different types of professionals that we that we have that uh kids need that sort of social work type of thing yeah and well and bob one of the things that we'll we'll be sharing uh during the reopening of comments i make about from the superintendent's report as a highlight and it's important to your question here is one of the things we have our hybrid plan but some of the most vulnerable students in some of the very specialized program either sel or our elc program so forth um there's there's an opportunity for some additional special programming on the opposite days of the week so mrs wagon has been working with those students to ensure we're in alignment with ieps you know and and uh you know idea and so forth uh for the hours so that's those were personal calls and letters that went home in addition to the survey that went out over the weekend so parents of children in those particular programs and with those significant needs most profound needs were addressed personally in terms of how we're handling that so she's really on top of it with the team i that's an excellent thought because the hybrid thing isn't homogeneous right when you come to special ed kids right you have paris who are with a specific child who aren't with that child some days a week you does give opportunities so um so i thank you for the question okay i'd be interested in hearing more about that as as it keeps developing i think um okay anything else on this ken no that's all i had okay uh rosa question no thank you okay all right any new business i don't have any do you want to talk about the grant update here yes thank you i i talked to marsha yesterday about the grants and so forth bob and marsha got right on it for us so please please um and none of it's good news so or any news to be honest um there's the new grant that came out last week that they're talking about the 160 million or what have you um and um the connecticut conference of municipalities is dealing with the state department of education on that every day um there is no timeline there are no application form oh marsha you just checked out oh no she's at the office so it should be hopefully that something didn't change over there i don't know this is brookfield and eversource i mean it never source right isn't that what they're doing i i will say ken's still with us i think yeah he's not across the hall so you're down but he's frozen as well yeah as i say i think i think ken froze too yeah go well i was gonna say i could kill some time waiting for marcia and that's kind of a question but i don't think that's gonna work let me text her it may be because steve steve dunn complained so bitterly about uh eversource that they took care of him and shut off the power at town hall i was astounded at the tone of his last red alert phone message yes last night right it was last night whoa that was almost bitter that's frustration there a lot of frustration in that oh god like i mean for eversource to keep its first selection in the dark it's just not right i mean i hate to say it oh there's ken okay just worry that he went out of town while there too yeah what happened i don't know you just relaxed and came back up oh you lost marshall was everybody else froze up before i disappeared no ken cannon at least um ken at least came right back in march is back in the waiting room here she is i'll just let her in there we go oh i did let her in that was interesting oops hey there she is uh i just lost my internet um and and there's a second grant out there that has the potential for education that's the community the the um um [Music] coveted relief fund through the office of policy and management i talked to the under secretary there today um that we're using half or less than half in this first tranche and i said so what's the second tranche going to be used for when are we going to and um they've extended the due date from august 31st to september 30th and they're not looking at anything considering anything doing anything until after september 30th when they see what the forced reports look like at least that's their public comment on it is are either of those tied i keep here watching the news and hearing statements like every state got a billion and a half dollars are either of these tied to federal funds that are a billion and a half dollars that came to the state of connecticut or is it hard to see it the first one is definitely federal funds um um but it was small it was like 160 million right you said yeah both of them are are relatively small compared to what the total costs are i keep trying to figure out what happened to this big amount of money the feds were given the states so so that corona violence relief fund that second one is money from the federal government um and and um um that is um part of it that um um that passed through and then the second one um this new one that he talked about last year is last week is the second one there was one that was called the education the uh e-s-s-e-r-f um that's the first one um that's 74 000 and then there was this governor's pot of money that's the second one as i understand it but it's not a lot of money either no could you when you're chatting with those guys could you ask the more generic question is we keep hearing the state's got these huge buckets of money and what happened to it i'm just curious where it went did it go to magnet schools did it go to special cities programs are they using it to cover non-education stuff because they keep saying it's education related um so all of it is there that everything that i know about um is there they just haven't done anything with it yet that it doesn't sound like it's adding up to the size numbers i would expect either so so they're sitting on it they're really helpful when we're trying to open schools right yeah it's a nice luxury yeah that's that's our state sad to say okay that's useful um one other uh old business item ken um is i had reached out to you on our 403 b plans and the need to ask for the rates we had a discussion at the last rbac meeting that we've confirmed that it is a fiduciary responsibility that we have to be able to know what the charges that are going to our employees are and there may be fiduciary responsibilities to communicate to our employees and so we seem to be operating on a fully delegated way to this outfit that we did contracting with but we still have some primary responsibility so i know you've been busy so trust me at the very least can we make the request from from most from the company saying we want to know all your all the rates that are being charged to our employees right whether it's direct or indirect um uh and if they because we need to know if they're going to hold us off and say no we can't give those to you or we can't give those to you um and john just so you know we offer this 403 b plan through i want to say it's omni is the name of the outfit yeah they're the administrator um and the our back committee's had some expat experiences with some of these people who run those types of programs that they charge astronomical rates to employees and we worked hard on the town side to negotiate very low rates for the employees who put their money into these things so the town is looking out for its employees that way but the question came up because the 403 b is kind of independent from the town side uh it's kind of a two level question one is are our employees being treated well or not right because we and we ought to stand up and look out for them that's part of our duty um and then the second is if they're not or we conclude they're not then should we be maybe offering them the way to participate in something that's a lower fee model which is a very good townside program that we run through mass mutual so um and uh and i think we think that it's going to be hard to match some of the rates the the in the rates that we get um but you know we have a whole population that's used to dealing with the 403 b so ken we can't just let it idle as i guess my point i wrote it all down in the notes so we have things that we got to work on it's really that first step at the very least asking to see them right we can do that i think the way it works so i think the way it works is that the the individual investment companies are the one that charged the fees to the to the uh employees not omni omni doesn't charge the fees but we'll find out we'll find out as much as we can trust me on these charging fees to those individual funds who are then incorporated so yeah and then there's these revenue sharing funds in the investment options that are hidden fees you know that it's uh they're being taken out of the each individual fund so you have to ask about direct and indirect and how is omni's costs being recovered and how are the individual funds being recovered and i think you gotta ask omni and when they push back and say you gotta talk to the individual funds tell them no you were acting as our uh fiduciary uh person running it we need you to go get those for us that's what they're gonna give you or they're gonna give you the runaround and i'm predicting that we're looking at fees being charged to the employees on average on these types of funds you can earn six to seven percent right on the long run and i'll bet you you're getting two or three percentage points of fees being taken out of the employees and we've got this mass mutual thing where the fee is 0.65 percent it's i mean so that gives them the long run a much better rate of return for employees um and uh by by looking out for them and that's our fiduciary duty is to make sure we're aware and taking action if we think that that's not if it's being charging too much um and uh and i'm very nervous about this um it's been kind of lazy fair for a long time i think we did this long before you even you know came into this job um you know your predecessor signed the contract and i don't think we just let it run so i'm nervous about it well we'll take that first i don't think our employee does any of do any of the folks who are here or who are school board employees or do you participate in any of those uh investment funds yeah all of you do um do you get disclosed from the fund you're working with what fees they're charging did they tell you i think i think they did when i signed up but i don't remember what it is now yeah i mean my provider's axe i don't know about the rest of the group yeah me too yeah i'd have to go look i honestly bob i'd have to go look i i remember when i signed up getting told the fee same as ken um but i haven't looked at it in a long time which is my own which is my own fault which is bob's point right which is not a point so so part of it's which you know how do we act right to look out for everybody right and uh if we found out axa was we found out voya who was doing the townside 401 plan they were charging i want to say marcia it was like two percentage points or something it was like triple what uh mass mutual was charging and uh they were giving a lot of hand-holding support but it was a very high rate and most employees didn't realize it they thought they were they just kept going along put money in and uh they're not most of us aren't sophisticated investors right that way right we put the money in we choose some funds and it grows right we're happy right and i'm that way a little bit too and i'm a financial guy um but uh a lot of our people who work for us don't at all sophisticated right they they just will say i'll choose one on axa right and um and i'll start putting my money in there and they were looking at the gross return and um and a little bit upset that the gross return went down and didn't realize the net return went up yeah so uh so it's just uh i know we've spent as a committee a lot of time on this sort of thing marsha's on the committee and and it's just the attention is turned to saying what are we doing on the school side and i want to make sure we've looked at it um and and uh just just i think it's an easy thing to launch the request and see what we get i think we're gonna get pushed back i think i'm convinced of that and will because that that and you know what the people in that industry are required to give us that information right that's that is not under law something that you can uh uh you cannot you cannot not provide but boy you can you can evade right um by saying oh you gotta talk to someone else and make it so hard for people to get the information that they give up so we just got to get that um any other miscellaneous discussion items all right it's 6 17.
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and um so actually i think this ordinance is basically done um in terms of residential area but missy josh as far as i know wants to launch this time of market marketing ordinance that will require a home energy audit at the time of marketing when a house is put up for sale she wants to launch that at the same time we have a similar kind of thing for multi-family and um also one for commercial so we're doing it across the board and not singling out any one segment is that correct yes yeah and we've had some uh really good talking about actually the 2030 district and i've actually asked jan to maybe uh join our our subcommittee our housing and built environment subcommittee because we had a really good conversation i had a really good conversation with her a couple of days ago as far as um you know what new york has been doing on the commercial sector what what really makes sense as far as going forward for energy disclosure so i think we should have some pretty good conversations along those lines as well so should we change this to not only the time of marketing ordinance but really just um energy disclosure and benchmarking together sort of combined with 12 and number 12 above should we combine those two yeah and we can john if you want offline i can go ahead and edit some of this so i'm just putting comments that way i remember yep yep but again this is so that people can um have a sense of what they're interested in they have a rough idea of what it is and then we can use that as a springboard to actually in a smaller group start to work on these yep i think it's a great idea getting jan more involved with this activity and um should be great get on the commission yeah she would be great yeah she has been an incredible partner uh thought partner and otherwise you know we've often uh relied heavily on the 23rd district and you know i sit on the board and so it's it's been a really great relationship and i think it's a great asset for the energy commission as well um strengthening that that relationship and i told her as much i said you should come come to the subcommittee meetings that way we can glean from that new column that we added uh you know potential is you don't see it here but potential community volunteers we should we should recruit jan in that column absolutely to mark's point yep thanks um we can drop down now to item 14.
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